The DSR Network

In this special Agenda 2021 episode, we bring together three of America's top expert commentators on the COVID crisis to discuss where we are in the crisis, what may impact it between now and the election and then what the first 100 days health policy priorities for a Joe Biden Administration ought to be. Pulitzer Prize Winner Laurie Garrett, former Baltimore Health Commissioner and practicing ER...

For four decades America has been led away from the values of opportunity and creative ingenuity that led it to become the greatest power in the world. Inequality has grown, society has grown more divided, and power has grown more concentrated in the hands of the few. How we got here is revealed in Kurt Andersen's brilliant, insight-rich new book "Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent H...

America has had disputed election results in the past. 2016 comes to mind. So does 2000. So does 1876. But, in all these cases and with all the instances of trying to fiddle with democracy that have marked our history, there has never been a case where the President of the United States and his entire executive branch seemed so committed to rigging the election in their favor or, short of that, to...

In Russia, they refer to Trump as being "theirs." In France, the president muses about how Europe should prepare for an America that is no longer an ally. In China, they know they are gaining with every setback the U.S. faces. But what if Trump is re-elected? What will it mean for the rule of law in America? Will Bill Barr be a kind of Prime Minister of a Trump Junta? Will it be the end for NATO a...

In a remarkable 50 year career in government that has seen him as Secretary of Defense, Director of the CIA, White House Chief of Staff, Director of the Office of Management and Budget and in Congressional leadership, Leon Panetta has seen it all. But, he tells us in an exclusive Agenda 2021 interview, he has never seen anything like the situation we're in now. We discuss Trump's COVID leadership...

Thanks to his trusty personal defense attorney Bill Barr and his defender in the Senate Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump has gotten away with betraying his country, enriching himself at the expense of the public, sidestepping national security rules, quashing his opponents and rewarding enemies of the US around the world. But, for now, we have to view that as water under the bridge. An election is co...

Commentator and political pro Zerlina Maxwell's book "The End of White Politics" could not be better timed. It comes in the summer of BLM and COVID when America's racial inequities and their costs could not be clearer. But it also comes as America begins a 25 year transition to becoming a society in which whites are in the minority for the first time in our history. The GOP is seeking to play on t...

No one has provided the insight into the pathologies that define Donald Trump and his presidency like Trump's niece, Mary L. Trump. Her book, "Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man" is a brilliantly written, harrowing tale of familial dysfunction and how it produced the most corrupt president in U.S. history. Join David Sanger of the New York Times and Ros...

Viruses occur in nature. So do epidemics. But where most of the world's leading economies managed the COVID crisis well enough to control it? America under Trump made error after error. What went wrong? Who's to blame other than Trump? Where will this all lead? We discuss with experts Dr. Kavita Patel, former top Obama health advisor, Jeremy Konyndyk, also a former advisor on epidemics to the Obam...

Any Democratic president would immediately work to reverse the damage that the Trump Administration has done to climate and environmental policies in the U.S. But there are signs that a Biden Administration may represent a major change on these policies even when contrasted with its Democratic predecessors. The climate crisis has worsened, a rising generation sees climate as a top priority, Biden...

Some national governments are clusterfucks. Others are omnishambles. But a rare few are both. Is Donald Trump's America the capital of omnishambolic clusterfuckery? Boris Johnson's UK? Jair Bolsonaro's Brazil? Do really bad leaders like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi have a shot at topping this league table? And from what part of the world will come the big international story that s...

The Trump Administration and its allies in key statehouses are suppressing vital data about the spread of COVID. Without that data, tens of thousands of more Americans will die. Crimes are being committed. Who will be held responsible? And who, if anyone has a plan to get us out of this rapidly worsening situation? We discuss with Pultizer Prize-winning author Laurie Garrett and former Obama Admin...

