Keen On America

Will Trump be removed by the 25th Amendment? No, it’s never going to happen - not after Jan 6 or Venezuela or Greenland or any other mad foreign or domestic adventure. That, at least, seems the conclusion of Rebecca Lubot, author of Keeping a Finger on the Button, a timely new analysis of the 25th Amendment. But the real question isn't about the nuclear button—it's about who controls the White House. And the way to do that is through new Congressional or judicial initiatives. The 25th Amendment was passed in what now feels like the halcyon 1960s. Trump has created an entirely new political reality in America. Congress needs to respond accordingly with a new Constitutional Amendment for our 21st century Imperial Presidential age.

The great John Maynard Keynes explained it a century ago. In his 1930 essay, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren," Keynes predicted that the future would be defined by economic abundance rather than scarcity. But such a cornucopian future, Keynes warned, would create societies teetering perpetually on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Keynes' vision has been updated by Niskanen Center SVP Brink Lindsey in his new book, The Permanent Problem. Today's societies, the Thailand-based Lindsey observes, are all on the verge of nervous breakdowns triggered by economic prosperity rather than poverty. So the challenge today, he notes with his own Keynesian flourish, is transforming this mass plenty into mass human flourishing.

Back in 2018, the New York Times reporters Katie Benner and Erica L. Green exposed the disturbing reality of the T.M. Landry college prep school in rural Louisiana. Celebrated as a “miracle” institution that successfully sent underprivileged black students to elite colleges, Benner and Green uncovered a miserable school that doctored college applications and bullied its students. Seven years later, Benner and Green have written Miracle Children, a book as much about race, education and false promises in contemporary America as it is about T.M. Landry itself. While Benner and Green’s narrative won’t please everyone, it should be required reading for those on both the left and right who peddle magical educational solutions to historically complex social problems.

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WTF will happen in 2026? Over the last week, we’ve been running a series of interviews about the promise and peril of the new year. And in this new weekly magazine-style KEEN ON AMERICA show, we feature highlights of conversations with Charles Kupchan, Julia Hobsbawm, Keith Teare, Jason Pack, Jim Goldgeier, Chris Schroeder and Soli Ozel. And I end the show with some thoughts from the David Masciotra interview about my own thoughts on the upcoming year. That’s it for previews of 2026. Now let’s see what really happens.

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If Darwin’s evolutionary theories couldn’t kill America’s faith in God, then what could? That’s the message in Daniel K. William’s new book, The Search for a Rational Faith. Americans, Williams argues, have always sought to combine scientific knowledge with Christian apologetics. From the Founding Puritans to John Adams, Harriet Beecher and Martin Luther King, Americans have clung to the idea that enlightenment doesn’t undermine faith. That’s why thoughtful people - or, at least, thoughtful Americans - believe in God. “Without religion as a moral constraint, any sort of moral anarchy would be theoretically possible. In the world of the atomic bomb, there had to be some form of transcendent thinking,” Williams argues. “Religion has not been simply an anti-liberal reactionary force, but actually has been central to the American story and to America’s human rights project.”

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Hold onto your collars. The AI-generated crisis of work is here, and the storm will concentrate on white-collar workers from the professional economy. According to Julia Hobsbawm, founder of Workathon.io, these workers are about to experience the dismal reality of blue-collar redundancy. 50% of the US workforce will be freelance by 2030, some experts warn, making this transition the biggest shift in the nature of work since the Industrial Revolution. Humans can't be completely replaced by machines, Hobsbawm says. But enough will be replaced to create mass suffering — the same conditions that generated the revolutionary movements of the 19th century.

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Happy New Year everyone! As the final show of 2025 and first for 2026, we turned the tables and had me interviewed by the formidable David Masciotra. As you will see, my reading of 2025 is more optimistic than many of my guests. And my sense about 2026 is that it will be a happier year for America than 2025 (which isn’t saying much). As I explain to David, I suspect the zeitgeist is shifting back to a cautious optimism about the American future. Despite all the doom-mongering, 2025 was actually an exciting year for movies, books, and music — the artistic world being at least as vibrant and diverse as it was twenty years ago. That said, I warn about the medieval wealth gap between rich and poor, Trump’s pride in willful cruelty to immigrants, and the increasingly chasmic divide between young and older Americans.

This is all speculative, of course. But what I can promise is that this show will remain a daily broadcast featuring America’s leading commentators. So stay tuned. I can guarantee that 2026 will be an exciting year for all KEEN ON AMERICA viewers, listeners and readers.

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We live in transitional times. "The old is dead and the new cannot be born—this is the time of monsters," Antonio Gramsci famously wrote. But today, as the West declines and the East rises, these may equally be times for middle powers like Turkey. That, at least, is the view from Istanbul of the Turkish commentator Soli Özel, who sees an opportunity for regional powers to become more influential players in the international system. Expect more international empowerment of states like Turkey, Brazil, and India in 2026, Özel suggests. Today's emerging multipolar world is, indeed, not just a time for monsters, but also for middle-ranked powers.

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For Jason Pack, presenter of the Disorder podcast, the person of the year for 2025 was the Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney. But for 2026, Pack predicts, the person of the year will be a resurrected Jeffrey Epstein (or, at least, the Epstein scandal). Orderers vs Disorderers: the dialectic driving our age of upheaval. The Canadian Prime Minister, for Pack, is a hero. "Carney stood up to Trump and said, Great, you want to punish us? Punish us," Pack says. Whereas the conspiracy theorists stoking the Epstein paranoia are the bad guys. "The more that we in the mainstream attempt to say it was just a sex scandal, the more that people on the extreme left and right are gonna gain in power," Pack warns. So it's Carney vs Epstein. The hard center vs the extreme left and right. Order vs disorder. If only the future was that dialectically simple.

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According to the German Marshall Fund chair Chris Schroeder, China both goes to bed and wakes up thinking of China rather than America. How does the Washington DC based Schroeder know? Because, unlike almost all Americans, he actually made the effort of visiting China this year and seeing this vast and paradoxical country for himself. “Curiosity has never been more valuable,” Schroeder warns. “If you are not on the ground, you have no sense of nuance. You get caught in a narrative which is much more macro." And that’s exactly what the global investor and entrepreneur did. He got on the ground - talked to young Chinese entrepreneurs, traveled on high speed rail, saw an entire car assembled in twenty seconds. Americans might not want to obsess over the China paradox. But they should probably occasionally spare a thought for this remarkable country before going to bed or waking up in the morning.

According to German Marshall Fund chair Chris Schroeder, China goes to bed and wakes up thinking about China — not America. How does the Washington, DC-based Schroeder know? Because, unlike almost all Americans, he actually made the effort of visiting China this year and seeing this vast and paradoxical country for himself. “Curiosity has never been more valuable,” he warns. “If you are not on the ground, you have no sense of nuance. You get caught in a narrative which is much more macro.” And that’s exactly what the global investor and entrepreneur did — he talked to young Chinese entrepreneurs, traveled on high-speed rail, saw an entire car assembled in 20 seconds. Americans don’t need to think about China every night or morning. But they would be advised to listen to nuanced and on-the-ground stories of curious travelers like Chris Schroeder.