The Political Scene | The New Yorker

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 pr...

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 ...

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 Gr...

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 o...

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 iss...

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. ...

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...

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 softwa...

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 politiciz...

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...

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 k...

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 f...

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 Believ...

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 conferenc...

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...

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...

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...

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 Cry...

The staff writer John Cassidy joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the recent meltdown of the U.S. stock market, Donald Trump’s long-standing support for tariffs, and what the potential death of an American-dominated free-trade system could mean for the global economy. 

This week’s reading:

• “Will Trumpian Uncertainty Knock the Economy Into a Recession?,” by John Cassidy
• “Who Gets to Determine Greenland’s Future?,” by ...