The New Yorker: Politics And More

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.” This week’s reading: “Mike Waltz Learns the Hard Truth About Serving Donald Trump,” by Susan B. Glasser “How Donald Trump Is Expanding His Authority While Shrinking the Government,” by Jon Allsop “What Canadians Heard—and Americans Didn’t,” by Adam Gopnik “Trump’s Deportees to El Salvador Are Now ‘Ghosts’ in U.S. Courts,” by Jonathan Blitzer “Will the Trump Tariffs Devastate the Whiskey Industry?,” by Charles Bethea “A Life-Changing Scientific Study Ended by the Trump Administration,” by Dhruv Khullar “The Bureaucratic Nightmares of Being Trans Under Tr

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.This week’s reading: “Is It Happening Here?,” by Andrew Marantz  “One Hundred Days of Ineptitude,” by David Remnick “The Bureaucratic Nightmares of Being Trans Under Trump,” by Grace Byron To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To s

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,

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. This week’s reading: “Waiting for Trump’s Big, Beautiful Deals,” by Susan B. Glasser “The Conservative Lawyer Defending a Firm from Donald Trump,” by Ruth Marcus “The Immigrant Families Jailed in Texas,” by Jack Herrera “The Cost of Defunding Harvard,” by Atul Gawande “Donald Trump’s Deportation Obsession,” by Jonathan Blitzer “The Guerrilla Marketing Campaign Against Elon Musk,” by Anna Russell “The Supreme Court Finally Takes On Trump,” by

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. This week’s reading: “The Down-to-Earth Pope,” by Paul Elie “Pope Francis’s Tangled Relationship with Argentina,” by Graciela Mochkofsky “The Mexican President Who’s Facing Off with Trump,” by Stephania Taladrid “The Cost of Defunding Harvard,” by Atul Gawande “The Supreme Court Finally Takes On Trump,” by Ruth Marcus  Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Elon Musk, who’s taking his chainsaw to the federal government, is not merely a chaos agent, as he is sometimes described. Jill Lepore, the best-selling author of “These Truths” and other books, says that Musk is animated by obsessions and a sense of mission he acquired through reading, and misreading, science fiction. “When he keeps saying, you know, ‘We’re at a fork in the road. The future of human civilization depends on this election,’ he means SpaceX,” she tells David Remnick. “He means . . . ‘I need to take these rockets to colonize Mars and that’s only going to happen through Trump.’ ” The massive-scale reduction in social services he is enacting through DOGE, Lepore thinks, is tied to this objective. “Although there may be billions of [people] suffering here on planet Earth today, those are miniscule compared to the calculation of the needs of the billions of humans that will one day ever live if we can gain escape velocity from planet Earth. . . . That is, in fact, the math that lies behind DOGE.”  L

Ruth Marcus resigned from the Washington Post after its C.E.O. killed an editorial she wrote that was critical of the paper's owner, Jeff Bezos. She ended up publishing the column in The New Yorker, and soon after she published another piece for the magazine asking "Has Trump's Legal Strategy Backfired?" "Trump's legal strategy has been backfiring, I think, demonstrably in the lower courts," she tells David Remnick, on issues such as undoing birthright citizenship and deporting people without due process. Federal judges have rebuked the Administration's lawyers, and ordered deportees returned to the United States. But "we have this thing called the Supreme Court, which is, in fact, supreme," Marcus says. "I thought the Supreme Court was going to send a message to the Trump Administration: 'Back off, guys.' . . . That's not what's happened." In recent days, that Court has issued a number of rulings that, while narrow, suggest a more deferential approach toward Presidential power. Marcus and Remnick spoke last

The Washington Roundtable is joined by Mark Blyth, a professor of international economics and public affairs at Brown University, to discuss how the bond market forced Donald Trump to retreat on some tariffs, and the risks of the President’s escalating trade war with China. “Ultimately, they can take the pain more than you can,” Blyth says, of the Chinese government. “They have locked down their cities for a year or more. They can deliver food through the window through drones. They don’t care if you cut them off from certain things. So getting into that fight is very, very destructive.”This week’s reading: “Trump’s Do-Over Presidency,” by Susan B. Glasser “The Conservative Legal Advocates Working to Kill Trump’s Tariffs,” by Cristian Farias “At the Smithsonian, Donald Trump Takes Aim at History,” by David Remnick “The Trump Show Comes to the Kennedy Center,” by Katy Waldman “The Other Side of Signalgate,” by Rozina Ali To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in fe

