Trump has been making some foreign policy moves I didn’t entirely expect. He seems determined to get a nuclear deal with Iran. He’s been public about his disagreements with Benjamin Netanyahu. He called Vladimir Putin “crazy.” And he keeps talking about wanting his legacy to be that of a peacemaker. 

So what, at this point, can we say about Trump’s foreign policy? What is he trying to do, and how well is it working? If he succeeds, what might his legacy be? 

Emma Ashford is a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, a foreign policy think tank, and the author of the forthcoming book “First Among Equals.” She comes from a school of thought that’s more sympathetic to the “America First” agenda than I typically am. But she’s also cleareyed about what is and isn’t working and the ways that Trump is an idiosyncratic foreign policy maker who isn’t always following an “America First” agenda himself.  

Book Recommendations:
A Superpower Transformed by Daniel Sargent
The Strategy of Denial by Elbridge Colby

A World Safe for Commerce by Dale Copeland

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected].

You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

This is a bit of a strange episode. It’s an attempt to explore the difficulty of everything we’re supposed to feel in a day. We’re in a time when to open the news is to expose yourself to horrors — ones that are a world away, others that are growing ever closer, or perhaps have already made landfall in our lives. And then many of us look up from our screens into a normal spring day. What do you do with that?

But that’s not new or exceptional. It’s the human condition. It exists for all of us, and it always has: life intermingling with death, grief coexisting with joy. Kathryn Schulz’s memoir, “Lost & Found,” is all about this experience — the core of her book isn’t losing a parent or finding a life partner. It’s the “and” that connects them both. How do we hold all that we have to hold, all at once? How do we not feel overwhelmed, or emotionally numbed? 

I found this to be a beautiful conversation. But it’s also a conversation — particularly at the beginning — about loss and grief. That was the part that felt truest to me, and so I hope noting it doesn’t warn you off. But I wanted to note it. 

Book Recommendations:

A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel

Spent by Alison Bechdel

Who Is Government? Edited by Michael Lewis

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected].

You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to the Talbot County Free Library.

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Steve Bannon famously talked about using “muzzle velocity” as a strategy: doing so much so quickly that you overwhelm the ability of the media to cover it. I think what the Trump family is doing with crypto is muzzle velocity for corruption.

What they’re doing isn’t necessarily illegal. It would be if these were official campaign donations; the sums involved are so large, and the buyers include foreign nationals. But the Trump family is making this money personally. And they’re doing it across so many different crypto ventures, it’s almost impossible to keep track.

So that’s what I wanted to do with this episode: try to track at least some of it.

The person I’ve enlisted to help me out is Zeke Faux. He’s the author of the fantastic book “Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall” and an investigative reporter at Bloomberg, where he’s been covering many of these strange Trump family crypto schemes.

This episode contains strong language.

Mentioned:

“Trump Crypto Venture Has Talked to Binance About Doing Business” by Zeke Faux

Book Recommendations:

A Distant Mirror by Barbara W. Tuchman

Nixonland by Rick Perlstein

Gretel and the Great War by Adam Sachs

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected].

You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Richard Painter.

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is the cruelest and most irresponsible piece of domestic legislation to be seriously proposed in my lifetime.

When you think about this bill, you should think about risk. It would increase our risk of a fiscal crisis by adding a hefty sum to our nation’s debt, at a time when we’re alienating the countries that typically buy our debt. It would slash food stamps and strip health insurance from millions of people, increasing the risk that the safety net won’t be able to catch any of us, at a time when President Trump’s tariffs have increased the risk of a recession.

It’s what I’m calling the Big Budget Bomb. And if it passes, we’ll all be in the blast radius.

My guest today is Catherine Rampell. She’s an opinion columnist at The Washington Post and an anchor on MSNBC. She’s been covering this closely, so I asked her to come on the show to help talk through all the different risks this bill brings.

Editor’s note: This episode was recorded before the House passed Trump’s domestic policy package.

Mentioned:

“Arkansas’s Medicaid experiment has proved disastrous” by Catherine Rampell

“The Time Tax” by Annie Lowrey

“Barbara Kingsolver Thinks Urban Liberals Have It All Wrong on Appalachia” by The Ezra Klein Show

Book Recommendations:

Our Dollar, Your Problem by Ken Rogoff

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Shy by Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected].

You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Tyson Brody.

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

This episode is about a seemingly simple question: Was there a Joe Biden cover-up?

Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book argues there was. “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again” details how Biden’s top advisers closed the circle around him and tried to conceal the extent of his decline.

But I think the story here is more complicated. If Biden’s top advisers were misleading the public, I think they were also lying to themselves. And if there was a cover-up, it had a lot of holes; voters had been telling pollsters they were worried about Biden’s age for years.

So I wanted to have Tapper on the show to talk about the discoveries in his book, but also about some of the bigger questions raised by the Democratic Party’s decision to almost renominate Biden: How do you see what is right in front of your eyes? How do you avoid letting loyalty to a person or a party blind you?

This episode contains strong language.

Mentioned:

“Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden” by Ezra Klein

“Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping” by Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes

Book Recommendations:

Lorne by Susan Morrison

Hitler’s People by Richard Evans

The Holy Roller by Andy Samberg, Joe Trohman and Rick Remender

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected].

