Original air date: July 23, 2025

In the last few days, we seem to have crossed a threshold. President Trump is ratcheting up the authoritarianism and threatening to prosecute his enemies in a new kind of way. In a series of angry new rants, Trump accused Barack Obama and other members of Obama’s administration of serious crimes. He’s also calling for Senator Adam Schiff to be put in “prison.” Critically, all this has been accompanied by unabashedly corrupt manipulation of the bureaucracy that’s designed to manufacture pretexts for the prosecutions of those enemies. Ryan Enos, a professor of government at Harvard, put it very starkly on Bluesky, saying that authoritarianism is “right here in front of us.” So we invited Enos on the show. He explains why “we’re in real trouble in the short term,” how Trump compares to other authoritarians around the globe, and why our only choices now are to fight the takeover or “accept that this is our future.”

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Original air date: July 15, 2025

The MAGA movement has been in full meltdown ever since President Trump’s Department of Justice concluded they have no evidence that sex offender Jeffrey Epstein kept a client list or was murdered in jail. This contradicted a major MAGA conspiracy theory, and MAGA influencers are screaming cover-up. Tucker Carlson just ratcheted this all up by attacking Trump: He faulted Trump’s government for failing to take questions about the matter seriously. In another heresy, Carlson even criticized Trump himself for brushing off MAGA’s anger over it. Carlson’s broadside has some Republicans quietly grappling with why he is so successfully capturing MAGA anger about the Epstein fiasco. We talked to historian Nicole Hemmer, author of several major books about the right and its media networks. She expertly decodes the MAGA pathologies animating the Epstein drama, digs into their deeper sources on the right, and explains what it all says about today’s Trumpified political world.

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Original air date: July 11, 2025

Stephen Miller recently berated ICE officials in a private meeting, demanding that they hit supercharged new arrest quotas and steamrolling anyone who balked, reports The Atlantic. Yet in a surprise twist, the report also details that Miller’s demands for maximum arrests are driving morale at ICE into the crapper. Importantly, what’s irking ICE agents is precisely that the mission of arresting as many low-level offenders as possible is pulling them away from pursuing serious criminals. This brutally unmasks one of Trump’s biggest scams: It demonstrates clearly that his mass deportations are not at all about public safety and are only about getting as many peaceful and noncriminal immigrants out of the country as possible. We talked to one of our favorite observers on this issue, FWD.us president Todd Schulte. He explains how all this reveals the soft underbelly of Trump’s political strength, why MAGA is now addicted vile memes about shackling immigrants, and what ordinary people can do to effectively resist the coming horrors.

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It appears to be dawning on President Trump that he will not be ending the Russia-Ukraine war in one day as he promised during the campaign. Trump’s frustration at Vladimir Putin is rising: This week he accused Putin of hitting him with “bullshit” and even admitted Putin’s word to him is “meaningless.” This comes as it’s now being reported that Putin is escalating the war against Ukraine and that he’s brushing aside Trump’s anger about it. Add it all up, and Trump is plainly humiliated, realizing that Putin is laughing off his demand for “peace.” We talked to Mona Charen, policy editor at The Bulwark, who writes well about the Trumpified GOP’s embrace of Putin. She explains how Putin has long played Trump, why Putin feels free to humiliate him, and what the various scenarios ahead look like.

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Original air date: July 30, 2025

You’ve probably heard that President Trump and the European Union have reached a big trade deal. This is being widely portrayed as a “win” for Trump and a big humiliation for the EU. But it’s not at all clear what we gain as a country from this deal. Surely the phrase “Trump won” has to mean more than “Trump gets to claim a personal victory and the media is required to play along,” right? We talked to economist Paul Krugman, who has a great new piece on his Substack casting a lot of much-needed skepticism on the deal. Krugman explains in extensive detail what a sham it is: He argues that Europe’s concessions are fake; that the deal won’t spur a lot more manufacturing in the United States; and that its burden will fall heavily on MAGA, making it a “scam on his voters.” Krugman also discusses why the media seems incapable of reporting clearly and accurately on the magnitude of Trump’s incompetence and delusions. 