Rep. Anthony Brown, (D-Maryland), Vice Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, with a distinguished military career behind him, joins our regulars to discuss how the military is responding to major challenges before it, from its need to address major diversity problems in its ranks to the current movement to rename military bases currently bearing the names of the Confederate leaders to th...

The Supreme Court rulings on Trump's taxes put a stake through the heart of the absurd idea that U.S. presidents had absolute immunity and underscored the right of states to prosecute a sitting president. While they left some avenues for further delay for Trump and his battery of lawyers, it is now clear that sooner or later prosecutors will have the chance to review the president's financial reco...

This episode of our Agenda 2021 series is a one-on-one conversation with General James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence and prior to that Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. We discuss President Trump's pattern of placing Russian interests ahead of our own, his attacks on the foundations of our national security, why a second Trump term will be "like the first one on ster...

The most charitable interpretation of the events surrounding the Russian bounty scandal is that we have suffered a catastrophic breakdown in our policy processes. But the scandal likely reveals other, even larger, internal crises--a government wide set of leadership failures from COVID to the economy to social unrest to this national security scandal and, of course, the President's pattern of putt...

The Russian-Afghan bounty on allied troops scandal is rocking the White House. But it is actually many scandals in one. There is the scandal that Russia sought to pay to have US and allied forces killed, the scandal associated with the president's assertion he never heard about it, the scandal that exist if he did hear about it and didn't do anything about it, the compounding of that last scandal...

Have we ever seen an Attorney General so contemptuous of the law? A Department of Justice so dedicated to promulgating injustice? A judiciary so full of political hacks and incompetents? The U.S. justice system is broken and few weeks have illustrated that quite so well as the one just passed--from the effort to oust the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York to a court ruling support...

We face an extraordinary challenge--a massive economic crisis and a great public health crisis, each feeding into one another. Our government's response thus far has exacerbated both. To recover is going to require big ideas and bold execution from the next president of the United States. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz offers some of those ideas and thoughts on how a Biden Administr...

To commemorate the beginning of summer, we take a look at the issues likely to dominate the headlines between now and Labor Day, from COVID to unrest in the streets, the economic crisis to potential cyberattacks, from foreign policy threats to the navel gazing of the narcissist-in-chief. We talk to Natasha Bertrand, national security correspondent for Politico, Chris Lu, former Cabinet Secretary a...

Everywhere you go, you get the sense that people are "over" COVID...except the hospitals that are filling up across the country. In fact, the anti-science populism of some political leaders and the short-attention span of some in the media are combining to make the next six months of the COVID crisis look potentially more deadly and more challenging than the last six months. How bad can it get? Wh...

John Bolton's book has Washington in a tizzy. Whether the rest of the country cares that much, whether anyone will see it as revelatory, whether it has any impact on the election and whether Bolton will ever see a penny of profit from it are all open questions. We discuss the book's aftershocks with David Sanger of the New York Times, Greg Sargent of the Washington Post and Ryan Goodman of "Just S...

In honor of three years of doing "Deep State Radio", the original gang of Rosa Brooks of Georgetown Law Center, Kori Schake of AEI and David Sanger of the New York Times join host David Rothkopf for a discussion of the biggest stories that have taken place during the past three years that have not involved the president of the US. That's right--an entirely He Who Shall Not Be Named-free episode! I...

Donald Trump says he's never even heard of Brett McGurk, but that's what he says whenever he feels jilted. On today's episode of Deep State Radio, Rosa Brooks stands in for David Rothkopf as host, and DSR regulars Ryan Goodman and David Sanger are joined by Brett McGurk, who hurt Trump's feelings very badly when he resigned as Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL in...

We are in a deep economic crisis today, the worst unemployment crisis since the Great Depression. While some recovery from the worst of the crisis is possible prior to the election, whomever takes office in 2021 will have major challenges before him. In this, the latest in our Agenda 2021 series of podcasts, we discuss how to tackle those challenges with the man who served as Chairman of Barack Ob...