The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer

Even as he imposes authoritarianism on the United States, Donald Trump has given a new lease on life to the center left in many other countries. Canada is holding an election at the end of April under the shadow of the American presidents threat to turn it into the 51st state. Until Trump’s inauguration, the Conservative Party of Canada had a commanding lead. But voters are changing their minds fa...

By helping the Republicans pass a spending bill that made no compromises with the Democrats and extend Donald Trump’s power over the government, Chuck Schumer has made himself widely unpopular in his own party. Anger at Schumer is so intense that he had to cancel parts of his tour to promote his new book Antisemitism in America: A Warning . David Klion, Nation columnist and frequent guest on the p...

This week Washington was abuzz with a security scandal over a group chat planning the bombing of Yemen accidentally included magazine editor Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic. Lost amid the finger pointing about operational security was the fact that the bombing of Yemen is illegal, immoral, and ineffective. To take up the actual scandal of the war, I spoke with Matt Duss, executive vice president...

The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas turned out to be short lived: Israel has now decisively broken the ceasefire and launched an even more intense onslaught into Gaza. Coupled with this renewed attack, Israel (sometimes in conjunction with the united States) is also carrying on military campaigns against Yemen, Lebanon and Syria, with rumors floating of a new attack on Iran. I discuss this rapi...

For nearly seven decades, Noam Chomsky has been the most important critic of American foreign policy. Daniel Besser, co-host of the  Nation  podcast, American Prestige , recently  reviewed for the magazine  a new book authored by Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson,  The Myth of American Idealism . In his review, Daniel both extolled Chomsky’s monumental achievement and raised questions about the weakn...

During his first term in office, Donald Trump often talked about his radical America First agenda but in practice his foreign policy was that of a conventional Republican hawk. Just five weeks into his second term, there has been a marked shift. As Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, recently noted in The Guardian , Trump 2.0 is marked by a turn tow...

Running for president last year, Donald Trump disowned Project 2025, the laundry list of radical demands gathered together by right-wing think tanks. Trump claimed Project 2025 had no influence on him and was only being raised by Democrats as a political attack. But now Trump is in power, he’s enacting an agenda of dismantling the welfare state that is following Project 2025 in close detail, as my...

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, David Klion and Matt Duss on a popular right-wing fabulist. Has former president Barack Obama secretly been running the American elite — including the media and wide parts of the government — for nearly 20 years? Has he been doing so on behalf of a subversive agenda to empower Iran and undermine American exceptionalism? That’s the argument made by David Sam...

Matthew Yglesias, a very  influential journalist  and  proprietor of the Slow Boring substack , has emerged as a divisive figure within the Democratic party. To admirers, he’s a compelling advocate of popularism, the view the Democratic party needing to moderate its message to win over undecided voters. To critics, he’s a  glib attention seeker  who has achieved prominence by coming up with clever...

For this week’s podcast, I’m posting a talk I  gave at Carleton University  earlier this month on how the crisis of democracy is related to the crisis of journalism. In the talk, I argue that we are living in an age where the salient political divide is not so much left/right as system/antisytem. Liberals have tried to fight antisystem politicians like Donald Trump by doubling down on factchecking...

The one good thing about defeat is you can learn some lessons. But what if the lessons you learn are the wrong ones. In the wake of Donald Trump winning the presidential election, pundits and Democratic strategists have already been drawing lessons. Unfortunately, as Branko Marcetic  documents  in a recent piece in Jacobin, many of these lessons are in fact myths, designed to exculpate those respo...

Donald Trump and JD Vance have a surprising closing message in the 2024 election: they are the antiwar candidate. About the rising conflict in the Middle East, Trump has said, “I wanna see it all stop, I wanna see the Middle East get back to peace.” On a podcast, Vance criticized the Biden “Even though they say they want to minimize Palestinian civilian casualties, they pursued the pathway that ma...

On this episode of The Time of Monsters , Jeet Heer is joined by David Klion to discuss 'The Apprentice' — a movie about Roy Cohn’s mentoring of a future president. --- Donald Trump is such a clearly defined figure — a walking, talking political cartoon — that it’s hard to imagine when he was someone different. Ali Abbasi’s new film, The Apprentice , gives us a Trump we’re not used to seei...

