The New Yorker: Politics And More

The Washington Roundtable discusses Vice-President J. D. Vance’s week on the world stage: stumping for the Kremlin-aligned Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán and being tasked with leading American negotiations in Pakistan to resolve the war with Iran, a conflict he reportedly opposed. The panel explores the events and people that shaped Vance, and how his political evolution toward MAGA may not be enough to make him the Republican Presidential nominee in 2028. “Anyone who comes after Trump is going to have a really hard time inheriting a cult of personality and turning that back into a party,” the staff writer Susan B. Glasser says. Vance is “not this kind of charismatic movement leader.”This week’s reading: “The Costs of Trump’s Iran-War Folly,” by Susan B. Glasser “Trump’s Strategic and Moral Failure in Iran,” by David Remnick “The Global Stakes of Hungary’s Pivotal Election,” by Kapil Komireddi “A U.S.-Iran Ceasefire Is Here, but Trump’s Stone Age Mentality Endures,” by Ishaan Tharoor “How the Internet Fringe

The New Yorker contributing writer Ruth Marcus joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss Pam Bondi’s removal from her post as Attorney General. They examine the series of missteps and failures that led to her firing—from her continued mishandling of the Jeffrey Epstein files to her inability to effectively carry out Donald Trump’s efforts to target his political enemies. They also explore the long-term damage Bondi has done to the Department of Justice, and whether her ouster—alongside Kristi Noem’s dismissal as Secretary of Homeland Security—signals a new era of shakeups within the Trump Administration.This week’s reading: “Pam Bondi’s Legacy of Flattery and Destruction,” by Ruth Marcus “A U.S.-Iran Ceasefire Is Here, but Trump’s Stone Age Mentality Endures,” by Ishaan Tharoor “Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?,” by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz “How the Internet Fringe Infiltrated Republican Politics,” by Antonia Hitchens “The Forest Service—a Force Across Rural America—‘Reorganizes’ Under Trump,”

In 2021, when Olga Rudenko and other journalists launched the English-language news outlet the Kyiv Independent, they were committed to making a publication that wouldn’t face political pressure from an owner. A few months later, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the Independent began reporting breaking news from the front lines, and conducting investigations of the Ukrainian government. David Remnick talks with Rudenko, the Independent’s editor-in-chief, about the challenges of reporting in wartime; President Volodymyr Zelensky’s pushback on independent journalism; how Iran and Russia have been providing military aid to one another; and why Ukraine cannot accept the peace deal with Russia that Donald Trump is insisting that it take. Further reading:  “The Assault on Ukraine’s Power Grid,” by Michael Holtz “What Are Putin’s Ultimate Demands for Peace in Ukraine?,” by Joshua Yaffa “Ukraine Has ‘Irrefutable Evidence’ of Russia Providing Intelligence to Iran, Zelensky Says,” by Asami Terajima

The Washington Roundtable discusses Donald Trump’s address on the Iran war and the playbook that has defined his career in business and politics when confronted with a crisis: escalate and blame others. The panel discusses how that same playbook is being applied to the Iran conflict with potentially disastrous results. “He’s immune to any possibility of accountability,” the staff writer Evan Osnos says. “That became not just one of the ways he tells his own story but actually how he imagines history will unfold in his hands.”This week’s reading: “Donald Trump’s Case for War Fails to Mention How to Win It,” by Susan B. Glasser “The Team Behind a Pro-Iran, Lego-Themed Viral-Video Campaign,” by Kyle Chayka “He Helped Stop Iran from Getting the Bomb,” by David D. Kirkpatrick “How Pakistan Became a Major Player in Peace Negotiations Between the U.S. and Iran,” by Isaac Chotiner “The Spectacle of War and the Struggle to Protest,” by Jay Caspian Kang The Political Scene draws on the reporting and analysis found in T

Thousands of federal prosecutors have been fired or have resigned from their roles since Pam Bondi took over as Attorney General. She has made no secret of weaponizing the Justice Department to pursue Donald Trump’s vendettas. One of those prosecutors is Troy Edwards, who quit a senior national-security position in the Eastern District of Virginia. As an assistant U.S. attorney in DC, Edwardshad won convictions against members of the Oath Keepers for January 6th-related offenses. Edwards is also the son-in-law of the former F.B.I. director James Comey, and, when the Justice Department indicted Comey on grounds widely seen as flimsy, Edwards knew he had reached his red line. (The charges were quickly dismissed, though without prejudice.) The New Yorker’s legal correspondent Ruth Marcus talks with Edwards about his decision to leave, how he broke it to his family, and why he thinks other prosecutors should not follow his lead. Further reading:  “Pam Bondi’s Contempt for Congress,” by Ruth Marcus “The Flimsy, Da

