Ezra Klein: Protecting People Means Winning Power
The White House readies plans for mass firings in the federal government as Democrats weigh the stakes of forcing a government shutdown. The Justice Department prepares to seek an indictment for former FBI Director James Comey as President Trump hunts for revenge against his political enemies.
1hr 10m Sep 25, 2025
1hr 10m
Angie Craig and Glenn Thrush: Don’t Be Called Weak Sauce
A government shutdown creeps closer as President Trump cancels a meeting with Democratic leaders. Former Vice President Kamala Harris embarks on a press tour to promote a score settling book about her campaign.
57m Sep 24, 2025
57m
Bakari Sellers: The Danger of RFK Jr.
The injecting-bleach president is getting some super-strong pseudoscientific information to scare mothers and blame them for autism while conveniently ignoring the role geriatric sperm may play in neurodivergence.
52m Sep 23, 2025
52m
Bill Kristol: Where Is the $50,000?
We thought Tom Homan was just an extreme border hawk and ideologue. Now we know this powerful law enforcement official, who's depriving immigrants of their freedom, may also be a corrupt law-breaker—after he was reportedly recorded taking a $50,000 cash bribe during an FBI sting operation.
40m Sep 22, 2025
40m
Thomas Chatterton Williams: How MAGA Learned to Love Cancel Culture
Cancel culture lives on, but it's taken new turns, especially among some of the loudest opponents of woke culture who simply can not abide one word of criticism about Charlie Kirk or Israel.
1hr Sep 19, 2025
1hr
Brian Stelter and Jonathan V. Last: Worst Case Scenario
The administration wants people to believe that Jimmy Kimmel was pulled off the air because he supposedly crossed a red line when it came to Charlie Kirk—yet at the same time, somehow totally ignore that this is naked government coercion of critics who embrace the time-honored tradition of skewering presidents.
1hr 2m Sep 18, 2025
1hr 2m
Susan Rice: A Cancer in the Body Politic
This country has been dealing with an increase in political violence for nearly a decade, and leaders from across the spectrum need to do everything they can to get us off this terrible path.
48m Sep 17, 2025
48m
Joe Manchin: The Man in the Middle
The former senator and former Dem has some not-very-nice things to say about Schumer and Obama—as well as progressives—who he blames for hounding Biden to move left and diminishing his will to fight.
59m Sep 16, 2025
59m
Bill Kristol: What Does 'They' Mean?
The administration is threatening to take away money and power—and maybe even freedom—from some vague Trump opponents because of the Kirk assassination. It doesn't seem to matter that elected Democrats have roundly condemned his murder.
1hr Sep 15, 2025
1hr
David Frum: Leveraging Violence as a Tool of Power
Trump and the people around him want to use the Kirk assassination to suppress their political opposition. And Trump is clearly laying the groundwork for cracking down on people he doesn't like—peaceful protesters, Dem fundraisers—while also offering rhetorical comfort to potential vigilantes on the right.
1hr 1m Sep 12, 2025
1hr 1m
Erin Ryan: The Murder of Charlie Kirk
This country has too many guns and too many crazy people. And the social media oligarchs are fanning the flames of violence by constantly trying to piss people off. The Kirk assassination highlights just how dangerous a moment we are living in.
1hr 6m Sep 11, 2025
1hr 6m
Stephanie Ruhle and Tom Saenz: Why Aren't People Freaking Out?
If Zohran Mamdani, as NYC mayor-elect, held a dinner with finance bros and threatened them with a huge wealth tax if they didn't sweet-talk him and say how much they agreed with his political vision, the Wall Street community would freak out.
58m Sep 10, 2025
58m
James Bennet: Trump Is Still Hacking the Media
More than 10 years in, journalists still have not figured out how to cover Trump. He understands the media environment better than a lot of reporters, and knows his outrageous acts and statements command attention—and that people will not be able to finish processing one outrage before the next one comes down the pike.
1hr 9m Sep 09, 2025
1hr 9m
Bill Kristol: Escalating the Authoritarian Project
In seven months, Trump has accumulated an astonishing amount of unchecked power. No one inside his administration is challenging his will, and Trump is assuming war powers with barely any explanation—while blacklisting Tom Hanks from West Point.
49m Sep 08, 2025
49m
David French: Maybe the Tariffs Are the Problem
Last month, Trump fired the "woke" job numbers person after she released weak employment data. Now, we have even worse jobs numbers—and burgeoning signs of a tariffs-triggered manufacturing recession.
1hr 6m Sep 05, 2025
1hr 6m
Mark Hertling: Performative and Deadly
The lethal U.S. military strike on a speedboat in the Caribbean was more about putting on a show than countering the drug trade out of South America. And it's not even clear that the people killed on the boat were running drugs, or that any contraband was bound for America.