As the presidential election comes down to the wire, it’s hard to ignore evidence of Donald Trump is increasingly erratic behavior: his slurring of words, his freezing up during questions, his repeated cancellations of interviews, and the bizarre incident at a town hall in Pennsylvania, where Trump  unexpectedly spent more than half an hour bobbing and tottering on stage to a selection of his favo...

More than forty years in the making, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is the most divisive movie of our time. Some critics have hailed it as a major work while others dismiss it as a stinker . The film tells the story of Cesar Catilina (played by Adam Driver), a visionary architect who fights for his utopian urban plans against the entrenched forces of the status quo. Whether you like the movie...

The Israeli incursion into Lebanon has rapidly shifted from a bombing campaign into a ground invasion, one that the Pentagon now says might last for some time. This current escalation of the Middle Eastern conflict, which has also seen Iran and Israel trade blows, reflects the wider failure of Joe Biden’s bear-hug foreign policy. To discuss the conflict and also the prospect for change under a Kam...

Joe Biden’s foreign policy team was hoping for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas before his term was over, perhaps as early as the end of September. This always seemed wishful thinking but now is almost impossible as Israel not only continues to fight in Gaza but has expanded its conflict with Palestinian forces in neighboring Lebanon. The expanding conflict once again raises the question of B...

Kamala Harris and many other Democrats often warn that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. This is true enough, but it raises the question of how a ridiculous reality-TV star got in a position to be so dangerous. The  excellent new podcast  Master Plan  shows that democracy has been under siege in the United States for decades due to a concerted effort to let corporations dominate the commandin...

After the convention and on the cusp of a debate, the presidential election is a near dead heat. The polls show Kamala Harris has a slight edge, but it is well within the margin of error. This is a massive improvement over the performance of Joe Biden, who was on a path to a major defeat but it is by no means a guarantee of victory. To take up the state of the race, I talk to analyst Joshua A. Coh...

On June 28, I delivered a speech at the central branch of the Regina Public Library on the history of American support for Israel. The speech almost didn’t happen. The library briefly cancelled it because they claimed the group promoting it was encouraging discrimination against Jews. Fortunately, a city councillor intervened to sponsor the talk. For this podcast, I give the gist of my talk.  The...

Joe Biden’s performance on the first presidential debate, held on Thursday in Atlanta, has been widely criticized. Much of the criticism has focused on Biden’s style: his horse voice, frequent halting digressions and verbal flubs. But the substance of Biden’s comments, as Moira Donegan pointed out in her Guardian column, was equally troubling. In this podcast, Moira and I dissect Biden’s weak and...

Joe Biden has often been described as among the most pro-Israel politicians in America, a characterization which has a large element of truth but misses some important nuances. As David Klion argues in a deeply researched essay for The Nation , Biden’s support for Israel has long been accompanied by rhetorical gestures indicating opposition to aspects of Israel’s policies, particularly the buildin...

Donald Trump does not like sharks. During his memorable encounter with Stormy Daniels, he fixated on a documentary about the predator that was playing on the hotel television and  muttered , “I hope all the sharks die.” The former president returned to this topic at a recent campaign rally where he went on bizarre and lengthy digression asking what would be worse, being electrocuted or being eaten...

The summer season has started with a fizzle for Hollywood, as expected hits like  The Fall Guy , and  Furioso  have far underperformed their expectations. This isn’t a matter of a few films. Over the last few years, Hollywood is discovering that audiences are no longer reliably willing to buy tickets for the action adventure franchises that are the mainstay of the film industry. In particular, the...

Marty Peretz has led a large life, one he recounts with aplomb in his autobiography The Controversialist. As long time publisher and editor-in-chief of The New Republic , from 1974 to 2011, he transformed the venerable liberal magazine into an organ of neoliberalism, with a politics that emphasized deregulation of the economy, scaling back the welfare state, militant Zionism, and an aggressive for...