Stress Test, from Mother Jones

Today, President Donald Trump became the first president in US history to be impeached twice. A majority of the US House of Representatives—including 10 Republican members—voted to impeach Trump following last week’s violent attack by right-wing extremists on the US Capitol. “Donald Trump will go down in history as the most impeached president, ever,” says Washington DC bureau chief David Corn, on this breaking news edition of the show.

By the time House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s gavel formalized the historic rebuke of Trump, 232 members had voted for the measure, 197 against. Corn suggests that in the final weeks of his presidency, Trump’s incendiary rhetoric and persistent attacks on the election results will leave an everlasting stain on his legacy. “It was inevitable that the Trump presidency would end ugly.”

The impeachment moves next to the Senate. It is unclear whether Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will support it. But fractures have already appeared in the traditionally watertight Republican caucus, which has previously acted as a loyal force for Trump over the past four years. The future of the Republican party hangs in the balance.

The January 6 attack on the US Capitol by a mob of extremist Trump supporters was shocking and scary—but not surprising. Incendiary rhetoric and racist dog whistles have been centerpieces of President Trump’s politics since he first ran for office. Trump has encouraged his supporters to bully immigrants, journalists, and Democratic politicians. He tapped into a thick vein of right-wing extremism that has led to violence countless times in American history: from the Ku Klux Klan, to the Oklahoma City bombing, the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre, Charlottesville, El Paso, and Kenosha, just to name a few. Right-wing extremism has time and again been the ideological driver of domestic terrorism.

Mother Jones National Affairs Editor has been tracking President Trump’s terror tactics for years. He joined Jamilah King on the podcast to explain how he saw the Capitol attack coming. “Anyone who was paying attention to the rhetoric Trump was using was able to see that bad things were coming,” Follman says. “It was logical that once he turned the full fury of his extremist rhetoric on the 2020 election that would lead to violence in the wake of the election, and that’s exactly what we saw with the assault on Congress.”

Why weren’t the Capitol police prepared? Is there evidence of right-wing extremism among American law enforcement and military personnel? Does de-platforming actually work? Will there be violence between now and the inauguration? Follman explains how the attack on Congress was a coordinated, logical, and predictable outgrowth of Trumpism and an American brand of extremism—and the end of the president’s plausible deniability.

On Wednesday, a mob of Trump supporters surged towards the US Capitol as the Senate was debating certification of Joe Biden’s election win. “No one gets out alive, not today!” a man brandishing a Trump flag shouted, according to MoJo reporter Matt Cohen, who was there when the barricades fell and the insurgency began. The rioters then scaled the walls, smashed windows, and ran through the Capitol building, ransacking and looting as they went, forcing unprepared police officers to issue tear gas and lockdown orders. Five people were killed. The Capitol rotunda was littered with broken glass and damaged furniture.

Having covered many protests over the years, Cohen says this one was different: “This really felt like the first time that if I had been wearing my press badge, especially when things go hairy, I would have been a target.” Cohen joins Jamilah King on the Mother Jones Podcast to share his firsthand account with our listeners.

NOTE: This episode was recorded just before violence erupted on Capitol Hill when pro-Trump extremists, inflamed by the president, rampaged inside Congress.

Wow. What a start to the year. For those of you hoping high-stakes political drama might be confined to the 2020 presidential election, think again. In the year's opening week alone, we've heard a raging president, caught on tape, bullying state officials to fake the election result; witnessed a band of would-be coup-plotters launch an unheard-of attack on democracy; and watched a runoff election in Georgia that will decide the fate of the US Senate—and Biden's agenda. To explain the meaning of these dizzying, concurrent developments, host Jamilah King is joined by Washington DC Bureau Chief, David Corn, who provides much-needed historical background to the civil war brewing inside the Republican Party, and more.

"The guy who goes on about election fraud has been caught red-handed, trying to induce election fraud!" Corn explains during the show. "What Trump is doing is he’s trying to create a loyalty test.”

What does this Trump loyalty test mean for the future of the Republican party? Are there parallels between the Whig party’s implosion in the 1800s and the rift within today’s GOP? Could Trump face criminal charges for trying to coerce the Georgia Secretary of State to find him more votes? "What we see here is the coddling of a coup," Corn concludes. "I mean: that’s what they’re trying to do."

A disease, global in reach but intimate in its cruelty. A nation plunged into economic ruin. A president raging and incompetent. Society's unforgiving disparities revealed like never before. What a year to be putting out a weekly news podcast. On this week's episode of the Mother Jones Podcast, our last for 2020, the entire production team joins host Jamilah King to reflect on the year and replay what we thought were the most meaningful moments from our coverage. It seemed the best way—both personal and journalistic—to chart these extraordinary events.

We start as the coronavirus catches fire. In March, producer Molly Schwartz followed reporter Noah Lanard to document how restaurants in Flushing, Queens, faced imminent collapse. As our producer James West recovered from his own bout of COVID, he turned to Peter Staley, a prominent AIDS activist who worked (and sparred) with Dr. Anthony Fauci in the early days of that epidemic. Staley's scathing indictment of Trump's inaction is haunting still. "The deaths are all on his head," he said. "The blood is all on his hands. The people dying now are Trump deaths."

Soon, the unequal impact of coping with quarantine became painfully apparent. Learning from home was hard enough, but Molly found that remote education in a place known as the "valley of the telescopes"—in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, where WiFi is outlawed to preserve the integrity of a massive radio telescope—was a complete disaster.