52m Sep 04, 2025
52m
Lina Khan: The Impunity of the Elites
The economic populists at the Nat Con conference may be talking a lot about elites screwing over the little guy, but the Trump administration itself has been catastrophic for working people—its policies are all about doing special favors for elite interests.
43m Sep 03, 2025
43m
Stuart Stevens: Say They're Not Patriots
Democrats need to learn to fight like Republicans. So when senators with serious foreign policy chops vote to confirm a middling weekend talk show host as secretary of defense, Dems need to call them out for being unpatriotic.
48m Sep 02, 2025
48m
Jonathan V. Last: Burning Things Down
Red States are flexing their muscles and imposing their will on the other states through their coordinated redistricting efforts. And if they deploy their Guard troops to other blue cities beyond D.C., the only real precedent would be the era before the Civil War when the South tried to force more slave states on the union.
42m Sep 01, 2025
42m
Tom Nichols: America's Problem Child
Trump is like a dysfunctional 8-year-old whose parents are always in the principal's office arguing that their son is a good boy. The media, CEOs, and Wall Street keep giving him a pass for his behavior while his supporters and apologists explain why he just had to set the school on fire.
54m Aug 29, 2025
54m
Sam Stein and Talmon Smith: Brain Drain
The resignations of senior leaders at the CDC is a calamity. People with decades of expertise in infectious disease are leaving the agency because the new director—who Trump just appointed—refused to get on board with RFK's anti-vax crusade, including limiting access to Covid boosters.
1hr 10m Aug 28, 2025
1hr 10m
Jake Sullivan: Trump Is Making China Great Again
A year ago, China was globally isolated and its economy was struggling. But once Trump was back in office pursuing his own personal and political gain, the U.S. brand got tossed in the toilet and the view from Beijing got pretty sweet.
59m Aug 27, 2025
59m
Susan Glasser: An Exercise in National Humiliation
Some rando far-right social media suck-up, who Trump rewarded with an appointment to his administration, is pushing mortgage fraud investigations of Adam Schiff, Tish James, and now Fed governor Lisa Cook.
51m Aug 26, 2025
51m
Bill Kristol: March to Dictatorship
Trump and his people have used the summer months to up the despot game—sending armed troops into the streets, taking over the police in D.C., and promising to export the same tactics to even more blue cities.
50m Aug 25, 2025
50m
Tommy Vietor: Trump's Security State
The fears of jack-booted thugs and the military in the streets that filled the fever dreams of numerous people on the right since the 90s have come to pass. Not to mention that these are boom times for private prisons, deportation camps, and huge data centers driving up electricity bills.
1hr 9m Aug 22, 2025
1hr 9m
Garry Kasparov and Jerusalem Demsas: Democracy Can't Defend Itself
While Trump keeps working hard on his own monetization and glorification—and delivers a Watergate practically every hour—the pro-democracy coalition must stay focused on winning next year's midterm elections.
1hr 11m Aug 21, 2025
1hr 11m
Adam Kinzinger: Don't Feed the Dictator
Russia is losing the war in Ukraine. More than 1 million Russian troops have been killed or injured, and it's been estimated that it would take another four years and 2 million more soldiers for Putin to conquer the Donbas region.
57m Aug 20, 2025
57m
David Kirkpatrick: Trump's Self-Enrichment
Back in the day, Trump used to puff up his wealth to get on the Forbes list. Lately though, he doesn't talk about how much money he has, especially now that he and his family have pocketed an estimated $3.4 billion off his time in the White House.
49m Aug 19, 2025
49m
Bill Kristol: Authoritarian Takeover
Militarizing the nation's capital is not a distraction, and Democrats really need to stop using that term. Trump is trying to seize power, intimidate the public, and foment violence in the streets.
43m Aug 18, 2025
43m
Hakeem Jeffries: More Is More
While Donald Trump delivers chaos, cruelty, and corruption—and Republicans play the facts-and-hypocrisy don't matter game— Democrats have to do more rallies, more town halls, and more hearings, on and off the Hill.
1hr Aug 15, 2025
1hr
Michael Weiss: Helsinki in Anchorage?
At the Alaska summit, Putin will likely be angling for a sequel of the Helsinki meeting, the infamous tête-à-tête in 2018 where Trump got rolled and cajoled.
48m Aug 14, 2025
48m
Jason Calacanis: Anarcho Capitalism
Tim Cook groveling to Trump with a golden trophy and a dash of MAGA identity politics is probably a sign that we are not currently living in a healthy free-market economy.
1hr 3m Aug 13, 2025
1hr 3m
Amanda Carpenter: Fake Emergencies
Trump keeps creating all these phony crises—an 'invasion' at the border, immigrants in the interior, crime in D.C.—so he can put on a show of force for his white base.
55m Aug 12, 2025
55m
Bill Kristol: The Lawless Administration
Crime is down in D.C., but Trump is using the pretext of an attempted carjacking of "Big Balls," the former 19-year-old DOGE employee, to take over the city's police department and deploy the National Guard.
