The Nation Podcasts

Nobody should be satisfied with Attorney General William Barr’s account of the Mueller report, says John Nichols.  We had assumed that the independent counsel’s investigation into obstruction of justice would conclude one way or the other. Instead we have Barr making exactly the kind of political decision by a Trump appointee that the independent counsel’s office was created to prevent.  There’s n...

50 people in six states were accused by the Justice Department last week of taking part in a major college admission scandal. They include Hollywood stars and business leaders, who paid bribes to elite college coaches.  But that’s not the way Jared Kushner got in to Harvard—his father paid the university directly.  Amy Wilentz comments on the legal, and the illegal, ways wealthy people get their u...

The Democrats’ picking Milwaukee for their convention in 2020 indicates how that Wisconsin is a key battleground the party must win in order to recapture the White House.  John Nichols talks about what it going to take for the Democrats to carry Wisconsin—and Michigan and Pennsylvania—and about the far-reaching tasks that face the party after four years of Trump.  Also: southern Democrats were an...

To replace coal and oil, do we need nuclear power?  Is switching from coal powered electric plants to natural gas a step in the right direction?  And what lessons can we draw from the recent victories—and setbacks--for the climate movement in California?  Bill McKibben comments--and talks how to get to a Green New Deal.  Bill’s new book, “Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?”, will...

Trump’s presidency is not the end of Democracy, as some of our friends have suggested.  Instead we are seeing the end of a political cycle, the one that began in 1980 with Reagan.  And now, it’s time for something new—and that could be a Green New Deal.  New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg comments. Also: For years Elizabeth Warren has been talking about how the political system is rigged b...

Naomi Klein says the Green New Deal needs to follow the example of the New Deal of the 1930s, when nothing would have happened without “massive pressure from social movements” that “changed the calculus of what was possible.”  Naomi is a contributing editor at The Nation and author of several number one bestsellers, including “This Changes Everything.” Plus Dahlia Lithwick talks about the national...

Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, free college tuition, a $15 minimum wage – and how about adding Child care for all to the Progressive agenda?  That’s Katha Pollitt’s proposal—she argues it will help huge numbers of people. Also: Bernie’s foreign policy: in 2016 he ran on domestic issues almost exclusively. This time around, if he runs—and it looks like he will--he’s going to say more about for...

John Nichols says Trump’s State of the Union speech Tuesday night was "cynical and crude." Also: Temporary Protected Status – “TPS” - has allowed immigrants and refugees from half a dozen countries with terrible problems to stay in the US for decades – but now Trump is trying to get rid of all of them.  Sasha Abramsky reports on the human toll of this cruel policy. Plus: Elizabeth Kolbert...

The battle between Democrats and Trump over a border wall was a disagreement about symbolism, not policy, Atossa Araxia Abrahamian argues; the borders of the future won’t be as easy to spot as the wall that Trump is proposing. And the new borders going up around us—digital ones—are already taking away our freedom.  Also: how the progressives in the House will fight Trump: Joan Walsh reports on the...

What will 2019 be like for Trump? Will it be like Nixon in 1974—the Watergate year, which ended with his resignation? Or more like Clinton in 1998—the Monica year, which culminated with an impeachment trial in the Senate in 1999? He won that vote easily and came out more popular than before. John Nichols looks at the investigations coming up in the House, leading us to conclude that 2019 will be t...

A political movement combining a left-wing economic program with anti-immigrant initiatives: it’s developing right now in Germany and France – could it happen here? David Adler explains: he’s the Policy Coordinator for the European Spring — Europe’s first transnational party, led by Yanis Varoufakis. He writing has appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, and Jacobin—and now...

Now that the Democrats are in charge in the House of Representatives, Harold Meyerson says, we can learn a lot about progressive political opportunities by studying “the Republican dogs that didn’t bark in the night” – the political issues Republicans didn’t attack in the recent elections--because they have widespread public support.  Harold is executive editor of The American Prospect and a regul...

Our most popular interviews of the year, starting with Seymour Hersh, one of our heroes; he says “don’t underestimate Trump.”  He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for his expose of the My Lai massacre—he was a 33-year-old freelancer at the time. Since then, he’s won pretty much every other journalism award. He’s worked as a staff writer for The New York Times and The New Yorker. He’s also written a do...

