Lever Time

In a special Lever Time post-election bonus episode, Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) details how he was nearly excommunicated from the Democratic Party after he raised early concerns about the party's electability in 2023.

The group discusses how Democrats’ culture of blind loyalty to the party elite and extreme deference to wealthy donors leave them hopelessly out of touch with voters — and what can be done to change that.

Arjun Singh interviews Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney about The Bibi Files, a new documentary he produced that uncovers explosive new police footage from the corruption trial of increasingly besieged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The podcast comes the same week the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu — and the U.S. Senate voted down a measure to block military aid to Netany...

No matter what, the cryptocurrency industry was going to win the election. After spending hundreds of millions to influence politicians in both parties, the industry defeated some of its fiercest critics and scored bipartisan support, particularly from President-elect Donald Trump, despite crypto’s potential risks for consumers and the financial system. Today on Lever Time, Lever reporter Freddy Brewster discusses crypto’s...

Donald Trump easily won reelection with the help of voters who were once considered bedrocks of the Democratic base. In this election, the former president managed to win over more working-class voters than in his 2016 campaign and made historic inroads with nonwhite voters. Why did this happen — and how can Democrats win them back?

Today on Lever Time, senior podcast producer Arjun Singh sits down with political analyst Kr...

If elected, former president Donald Trump has promised to implement mass deportations, target journalists, and carry out other unprecedented actions. How could he pull it off? Project 2025, a radical plan to reshape the government under Trump, highlights the key to his sweeping agenda: Schedule F, a policy that would expose federal workers to political interference and give the president broad leeway to govern through fear...

A biopic of former president Donald Trump released right before the election seems ripe for box office success. But when screenwriter Gabriel Sherman looked for a distributor for his new film The Apprentice, Trump threatened legal action, and major studios got cold feet. Today on Lever Time, Sherman sits down with David Sirota and Arjun Singh to discuss the battle to release The Apprentice and how Wall Street’s Hollywood t...

For decades, major labor unions like the Teamsters have endorsed the Democratic ticket in presidential elections — but not this year. In a surprise move, the Teamsters declined to endorse either former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris. The development — and Trump’s surprising levels of support from blue-collar and union voters — suggests something’s changing in the world of working-class politics.

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Millions in the Southeastern United States recently endured one cataclysm after another. First, Hurricane Helene left chaos and destruction across a trail of states. Then, in Georgia, a catastrophic chemical plant fire released plumes of toxic chlorine gas, forcing thousands to evacuate or shelter in place. Both disasters share a troubling backstory: regulatory failures fueled in part by corporate greed made the crises wor...

Vice President Kamala Harris has built a broad coalition that stretches from climate activists to a former oil company CEO, all of them aligned against former President Donald Trump. But if Harris wins in November and Trump’s out of the picture, what happens to this band of strange bedfellows, who frequently find themselves split on core issues like taxation and corporate power? What kind of a mandate will Harris have to l...

In 1971, Lewis Powell, a tobacco industry lawyer and future Supreme Court justice, penned a memo calling on conservatives and business interests to make the nation’s legal system far more friendly to corporate power. A few years later, a lawyer named Michael Horowitz penned a follow-up memo calling for conservatives to indoctrinate generations of lawyers as the right’s foot soldiers on the ground. 

Today on Lever Time, seni...

When Kamala Harris first ran for president in 2019, she promised to deliver Medicare for All to the people — but that changed. Early in her campaign, she frequently referred to a 2017 bill she co-sponsored with Sen. Bernie Sanders that would have effectively abolished private health insurance. But when political winds didn’t look good, Harris changed course, and ultimately released her own, very different version of the bi...

In television commercials, at speeches, and on the campaign trail, Vice President Kamala Harris frequently boasts that she stood up to big banks as California's attorney general. But her sloganeering obscures a sometimes-ugly record. Today on Lever Time, Arjun Singh looks back at Harris' early years as a district attorney and then state attorney general to see what they show us about the president she may soon become.

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The Lever’s David Sirota reports on his adventures at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, sharing his on-the-ground reporting on Democrats’ fear of another Trump presidency and their rhetoric loathing the corporate takeover of politics. Sirota spotlights the tension between the convention’s populist framing and its corporate sponsors footing the bill. Sirota also talked to Democratic senators about whether any o...

Vice President Kamala Harris’ ascent to presumptive Democratic nominee has upended the presidential contest and energized Democratic voters — but what’s the policy behind the vibes?

On Friday, Harris unveiled a series of economic policies, including a proposed federal ban on grocery price gouging and plans to lower prescription drug and housing costs. It was a good step, but one that came after Harris faced pressure and cri...

For more than a decade, global politics have been rocked by the rise of right-wing nationalist governments. Similar to Donald Trump’s rise in the United States, countries like India, Hungary, Brazil, and Italy have seen the emergence of far-right governments who’ve channeled popular anger into support for nativist and anti-immigrant platforms. It turns out we’re largely to blame for it.

Today on Lever Time, Arjun Singh sits...

On Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, a move that drew praise from a wide swath of the party, from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Sen. Joe Manchin. 

Though Walz was relatively unknown until recently, his stock within Democratic politics skyrocketed in the last few weeks. As governor, Walz passed legislation Democrats have long championed, including increasing taxes ...

Floods, heat waves, wildfires and other climate extremes are becoming a way of life for millions around the world — and tragically a way of death. After a historic, record-breaking flood in France killed her mother, a daughter wants to hold oil companies criminally responsible for her death, joining seven other plaintiffs in a lawsuit. Today on Lever Time, senior investigative reporter Lois Parshley examines a growing glob...