Two weeks after the Inauguration of Donald Trump, Elon Musk tweeted, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into a wood chipper.” Musk was referring to the Agency for International Development, an agency which supports global health and economic development, and which has saved millions of lives around the world. “A viper’s nest of radical-left lunatics,” Musk called it. U.S.A.I.D.’s funding is authorized by Congress, and its work is a crucial element of American soft power. DOGE has decimated the agency with cuts so sudden and precipitous that federal workers stationed in conflict zones were stranded without safe passage home, as their own government publicly maligned them for alleged fraud and corruption.  Courts have blocked aspects of the federal purge of U.S.A.I.D., but it’s not clear if workers can be rehired and contracts restarted, or whether the damage is done. In January, 2022, Atul Gawande, a surgeon and leading public health expert who has written for The New Yorker since 1998, was sworn in as assistant administrator for global health at U.S.A.I.D. He resigned as the new administration came to power, and is watching in shock as Trump and Musk make U.S.A.I.D. a guinea pig for the government-wide purge now under way. U.S.A.I.D. was, he admits, a soft target for MAGA—helping people in faraway countries. Gawande calls U.S.A.I.D. “America at its best.” But with Trump and Musk, “there’s a different world view at play here,” he says. “Power is what matters, not impact.”

The Washington Roundtable discusses the ideological underpinnings of Elon Musk’s DOGE with the former Democratic operative and San Francisco-based journalist Gil Duran. Duran writes about the so-called cognitive élite, the right-wing Silicon Valley technologists who want to use A.I. and cryptocurrency to unmake the federal government, on his newsletter The Nerd Reich. 

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The staff writer John Cassidy joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the recent meltdown of the U.S. stock market, Donald Trump’s long-standing support for tariffs, and what the potential death of an American-dominated free-trade system could mean for the global economy. 

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Recently, the former New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez was sentenced to eleven years in prison for accepting bribes in cash and gold worth more than half a million dollars. He is the first person sentenced to prison for crimes committed in the Senate in more than forty years. Menendez did favors for the government of Egypt while he was the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, and intervened in criminal cases against the businessmen who were bribing him. In New York, he broke down in tears before  a federal judge, pleading for leniency. Upon emerging from the courtroom, he made a thinly veiled plea to the man he had once voted to impeach. “President Trump is right,” Menendez declared to news cameras. “This process is political, and it’s corrupted to the core. I hope President Trump cleans up the cesspool and restores the integrity to the system.”  WNYC’s New Jersey reporter Nancy Solomon explores how the son of working-class immigrants from Cuba scaled the heights of American politics, and then fell dramatically. But will he serve the time? Solomon speaks with the constitutional-law professor Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, who says, “It’s hard to know who Trump will pardon next. One of the more recent pardons was for the former governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich. He was a Democrat. . . .  [Trump] seems much more  interested in undermining anti-corruption laws left, right, and center.”

The Washington Roundtable speaks with Jeffrey Rosen, the president and C.E.O. of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit, about how America’s founders tried to tyrant-proof their constitutional system, how Donald Trump’s whim-based decision-making resembles that of the dictator Julius Caesar, and what we can learn from the fall of the Roman Republic. Plus, how the Supreme Court is responding to the Trump Administration’s broad claims of executive power. 

Rosen, a professor at George Washington University Law School, hosts the “We the People” podcast and is the author of “The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.” 

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The staff writer Eric Lach joins the guest host Andrew Marantz to discuss the alleged quid pro quo between Mayor Eric Adams and President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice. Plus, why the President keeps inserting himself into New York City politics and what to make of former Governor Andrew Cuomo’s bid for Gracie Mansion. 

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Democrats in Washington have seemed almost paralyzed by the onslaught of far-right appointments and draconian executive orders coming from the Trump White House. But some state governors seem more willing to oppose the federal government than congressional Democrats are. In January, Governor Tim Walz, of Minnesota, tweeted, “President Trump just shut off funding for law enforcement, farmers, schools, veterans, and health care. . . . Minnesota needs answers. We’ll see Trump in court.” He’s only one of many Democratic governors challenging the federal government. Walz joins David Remnick to offer his analysis of why Democrats lost the 2024 election, why the Party has been losing support from men, and what Democrats need to do now that Donald Trump is back in the White House.

The Washington Roundtable discusses the Trump Administration’s decision to bar the Associated Press from Presidential events, Jeff Bezos’s dramatic makeover of the Washington Post’s opinion section, and why freedom of the press matters. Plus, what journalists can do to meet this moment. 

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The staff writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss why people around the world are having fewer and fewer children and how the issue of birth rates has become a rallying cry for the American right. Plus, the lack of political will on the left to contend with the issue; and the societal effects on South Korea, which has the lowest birth rates in the world. 

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Since the election, Senator John Fetterman—once a great hope of progressives—has conspicuously blamed Democrats for the electoral loss. Fetterman tells David Remnick that the Democratic Party discouraged male voters, particularly white men. He has pursued a lonely course of bipartisanship by meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago before his Inauguration, joining Truth Social, and voting to confirm Pam Bondi as Attorney General—the only Democrat to do so. But, despite Trump’s relatively high approval ratings, he lambasts the Administration for the “chaos” it is currently sowing in America. Fetterman sympathizes with voters’ widespread disgust with contemporary politicking. “Unlimited money has turned all of us in some way into all OnlyFans models,” he says. “We’re all just online hustling for money.”