What A Day

What A Day

If you’re looking for hype, fake outrage, and groupthink, kindly keep moving. Our mission at What a Day is simple: to be your guide to what truly matters each morning (and the fun stuff you might have missed) in just 20 minutes. Host Jane Coaston brings you in-depth reporting and substantive analysis on the big stories shaping today and the creeping trends shaping tomorrow—and when she doesn’t know the answers, she asks someone even smarter to fill us all in. Radical, right? New episodes at 5:00 a.m. EST, Monday–Friday in your favorite podcast app and on YouTube. Being informed was never this easy.

Episodes

July 21, 2025 20 mins

As artificial intelligence programs become more widely accessible, so too do increasingly sophisticated deepfake scams that take advantage of the technology. Earlier this month, the State Department confirmed reports that an imposter pretending to be Secretary of State Marco Rubio reached out to at least five high-ranking government officials. It wasn’t the first time a member of the Trump administration had been impersonated by AI...

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Alligator Alcatraz, a pop-up immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades, has been touted by members of the Trump Administration as an ‘efficient and low cost way’ to carry out the president's mass deportation agenda against ‘criminal illegal aliens.’ But an investigation by the Miami Herald found hundreds of the people at the facility have no criminal convictions or pending charges at all. And according to detainees and...

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July 17, 2025 22 mins

President Donald Trump spent Wednesday refuting reports he plans to imminently fire Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. The president has been complaining about him for months, accusing Powell of unnecessarily keeping interest rates high. But Trump’s frustrations seemed to reach a new peak this week amid reports he had a letter drafted to oust the man he appointed to the job back in 2017, then asked a group of House Republicans...

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July 16, 2025 25 mins

On the 2024 campaign trail, then-candidate Donald Trump repeatedly claimed he could end Russia’s war in Ukraine ‘on day one.’ Roughly 180 days into his second presidential term, the war has only escalated. What has changed is Trump’s attitude toward Russian President Vladimir Putin. This week, Trump announced a new deal to send U.S. weapons to Ukraine, after weeks of complaining about Putin’s increasingly destructive attacks. Ben R...

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After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade three years ago, the question of abortion's legality and availability returned to the states. As of now, abortion remains broadly legal in more than 30 states and Washington, D.C. In some, like Kansas, Missouri and Montana, abortion is still legal largely because of voters. But while Trump spent a lot of time on the campaign trail trying to avoid the topic of abortion, his new tax and ...

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President Donald Trump’s new spending and tax law is set to balloon the budget for immigration and detention enforcement. With an extra $170 billion over the next four years, the government is hoping to hire 10 thousand new Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, build new detention facilities, and otherwise ramp up every aspect of arrests and removals. In fact, under the new spending plan, ICE will become the most well-funded ...

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President Donald Trump is scheduled to travel to central Texas today to tour damage of the devastating July 4th weekend floods. More than 100 people have been confirmed dead, and nearly 200 are still missing a week later. As people in the region continue to mourn their loved ones and assess the destruction, there has been a lot of finger-pointing over whether more could have been done to alert people about the flood risks. If staff...

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Federal agents descended on a park in the middle of Los Angeles midday Monday, showing up on horseback, in armored tanks, and carrying rifles. While it’s still not at all clear if the agents made any arrests, a regional Customs and Border Protection chief told a local FOX News reporter, “Better get used to us now, because this is gonna be normal very soon.” He may not be wrong. President Donald Trump’s new spending and tax law expl...

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In just a few short months on the job, Health And Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has managed to upend the American public health system, successfully inserting his decades of vaccine skepticism into national policy. Late last month, he fired every member of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel, replacing them mostly with people who’ve voiced skepticism about vaccines. In May, he an...

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Now that President Donald Trump has gotten exactly what he wanted, and signed his major domestic tax and policy agenda into law, what should Democrats do now? Poll after poll has shown the legislation is wildly unpopular, but also that voters don’t know a ton about it. The legislation is projected to strip millions of people of health care and food assistance over the next decade. And for Democrats, tying Republicans to the law’s m...

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July 7, 2025 24 mins

Despite months of handwringing and a litany complaints from dozens of Congressional Republicans, President Donald Trump scored yet another major political victory Friday when he signed his One Big Beautiful Bill into law, just like he wanted. The measure, stuffed with Republican spending and policy priorities, threatens to balloon the federal deficit by more than $3 trillion dollars over the next decade while kicking millions of po...

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The New York City Board of Elections on Tuesday confirmed Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old state assemblyman, beat former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the city's Democratic primary for mayor. And not by a thin margin – the results show Mamdani won by 12 points after the ranked choice vote count. The decisive victory puts Mamdani in pole position to win November’s general election and become the city’s next mayor, though Cuomo and current Mayo...

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The Senate passed President Donald Trump's spending bill on Tuesday after Vice President JD Vance arrived to break a 50-50 tie. The bill is now headed back to the House where Republican Speaker Mike Johnson can only afford to lose three members and still pass the bill by a party line vote. To learn more about what this means for Republicans' big beautiful bill and the looming July Fourth deadline, we spoke with Nicholas Wu, a congr...

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As Republicans in Congress look to gut Medicaid with President Donald Trump’s supposed “Big Beautiful Bill,” the Supreme Court ended its session ruling on United States vs. Skirmetti that Tennessee could bar gender-affirming care for minors. The ruling itself centered on whether or not such a ban would violate the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. In a 6–3 decision, with the three liberal justices dissenting, the court deci...

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It’s make-or-break week for Congressional Republicans and their big policy and spending legislation, a.k.a. President Donald Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill.’ Trump says he still expects to see the final package on his desk by this Friday, even as new estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office show the latest version of the bill could add more than $3 trillion dollars to the national debt over the next decade. Is th...

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The Supreme Court will issue a slew of major opinions today on what’s expected to be the final day of its current term. Still outstanding are decisions in cases over President Donald Trump’s birthright citizenship order, a voting rights challenge in Louisiana, LGBTQ books in schools, and more. On Thursday, the court also paved the way for states to bar Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funds, even for services not at all r...

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June 26, 2025 23 mins

President Donald Trump addressed leaders at a NATO summit in the Netherlands Wednesday as the tenuous ceasefire between Israel and Iran continued to hold for a second day. Trump said the U.S. would be holding talks with Iran sometime next week, though he added he didn’t think a new nuclear agreement was actually necessary because ‘the war’s done.’ While the administration continues to fight reports that Iran’s nuclear program remai...

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What does national leadership really look like? Despite all of President Donald Trump's rhetoric, it's not like running a business. It's not even like running a state. It's running a massive apparatus that employs millions of people and also a military, while dealing with every other country that needs to or wants to deal with your country. Frequently, it also requires doing all of that in the the middle of a crisis. Former New Zea...

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Iran fired missiles at a U.S. military base in Qatar Monday in retaliation for American strikes on three nuclear enrichment sites, marking another major escalation in the growing Middle East conflict. The Qatari government said U.S. forces were able to intercept those missiles. And President Donald Trump downplayed the strikes on Truth Social, writing Iran had alerted the government ahead of time and now "gotten it all out of their...

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The United States is going to war in the Middle East again… maybe. President Donald Trump announced Saturday the U.S. had bombed three of Iran’s main nuclear facilities, adding, “NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE!” But while multiple members of the administration spent Sunday insisting the U.S. is not out for regime change, Trump later undermined them in another Truth Social post floating the idea. The extent of the damage inflicted on Ira...

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