Impolitic with John Heilemann
Join Puck’s chief political columnist, MSNBC/NBC News national affairs analyst, and best-selling author John Heilemann as he roams the corridors of power and influence in America on this twice-weekly interview show, taking you behind the scenes and beyond the headlines with the people who shape and shift our culture: icons and up-and-comers, incumbents and insurgents, moguls and machers in the overlapping worlds of politics, entertainment, tech, business, sports, media, and beyond. The conversations are rich and revealing, unrehearsed and unexpected … and reliably impolitic. A Puck-Audacy joint, new episodes drop every Wednesday and Friday.
Episodes
September 26, 2025 • 73 mins
John welcomes Rahm Emanuel—former Democratic Illinois congressman, White House chief of staff, mayor of Chicago, U.S. ambassador to Japan, and likely 2028 presidential candidate—to discuss the lessons of the Jimmy Kimmel conniption; how the broadcast networks could band together to beat back Donald Trump's regulatory and legal campaign against them; and the strategy and tactics his party should employ in the battle over shutting do...
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September 22, 2025 • 68 mins
John welcomes Drew Nieporent, the celebrated owner-operator behind Nobu, Tribeca Grill, and Montrachet, to discuss his new memoir, “I’m Not Trying To Be Difficult: Stories From the Restaurant Trenches.” Nieporent describes his role in transforming the stuffy, fussy, French-focused fine dining culture of New York in the 1970s into the dynamic, freewheeling, scene-driven atmosphere that took hold in the late 1980s; how his fabled par...
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September 19, 2025 • 79 mins
John welcomes New York Times scribe Robert Draper and Atlantic staff writer and podcast host David Frum to discuss the political reverberations from the fatal shooting of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Draper joins the show from Kirk’s home base in Arizona, and assesses the impact of the shooting on those who revered him in the MAGA movement and the future of the organization he founded, Turning Point USA. Meanwhile, Frum takes ...
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September 15, 2025 • 64 mins
John welcomes world-renowned epidemiologist Dr. Michael Osterholm to discuss the threats to America’s public health system under Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Osterholm catalogues the damage Donald Trump’s Secretary of Health & Human Services has inflicted in just seven months in office; the misstatements and misinformation he put forward in his recent appearance before the Senate; and his especially dangerous and scientifically baseless ...
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September 12, 2025 • 74 mins
John welcomes former FBI assistant director Frank Figliuzzi back to the show to discuss the murder of Charlie Kirk. Figliuzzi assesses the state of the investigation into the apparent assassination and manhunt for the killer; what we know and don’t know on the basis of the evidence that's been made public; what’s driving thecross-partisan epidemic of political violence in America; and what, if anything, can be done to break the vic...
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September 8, 2025 • 68 mins
John welcomes writer, director, and actor Rob Reiner to the show to discuss the release of the sequel to his genre-defining 1984 mockumentary “This Is Spinal Tap” — “Spinal Tap II: The End Continues". Reiner explains why it took 30 years for the follow-up to get made; how the original film went from box-office dud to cultural landmark; and its influence on a generation of comics, from Ricky Gervais to Ben Stiller to Jack Black, and...
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September 5, 2025 • 56 mins
John welcomes Puck’s chief Washington correspondent, Leigh Ann Caldwell, back to the show to discuss Congress’s return to work after its August recess. Leigh Ann assesses the political potency (and limitations) of the public display of solidarity by a phalanx of Jeffrey Epstein survivors in the face of Donald Trump’s continued insistence that the story is a “Democrat hoax”; the potential implications of the Senate Finance Committee...
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September 1, 2025 • 91 mins
John welcomes Jonathan Mahler, New York Times Magazine staff writer and bestselling author of “The Bronx Is Burning,” to discuss his new book, “The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990.” Mahler unpacks the reinvention of the Big Apple in the second half of the Eighties; riffs on the outsized characters (from Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani to Larry Kramer, Al Sharpton, and, of c...
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August 31, 2025 • 2 mins
With every episode, Lena Dunham and Alissa Bennett take you on a historical deep dive into the life of a woman society dismissed by calling her mad, sad, or just plain bad: Lindsay Lohan, Judy Garland, Winona Ryder, Mariah Carey, Lil Kim and many more. Join them for a rich, hilarious, and heartbreaking look into exactly what it means when we call a woman “crazy.”
The C-Word was originally published behind a paywall from 2019 - 202...
