DMZ America with Ted Rall & Scott Stantis

Hitler was elected democratically and consolidated his dictatorship after seizing power. Donald Trump just won a fair election. Is he plotting to subvert American democracy? There are signs that suggest “yes.”  Presidents may only serve two terms, yet Trump repeatedly suggests that he ought to run and win a third term. A “Third Term Project” was announced at CPAC. This past week, Trump called hims...

House Leader Jeffries sounds like a Vichy Democrat who has given up. “What leverage do we have?” he asked reporters at his weekly news conference on Friday. “They control the House, the Senate and the presidency. It’s their government.” Yet Republicans had a very different attitude when they found themselves in the same position Democrats are in now. They threatened to shut down the federal govern...

Is this the end of the American experiment? Donald Trump, Elon Musk and his administration are flouting the Constitution and making a mockery of the checks and balances that have kept U.S. democracy going over nearly a quarter millennium. Congress has signaled that it does not plan to rein in the president so it’s mostly up to the Supreme Court. With governing norms demolished, will we still be ab...

It’s Trump’s second week as president and he’s a busy boy. He’s expanding Guantánamo Concentration Camp to accommodate as many as 36,000 migrants in perpetuity, working on ways to get a third term, firing the inspectors general and running roughshod over the hapless Democrats who still seem to think they shouldn’t change a thing. Editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on t...

Editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) break down Donald Trump’s first week as president. From pardons to executive orders to cabinet appointments to the inauguration to domestic and foreign policy legislation, what does what we’ve seen so far augur for the next four years of the Trumpian restoration? On the DMZ America podcast, political cartoonists Ted Rall...

Editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) react to the arrest of Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and comic-strip artist Darrin Bell for possessing and distributing child pornography. Support the show The DMZ America Podcast is recorded weekly by political cartoonists Ted Rall and Scott Stantis.  Twitter/X: @scottstantis and @tedrall Web: Rall.com

Free speech is in the news! Editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) discuss the high-profile departure of their colleague, Pulitzer-winning political cartoonist Ann Telnaes, from The Washington Post. Meta and Facebook are getting rid of their fact checkers. And TikTok is begging the Supreme Court for its life. Support the show The DMZ America Podcast is record...

The DMZ America Podcast’s Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) are joined by David Fitzsimmons, Cartoonist and Columnist for the Arizona Daily Star, to discuss David’s role as a Democratic activist and the future of the Democratic Party following Biden’s dropping out of the race and the defeat of Kamala Harris. Support the show The DMZ America Podcast is recorded weekly by polit...

The DMZ America Podcast’s Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) celebrate the December 23rd holiday of Festivus with the traditional Airing of Grievances. As “Seinfeld”’s Frank Costanza said it in the show’s Festivus episode: "I got a lotta problems with you people, and now you're going to hear about it!" Scott and Ted are deeply, deeply disappointed by many people...

As the Biden era yields to the second rise of Trumpism, the transition to What Happens Next is continuing with a sense of purpose as well as foreboding. Editorial cartoonist Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) analyze the mood of the country, handicap Kamala Harris' next moves and try to figure out where the Democrats go from here. Joe Biden, perhaps not strangely, has...

The DMZ America Podcast’s Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) discuss a pair of stories that reflect a disturbing trend: as the government turns more lawless and fails to enforce the law, Americans are taking the law into their own hands—and voters seem to approve. A Manhattan jury acquitted Daniel Penny, the subway rider who strangled a mentally-ill homeless man, Jordan Neely,...

The DMZ America Podcast’s Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) are joined by Terry Anderson of the Cartoonist Rights Network International to discuss the state of political cartooning in the United States and around the world during a time of political transition and the ongoing seismic disruption in the print media ecosystem that supported the profession throughout the previous...

The DMZ America Podcast’s Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) dig into the shooting death of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Does the misery intrinsic to the profit model of companies like United Healthcare justify violent acts like this in a society where there is little recourse for justice? Or is taking the law into your own hands always inherently wrong? And is there...

The DMZ America Podcast’s Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) are joined by syndicated columnist Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune to discuss the despondent state of the Democratic Party in the wake of their defeat. Progressives like Bernie Sanders say the party erred in neglecting the working class, moderates think the party appears too “woke” for mainstream Americans and i...

Trump recently reconfirmed that he plans to carry out his campaign pledge to enforce mass deportations of many of the 10 million migrants with varying statuses who have entered the United States in recent years. Some overstayed their tourist visas. Some snuck across the border, the so-called “got-aways.” But the majority arrived legally and were admitted as asylum applicants—a status the new Admin...

During the campaign, President-Elect Donald Trump promised to bring a rapid conclusion to the Russo-Ukrainian conflict that began in 2022. But most Americans aren't aware of how or why the war began in the first place. Now the waters are getting further muddied by a decision of President Biden, a lame duck with just two months left in his term, to allow Ukraine to fire long-range American mis...

As President-Elect Donald Trump fills out his cabinet and key White House positions, including creating a new government-efficiency office for Elon Musk, the DMZ America podcast’s Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) are joined by their colleague, fellow political cartoonist Ben Sargent, formerly of the Austin American-Statesman and now at the Texas Observer. Republicans are...

President-Elect Donald Trump has made headlines with an extraordinarily esoteric group of appointments to his cabinet and other top jobs in his incoming second administration. Controversial alleged sex criminal Matt Gaetz has been named Attorney General, the nations chief law-enforcement officer. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., widely if somewhat unfairly described as a skeptic of vaccinations, has been n...

The Democratic Party finds itself in nearly as much disarray as the GOP did following Barry Goldwater’s 1964 defeat to LBJ. DMZ America co-hosts Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) turn to American political scientist Charles Lipson to dissect what went wrong for the Democrats in the election and to discuss their prospects for renewal. Can Democrats follow the Republican ex...

DMZ America co-hosts Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) turn to their colleague, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Mark Fiore , known for his hard-hitting animated shorts about U.S. politics, to discuss the fallout of the 2024 election results and to prepare for another four years of satirizing Donald Trump. In what ways can we expect Trump’s second term to differ from his...

DMZ America co-hosts Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) look back at the only other president in history who returned to the White House after having served and then been defeated: Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th Presidents the United States who served 1885-1889 and 1893-1897. Cleveland was a Democrat renowned for honesty and probity, but otherwise there are some remar...

DMZ America co-hosts Ted Rall (from the Left) and Manila Chan (from the Right) analyze Donald Trump’s shocking reelection victory and the Republican sweep of Congress. What should we expect from a second Trump term: A federal ban on abortion rights? Mass deportations? Tariffs on Chinese imports? An end to the war in Ukraine? Gaza?  The Democratic blame game has already begun. Corporate DNC Democra...

It may feel surreal, but tens of millions of Americans have already voted and the wild 2024 presidential campaign comes to an end in days. The DMZ America podcast, which began at the beginning of the Biden Administration, reviews how we've arrived at this unexpected contest between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist David Horsey, formerly of the Seattle...

Two major newspapers owned by billionaires with business interests tied to the government, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, prompted reader anger when they nullified their intention to endorse Kamala shortly before the election. More than 250,000 people canceled their Post subscriptions. The non-endorsement scandals are the latest manifestation of Americans' longstanding distrus...

With one week left before Election Day 2024, editorial cartoonists with opposing politics and a great friendship, Ted Rall (Left) and Scott Stantis (Right) ask: why is Kamala Harris dead-even in the polls, and seemingly losing ground, against a maniac like Donald Trump? How did we get here? What did Biden, Harris and the Democrats do wrong and what could they have done better? And, if she wins, wi...