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Original air date: June 2, 2025

Ming Li Hui, who goes by the name of “Carol,” has lived for 20 years in the town of Kennett, Missouri, after coming here from Hong Kong. She has been raising a family there and works as a waitress—and as The New York Times reports in a piece featuring quotes from Carol and many locals, she’s well-liked in the community. But Carol was recently arrested and now faces potential deportation. This has shocked and dismayed many of the town’s residents, even though the area went overwhelmingly for Trump. Carol talked to us on the podcast straight from jail, where she is awaiting her fate. At times the conversation was difficult: She broke down in tears about her ordeal, was emotionally overwhelmed at the support she’s received from the Trump-backing town, and offers wrenching thoughts about Trump’s effort to deport countless others just like her.

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On Thursday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt delivered one of her most obsequious, fawning tirades about President Trump yet. She credited him with single-handedly resolving a half dozen major geopolitical conflicts around the world, and angrily asserted that it’s high time Trump is granted the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s no accident that this came amid new polling evidence that Trump’s coalition is falling apart in a freshly dangerous way for him, as documented in a great new piece by New Republic senior editor Alex Shephard. In today’s episode, Shephard explains how the numbers show key constituencies getting away from him. We discuss all the ways Leavitt’s North Korea-style propaganda actually works against Trump by reinforcing the emperor-has-no-clothes vibe around him, why the press is reluctant to tell the truth about his unpopularity, how Democrats need to stop treating him as if he’s invincible, and what that should look like.

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President Donald Trump has been raging at Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell for weeks, demanding that he cut interest rates. But on Wednesday, the Fed declined—and worse for Trump, Powell delivered a blunt assessment of his tariffs, claiming they are “pushing up prices,” and that “near-term measures of inflation expectations have moved up.” Given that this comes right when more of Trump’s tariffs are set to take effect on August 1, and given that Powell is directly defying Trump’s fury, that amounts to a harsh blow for the president. Indeed, Trump is also venting his fury at various GOP senators for not doing his bidding. On top of all that, two new polls show his approval rating down to an abysmal 40 percent, with one finding his approval on the economy even lower. We talked to MSNBC.com columnist James Downie, author of a new piece on Democrats and the midterm elections. We discuss why Trump is weaker politically than he looks, why various dynamics look poised to make that worse, and why it’s high time for Democrats to start acting like it.

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You’ve probably heard that President Trump and the European Union have reached a big trade deal. This is being widely portrayed as a “win” for Trump and a big humiliation for the EU. But it’s not at all clear what we gain as a country from this deal. Surely the phrase “Trump won” has to mean more than, “Trump gets to claim a personal victory and the media is required to play along,” right? We talked to economist Paul Krugman, who has a great new piece on his Substack casting a lot of much-needed skepticism on the deal. Krugman explains in extensive detail what a sham it is: He argues that Europe’s concessions are fake, that the deal won’t spur a lot more manufacturing in the U.S., and that its burden will fall heavily on MAGA, making it a “scam on his voters.” Krugman also discusses why the media seems incapable of reporting clearly and accurately on the magnitude of Trump’s incompetence and delusions. 

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President Trump just offered some bizarre new ramblings about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. But he undermined himself: He claimed to know about elite Democrats and liberals who had visited Epstein. But that just raises the question that won’t go away: If this is what the Epstein files would reveal, then why isn’t Trump ordering their release? Every time Trump says such things, he wrecks his own Big Lie: That the Epstein scandal is a Democratic hoax that actually implicates Democrats even as he won’t release the files. Meanwhile, Elon Musk just endorsed the idea that Trump might try to pardon Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell in exchange for exoneration. Musk knows Trump’s machinations here are a major point of weakness. We talked to Jennifer Rubin, editor-in-chief of The Contrarian, who has a good new piece laying out why Trump should be panicking over this scandal. We discuss the absurdity of Trump’s biggest Epstein deceptions, why they’re unsustainable for Trump, and why it all underscores the urgency of a Democratic victory in 2026.

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