“Our troops will fight to win," President Donald Trump said Monday night in his first first prime-time broadcast on a single policy issue. "We  will fight to win. From now on, victory will have a clear definition.” Yet, as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson appeared to concede in public remarks the following day, the reality on the ground is not one that appears to present any possible clear victory. In this week's TrumpWatch, Rod Nordland speaks to Jesse from Kabul, Afghanistan (where he is the New York Times bureau chief) about his recent article "What an Afghanistan Victory Looks Like Under the Trump Plan."

On Saturday, after a 20-year-old Nazi sympathizer named James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others, President Donald Trump addressed the nation from his Bedminster, N.J. golf course. His statement that blame was shared by "many sides" was immediately called out for being insufficient by politicians of both parties, leading the President to call the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists "repugnant" in a revised statement on the issue on Monday. But the following day, Trump appeared to double down on his original comments that there was blame on both sides. On this week's TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent talks to Scott Marzano, a former U.S. Marine who served two tours of duty in Iraq and participated in the counter-protest in Charlottesville on Saturday. Scott was standing in the same crowd of counter-protesters as Heather Heyer when she was killed. Beyond sharing his first-hand account of the tragic event, the ex-Marine's offers his own impression of President Trump's response to the attack.

When President Donald Trump tweeted that "the United States Government will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. military," he called into question the fate of the estimated 12,800 troops currently in active service that would be affected. But are the President's stated reasons for the pledged shift in policy, the “tremendous medical costs and disruption,” supported by the facts? In this episode of TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent examines whether sexual orientation actually has a quantifiable effect on the cohesion of our fighting force with Nathaniel Frank, director of Columbia Law School's What We Know Project, a research initiative that collects scholarship on LGBTQ public policy and the author of “Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America” and Alexander Downes, an associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, where he teaches courses on international security and military effectiveness. His article “Would transgender troops harm military effectiveness? Here’s what the research says” was published on August 1 in the Washington Post.

This week, with Vice President Mike Pence casting the tie-breaking vote and Sen. John McCain of Arizona returning to the Capitol despite a brain cancer diagnosis and recent surgery to remove a blood clot over his left eye, Senate Republicans were able to secure the 50 votes needed to begin debate on bills repealing or replacing the Affordable Care  Act. If they are able to pass legislation reversing President Obama's signature health care policy, President Donald Trump has vowed to sign it, as long as it is what he described to Fox News co-anchor Eric Bolling back in May as a "great plan." But what does this all mean for the future of health policy in America? In this week's TrumpWatch, Jesse talks to Russell Berman, senior associate editor at The Atlantic, about where the political battle over repeal and replace is headed.

As most Americans know, Donald Trump had a long and well-publicized  business career before entering the political arena in his 70s. In part two of his interview with David Cay Johnston, the Pulitzer Prize-winning  editor-in-chief of DCReport.org and the author of "The Making Of Donald  Trump," host Jesse Lent asks about Trump's past business ventures financial history, a subject on which Johnston is considered one of the nation's foremost authorities.

The ongoing Justice Department investigation into whether the Donald Trump campaign colluded with Russian officials in the 2016 presidential  election has been splashed across the front page for months. But are the elite journalists at the forefront of this media frenzy missing the mark? In the first installment of a two-part interview, TrumpWatch" host Jesse Lent speaks with David Cay Johnston, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor-in-chief of  DCReport.org and the author of "The Making Of Donald Trump" about what key aspects of the Russian collusion controversy are getting lost in the  heat of the current political moment. His July 8 editorial, "Why Did We Create DCReport.org? Because Most News Coverage of the Trump-Putin  Meeting Missed the Most Important Point," explored critical areas of Trump's relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin that have gone underreported by most major newspapers.

In December of 2017, when Donald Trump nominated retired General John F.  Kelly to his current post of U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, he sailed through his Senate confirmation hearings, receiving the chamber's  approval by a margin of 88 Senators to 11. But the stricter rules regarding airline travel coming out of the Department of Homeland Security under his watch and his full-throated support for the President's immigration policy, has left many Democrats with buyer's remorse. In this episode of TrumpWatch, Jesse talks to Jonah Walters of the quarterly magazine Jacobin about what Kelly's past can tell us about the man and his views on U.S. security policy.

On Monday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments when the nine Justices reconvene in the fall on whether  President Donald Trump's Executive Order 13769, entitled Protecting the  Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States, (what the President himself has called a travel ban) is constitutional. Yet, they also lifted a stay on certain aspects of Trump's travel ban, overriding several federal appeals court decisions blocking the order.  The ruling means anyone coming to the US from the six banned countries, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, will be  forced to prove they have "bone-fide ties" to a local organization or citizen in order to gain entry until the final Supreme Court decision is handed down. According to Diala Shamas, a lecturer in law and a supervising attorney at Stanford Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic who works with Muslim communities in the United States, the SCOTUS ruling on Trump's travel ban is proof that the judicial branch cannot be the check on the President's agenda that many on the left were hoping it would be. Her op-ed  “Lawyers alone can’t save us from Trump. The Supreme Court just proved it,” appeared in Tuesday's edition of the Washington Post. In this episode of TrumpWatch, Jesse talks to Professor Shamas about what the Supreme Court decision will mean in the immediate term, why it signifies the problems with expecting lawyers to be a bulwark against the President's agenda and what citizens can do to e resist the change in national immigration policy if the answer isn't in the courts.

On June 16, 2017, when President Donald J. Trump announced he would reverse the Obama-era loosening of the US embargo of Cuba, he raised major  questions about what the change will mean for relations between the two countries. On this week's TrumpWatch, Jesse explores what the President's return to a harder line in U.S.-Cuba policy will mean for travel, trade and diplomatic relations between the two nations with Mimi Whitefield of the Miami Herald.

With the ongoing investigation of Trump administration ties to Russia dominating national news  coverage, it can often appear like there is little time for reporters to investigate anything else. Among the litany of critical issues getting  kicked off of the front pages of most major newspapers in America is the environment. President Trump and his EPA head Scott Pruitt promised to rollback reams of Obama-era regulations and so far they have made good on that promise. In this episode of TrumpWatch, Amy Harder, a reporter covering energy and environmental policy for Axios who writes the Harder Line weekly column, returns to the show to discuss which shifts in green policy have been overshadowed by the daily revelations of the investigation into Russian collusion.