The Washington Roundtable examines the potential for a “Blue Wave” in the 2026 midterms. The hosts are joined by Morris Katz, a twenty-six-year-old Democratic political strategist for Zohran Mamdani and Graham Platner, a Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine. Katz argues that for the Party to win a historic majority in the next election, it needs to embrace outsider candidates who refuse money from corporate PACs and aren’t “apologetic” about the government’s role in people’s lives. “We can run a campaign that says, ‘Donald Trump said he’d end forever war and lower costs and he hasn’t’—that will be successful,” Katz says. “I think even more successful would be that we are going to end forever wars, and we are going to lower costs by taking on monopolies—by taking on price gouging, by raising wages, by taxing billionaires more.” This week’s reading: “​​Donald Trump Is Breaking Up with Europe,” by Susan B. Glasser “How the War in Iran Became a Race to Stabilize the Global Economic Order,” by Sudarsan Raghava

The reporter Cora Engelbrecht joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss what life is like for the people of Iran as war unfolds. They talk about Engelbrecht’s reporting, which is based on dispatches from a dissident in Tehran who maintained contact during an internet blackout, and about how his account reveals some of the challenges of daily life under bombardment from the U.S. and Israel—and under a government that continues to police dissent. They also explore how the conflict has complicated the hopes of many Iranians who once saw foreign intervention as a path to liberation, and the growing fear that, whatever the outcome of the war, everyday citizens will continue to bear the cost.This week’s reading: “What the War Has Done to Iranians,” by Cora Engelbrecht “A Former Prisoner of the Iranian Regime Watches Trump’s War,” by Jason Rezaian “How Donald Trump May Have Sabotaged His Chances for a Deal with Iran,” by Isaac Chotiner “The Distant Promise of Iran’s Would-Be King,” by Azadeh Moaveni “Is Cuba Next?,” by Jon Lee

The staff writer Jon Lee Anderson has reported from Cuba for many years, and recently wrote about the deteriorating economic conditions on the island. His newest piece for the magazine dives into the potential outcomes of Donald Trump’s desire to pursue regime change. Anderson explores the economic impact of the United States blocking Venezuelan oil from reaching Cuba, which could be a death knell for the Communist government. Anderson and David Remnick discuss the current negotiations between the two countries, Marco Rubio’s strategy, and what cards the Cuban government might still hold. “They’re going to go into this,” Anderson suggests, “like maybe a canny poker player.”Plus, the historian Ada Ferrer won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2022 book, “Cuba: An American History,” and she has one of the clearest views of the long and vexed relationship between the island and its giant neighbor. Ferrer left Cuba as an infant, coming to the United States with her mother in 1963 when Fidel Castro’s regime was arguably a

The Washington Roundtable is off today, and will be back next week. In the meantime, enjoy an episode of The New Yorker’s Critics at Large podcast about the FX series “Love Story,” which drops audiences into the lives of one of the most talked-about couples of the nineties: J.F.K., Jr., and the style icon Carolyn Bessette. The hosts Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz, who are staff writers and critics at The New Yorker, discuss how the show re-creates the look and fashion of the era in granular detail while reducing the relationship itself to a generic fairy tale. “Love Story” ’s focus on style underscores how much the Kennedy legacy lives in aesthetics, which risks obscuring some of the darker chapters of its history. “It does seem like we have ever more efficiently stripped the Kennedys and their image, and their style, from any notions of political power,” Cunningham says. “The look of something and the sort of moral thrust of something are not always one to one working in parallel.”New e

The New Yorker staff writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the escalating standoff between the A.I. company Anthropic and the Department of War. They consider recent reporting on the use of Claude—Anthropic’s family of large language models—in military operations in Venezuela and Iran, and how that news has pushed the company’s relationship with the Pentagon to a breaking point. They also explore how the tech industry is responding to the conflict between the Trump Administration and Anthropic, and the thorny question of whether A.I. should be subject to greater safeguards and more oversight than previous technological innovations.This week’s reading: “The Pentagon Went to War with Anthropic. What’s Really at Stake?,” by Gideon Lewis-Kraus “Israel’s Gulf-State Gamble in the Iran War,” by Ruth Margalit “The Iran War Is Another Reason to Quit Oil,” by Bill McKibben “Trump’s Mass-Detention Campaign,” by Jonathan Blitzer “How Should We Remember the Hippies?,” by Jay Caspian Kang The Political S