But other historic fissures were soon to crack open anew. The death of George Floyd in May at the hands of the Minneapolis police was broadcast to the world and "pushed nearly anyone with a political conscience into physical action," Jamilah wrote soon after, in a painful but galvanizing personal essay we turned into radio.

Anger indeed was a 2020 touchstone. Trump's chief enabler Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, upon the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September, began ramming through a new conservative justice. "His entire vision for the Trump presidency has been to pack the courts," reporter Ari Berman explained during a podcast about this unfolding democratic emergency. Jamilah recalls this breathtaking hypocrisy: "It was a moment that kind of signaled that 'we're done'," she says. "We're done, being run over and being dictated to."

And that was the sentiment that turned out, finally, to hold. Election Day 2020 was a picture of democracy in action. In the swing state of Arizona, long a laboratory for anti-immigrant laws, reporter Fernanda Echavarri documented a new group of activists determined to turf Trump from office, a coalition that became emblematic of Joe Biden's ultimate victory in November. "It really was this full circle," Fernanda says of the effort to flip Arizona. "Young, old, rich, poor, people came together and said, 'We're not going to have this here in Ar…

Joe Biden’s biographer joins the Mother Jones Podcast to tell us about the man behind the public figure. Over his decades in public life, we’ve heard about the tragedies our president elect has experienced: the trauma of the car accident that killed his first wife and small daughter, his own health challenges, his unsuccessful runs for president, and the death of his golden son Beau while his other son Hunter struggled with drug addiction. 

But what are the deeper stories beneath this well-known narrative? What makes him tick? What is  he like off-camera? And perhaps most important of all, what kind of president is he likely to be? That's what Evan Osnos set out to explore in his new biography Joe Biden: The Life, The Run, and What Matters Now. We know that Biden faced enormous personal tragedies and devoted himself to public service for most of his adult life. Yet for many, the private person remains something of an enigma. In his biography, Osnos portrays a canny political operator known for his bipartisanship who has always maintained a certain political looseness, partly because his stutter made him averse to teleprompters. Jamilah King talks with Osnos about Biden’s relationship with Mitch McConnell, his political evolution, and how his diverse cabinet picks square with his legislative record on racial justice. In just a few more weeks, Joe Biden will achieve the position he has been striving for since he was a kid. Here’s a chance to understand what that means for him–and for the country.

On this week's Mother Jones Podcast, we take you along for the ride as Democrats barnstorm Georgia in the last few weeks before the pivotal runoff elections. Our reporter Becca Andrews is pulling up to drive-in church services and political rallies at the heart of the Reverend Raphael Warnock’s race against incumbent Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler. It’s something of an old narrative meeting a new age: Republicans are unleashing dated stereotypes and prejudices about the Black church to smear Warnock, but his faith and his deep ties to the civil rights movement are rallying points for his supporters—and they’ll be crucial in Democrats’ pursuit of Senate control. The party will need to rely, at least in part, on the deep legacy of the Black church in political activism and in expanding voting rights, while a younger generation of organizers brings new-school methods to an old-school race.

You might be breathing a deep sigh of relief that the 2020 elections are finally over. But spare a thought for our friends in Georgia. Voters there are still being bombarded with political ads, national attention, and oodles of fresh campaign cash because they are about to decide, in two contests on January 5, who controls the US Senate. Runoff elections like these in Georgia are typically disasters for Democrats, explains our voting rights reporter Ari Berman. But organizing against voter suppression and high turnout in November are giving Democrats hope that these Senate races could be different this time around. Democrats have believed for some time that a rapidly diversifying electorate would allow them to be competitive in Georgia, but repeated voter suppression efforts had kept that electorate from fully forming. Now, two years of activism have created the conditions for Joe Biden to carry the state by just under 12,000 votes, making him the first Democratic presidential candidate in 28 years to win Georgia, amid record turnout. That electorate is now giving Democrats hope that Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff can win runoff elections that would have seemed almost unwinnable in past years. While Republicans are melting down over Trump’s false allegations of voter fraud, Democrats and Black organizers are now focused on electing a majority in the US Senate that can pass Biden’s legislative agenda. They might just make history.

Young people turned out in record numbers for the 2020 presidential election, and they overwhelmingly backed Joe Biden. Now, the hashtag #CancelStudentDebt has been trending on Twitter, as intense pressure mounts on the President-elect to finally tackle the $1.7 trillion student debt crisis holding millions of Americans, especially young Americans, hostage to often crippling monthly payments for years to come. “This feels like the closest we’ve ever been,” one education advocate recently told Time, referring to the chance for real policy changes. According to Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) who has established herself as the loudest voice on the matter, large-scale debt forgiveness would provide “the single most effective economic stimulus that is available through executive action.” But how likely is that? Can this finally be fixed?

On this week’s episode of the Mother Jones Podcast, we’re revisiting our big investigation by journalist Ryann Liebenthal into America’s broken student debt machine. We first brought you this story in August 2018, detailing the flailing government program known as Public Service Loan Forgiveness, a system that, when Biden was a candidate, he pledged to streamline and reform. “It should be done immediately,” he said, referring to the passage of new legislation. But that depends on who controls the Senate come January, and Biden’s professed urgency must inevitably be tempered with a tough political reality.

To bring us up to speed on what’s changed since the campaign and what Biden’s picks for his economic team can tell us about his ambitions, we also chatted to our very own transition tracker, Washington, DC, political reporter Kara Vogt. “The demands for canceling student debt have not ceased since president-elect Joe Biden won in November,” Voght says. “It’s not just the grassroots, not just progressive who are calling for this.” Revisit our original written investigation here.