In September of 2017, Trump famously asked the crowd at an Alabama rally "wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, 'get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out, he's fired?'" Though there is undoubtedly a long history of activism in professional sports, from Muhammad Ali to LeBron James, the current controversy began last season when Colin Kaepernick, then a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, refused to rise for the national anthem at the start of games to highlight police brutality and the killing of unarmed  African-Americans. Kaepernick has yet to sign with an NFL team after becoming a free agent earlier this year. In a special one-hour episode of TrumpWatch, Jesse speaks with Dr. Harry Edwards, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, about the role athletes have played in the struggle for civil rights in America. A longtime consultant for the San Francisco 49ers and the Golden State Warriors, Dr. Edwards organized the Olympic Project for Human Rights, which inspired African-American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos to raise a fist in the "Black Power salute" during the playing of the United States national anthem at a medal ceremony during the 1968 Summer Olympic Games in Mexico City. 

What goes into creating an iconic impression? Does assuming the personality of a subject, even to make fun of them, allow you any new insight into their way of thinking? On this week’s TrumpWatch, Jesse Lent talks to Alec Baldwin whose impression of Donald Trump on “Saturday Night Live,” has become the definitive impression of the 45th President. In addition to discussing what it’s like to perform as someone he admittedly dislikes, Alec compares playing Trump to some of his other iconic roles. Jesse also speaks with Kurt Andersen, the host of “Studio  360” on Public Radio International, who co-authored a new Trump parody book with Alec entitled “You Can't Spell America Without Me: The Really Tremendous Inside Story of My Fantastic First Year as President Donald J. Trump.”

When special counsel Robert Mueller announced indictments for Donald Trump’s former campaign adviser, Paul Manafort and campaign aide Rick Gates and unsealed a plea deal made for false statements by campaign volunteer George Papadopoulos, it led to more questions than answers. Tasked by the Justice Department back in May to pursue alleged Russian efforts to help Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election and investigate any possible collusion between Trump campaign staff and Moscow, Monday’s announcement was the first major public move that  Mueller has made. This week, in a special one-hour episode of  TrumpWatch, Jesse examines what this week’s developments tell us about the direction that the Mueller investigation is taking with national security journalist Marcy Wheeler who wrote the Intercept article “George Papadopoulos’s Plea Deal Is Very, Very Bad News for Attorney General Jeff Sessions” and POLITICO senior investigative reporter Josh Meyer, whose own Oct. 30 piece is entitled “Kremlin likely cultivated Trump adviser, experts say.”

What makes Steve Bannon tick? What drives a man as feared and hated by liberals and conservatives as he is beloved by the army of “alt-right”  white nationalist followers he’s cultivated as executive chairman of the far-right leaning news and opinion website Breitbart? Is President Trump’s former chief strategist “The Great Manipulator” as Time branded him in a February cover story or the “virulently anti-establishment revolutionary out to destroy the administrative state,” as he was described in a New York Times article from back in April? And is Bannon’s political activity since being fired motivated purely by his core beliefs, as his public persona would seem to imply, or is he simply acting out of his own self-interest? According to this week’s guest Anita Kumar, White House correspondent for the news agency McClatchyDC, the answer isn’t so easy to determine. Yet, there's one thing most political reporters seem to agree on--Steve Bannon still has the President’s ear.

Returning to Washington DC aboard Air Force One after touring the devastation Hurricane Maria unleashed on the US territory of Puerto Rico, President Trump told reporters his administration has “only heard ‘thank yous’ from the people" there. Though the locals may appreciate the help, according to Abby Maxman, the president of Oxfam America, the US chapter of the international confederation of charitable organizations focused on fighting global poverty, "clean water, food, fuel, electricity and health care are in desperately short supply and quickly dwindling and we’re hearing excuses and criticism from the administration instead of a cohesive and compassionate response.” On this week’s TrumpWatch, Jesse talks to Scott Paul, humanitarian policy lead for Oxfam about the Trump administration’s relief efforts in Puerto Rico and why the members of his organization believe they have been so poor that there was a need to take the unusual step of speaking out.