The former senator Sherrod Brown, of Ohio, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the tumult that Trump’s tariffs have inflicted on the global economy, and why progressives should not merely oppose the President’s trade policy but offer a clear alternative. “I've heard economists talk about these tariffs upending the global order on trade. Well, to a lot of workers, anything’s better than the global order on trade. It’s our policy problem as a country, and it’s our political problem for Democrats,” Brown says. They also discuss his latest project, The Dignity of Work Institute, a think tank dedicated to advocacy for the working class. This week’s reading: “‘I Am Seeing My Community of Researchers Decimated,’” by E. Tammy Kim “The Other Side of Signalgate,” by Rozina Ali “The Trump Show Comes to the Kennedy Center,” by Katy Waldman “At the Smithsonian, Donald Trump Takes Aim at History,” by David Remnick To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, writ

The microchip maker Nvidia is a Silicon Valley colossus. After years as a runner-up to Intel and Qualcomm, Nvidia has all but cornered the market on the parallel processors essential for artificial-intelligence programs like ChatGPT. “Nvidia was there at the beginning of A.I.,” the tech journalist Stephen Witt tells David Remnick. “They really kind of made these systems work for the first time. We think of A.I. as a software revolution, something called neural nets, but A.I. is also a hardware revolution.” In The New Yorker, Stephen Witt profiled Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s brilliant and idiosyncratic co-founder and C.E.O. His new book is “The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip.” Until recently, Nvidia was the most valuable company in the world, but its stock price has been volatile, posting the largest single-day loss in history in January. But the company’s story is only partially a business story; it’s also one about global superpowers, and who will decide the future.

The Washington Roundtable discusses President Donald Trump’s invocation of emergency powers to enact sweeping tariffs and the ensuing global economic meltdown, in addition to how authoritarians have historically used economic control and coercion to strengthen their grip on power. The Roundtable also examines other spheres where Trump’s maximalist approach might make a mark, including immigration enforcement, the politicization of the military, and the potential seizure of Greenland. This week’s reading: “Donald Trump’s Ego Melts the Global Economy,” by Susan B. Glasser “Pete Hegseth’s Secret History,” by Jane Mayer (December, 2024) “The Truth About Donald Trump’s ‘Liberation Day,’ ” by John Cassidy “Has Trump’s Legal Strategy Backfired?,” by Ruth Marcus “Fighting Elon Musk, One Tesla Dealership at a Time,” by Sarah Larson “How Trump Is Helping Tycoons Exploit the Pandemic,” by Jane Mayer (July, 2020) To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this epis

Sarah Larson joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the Tesla Takedown movement, protesting Elon Musk and Donald Trump, along with the political efficacy of targeting an electric-car company and why some protesters are borrowing tactics from the AIDS activist group ACT UP. This week’s reading: “Fighting Elon Musk, One Tesla Dealership at a Time,” by Sarah Larson “The Fired Student-Debt Relievers,” by E. Tammy Kim “What Marine Le Pen’s Conviction Means for French Democracy,” by Isaac Chotiner “How Donald Trump Throttled Big Law,” by Ruth Marcus “Why Benjamin Netanyahu Is Going Back to War,” by Bernard Avishai To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to [email protected]. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

With congressional Republicans unwilling to put any checks on an Administration breaking norms and issuing illegal orders, the focus has shifted to the Democratic opposition—or the lack thereof.  Democrats like Chris Murphy, the junior senator from Connecticut, have vehemently disagreed with party leaders’ reversion to business as usual. Murphy opposed Senator Chuck Schumer’s negotiation to pass the Republican budget and keep the government running; he advocated for the Democrats to skip the President’s joint address to Congress en masse. Murphy believes that the Democrats have a winning formula if they stick to a populist, anti-big-money agenda. But, he concedes, some of his colleagues are playing normal politics, “where we try to become more popular than Republicans. People like me believe that it won’t matter if we’re more popular than them, because the rules won’t allow us to run a fair election.” By attacking democratic institutions, law firms, and other allies, he thinks, Republicans can insure that the

