The Ezra Klein Show

Every Israeli-Palestinian peace deal has failed. Could Trump’s be any different?

On Oct. 10, the Israeli cabinet approved a cease-fire deal brokered by the Trump administration, Turkey and Qatar. Since then, the living Israeli hostages have come home. Nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israel have been freed. Israeli forces have partially withdrawn from the Gaza Strip, and they’re allowing in more desperately needed aid. This is ...

Eliezer Yudkowsky is as afraid as you could possibly be. He makes his case.

Yudkowsky is a pioneer of A.I. safety research, who started warning about the existential risks of the technology decades ago, – influencing a lot of leading figures in the field. But over the last couple of years, talk of an A.I. apocalypse has become a little passé. Many of the people Yudkowsky influenced have gone on to work for A.I. companies, and those ...

The government shutdown is the Democrats’ first big strategic bet of Trump’s term.

Not everyone in the party agreed that shutting down the government was the right move or that health care was the right message. So why did they ultimately pick this fight? What are the risks? And what could Democrats learn here that might help shape their strategy for the midterms and beyond?

Jon Favreau, a former Obama speechwriter and a current co-h...

There’s a serious high-stakes policy fight at the heart of this.

The Democrats didn’t pick a fight over authoritarianism or tariffs or masked immigration agents in the streets. They picked one over health care. And the issue here is very real. Huge health insurance subsidies passed under President Joe Biden are set to expire at the end of this year, threatening to make health care premiums skyrocket and kick millions off their insur...

Brian Eno’s music opens up worlds I love to step into during trying times. And this conversation with Eno did the same thing.

Eno is a trailblazing musician and producer who’s worked on seminal records by U2, David Bowie, the Talking Heads and Coldplay, among others. But Eno isn’t just a great collaborator with other artists; he’s also a great collaborator with machines. He’s been experimenting with music technology for decades. Lon...

The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates was harshly critical of my response to Charlie Kirk’s assassination. In an article in Vanity Fair, he suggested I was whitewashing Kirk’s legacy, comparing it to the whitewashing of the Southern cause after the Civil War.

So I wanted to have Coates on the show to talk out our disagreement, as well as some deeper questions that I think exist underneath it about the work of politics.

What should the left do ...

This is McCarthyism 2.0. 

Since Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the Trump administration has been speed-running an attack on the “radical left.” And the tactics it has been using are darkly reminiscent of the Red Scare of the 1940s and ’50s. So what can that period teach us about the current moment and what the Trump administration might do next? How far could this go? 

Corey Robin is a political theorist at Brooklyn College. He’s an e...

The Utah governor is trying to model a different kind of leadership in a very dangerous political moment.

The Trump administration seems intent on using the assassination of Charlie Kirk to crack down on what it calls “the radical left.” But Spencer Cox doesn’t believe that suppression will make Americans safer.

For years now, Cox has been thinking seriously about our toxic political culture and what the path out of it could be. So I...

This is an episode in two parts. First, my thoughts on Charlie Kirk’s murder, now that I’ve had a few days to process it, and to see the unfolding reactions and responses on both sides. Then a conversation with Ben Shapiro — one that was recorded shortly before Kirk’s assassination, but that has a different significance after it.

This episode contains strong language.

Mentioned:

“Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way” by ...

In a few weeks the government’s funding will run out. If Democrats vote for a new spending bill, they will be funding Trump’s autocratic takeover. What should they do?

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-kle...

Trump was losing in the courts. He’s not anymore.

In the early months of the administration, the courts were proving a powerful check on President Trump, blocking many of his boldest actions. But those were the lower courts. In the past few months, the Supreme Court has weighed in, and it has handed Trump win after win after win.

So what do these decisions enable the president to do? And why is the Supreme Court giving Trump what he ...

ICE now has the biggest budget of any law enforcement agency in America.

“ICE and Customs and Border Protection have long been the most rogue, kind of renegade and certainly pro-Trump police agencies in the federal government,” explained Radley Balko, a journalist who’s covered policing for decades. “What I think we are seeing right now is Trump is attempting to build his own paramilitary force. They want people whose first, ultimat...

“Make America Healthy Again” is a great idea — somebody should try it.

A lot of the concerns animating the MAHA movement — chronic disease, the unhealthiness of the American diet, how profits warp our health care system — are serious issues. But Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hasn’t taken major actions to address them. Instead he’s gutted funding for scientific research, including nearly $500 million dedicated to mRNA vaccine development, th...

I do my best to respond to your critiques of some of our recent episodes.

We got an overwhelming response to my interviews with the Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, the national conservativism theorist Yoram Hazony and the human rights lawyer Philippe Sands on whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. So in this subscriber-only Ask Me Anything I answer some of the biggest critiques we received, as well as other listener que...

What is going on with the economy right now?

There are a lot of mixed signals. President Trump slashed taxes, but he’s also bringing in a lot of money through tariffs. Inflation is creeping up, but the stock market keeps rising. Eye-wateringly large investments are flowing to A.I., which could lead to an explosion of productivity but also mass job loss. And then Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after a disappoi...

In December 2023, when South Africa accused Israel of genocide before the International Court of Justice, I thought it was wrong to do so. Israel had been attacked. Its defense was legitimate. The blood was on Hamas’s hands.

But over the last year, I have watched a slew of organizations and scholars arrive at the view that whatever Israel’s war on Gaza began as, its mass assault on Palestinian civilians fits the definition of genoci...

Mahmoud Khalil was a leader in Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests. In March, he was arrested by ICE agents and held for more than 100 days in a Louisiana detention facility. The Trump administration claims Khalil is deportable — even though he has a green card, married to a U.S. citizen — because he poses a threat to U.S. foreign policy goals.

Khalil’s alleged offense here is speech.

Khalil is out now on bail, and he’s st...

Vice President JD Vance gave a speech recently that deserved more attention than it got. Accepting an award at a right-wing think tank, he argued that there’s a fundamental brokenness in how we define who is an American. He explained that this is the root of many of our country’s problems: a national identity that has become too broad.

That was also a core idea of the 2018 book “The Virtue of Nationalism,” which caused a sensation o...

“It’s so insidious, people don’t realize it,” Barbara Kingsolver told me, describing the prejudice against “country people.” Kingsolver is one of those “country people,” as well as a literary legend in her own time, who set out to write the “great Appalachian novel.” And I think she did. 

“Demon Copperhead” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2023, and we taped this conversation later that year. And I wanted to re-air it because the divide be...