From calling Mexicans rapists and criminals at his campaign kick-off, to three different travel bans restricting travel from majority-Muslim  nations, from alleged violations of the emoluments clause to the ongoing probe into collusion with the Russian government in the 2016 election,  from the "Access Hollywood" tape to the Iran nuclear deal, from the NBA to the NFL, there sometimes seem to be as many reasons given for why President Donald Trump must be removed from office as there are protest movements. In a one-hour special State of the Resistance edition of TrumpWatch, Jesse discusses what lessons activists can learn from the history of radical anti-fascist  protest throughout the last century with Mark Bray, a former Occupy Wall Street organizer, Dartmouth College lecturer and author of the book  "Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook" and Barbara Ann Radnofsky, a retired trial lawyer, the first woman in Texas history to run as the Democratic candidate for the US Senate and the author of "A Citizen's Guide to Impeachment" about what remedies are available within the current political system to remove a sitting president from office.

Earlier this week at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City, President Donald Trump took the opportunity of his first address to the General Assembly to rail against the Iran nuclear deal reached during President  Barack Obama’s administration. “The Iran deal was one of the worst and  most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into,” President Trump told the room of world leaders. “Frankly, that deal is an embarrassment to the United States and I don't think you've heard the last of it. Believe me.” Political analysts were practically unanimous in their belief that President Trump was signifying plans to find Iran in breech of a nuclear agreement negotiated by President Barack Obama and six other major nations in 2015, before the Oct. 15 deadline. On this week’s TrumpWatch, Jesse talks to Parisa Hafezi, chief Iran correspondent for Reuters, about where President Trump’s bluster towards Iran is leading us. Typically Based in Ankara, Turkey, Parisa is currently in New York City to cover the U.N. General Assembly and was in attendance for the President’s speech on Tuesday.

"With approximately 142 Americans dying every day, America is enduring a death toll equal to September 11 every three weeks,” reads an interim  report submitted to the White House earlier this month by President Trump’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis, led by New Jersey governor Chris Christie. The report prompted the President, speaking from his Bedminster, N.J. golf club on Aug. 10, to declare the opioid crisis a “national emergency.” Yet there has been little in the way of concrete action in the month since Trump's pronouncement. On this week's TrumpWatch, Jesse’s guest Jonah Walters, a researcher at the quarterly magazine Jacobin, wonders if this lack of action is better than a lot of what the commander-in-chief has in mind.  In his article “Ending the Opioid Crisis,” Jonah studies this national issue by exploring the local toll it has had on his hometown of Williamsport, PA.

On April 26, 2017, when Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for his Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke to review 27 national monuments  designated by the three previous Presidents, he made it clear that he already had a plan on how to proceed. Specifically calling out his predecessor Barack Obama for federal overreach, President Trump pledged to "return" significant parts of the land included in these monuments to  the states, despite the fact that these areas have been federally run since being seized from indigenous peoples in the early history of the American West. With Zinke submitting his report (which predictably recommended scaling back federal control over several of the tracts of public land on the list) to the White House on Aug. 24, the future of these national monuments is uncertain. In this week's TrumpWatch, Jesse talks to Brian Calvert, the editor-in-chief of High Country News, a Colorado-based magazine that covers the American West, about the nationally preserved lands the Trump  administration is poised to hand over to the states. His editorial, “The Trump administration's national monuments 'review' is a sham,” was published in the Guardian last week.

Back on July 26, When President Donald Trump tweeted that he would be implementing a ban on transgender troops serving in the U.S. Armed  Forces, military officials made it clear that there would be no change in policy without an official order to the Pentagon. Last Friday, the President made that order. In this week's TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent unpacks what the ban will mean for trans soldiers currently serving as well as for transgender citizens considering enlisting and how likely it is that the new rule will be reversed in the courts with Bobby Hodgson, a staff attorney at the ACLU of New York. The ACLU is currently suing the Trump administration, claiming the President's transgender military ban violates the constitutional rights of six active duty service members.