The Washington Roundtable is off today, and will be back next week. In the meantime, enjoy a conversation about the California governor’s new podcast venture, “This Is Gavin Newsom,” from Vanity Fair’s “Inside the Hive” podcast. Radhika Jones, the host and editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, talks with the magazine’s executive editor, Claire Howorth, and the “Hive” editor Michael Calderone about why Newsom is taking time off from running the world’s fifth-largest economy to talk to people such as Steve Bannon. Is he effectively reaching right-wingers and countering the MAGA media machine? And will the show help or hinder his chances of leading the Democratic ticket one day?To discover more from “Inside the Hive” and other Vanity Fair podcasts, visit vanityfair.com/podcasts. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The writer David W. Brown, who has long covered NASA and the space industry, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss Elon Musk’s takeover of NASA, the agency’s increasingly complicated relationship with SpaceX, and whether Donald Trump’s interest in sending people to Mars will spare the space program from DOGE’s downsizing. This week’s reading: “Inside Trump and Musk’s Takeover of NASA,” by David W. Brown “Don’t Believe Trump’s Promises About Protecting the Social Safety Net,” by John Cassidy “The E.P.A. vs. the Environment,” by Elizabeth Kolbert  “We’re Still Not Done with Jesus,” by Adam Gopnik “Is March Madness All Luck?,” by Tyler Foggatt To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to [email protected]. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Kaitlan Collins was only a couple years out of college when she became a White House correspondent for Tucker Carlson’s the Daily Caller. Collins stayed in the White House when she went over to CNN during Donald Trump’s first term, and she returned for his second. Trump has made his disdain for CNN clear—and he’s not a big fan of Collins, either. At one point during Trump’s first term, she was barred from a press conference; he called her a “nasty person” during a Presidential campaign interview. There’s never been a White House so overtly hostile to the press than the second Trump Administration, penalizing news organizations for not conforming to the President’s wishes. But, as Collins tells the staff writer Clare Malone, she believes that Trump is “someone who seeks the validation of the press as much as he criticizes them publicly. And so, you know, it doesn’t really bother me when he gets upset at my question.” Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Washington Roundtable speaks with with Michael Waldman, the president and C.E.O. of the Brennan Center for Justice, at N.Y.U. Law, to discuss the escalating attacks on the judiciary by  President Trump and his allies. If the Administration ignores a legitimate order from a federal judge, as it has come close to doing, what can the courts do in response? This week’s reading: “Donald Trump, Producer-in-Chief,” by Susan B. Glasser “Why ‘Constitutional Crisis’ Fails to Capture Trump’s Attack on the Rule of Law,” by Isaac Chotiner “The Trump Administration Nears Open Defiance of the Courts,” by Ruth Marcus To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to [email protected] with “The Political Scene” in the subject line. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The veteran courts reporter Ruth Marcus joins the host Tyler Foggatt to discuss the Trump Administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, why flights of Venezuelan deportees were sent to El Salvador, and how the defiance of federal court orders has set off a constitutional crisis. This week’s reading: “The Trump Administration Nears Open Defiance of the Courts,” by Ruth Marcus “The Case of Mahmoud Khalil,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells “The Long Nap of the Lazy Bureaucrat,” by Charlie Tyson “Hundreds of Thousands Will Die,” by David Remnick “The Felling of the U.S. Forest Service,” by Peter Slevin To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to [email protected]. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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 assist

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. This week’s reading: “The Most Powerful Crypto Bro in Washington Has Very Weird Beliefs,” by Gil Duran (for The New Republic)  “Uncertainty Is Trump’s Brand. But What if He Already Told Us Exactly What He’s Going to Do?,” by Susan B. Glasser “The Felling of the U.S. Forest Service,” by Peter Slevin “Trump Is Still Trying to Undermine Elections,” by Sue Halpern “Who Gets to Determine Greenland’s Future?,” by Louise Bokkenheuser To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to [email protected] with “The Political Scene” in the subject line. Learn about your ad choices: