The Washington Roundtable discusses new information that has emerged about Joe Biden’s decline while in office, and his advisers' efforts to downplay it, as chronicled in several new books. The group also discusses the challenges faced by members of the press as they report on Donald Trump’s signs of aging and his long-standing incoherence. “I think that’s where we run into trouble,” the staff writer Susan B. Glasser says. “Donald Trump has always been quite ignorant. He’s always been a fact checker's nightmare. He’s always rambled. He’s always lied. And, yes, he’s always not known basic facts about the American system of government. So where do we discern a trajectory with him? How does age factor into it?”

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The New Yorker staff writer Clare Malone joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the changes that Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, is making at the paper. They talk about why Bezos decided to purchase the paper, in 2013, how his recent exertion of editorial influence has caused the paper to hemorrhage both staffers and subscribers, and the future of a news media dependent on the support of “benevolent” billionaires to support it. 

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When Elissa Slotkin narrowly won her Senate seat in Michigan last fall, she was one of only four Democratic senators to claim victory in a state that voted for Donald Trump. It made other Democrats take note: since then, the Party has turned to her as someone who can bridge the red state–blue state divide. In March, Slotkin delivered the Democrats’ rebuttal to Trump’s speech before Congress, and she’s been making headlines for criticizing her own party’s attempts to rein in the President and the Republican Party. She thinks Democrats need to start projecting “alpha energy,” that identity politics “needs to go the way of the dodo,” and that Democrats should drop the word “oligarchy” from their vocabulary entirely. Slotkin prides herself on her bipartisanship, and she believes that Democrats must use old-school collegial collaboration in Congress. And, as different Democratic leaders have appeared on The New Yorker Radio Hour in the past few months, discussing what the next four years might have in store, Slotkin tells David Remnick about a different path forward.

The New Yorker staff writer Katy Waldman joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss Donald Trump’s fondness for A.I.-generated memes and what it tells us about our current political climate. They talk about how Trump uses these images to bend the cultural narrative to his will, why the MAGA aesthetic is tailor-made for the age of A.I., and how the proliferation of A.I. slop is damaging our brains.

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For a long time, Republicans and many Democrats espoused some version of free-trade economics that would have been familiar to Adam Smith. But Donald Trump breaks radically with that tradition, embracing a form of protectionism that resulted in his extremely broad and chaotic tariff proposals, which tanked markets and deepened the fear of a global recession. John Cassidy writes The New Yorker’s The Financial Page column, and he’s been covering economics for the magazine since 1995. His new book, “Capitalism and Its Critics: A History,” takes a long view of these debates, and breaks down some of the arguments that have shaped the U.S.’s current economic reality. “Capitalism itself has put its worst face forward in the last twenty or thirty years through the growth of huge monopolies which seem completely beyond any public control or accountability,” Cassidy tells David Remnick. “And young people—they look at capitalism and the economy through the prism of environmentalism now in a way that they didn’t in our generation.”

The Washington Roundtable discusses the unprecedented corruption of the federal government, including Trump Administration members’ self-enrichment through cryptocurrency schemes and the inaugural committee, and the gutting of parts of the government that are responsible for rooting out self-dealing from public life. It is a level of corruption so “outright” and “brazen,” the staff writer Evan Osnos says, that it constitutes “a new phase in American politics.” 

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In a new recurring series on The Political Scene, the staff writer Andrew Marantz joins Tyler Foggatt to assess the status of American democracy. How does one distinguish—in the blizzard of federal workforce cuts, deportations, and executive orders that have defined the first hundred days of Donald Trump’s second term—actions that are offensive to some, but fundamentally within the power of the executive, from moves which threaten the integrity of our system of government? Marantz applies the lens of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary to analyze where we may be in a potential slide toward autocracy, exploring ways in which Trump has even gone beyond the “Orbán playbook.” Marantz and Foggatt also discuss what it would take to reverse democratic backsliding.

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As Donald Trump continues to launch unprecedented and innovative attacks on immigrants, civic institutions, and the rule of law, the Democratic response has been—in the eyes of many observers—tepid and inadequate. One answer to the sense of desperation came from Senator Cory Booker, who, on March 31st, launched a marathon speech on the Senate floor, calling on Americans to resist authoritarianism. Booker beat the record previously held by Senator Strom Thurmond’s twenty-four-hour-long filibuster of the Civil Rights Act, in 1957, and he spoke in detail about Americans who are in desperate straits because of federal job cuts and budget slashing. “We knew . . . if I could last twenty-four hours and eighteen minutes, that we could potentially command some attention from the public,” Booker tells David Remnick. “That’s the key here . . . to deal with the poverty of empathy we have in our nation right now.” Yet Booker bridles as Remnick asks about Democratic strategy to resist the Administration’s attacks. Instead, he emphasized the need for “Republicans of good conscience” to step up. “Playing this as a partisan game cheapens the larger cause of the country,” he argues. “This is the time that America needs moral leadership, and not political leadership.”

The Washington Roundtable discusses the first hundred days of President Trump’s second Administration, and the fear, pain, and outrage reverberating through U.S. politics. The clinical psychologist and longtime Department of Justice official Alix McLearen is helping distressed government workers connect with service providers during this time. She joins the roundtable to discuss how a politics of fear is shaping the lives of federal employees and ordinary citizens alike, and strategies for coping when psychological forces like fear and trauma become governing principles. 

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Paul Elie, who writes about the Catholic Church for The New Yorker, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the life and legacy of Pope Francis, his feuds with traditionalist Church figures and right-wing political leaders, and what to expect from the upcoming papal conclave to determine his successor. 

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