You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Kelsey Kudak. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Is Donald Trump eroding American democracy and consolidating power for himself? Or is he trying to do that and failing? Is this what sliding toward authoritarianism looks like? Or is this what a functioning democracy looks like? And how can you tell the difference?

Two articles came out recently that offer very different perspectives on these questions. In Vox, Zack Beauchamp wrote a piece called “Trump Is Losing,” which argues that Trump’s efforts to cow his enemies and consolidate power are not organized or strategic enough to make a serious dent in our democratic system. In The New Yorker, Andrew Marantz published a piece that he reported in Hungary, about how life in a modern authoritarian regime doesn’t look and feel like you might expect: “You can live through the big one, it turns out, and still go on acting as if — still go on feeling as if — the big one is not yet here,” he writes.

So I invited both Beauchamp and Marantz on the show to debate these big questions: What timeline are we on? What signs are they looking at? If we’ve crossed the line into authoritarianism, how would we know? Is Trump losing? Or is it possible he’s already won?

This episode contains strong language.

Mentioned:

How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

“The Path to American Authoritarianism” by Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way

“How Will We Know When We Have Lost Our Democracy?” by Steven LevitskyLucan Way and Daniel Ziblatt

“Don’t Believe Him” by Ezra Klein

“The Emergency Is Here” by Ezra Klein

Democracy May Not Exist But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone by Astra Taylor

Recommendations

Political Liberalism by John Rawls

Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt

A World After Liberalism by Matthew Rose

Melting Point by Rachel Cockerell

I’m Still Here (film)

The Constitutional Bind by Aziz Rana

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected].

You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu and Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal and Kristin Lin. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

I honestly don’t know how I should be educating my kids. A.I. has raised a lot of questions for schools. Teachers have had to adapt to the most ingenious cheating technology ever devised. But for me, the deeper question is: What should schools be teaching at all? A.I. is going to make the future look very different. How do you prepare kids for a world you can’t predict?

And if we can offload more and more tasks to generative A.I., what’s left for the human mind to do?

Rebecca Winthrop is the director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution. She is also an author, with Jenny Anderson, of “The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better.” We discuss how A.I. is transforming what it means to work and be educated, and how our use of A.I. could revive — or undermine — American schools.

Mentioned:

Brookings Global Task Force on AI Education

Winthrop’s World of Education

Book Recommendations:

Democracy and Education by John Dewey

Unwired by Gaia Bernstein

Blueprint for Revolution by Srdja Popovic

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected].

You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Alexander Gil Fuentes and Switch and Board Podcast Studio.

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

A good rule of thumb is that whatever Margaret Atwood is worried about now, the rest of us will likely be worried about a decade from now. The rise of authoritarianism. A backlash against women’s social progress. Climate change leading to social unrest. Advertising permeating more and more of our lives.

We originally released this episode back in March 2022. But just like Atwood’s work, it somehow only got more relevant with time. 

Atwood is the author of at least 17 novels, including the classic “The Handmaid’s Tale,” as well as 20 books of poetry and nine collections of short fiction. When we spoke, she’d just published an essay collection, “Burning Questions.” And she has a new book coming out this fall, “Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts.”

Mentioned:

Art & Energy by Barry Lord

Book recommendations:

War by Margaret MacMillan

Biased by Jennifer L. Eberhardt

Secrets of the Sprakkar by Eliza Reid

Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White

Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Special thanks to Kristina Samulewski, Coral Ann Howells and Brooks Bouson. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin, Jack McCordick and Aman Sahota. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is one of just 13 Democrats to represent a district that Donald Trump won. Her distinctive economic message, and a willingness to buck her own party, helped her win re-election. But now the reality of the Trump era is coming home.

Gluesenkamp Perez faced raucous crowds at town halls in Washington State recently, with some of her more liberal constituents furious that she isn’t opposing the administration more forcefully. At the same time, the White House has started making economic arguments that sound very similar to ones that she’s made – that we should consume less, produce more and import less stuff from abroad.

So I wanted to talk to her about how she’s navigating this moment. What does she think of Trump’s economic agenda? What reactions is she seeing across her district? How does a Democrat now represent both terrified liberals and loyal Trump voters?

This episode contains strong language.

Book Recommendations:

The Wheelwright’s Shop by George Sturt

Experiences in Visual Thinking by Robert H. McKim

Children’s poetry anthologies from Jack Prelutsky

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected].

You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal and Kristin Lin. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Switch and Board Podcast Studio.

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

The U.S. dollar is the lingua franca of the global financial system. The fact that so much of the world relies on our currency has long been understood as our exorbitant privilege — the reason we have so much leverage in the global economy and are able to borrow at lower interest rates.

But the Trump administration has a much more complicated relationship with the dollar. It has come to see dollar dominance as a burden we bear on behalf of the rest of the world. But in its attempts to move away from dollar dominance, is the Trump administration on the verge of creating a financial crisis?

Kenneth Rogoff is a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and a professor of economics at Harvard University. He has a book coming out called “Our Dollar, Your Problem.” In this conversation he walks through the history of dollar dominance, why it’s been waning in recent years and what ripple effects the Trump administration’s policies might have.

This episode contains strong language.

Book Recommendations:

Muppets in Moscow by Natasha Lance Rogoff

The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis

Benjamin Franklin by Walter Isaacson

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected].

You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.