In the book “The Anxious Generation,” Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, argues that social-media platforms are detrimental to youths’ well-being, and that society needs to treat them as literally addictive. It has spent nearly a hundred weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, and has helped galvanize a movement seeking limits to social media in legislatures, in school districts, and in the courts. David Remnick speaks with Haidt about an Australian law to verify the age of social-media users, the first of its kind in the world, and about lawsuits in California that are aiming to pin liability for harms on social-media companies themselves. Further reading:  “World Happiness Report 2026,” featuring a contribution from Jonathan Haidt and other researchers  “Mountains of Evidence,” by Jonathan Haidt Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Washington Roundtable considers how the ideological commitments of Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, are at play in the conflict with Iran. Their guest, the journalist Katherine Stewart, has covered the MAGA right and is the author of “Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy.” The panel discusses how Christian nationalism has moved from the fringes of the culture to the center of American military power, with Hegseth driving the shift. “This is a movement that at its core has never believed in democracy,” Stewart says. “It rejects the principles of equality and pluralism, and, frankly, the rule of law that represents the best of the American promise.”This week’s reading: “The War Trump Doesn’t Want to Talk About,” by Susan B. Glasser “Trump’s Inexcusable Unpreparedness for the Iranian Oil Crisis,” by John Cassidy “What the Selection of Iran’s New Leader Might Mean for the War,” by Robin Wright “War in the Age of the Online ‘Information Bomb,’ ” by Kyle Chayka “How Putin V

The New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss Kristi Noem’s removal from her post as Secretary of Homeland Security. They talk about the lead-up to her firing—which included accusations of fiscal mismanagement and self-promotion—and her controversial tenure as the head of one of the largest and most powerful departments during Donald Trump’s second Presidential term. They also explore the history and evolution of the Department of Homeland Security and how its founding in the wake of the September 11th attacks laid the groundwork for the sweeping—and, according to some legal experts, unconstitutional—powers it wields today. This week’s reading:  “Kristi Noem’s Fireable Offenses,” by Jonathan Blitzer “How Donald Trump’s Iran War Is Destabilizing the Gulf,” by Isaac Chotiner “The Zombie Regulator,” by E. Tammy Kim “What the Selection of Iran’s New Leader Might Mean for the War," by Robin Wright “The G.O.P.’s Latest Voter-Suppression Plan,” by Sue Halpern  The Political Scene draws

As Iran’s retaliation hit American allies throughout the Middle East this week, David Remnick was joined by two New Yorker writers with decades of experience reporting from the region. Robin Wright has reported from Iran extensively, and she met with Ali Khamenei before he became the Supreme Leader of Iran; Dexter Filkins covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he has been reporting on the Pentagon and military readiness. Filkins and Wright discuss the possibilities for future leadership in Iran; the Administration’s chaotic statements in regard to its goals and time frame; and the economic impact of the war, which is already being felt around the globe. The Political Scene draws on the reporting and analysis found in The New Yorker for lively conversations about the big questions in American politics. Join the magazine’s writers and editors as they put into context the latest news—about elections, the economy, the White House, the Supreme Court, and much more. New episodes are available three times a w

The Washington Roundtable discusses the war that the United States and Israel have started with Iran, how the conflict might evolve and affect the whole region, and the Trump Administration’s rationale for launching the strikes. “I don’t think we have yet heard a clear explanation of what this war is about, what they intend to achieve, what the strategic goals are, and how it’s supposed to end,” the staff writer Jane Mayer says. The group also reflects on the lessons that they learned while reporting on the Iraq War about how conflicts such as these can transform societies. This week’s reading: “Can Donald Trump Win a War with Iran If He Can’t Explain Why He Started It?,” by Susan B. Glasser “Do U.S. Presidents Have the Power to Declare War?,” by Jill Lepore “In the Texas Primaries, a Good Night for James Talarico, and a Bad One for John Cornyn,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells “What Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Meant to Iran, and What Comes Next,” by Robin Wright “Has Trump Thought Through the Endgame in Iran?,” by Isha

