Stress Test, from Mother Jones

This week, we take a hard look at the strange, swampy saga of President Donald Trump and a Florida spa entrepreneur.

Li “Cindy” Yang is the former owner of the Jupiter, Florida, massage parlor where New England Patriots owner Bob Kraft was busted in February for allegedly soliciting prostitution. (She sold this location around 2012, and Kraft has denied the allegations.) Yang landed in the news after the Miami Herald published photos of Yang posing with President Trump and other Republican notables.

But there was more to the story. In 2017, Yang and her husband had formed a business, GY US Investments LLC, that offered clients opportunities to “interact with the president…and other political figures” at Mar-a-Lago.

Host Jamilah King chats with Dan Schulman, our deputy bureau chief in Washington D.C., and Dan Friedman, our foreign influence and national security reporter, about what know so far.

In a nail-biting Alabama special election in 2017 to fill the Senate seat formerly held by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Doug Jones made history when he narrowly won against former state Supreme Court justice Roy Moore, who was accused of sexual misconduct, to become the state's first Democrat elected to the US Senate in 25 years.

Jones’ improbable victory was celebrated nationally by Democrats because it represented a powerful, rare opportunity—the potential for Democrats to regain a foothold in the Deep South.

The freshman senator has been in Congress for a little over a year, during which time he has served on committees that shape policy affecting senior citizens, health care, banking, and defense. He's kept a relatively low profile, particularly in comparison to more vocal freshmen like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her cohort, but he tells Mother Jones that's just not his nature. 

Jones, who plans to run for reelection next year, spoke with the Mother Jones Podcast earlier this month about what he’s learned since taking office and how the Dems can turn the tide in the South.

The long-awaited report by special counsel Robert Mueller confirms what we already knew: that Donald Trump and his campaign privately interacted with Russia while Putin’s regime was preparing—and then carrying out—an attack on the 2016 US presidential election. On today's special edition of the show, host Jamilah King talks to Washington D.C. bureau chief David Corn about the ways in which Mueller has demonstrated the Trump-Russia scandal is neither a hoax nor a conspiracy theory, and how, even if Trump has not committed crimes, the president is guilty of many serious misdeeds and transgressions.

The blitz of media coverage for this week’s 20th anniversary of the Columbine attack has once again put the perpetrators center stage. But school shooters and other would-be attackers have continued to be inspired by the pair who committed suicidal mass murder at their Colorado high school on April 20, 1999— a dynamic known as the “Columbine effect.“ Some have even taken pilgrimage-style trips from as far away as North Carolina and Washington state, to visit Columbine in suburban Denver before returning home to carry out their own shootings. On today’s show, we ask: What has changed in the last two decades in the way the media covers mass shootings? And what has changed in our resolve to finally do something about this crisis? Host Jamilah King talks with Columbine survivor Craig Scott, and Dave Cullen, a reporter who rushed to the scene that day, about their recollections and ongoing struggles. We also talk to Mother Jones’s own national affairs editor, Mark Follman, about investigating the growing problem of copycat shooters. Finally, Igor Volsky, founder and executive director of Guns Down America, shares reporting from his new book, “Guns Down: How To Defeat The NRA And Build A Safer Future With Fewer Guns,” which proposes a plan for defeating the ever-resolute National Rifle Association. Four interviews, reflecting four unique perspectives at this moment of remembrance and commemoration.

When gun-toting militants set up shop, this Arizona community got fed up and came together. Arivaca is a town of just 700 residents and sits 11 miles north of the Mexico border in a remote area of the Sonoran Desert. For about two decades, anti-immigrant vigilante groups have patrolled the region to try to remedy what they perceive as the federal government’s failure to secure the border. On this week's show, host Jamilah King sits down with journalist Eric Reidy and the town's "unofficial mayor" Ken Buchanan, to discuss how locals finally banded together to fight back, and what other cities and towns in America can learn from their success. Also in the show: Mother Jones Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery chats with actor Emilio Estevez about his new film, The Public.

Can an openly gay war-veteran millennial become president in 2020?

This week’s guest is presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, vying for a shot in a crowded Democratic field. 

In front of a sold-out crowd at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco last week, Mayor Pete, as he’s known to his constituents, had a candid conversation with Mother Jones Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery, in which he shared his plans to bring the rigor of running a small Rust Belt town to the White House. 

But first, he needs to beat President Donald Trump—and Mayor Pete says he knows how.

We all craved a clear resolution after special counsel Robert Mueller submitted his report to Attorney General William Barr over the weekend. No such luck: We are left untangling what the combination of "no collusion" and "no obstruction" actually means, and the jury's out on obstruction of justice. Nonetheless, Trump has turned the result into an inevitable victory lap, with characteristic Trumpian vengeance. Speaking in the Oval Office on Monday, Trump said he had been victimized by Mueller’s investigation, and, ominously, he'd be taking "a look" at those he deemed responsible. So, where are we right now? Put simply, we are in a kind of political wilderness, without a roadmap, or an actual report to read, and lots of unanswered questions. In the podcast studio with host Jamilah King this week, David Corn, Washington, DC, Bureau Chief, and national security and foreign influence reporter, Dan Friedman help sort things out in the post-Mueller investigation world.

A special breaking news edition of the Mother Jones Podcast: Special counsel Robert Mueller has completed his investigation of the Trump-Russia scandal and submitted a confidential report to Attorney General William Barr. It is not yet clear if Barr will release a summary or any of Mueller’s findings to Congress. Barr said he notified congressional leaders in a letter on Friday evening that he “may be in a position to advise you of the special counsel’s principal conclusions as soon as this weekend,” according to the New York Times. So. Now what? The story is far from over—and Trump's war on the truth is set to ramp up. Joining host Jamilah King is Mother Jones's Washington Bureau Chief David Corn, who argues that instead of putting the controversy to rest, Mueller's report is about to release some serious partisan rancor.

Last Friday, at least 50 people were killed at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. While the perpetrator’s exact path to radicalization is still unknown, one thing has become increasingly clear: This was an attack crafted by the internet and for the internet, representing a new level of super-viral violence. The Christchurch shooter exploited an unwitting ally in the form of giant tech companies, who have proven themselves unable or unwilling to stop the spread of hate speech on their platforms. In doing so, he immediately turned some of America’s most profitable and influential companies into distributors of a lurid white nationalist recruitment video. Joining host Jamilah King are two experts on social media platforms and how they operate, Mother Jones reporters Ali Breland and Pema Levy. Also on the show, our National Affairs Editor, Mark Follman, describes how the rise of a global white supremacist movement combined with the rise of Trumpism, to create a highly combustible fuel for this kind of extreme violence.

Our guest today is David Wallace Wells, a deputy editor at New York Magazine, and author of a vividly distressing new book about the all-encompassing perils of climate change, called The Uninhabitable Earth. With every full-throated warning, on page after page, Wallace Wells fully embraces the notion that eloquently targeted fear can shake the public into action. He also presents a gripping argument that scientists, and others charged with sounding the alarm, have historically been far too timid, for fear of being branded "alarmist" or dismissed as leftist. Now is the time to panic, Wallace Wells argues. In fact, that moment passed long ago. So now what? Host Jamilah King helps listeners locate some moments of hope and optimism amid the fear.