Lever Time

If elected, former president Donald Trump has promised to implement mass deportations, target journalists, and carry out other unprecedented actions. How could he pull it off? Project 2025, a radical plan to reshape the government under Trump, highlights the key to his sweeping agenda: Schedule F, a policy that would expose federal workers to political interference and give the president broad leeway to govern through fear. 

Today on Lever Time, senior podcast producer Arjun Singh unpacks this radical strategy for Trump’s second term — and explores the religious fundamentalism and free-market ideology driving the creators of Project 2025, the right-wing think tank called The Heritage Foundation. 

In the early 1980s, the Heritage Foundation became the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement and today wields huge influence over the Republican party. Unlike other conservative think tanks, the Heritage Foundation was unique in blending the principles of free market capitalism with Christian nationalism, creating a blueprint for conservative politics that has now become the status quo. Over the past four years, a brain trust within the foundation has been drawing up Project 2025, laying the groundwork for how Trump could warp the tools of government and deliver ineradicable changes.

A biopic of former president Donald Trump released right before the election seems ripe for box office success. But when screenwriter Gabriel Sherman looked for a distributor for his new film The Apprentice, Trump threatened legal action, and major studios got cold feet. Today on Lever Time, Sherman sits down with David Sirota and Arjun Singh to discuss the battle to release The Apprentice and how Wall Street’s Hollywood takeover is making it more difficult for political films to get made.

In the early 2000s, a seismic shift happened in Hollywood. After decades of movie-studio dominance, media deregulation and favorable market conditions opened the doors for Wall Street to move in and consolidate the industry. the balance of power shifted from filmmakers to bankers. Now, with a potential Trump presidency looming, some filmmakers are concerned it could cast a chill over the industry and frighten studios from backing films that could be seen as critical of Trump or his allies.

Here’s a preview of the final episode of MASTER PLAN, The Lever’s investigative audio series exposing the 50-year plot to legalize corruption in America—winner of awards for Best Writing and Best News & Politics Podcast. To listen to the whole series for free, search Master Plan in your podcast app or visit MasterPlanPodcast.com.

This is a preview of a bonus episode exclusive for premium subscribers. To become a premium subscriber go here.

For decades, major labor unions like the Teamsters have endorsed the Democratic ticket in presidential elections — but not this year. In a surprise move, the Teamsters declined to endorse either former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris. The development — and Trump’s surprising levels of support from blue-collar and union voters — suggests something’s changing in the world of working-class politics.

Today on Lever Time, senior podcast producer Arjun Singh unpacks the cultural and economic trends that have turned working-class voters away from the Democratic Party and explores how the Republican Party is now working to win them over.

Donald Trump is heading to Aurora, Colorado, on Friday — a city that Trump has repeatedly portrayed as crime-ridden and taken over by Venezuelan gangs, despite the refutations of city officials and police. Ahead of Trump’s Colorado rally on Friday, David Sirota joined the podcast City Cast Denver to explain why Trump has focused on Aurora and the signal he’s sending with his rally in the Denver suburb.

Millions in the Southeastern United States recently endured one cataclysm after another. First, Hurricane Helene left chaos and destruction across a trail of states. Then, in Georgia, a catastrophic chemical plant fire released plumes of toxic chlorine gas, forcing thousands to evacuate or shelter in place. Both disasters share a troubling backstory: regulatory failures fueled in part by corporate greed made the crises worse.

On Lever Time, senior podcast producer Arjun Singh sits down with reporter Katya Schwenk and news editor Lucy Dean Stockton to hear how government inaction and corporate meddling led to weakened climate adaptation infrastructure and lax oversight of dangerous chemical facilities.

Vice President Kamala Harris has built a broad coalition that stretches from climate activists to a former oil company CEO, all of them aligned against former President Donald Trump. But if Harris wins in November and Trump’s out of the picture, what happens to this band of strange bedfellows, who frequently find themselves split on core issues like taxation and corporate power? What kind of a mandate will Harris have to lead? And is this arrangement setting her up for a rudderless administration?

Today on Lever Time, senior podcast producer Arjun Singh sits down with journalist Ben Bradford, host of the podcast series Landslide, to discuss what happened when Jimmy Carter built a similarly broad coalition in 1976 and ask if the Democrats’ big tent is about to burst. 

In 1971, Lewis Powell, a tobacco industry lawyer and future Supreme Court justice, penned a memo calling on conservatives and business interests to make the nation’s legal system far more friendly to corporate power. A few years later, a lawyer named Michael Horowitz penned a follow-up memo calling for conservatives to indoctrinate generations of lawyers as the right’s foot soldiers on the ground. 

Today on Lever Time, senior podcast producer Arjun Singh talks to David Sirota and Jared Jacang Maher about their deep-dive investigation into this 50-year plan in the hit new Lever  podcast Master Plan. Then, he sits down with journalist David Daley to discuss his latest book, Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right's 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections. 

Daley’s book centers around Chief Justice John Roberts, whose ascent to the high court — and the conservative rulings he’s handed down — was the culmination of decades of work that began with Powell and Horowitz’s memos. 

When Kamala Harris first ran for president in 2019, she promised to deliver Medicare for All to the people — but that changed. Early in her campaign, she frequently referred to a 2017 bill she co-sponsored with Sen. Bernie Sanders that would have effectively abolished private health insurance. But when political winds didn’t look good, Harris changed course, and ultimately released her own, very different version of the bill, which sought to bolster and support private insurance companies by expanding their role in Medicare. 

It wouldn’t be the only time Harris bucked a campaign pledge for political gain. Today on Lever Time, senior podcast producer Arjun Singh looks at two defining moments in Harris’ career to understand how the presidential hopeful acts when forced to choose between the values she campaigned on and political gain.

In her current campaign, Harris has tried to play it safe. She’s consistently pushed the Biden administration’s agenda while remaining vague on how she’d respond to key issues. One of those issues has been how to handle Israel’s invasion of Gaza, a disaster that Harris will likely inherit if she wins the presidency. If so, the Gaza crisis will present one of the first tests of what a President Harris would do in office, but even close observers are unsure what the vice president ultimately believes is the best course of action on the matter.