For our year-in-review show, we open with a Russiagate update with David Klion – he says it’s basically a corruption scandal whose basic facts have been obvious for a long time—and one that should bring down Trump’s presidency. In a lot of ways, Trump himself was the biggest story in 2018--we ask Amy Wilentz the key question: “is Trump crazy?” She discusses the mental and emotional status of the p...

John Nichols presents the highlights of The Nation’s annual Progressive Honor Roll—our heroes in Congress, in state politics, and in leading protests at the border. Also: is Obamacare unconstitutional? A federal judge ruled last week that all of Obamacare violates the constitution if he’s upheld by the Supreme Court, 20 million people will lose their insurance coverage. The case has the potent nam...

Trump’s nominee for Attorney General, William Barr, is more qualified to do the job than Matt Whitaker--but so are thousands of others. His record, however, show’s he as bad as Jeff Sessions—if not worse.  David Cole, National Legal Director of the ACLU and The Nation’s legal affairs correspondent, explains. Also: a report on The Nation’s investigation of Massive Accounting Fraud at the Pentagon –...

George H. W. Bush paved the way for today’s Republican party with his racist Willy Horton campaign, nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, and pardoned the Iran-Contra conspirator whose trial would have exposed his own abuse of power. Harold Meyerson explains -- he’s executive editor of the American Prospect. Also: Katha Pollitt finds lessons from the midterms about white women who suppor...

Michelle Obama declares in her new memoir, "I am not a political person, so I'm not going to attempt to offer an analysis" of Trump’s victory.  That’s her stance in the rest of the book as well.  It seems strange for the person the New York Times called "The most outspoken first lady in modern history."  What’s going on here?  Amy Wilentz comments. Plus: The Democrats won the m...

Orange County, California, was the political starting point for Nixon, for the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign, and for Reagan—as Republican as any place in America. But starting in January, not a single Republican will represent Orange County in the House. It’s solid blue. Gustavo Arellano will explain how it happened – he’s a weekly columnist for the LA Times, and wrote the legendary colum...

Frank Rich finds lessons for Democrats in the midterms: seeking “the political center,” as recommended by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff, running on “clean-government themes and promises of incremental improvement to the health care system rather than transformational social change,” is “ridiculous.” Frank writes about politics for New York Magazine and is executive producer of VEEP on...

Tuesday night was a good night for progressive Democrats, John Nichols argues—and Democratic control of the House will bring an epic change to Washington politics—starting with a return to Constitutional principles and an insistence that the president is subject to the rule of law. Also: women won unprecedented victories in the midterms.  Joan Walsh analyzes the feminist insurgency that will bring...

Women voters—and candidates—are mobilized as never before for next week’s midterms: Joan Walsh and Cecile Richards report from across the country at a Nation event introduced by publisher and editor Katrina vanden Heuvel.  Joan is the magazine’s National Affairs Correspondent and Cecile recently stepped down as head of Planned Parenthood after leading the organization since 2006\. Also: the Democr...

62 per cent of white men voted for Trump, 31 per cent for Clinton.  Kai Wright has our analysis--he’s host of WNYC’s podcast The United States of Anxiety, and he’s also a columnist for The Nation.  It’s easy to get confused by the crosscurrents of misogyny and racism and xenophobia, he argues; they are not  discrete issues, but rather “the interlocking tools of white men’s minority rule.” Also: Tr...

What lessons have the Democrats learned from the disaster of 2016? Jeff Cohen talks about the progressives’ fight to win the party away from dependence on corporate contributions—and instead to mobilize the grassroots. Jeff is one of the co-authors of “Democratic Autopsy—One Year Later” at TheNation.com. Also: Arizona is a red state, ground zero for Trump’s anti-immigrant politics, but it’s changi...

Rebecca Traister sees in the Kavanaugh hearings a typical case where women’s anger was marginalized or made to sound hysterical or infantile or threatening—but men’s anger was taken to be valid and righteous. But that is changing, she argues: women’s anger increasingly is “in the beating heart of many political and social movements.” Her new book is Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women&#...