Consider This from NPR

On Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is scheduled to meet President Donald Trump at the White House. On the agenda — a deal for Ukraine to share its rich natural resources. The Trump administration wants hundreds of billions of dollars of rare earth metals and other critical minerals. Details are thin on what exactly Ukraine would get in exchange. The meeting comes as the world marks...

President Trump's calls for the U.S. to take over Greenland have sparked alarm and outrage. Denmark, which is responsible for Greenland's security, recently announced that it would further boost its defense spending. And a recent poll found 85 percent of Greenlanders are opposed to being part of the United States. Parliamentary candidate Naaja Nathanielsen is one of them. It isn't clear whether Tr...

On Friday, Donald Trump fired Chairman of the Joint Chief's of Staff CQ Brown, along with several other top Pentagon officials. Now, Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island, has a question for the man tapped to succeed him, Retired Air Force Lieutenant General Dan Caine. Quote — "will he have the ability to speak truth to power?" Senator Reed is the top democrat on the Armed Services Commi...

President Donald Trump's tariffs and comments about turning Canada into the 51st state have tested U.S. relations with the country. One example is the deterioration of longstanding bonds between Detroit, Michigan and its neighbor across the river, Windsor, Ontario. NPR's Don Gonyea is a Detroit native and current resident of the city. He's had a front row view to changing attitudes between the two...

"The Department of Education is a big con job." That's just one of the things President Trump has said about one of the most high profile departments in federal government — a department Trump says he wants to eliminate. Trump says he wants to save money, and kill policies he doesn't like. Trump and Elon Musk's DOGE has already started cutting funding from the department. The Trump administration...

Earlier this week, President Donald Trump accused Ukraine of starting the war with Russia. Three years ago Russian troops poured over Ukraine's border, and Russian missiles and drones continue to bombard Ukrainian cities. Besides being untrue, the comments echoed a popular Kremlin talking point. And Trump's comments signaled a seismic shift in decades of U.S. foreign policy. Supporters of Ukraine...

Is the United States headed toward autocracy? That's a question prompted by a steady stream of executive orders seeking to consolidate power in the White House and upend long held policies and norms. New York Times Opinion writer M. Gessen lived through much of Russia's slide into autocracy, and wrote a book about it. They argue that one of the ways Vladimir Putin consolidated power... was by maki...

New York Governor Kathy Hochul, along withother top officials spent much of Tuesday weighing whether to use her power to remove New York City Mayor Eric Adams from office. It's a power that no New York Governor has ever used before. Adams faces growing calls to step down over allegations of corruption - and criticism that Adams' deepening ties with the Trump administration have compromised his abi...

An Israeli delegation is in Cairo to hash out details for the second phase of a ceasefire deal with Hamas. Under the first phase of the deal, Hamas agreed to release a total of 33 Israeli hostages – and Israel said it would free around 1,900 Palestinian prisoners and detainees. NPR's Jerome Socolovsky looks into why Israel has long accepted lopsided deals to bring back abducted citizens. For spons...

Across the country and around the world, tens of thousands of federal workers face uncertainty amid an unprecedented reduction and restructuring of the federal workforce. President Donald Trump has signed a flurry of executive orders — freezing hiring, ordering teleworkers back to the office, reclassifying employees and dismantling wide-ranging DEI programs. What will mass layoffs mean for federal...

There are at least two million people in America who have thoughts and ideas they can't put into words. People who have had strokes or traumatic brain injuries often live with aphasia: difficulty using language, both written and spoken. But music mostly originates in the undamaged hemisphere of the brain, and people with aphasia can often sing. Today in our bonus episode, in partnership with the p...

President Donald Trump is now chairman of The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Trump replaced 18 members of the board with allies who then elected him into the position. There is no precedent for this move – most presidents have been hands-off with the cultural center since it opened in 1971 – including President Trump himself during his first term. Already, artists affil...

Panama has been looking for solutions to a long-term problem. Every time a ship passes through the Panama Canal, more than 50 million gallons of fresh water from Lake Gatun pour out into the ocean. Nobody ever thought Panama could run out of water. It is one of the rainiest countries in the world. But a couple years ago, a drought got so bad that the canal had to reduce traffic by more than a thir...

The Gaza Strip – ground zero of Israel's war with Hamas – is only about twice the size of Washington, DC. It has about 25 miles of coastline along the Mediterranean Sea, with a population of about 2 million people. Last week, President Trump proposed relocating those people to other countries in the region, like Egypt and Jordan. Trump has said the Palestinians would not be allowed to return: UN o...

President Trump's blizzard of executive orders has run into a snowplow of legal challenges. There are dozens of cases challenging the White House's actions. Judges all over the country have found that the White House acted illegally. The challenges, and the rulings, continue to pour in. But Trump's team is punching back. After a judge blocked Elon Musk's DOGE team from accessing personal data and...

Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency is quickly expanding its reach through the federal government. It recently accessed systems at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Musk and his team now are looking at key payment and contracting systems for Medicare and Medicaid. That was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. On X, Musk said he believes quote "big money fraud is hap...

Project 2025 , is a 900-plus page blueprint for a conservative President. It was unveiled in the spring of 2023, well before Donald Trump had won the republican presidential nomination. It outlined a suite of very conservative policies that would, for example, outlaw the mailing of abortion pills and abolish the department of education. It even suggests a return to the gold standard. It became a d...

For centuries, scholars only had one version of the life of Margery Kempe, an English mystic who lived in the 14th and 15th centuries — until a ping pong match revealed her story in her own words. For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for C onsider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org Email us at considerthis@npr.org See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and...

A lot of labels have been applied to Trump's foreign policy approach. America First, Isolationist, transactional, imperialist, protectionist. "I'm a nationalist and a globalist" he told the Wall Street Journal during his first term. In his inaugural address last month , Trump made comments suggesting his foreign policy will be characterized by restraint, saying, in part, success should be defined...

As President Trump dismantles Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) practices at the federal level, organizations across the country are also shifting their approach to diversity. For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for C onsider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org . Email us at considerthis@npr.org . See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of person...

President Trump floated two stunning ideas about Gaza on Tuesday. The first is he said the U.S. would take over the territory, which has been devastated by the recent war. And, he said the entire population of Gaza would be relocated to other countries. Trump offered no specifics for his plans sending Palestinians and Israelis scrambling to understand what he means. President Trump's vague plan to...

In Washington these days, Elon Musk seems to be everywhere. In the 15 days Donald Trump has been back in the White House, Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency have been moving to change every corner of the federal government. The billionaire entrepreneur and his team have gained access to a sensitive government payment system in the Treasury Department. They're pushing to drastically r...

The Panama Canal has sat at the center of global trade for more than a century, connecting two oceans. The things Americans use every day pass through here, from gas to food. And now, this spot is also at the center of President Trump's global expansionist agenda. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has just wrapped up a trip to Panama where he told the President that if China's influence over the cana...

Most presidents want as much power as they can get. And it's not unusual to see them claim authority that they don't, in the end, actually have. We saw it just last term, when former President Biden tried to unilaterally forgive hundreds of billions of dollars in federal student loans. Or when he announced, days before leaving office that the 28th Amendment, on gender equality, was now the law of...

Schools, corporations, even churches, are wrestling with how to approach issues of racial and social justice in a highly polarized U.S. But what happens when people with shared political views disagree on how much is too much? For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for C onsider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org . Email us at considerthis@npr.org . See pcm.adswizz.com for in...