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August 29, 2025 • 99 mins
John welcomes legendary music and pop culture writer, thinker, and theoretician Chuck Klosterman to talk about the runaway success of the Oasis reunion tour and why America is suddenly gaga for the band 30 years after its peak. For those too young to remember the Britpop era or too addled to recall it clearly, Klosterman explains just how huge Oasis was back then; how the Internet and social media conspired to keep the perpetually ...
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August 25, 2025 • 67 mins
John welcomes Democratic Texas state representative James Talarico to discuss the escalating war over redistricting kicked off by Lone Star State Republicans. In the wake of Texas's enactment of a new congressional map sought by Donald Trump and designed to deliver five House seats to the GOP in next year’s midterms, Talarico explains why the two-week walkout by him and 56 of his colleagues succeeded despite the map’s adoption—by s...
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August 22, 2025 • 68 mins
John welcomes Michael McFaul, former U.S. ambassador to Russia, back to the show to discuss the past week’s flurry of diplomatic efforts to bring an end to the war in Ukraine. McFaul analyzes the meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Alaska; the subsequent visit of Volodymyr Zelensky and a phalanx of European leaders to the White House; the signals emanating from Russia that Putin’s maximalist war aims remain unchanged...
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August 18, 2025 • 65 mins
John welcomes Pod Save America cohost, Message Box author, and former top Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer back to the show to discuss the burgeoning competition to be the face of the Democratic Party’s future. Pfeiffer assesses the risks and rewards of California governor Gavin Newsom’s redistricting gambit for his presidential ambitions; the efforts of Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker to make his billionaire status tolerable to the popu...
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August 15, 2025 • 91 mins
John welcomes USA Today sports columnist Christine Brennan to discuss her runaway bestseller “On Her Game: Caitlin Clark and the Revolution in Women's Sports.” Brennan lays out the formative experiences that turned Clark into a national sensation; the WNBA’s lack of preparation to capitalize on the surge in popularity, income and impact that her arrival has unleashed; the troubling outbreaks of jealousy and resentment sparked by a ...
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August 11, 2025 • 57 mins
John welcomes second-term Democratic congressman and former mayor of Long Beach, CA, Robert Garcia to talk about the imperative for his party to move away from “respectability politics” to combat the Trump 2.0 agenda. Garcia explains why the Texas redistricting fight transcends the particulars of the Lone Star State as a central part of Donald Trump’s plan not just to steal the 2026 midterm elections but to stay in office past 2028...
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August 8, 2025 • 65 mins
John welcomes Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum back to the show to discuss her new cover story in The Atlantic on the devastating civil war in Sudan. Applebaum—whose 2004 tome “Gulag: A History” won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and whose most recent book, “Autocracy, Inc.” comes out in paperback this month—explains how anarchy, greed, and nihilism have replaced the liberal world order in Sudan; the role that D...
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August 4, 2025 • 84 mins
John is joined by Adam Pritzker and Daniel Squadron, co-founders of a pair of increasingly influential Democratic groups trying to cure what ails their party by looking WAY beyond Washington, D.C.—to the nation’s state legislatures. Pritzker and Squadron explain the genesis of the States Project, which they formed eight years ago and is already the largest Democratic donor to state legislative races (to the tune of $130 million in ...
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August 1, 2025 • 76 mins
John welcomes David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, and David Miliband, head of the International Rescue Committee, to discuss Israel’s war with Hamas and the humanitarian horror show unfolding in Gaza. Having just authored his fourth major reported piece on the conflict since October 7, 2023, Remnick explains Israel’s sense of “national euphoria” after the Twelve-Day War launched by Benjamin Netanyahu against Iran to cripple it...
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July 28, 2025 • 74 mins
John welcomes legendary Democratic strategist Bob Shrum to discuss Donald Trump’s inability to extricate himself from the Jeffrey Epstein quagmire and the opportunity for Democrats to weave the story into a broader political narrative. The Los Angeles-based Shrum, who rose to prominence as Ted Kennedy’s speechwriter and played a central role on both Al Gore’s and John Kerry's presidential campaigns, also offers his take on his stat...
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July 25, 2025 • 68 mins
John welcomes Maggie Haberman, New York Times White House Correspondent and author of the bestselling “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump & The Breaking of America,” to discuss the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein imbroglio and why Trump has thus far been entirely unsuccessful in his efforts to stanch the bleeding from what may prove to be the most damaging of his many self-inflicted political wounds. Plus: Maggie’s take on Stephen ...
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