46m Aug 11, 2025
46m
Lis Smith: Dems Need to Burn Down the Party Establishment
There's a direct line between when the Democratic Party got nationalized and when it started getting wiped out in red states. Dems need to embrace heterodoxy in their candidates—running in New York City is not the same as running in Nebraska.
49m Aug 08, 2025
49m
Anne Applebaum: What USAID's Absence Looks Like on the Ground
The United States, through USAID, not only supplied a big chunk of the world's humanitarian aid, it also provided almost all of the logistical support for other aid organizations to deliver relief as well.
49m Aug 07, 2025
49m
Zerlina Maxwell and Josh Barro: We Are in a Bad Place
Gerrymandering has always been partisan, but what's happening in Texas is straight-up racial politics. Republicans are targeting and trying to disenfranchise black voters while betting that Latino voters will stick with them.
1hr 10m Aug 06, 2025
1hr 10m
Chuck Todd: Is the Economy the Biggest Political Threat to Trump?
Voters in the seven swing states that elected Trump in 2024 thought he'd make the economy better. His perceived strength on the economy is the cornerstone Jenga piece of the whole Trump Tower.
55m Aug 05, 2025
55m
Bill Kristol: This Is So Third World
The boss only wants to hear good news: that's the takeaway from Trump's high-profile firing over the weak job numbers. So if a government worker has something bad to report, they now know they'll have to lie to keep their jobs.
57m Aug 04, 2025
57m
Dan Osborn: Connecting with Working People
Osborn, the populist independent who ran a surprisingly close campaign for a Senate seat in Nebraska last year, is back for another run in the 2026 midterms. A steamfitter and union member, he says he naturally connects with other workers drawing paychecks who are feeling the squeeze.
55m Aug 01, 2025
55m
Marc Elias: An Election War Machine
Texas Republicans are busy gerrymandering their already gerrymandered congressional map, and other red states are looking to do the same—all aimed at blocking the Dems from winning back the House and shielding Donald Trump at all costs.
50m Jul 31, 2025
50m
Franklin Foer: Elon, the Man Who Ate NASA
The rise of Elon—and why he is still involved with our government—has everything to do with the dimming of America's one-time crown jewel, NASA.
45m Jul 30, 2025
45m
David French: Israel's Humanitarian Obligations
Gaza is strewn with rubble, the war's end is nowhere in sight, and an entirely predictable humanitarian disaster is unfolding. With daily reports of starvation and malnutrition, Israel must provide a systematic and orderly distribution of large amounts of aid to stem the crisis—and stave off a Mad Max situation.
1hr 5m Jul 29, 2025
1hr 5m
Bill Kristol: Trump Is a Moral Monster
The man who cavorted with Jeffrey Epstein for 15 years never even bothers to feign empathy for Epstein's victims—even a sociopath would fake it.
1hr 4m Jul 28, 2025
1hr 4m
Andrew Weissmann: It Stinks to High Heaven
The deputy attorney general of the United States, who took an oath to help Donald Trump no matter what, is conferring with Jeffrey Epstein's literal partner in crime—a woman who lied about the sex trafficking she orchestrated and participated in.
58m Jul 25, 2025
58m
Mike Murphy: Trump's Kryptonite
The one thing Mr. Authenticity was supposed to be was the anti-politician: the guy who would supposedly go after the establishment, clean up Washington, and make a booming economy.
53m Jul 24, 2025
53m
Neera Tanden: Aiding and Abetting Trump
Mike Johnson is racing to shut the business of the House down to avoid a vote on releasing the Epstein files. Trump's own criminal lawyer, who's moonlighting as deputy attorney general, will be minding the matter of Ghislaine Maxwell.
54m Jul 23, 2025
54m
Chris Murphy: Time to Break Norms(?)
Republicans are nullifying bipartisan budget deals and planning a mid-decade redistricting to try to hold the House after the midterms. Trump is methodically working to crush dissent in the media, chill major Dem donors, and shut down the party's online fundraising portal, ActBlue.
46m Jul 22, 2025
46m
Bill Kristol: It's the Crimes and the Cover-Up
Our government disappeared hundreds of Venezuelans to a hellish Salvadoran prison for 125 days. When Trump's and Stephen Miller's whole CECOT plan even became too much for the dictator who runs El Salvador, Marco Rubio helped orchestrate a political win for Venezuela's strongman, Nicolas Maduro—who gets to look like a white knight in the hostage exchange.
49m Jul 21, 2025
49m
Tom Nichols: Secrets and Lies
If anyone in America was still thinking that Trump's ties to Epstein were a nothingburger, Trump’s own behavior this week has disabused them of that notion. His panicking and flailing around sure seem exactly like how a guilty man would act.
1hr 3m Jul 18, 2025
1hr 3m