The foreign-affairs journalist Ishaan Tharoor joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the fallout from the United States’ joint military operation with Israel in Iran. They talk about the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—who was among the hundreds killed by drone and missile strikes—and how the country has retaliated against the U.S., Israel, and several of its Arab neighbors. Their conversation explores what comes next for the Iranian government and people, how the conflict fits into President Donald Trump’s broader foreign-policy vision, and whether this latest attempt at regime change in the Middle East is likely to succeed when past American interventions have failed. This week’s reading: “Has Trump Thought Through the Endgame in Iran?,” by Ishaan Tharoor “What Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Meant to Iran, and What Comes Next,” by Robin Wright “Trump’s Reckless Decision to Pursue Regime Change in Iran,” by Isaac Chotiner “Donald Trump Launches a War of ‘Epic Fury’ on Iran,” by Robin Wright “What Mehd

The Washington Roundtable is joined by Stephen Vladeck, a Georgetown Law professor and self-proclaimed “Supreme Court nerd,” to examine President Trump’s increasing defiance of the Supreme Court. The panel discusses whether the Court’s strong rebuke of the President’s tariff policy obscures a broader pattern of expanding executive power through the use of emergency “shadow docket” rulings, a kind of shortcut for dealing with emergency requests. “I think that’s where the Justices have shown the most inclination to vote in ways that might be inconsistent as a matter of legal principle, but consistent as a matter of partisan political preference,” Vladeck says. Vladeck is the author of “The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic.” This week’s reading: “Donald Trump’s State of the Union Was Long and Wrong,” by Susan B. Glasser “The Supreme Court’s Complicated Takedown of Trump’s Tariffs,” by Amy Davidson Sorkin “The Right-Wing Nonprofit Serving A.I. Slo

The New Yorker staff writer Joshua Rothman joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the political and cultural fallout from the release of millions of documents from the criminal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. They talk about how years of institutional failures and scandals involving élites have shaped the way the material is being interpreted, why the sheer volume of information is raising more questions than answers, and how the fragmented and often chaotic flow of documents has left many Americans trying to make sense of the story for themselves. They also explore what the reaction to the files reveals about a growing belief that the powerful operate with relative impunity—and about the deepening cynicism toward institutions and powerful élites. This week’s reading:  “Are We Living in the Age of Epstein?,” by Joshua Rothman “Donald Trump’s State of the Union Was Long and Wrong,” by Susan B. Glasser “James Talarico Puts His Faith in Texas Voters,” by Tad Friend “Donald Trump’s Pantomime United Nations,” by Ishaa

Tucker Carlson has long been a standard-bearer for far-right views, such as the racist conspiracy theory known as the “great replacement.” He recently did a chatty interview with the white supremacist Nick Fuentes, an admirer of Hitler. And yet, Carlson started out as a respected, well-connected, albeit contrarian, political journalist. Jason Zengerle, who recently joined The New Yorker as a staff writer, talks with David Remnick about his new book, “Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind.” They trace how Carlson’s sense of personal resentment toward the establishment grew; how launching his own website radicalized his politics in the years before MAGA; and his political ambitions as a potential heir to Donald Trump. “I think, if Tucker Carlson concludes that J. D. Vance can’t get elected President, maybe he has to do it himself,” Zengerle says. “So much of politics now is just being a media figure and being an entertainer. And Tucker does those things very w

The Washington Roundtable discusses the upcoming State of the Union address and the public’s shift against Donald Trump on two of his signature issues: the economy and immigration. What pitch might Trump make for himself and the Republican Party heading into the midterms? “On the economy, he’s in the same fix Biden was in,” the staff writer Jane Mayer says. “He's trying to yell at people and tell them, ‘You are better off than you think you are,’ and that, we know, doesn't work.” Plus, the group examines what the retirement of Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene from Congress and what the Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom’s opposition to a wealth tax in California can tell us about ideological fissures within both parties. This week’s reading: “The E.P.A. Rescinds a Landmark Finding,” by Bill McKibben “The Chaos of an ICE Detention,” by Jordan Salama “​Presidents’ Days: From Obama to Trump,” by David Remnick “Trump Is Still Deporting People Wherever He Wants,” by Isaac Chotiner “The Jeffrey Epstein Files Are Pet