The Best People with Nicolle Wallace

Marc Elias is a formidable elections attorney and a fierce defender of voting rights. As Republicans hone a strategy of subtracting voters from the rolls in the 2026 midterms, Elias relentlessly challenges their efforts—in the courts and in the public square. Against the backdrop of notching over 60 legal victories against Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, Elias joins Nicolle to talk about the quiet legal war h...

It takes a rare kind of brilliance to be universally funny, and Leslie Jones is Exhibit A. With the release of her new comedy special "Life: Part Two”, the Emmy-award winning SNL alum joins Nicolle — who she affectionately calls “Nickkkaaay!” — for a conversation packed with candor, irreverence, and unadulterated hilarity. Whether she’s calling out the narcissism fueling our leaders or recounting how she noticed Donald Trump’s famo...

With the backdrop of intensifying scrutiny over the Trump administration's boat strikes, Nicolle’s friend and colleague Rachel Maddow returns — this time with a chilling piece of American history in hand. Rachel’s latest podcast, “Rachel Maddow Presents: Burn Order”, examines one of the most astonishing chapters in American history: the U.S. government’s decision to forcibly target, detain, and uproot innocent Japanese American cit...

Claire Danes knew she was destined to act at five years old, and audiences have felt that certainty ever since – from her turn as Angela Chase in the cult favorite series “My So-Called Life” to the iconic Carrie Mathison in “Homeland,” her devotion to her craft has delivered some of television’s most compelling characters. Her latest work in Netflix’s “The Beast in Me” is no different, with Danes playing a grieving mother who finds...

"Rachel Maddow Presents: Burn Order" is the story of one of the most shocking decisions in American history: the executive order to target and round up innocent citizens, Japanese Americans, at the outbreak of World War II. This six-episode narrative podcast will examine and shed new light on how that policy came to be, who was behind it, who attempted to stop it, and the heroism needed to end the policy for good. 

Listen to the tra...

Since the government shutdown ended, there’s been a renewed focus on releasing the Epstein files. And after the House and Senate voted to compel the Justice Department to make the files public, President Trump signed the bill, beginning a 30-day countdown to their release. With this as a backdrop, we thought it would be a good time to re-up an episode of "The Best People" we released back in mid-September with Jess Michaels and her...

As an American historian and history professor at Boston College, Heather Cox Richardson muses, “ I don't predict the future, I predict the past.” But there is a reason that her renowned “Letters From an American” Substack has the most subscribers of anyone on the platform: Cox Richardson’s ability to apply the lessons from our nation’s history to the politics of our present. And she sees a significant realignment happening in our ...

Scott Galloway — affectionately known as “Prof G” to his legion of podcast followers — is deeply concerned about young men in America. In his new book “Notes on Being a Man,” he reflects on how a lack of economic viability and social connection has created powerful headwinds that make the experience of young men today far different from his own. Scott joins Nicolle to share his analysis of several careening crises at play, from the...

“Pod Save America” began as a way to “narrow the distance” between the conversations former Obama White House staffers were having in private and the ones echoing throughout the public sphere. And since launching in 2017, it’s become a force in America’s competitive media culture. As two of the three co-founders behind Crooked Media, Jon Favreau and Tommy Vietor are ushering in a new era of political communication, championing a cr...

Governor JB Pritzker has mastered the art of standing up to Donald Trump. Whether he’s mocking Trump’s threat to jail him (“Come and get me, Mr. President!) or calling on the citizens of Illinois to grab their phones and document how ICE is targeting black and brown people, Pritzker is showing us how it’s done. With the threat of deployment of federal troops to the streets of Chicago, Pritzker is determined to lessen the fear and s...

Charlamagne Tha God’s more than 7 million monthly listeners hang on his every word for a reason: Charlamagne is plugged into real Americans’ lives. Listening to Charlamagne’s nationally syndicated radio show “The Breakfast Club” has been likened to “sitting on America’s front porch” – a sensibility Charlamagne honed growing up in rural South Carolina. “It gave me a front row seat on working class people”.  Now he’s putting politici...

Jen Psaki is on a mission to show us how the Democratic party can use this political moment to fight and win again. On Season 2 of her podcast, “The Blueprint,” she interviews the people reshaping the party, starting with Texas Congressman Greg Casar, Chair of the Progressive Caucus.

The first two episodes of “The Blueprint with Jen Psaki” are available now, and will continue to drop every Wednesday, from now through mid-November. 

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Martin Sheen has been playing iconic leading men for nearly 70 years from "Badlands" to "Apocalypse Now" and of course as President Jed Bartlet in "The West Wing." But the Emmy and Golden Globe winner says that while acting is his profession, activism keeps him alive. The son of immigrants, social justice is at the center of his life; Sheen's decades of non-violent civil disobedience has earned him the dubious distinction of being ...

Anthony Scaramucci, known as “The Mooch” to friends and foes alike, holds a unique place in American politics. A baseball fanatic and Goldman Sachs alum, he was once a Donald Trump supporter, campaign advisor, and held an 11-day stint as Trump’s White House Communications Director in 2017. After Trump called him a “deep-stater” and fired him, Scaramucci did a lot of soul searching. And in 2019, he came to own what he openly calls h...

Rosie O’Donnell has never shied away from a microphone. And while her decades-long public feud with Donald Trump has at times been fodder for tabloids, she is quite clear that her decision to move to Ireland, her ancestral home, was all about her family and her own self-preservation. Rosie and Nicolle first met as co-hosts thrown together to debate on “The View”, but they developed a friendship that continues today. This episode sh...

Legendary singer and activist Joan Baez still marches in protests; but she also performs in a circus, dances with drag queens and does whatever else she can to maintain a sense of joy and laughter. Baez has spent her career equally at home on the political frontlines as behind a guitar. But as the world has changed, so has how she calculates risk. She thinks if she were to be arrested now – as opposed to 58 years ago – it would be ...

At 22 years old, Jess Michaels was thriving. She was finding success as a dancer and model in New York City. Then, in 1991, she met Jeffrey Epstein. Jess Michaels was sexually assaulted by Epstein and it destroyed her stability, her career and her health. After doing the work to begin healing from this trauma, she has found renewed purpose as an advocate alongside other survivors of Epstein's abuse. The day after excerpts from Epst...

She’s a voting rights activist, a prominent voice in the Democratic party and a three-time New York Times best-selling novelist; but more than anything else, Stacey Abrams is a bonafide badass. As Democratic leaders struggle to unify around a message to counter Trump’s relentless attacks on democracy, Abrams envisions a future where having a moral backbone is an asset, not a weakness. She calls out the political cowardice that’s ta...

Ken Burns is America’s documentarian: From the Civil War to Vietnam, baseball to the Brooklyn Bridge, his films are gospel for generations of Americans curious about the world and our history. This November, in a new six part, 12-hour documentary series Burns turns his attention to the American Revolution – and the counterintuitive revelation that democracy was *not* on the table when the fighting first broke out. Burns says what t...