The DSR Network

Today's episode features a conversation with comedian Kathy Griffin. I tried to teach her to bake lemon bars and she tried to convince me she was too famous to have to know how to bake. But what she does do, brilliantly, is tell stories and the conversation we had while waiting for her lemon bars to come out of the oven is worth listening to. (The lemon bars are worth making too.) Support this sho...

None of us have ever lived through a year like 2020. What are its lessons? What has it changed forever? And where will it lead in 2021? We bring together an extraordinary group to discuss these issues and the questions they are left with in a year-end special edition of Deep State Radio. Our guests include the author of "Evil Geniuses" Kurt Andersen, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Laurie Garret...

We have endured one of the most massive cyberattacks in history this year. While the US Secretary of State, Attorney General and the intelligence community attribute it to Russia, the president does not. When he has not been silent on it, he has been deflecting attention to the Chinese. All this means we can count on the Trump team doing very little in response to this attack. So the burden shifts...

Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office this weekend discussing whether to send in US troops to declare martial law and nullify a legitimate election. The idea was rebuffed. Perhaps it's the last we'll hear of it. But looking back at the past four years it is clear that we had a president with strongman aspirations and they were far more successful than many imagined possible in the US. How do we resp...

Joe Biden's cabinet will look more like America than any in our history. It will contain more women, more people of color, a wide range of ages, political perspectives and regional points of view. Does that matter? How? And what is still missing? We discuss and then we turn our attention to the latest developments in the COVID crisis, Trump's increasingly erratic behavior as his exit approaches an...

No president has ever entered the job with more foreign policy experience than Joe Biden, who has been playing a role at the highest levels of U.S. international affairs since 1972. Nonetheless, the world continues to rapidly change and the new president will be quickly presented with challenges none of his predecessors have faced. We know what some of those are--from COVID to the challenge of suc...

Donald Trump was the worst president in US history. About that, at this point, there can be no doubt. One measure of the disaster he has been is the damage he has done to US foreign policy. Fortunately for the United States, the next president is coming into office with more foreign policy experience than any president since George H.W. Bush...and arguably considerably more than even Bush. And his...

Despite his historic losing streak in the courts (not to mention his big election loss), Donald Trump continues to argue he was robbed. And many in his own party are supporting Trump's arguments and his baseless conspiracy theories. In fact the vast majority of Republicans now believe what is a complete fairy tale from a president who, whether he likes it or not, has just a few short weeks left in...

Donald Trump is very nearly gone. The damage he has done will take years to repair. Where do we start? Socially? Politically? Economically? At home? With the rest of the world? What should our priorities be? Are there potentially traps? We discuss with Mary Trump, author of “Too Much and Never Enough,” Max Boot of the Washington Post, Kori Schake of the American Enterprise Institute and Rosa Brook...

We are about to enter a period of national catastrophe unlike any we have ever seen, unlike the past year, unlike wars through which we have lived. Mass death during this time is preventable if you listen to scientists and use common sense. But half the country does not. They have embraced an 11th Century combination of superstition and ignorance and are condemning their relatives, their neighbors...

We went from the bi-polar world to the uni-polar world to WTF. The question now is "What comes after WTF?" Is it a restoration? An attempt to squeeze out another few years of the American Century? Decline? More confusion? Or is it an effort to remake the international order in collaboration with other leading nations? We discuss with Quincy Institute co-founder and author of "Tomorrow the World" S...

Wait, what? A president who actually has foreign policy experience? A national security team that is not comprised of traitors, crackpots, sycophants, and corrupt relatives? Joe Biden seems to be introducing us to some old ideas that seem fresh and vibrant because they contrast so starkly with the disaster of the Trump years. His national security team is professional, smart, proven, diverse, and...

We go where no one else dares: To imagine a Trumpless future, a normal American president doing normal American president-y things like making domestic and foreign policy, succeeding sometimes, faltering other times and doing his best for the American people. Yes, we bring together a great group of experts to have a discussion about what the Biden Administration is likely to look like, how it will...

Pulitzer Prize-winner Tom Ricks, one of America's foremost journalists and authors, has a new book called "First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country" and it could not be more timely. It challenges many assumptions about the ideas leading to America's foundings and sheds light on many of the problems we are grappling with today. Ros...

With COVID spiking we will pass over 450,000 dead of the pandemic within months. Hospitals and morgues are being stretched past capacity. The White House has given up doing anything about the crisis and is not helping the incoming administration prepare. Holiday plans for many Americans will no longer be able to include family gatherings or travel. The economic crisis lingers and the Trump Adminis...

Donald Trump's defeat is a watershed in modern U.S. history and a relief for so many of us that it may do permanent damage to the sales of Tums and headache medications. Which is a good thing. But, having said that, huge challenges remain for the US and the world. We discuss with Rosa Brooks of Georgetown Law Center, Ed Luce of the Financial Times, Kori Schake of the American Enterprise Institute...

As of the posting of this latest edition of Deep State Radio, no victor had been called in the presidential race. But it seems likely Joe Biden is the next president of the United States. Will we be able to appreciate and celebrate that or will challenges to the results, a rapidly deepening COVID crisis, election irregularities, and the possibility of divided government yuck our collective yum? We...

Someday soon Tuesday November 3 will end. It may not be for a few weeks. Our president seems to want to make sure it never ends...because when it does, likely, he will too. But someday it'll happen and we'll have to figure out what hit us and what's going to happen next. To tackle that big job, we have a special broadcast that will include an extraordinary array of commentators. During our first h...

With Election Day looming this year, Americans began to shutter their windows, put up plywood on the storefronts and they watched National Guard troops rumble into their cities. What should be a celebration of democracy and possibilities is has gained an air of dread we've never seen in most of our lifetimes. That suggests that regardless of the election's outcome, we face much deeper problems in...

We all remember Russia's interference in the last election and we know they are back this time, joined, it seems, by the Iranians. But foreign threats are not the only challenges to election security or the reliability of our results next week. We have the potential for domestic hacking, the possibility of voter suppression, the absence of verifiable audits in 47 out of 50 states, the unreliabilit...

A Democratic victory in the 2020 elections is not a sure thing. As we have discussed on other episodes, the elections are fraught with risks. Further, once an election takes place, there are many ways that the President or his allies can try to cling to power. Only after there is a smooth transition and new leadership however, can the US turn to the business of effectively confronting our looming...

On a special webinar edition of Deep State Radio, the Financial Times Edward Luce hosts a conversation with David Rothkopf, author of "Traitor: A History of American Betrayal from Benedict Arnold to Donald Trump" about the book, Trump's place in history, how to hold Trump and Co. accountable for any crimes they may have committed and how to restore America's standing in the world. Questions were t...

We know, we know. This is no time for complacency. This is no time to minimize the challenges we face. This is no time to assume anything about the election or its aftermath. We must work hard and be on guard against abuses. But...what if things turn out as the polls suggest they might? What if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and a Democratic Senate and Congress win? Might government, dare we say it,...

In this special episode we discuss "The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III," the landmark biography of one of the real titans of the Washington scene over the past half century, with its authors, New Yorker staff writer Susan Glasser and NY Times Chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker. The book is not only a compelling life story, it is also a lens via which to s...

Some of the most hard-hitting and shocking criticisms of Donald Trump have come from insiders in his administration. From Rex Tillerson’s calling his former boss a “fucking moron” to his former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats saying that having watched Trump up close the only conclusion he could draw was that the Russian’s had something on the president. Miles Taylor, former chief of s...