At a rally in Washington, Michigan on Saturday, President Donald Trump seemed to relish the crowd chants of “Nobel!”--a reference to his upcoming meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and a historic summit the previous day between Kim and his South Korean counterpart, President Moon Jae In of South Korea. But how much credit does Trump, who was engaged with a vicious war of words with Kim less than six months ago, deserve for this recent diplomatic display on the Korean Peninsula? On this week’s  TrumpWatch, Jesse talks to David Smith, Washington DC bureau chief of The Guardian.

Last week, 131 representatives and 39 senators signed a congressional resolution calling on Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt to resign. But, according to Amy Harder of Axios, whether Pruitt stays in his role at the EPA or goes his controversial agenda of slashing  environmental regulations will continue as long as there is a Republican in the White House. On this week’s TrumpWatch, Amy reviews some of the most consequential actions Pruitt has taken while overseeing the EPA.

In 2017, when President Trump authorized the firing of 59 Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian air base in retaliation for its alleged role in a sarin gas attack both British and French government agencies reportedly had soil samples confirming that chemical weapons had been used, violating international law. Yet, when US forces launched coordinated airstrikes with the UK and France on Friday to take out three facilities in Syria believed to be researching, developing and  storing chemical weapons, the proof was a lot less solid. On this week’s TrumpWatch, Colum Lynch and Elias Groll, co-authors of the Foreign Policy article “How Social Media Built the Case for Trump’s Strike on Syria,” examine the evidence used to justify this new round of air attacks by the US and its allies.

From the time he announced his intention to run for president, in June  of 2015, Donald Trump has consistently linked rape with undocumented  immigrants. But while the President has repeatedly called Mexicans rapists without any evidence to support his claims, according to a new investigative report by Alice Speri of The Intercept, it is actually U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers that are sexually assaulting undocumented immigrants. Alice’s article “Detained, Then Violated: 1,224 Complaints Reveal a Staggering Pattern of Sexual Abuse in Immigration Detention. Half of Those Accused Worked for ICE,” parses the hundreds of reports of sexual abuse filed by those who allege that they were raped while in custody. On this week’s TrumpWatch, Jesse talks to Alice about the disturbing accounts she uncovered and examines what can be done to stop this.

On April 4, 1968, the legacy of civil rights in America changed in an instant when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed by an assassin’s bullet at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. On this week’s TrumpWatch with Jesse Lent on WBAI, Larry Hamm, chairman and founder of the People’s Organization for Progress reflects on the struggle for black equality in the 50 years since the slaying of Dr. King.

When President Donald Trump held a joint press conference with Gov. Ricardo Rossello of Puerto Rico at the White House in October, exactly one month after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, he was asked how he would rate his administration’s response to the devastating storm on a scale of one to 10. The President gave himself a 10. Yet for the thousands of Puerto Ricans still stranded without power or adequate access to food or clean water, the federal response to Maria had been anything but. On this week’s TrumpWatch, Jesse talks to Danny Vinik, assistant editor of The Agenda at POLITICO, whose March 27 article “How Trump favored Texas over Puerto Rico: A POLITICO investigation shows a persistent double  standard in the president’s handling of relief efforts for Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Maria” explores how the Trump administration treated the U.S. island territory differently than the 28th state.

On  February 17, at a gun control rally held in front of the Broward County Courthouse, Stoneman Douglas senior Emma Gonzalez gave an impassioned plea for students to stand up and demand action for her slain classmates after a student went on a shooting rampage on February 14 that killed 17 and wounded 17. The clip was viewed over 3 million times on YouTube.  But Gonzalez was just getting started. Along with her schoolmates Alfonso Calderon, Sarah Chadwick, Emma González, David Hogg and Cameron Kasky,  she started the organization Never Again MSD with the goal of ending  school shootings in the US permanently. With Never Again MSD’s first major demonstration, The March For Our Lives happening in Washington, DC and across the country on Saturday, Jesse talks to Josh Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition To Stop Gun  Violence, about how the Parkland students have changed the political calculus of the gun debate in this country.

Back in September, when Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, 44 percent of local residents were left without safe drinking water. But according to Sarah Laskow, author of the Atlas Obscura article “The Hidden  Problems With Puerto Rico’s Water Supply,” the island’s water infrastructure was already in deep trouble before Maria hit, from a combination of leaky pipes, a high concentration of toxic Superfund sites and the natural geography of the area. On this week’s TrumpWatch, Jesse asks Sarah how we got here and what it will  take to get Puerto Rico’s water system to work for all of the people living there.

What does it mean to have someone in charge of the third largest government agency (with over 240,000 employees and a roster that includes the Secret Service, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Coast Guard) whose main qualification is her unfettered loyalty to President Trump? On this week’s TrumpWatch on WBAI, Jesse considers this question with Jonathan Blitzer of The New Yorker. Jonathan spoke to seven current and former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) staff members for his March 1 article “How the DHS Secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, Became One of President Trump’s Fiercest Loyalists.”

President Trump had been in office for three months when he called Washington Post reporter Robert Costa on his cellphone to inform him that a Republican bill to overhaul the healthcare system was dead. The previous October, when a tape of Trump talking crudely in 2005 to “Access Hollywood” host Billy Bush threatened to derail his 2016 campaign, Trump gave his first interview to the entrenched journo. Again and again the President has demonstrated his trust in the 32-year-old journalist by speaking to him on the record, despite Costa’s refusal to shy away from reporting unflattering developments within the  administration. In 2017, Robert replaced Gwen Ifill as the host of PBS's “Washington Week” after the groundbreaking journalist died from endometrial cancer the previous year. In this installment of TrumpWatch, Jesse talks to Robert about the ways that Washington, DC has changed during the Trump presidency.