The Political Scene | The New Yorker

The Washington Roundtable is joined by Mark Blyth, a professor of international economics and public affairs at Brown University, to discuss how the bond market forced Donald Trump to retreat on some tariffs, and the risks of the President’s escalating trade war with China. “Ultimately, they can take the pain more than you can,” Blyth says, of the Chinese government. “They have locked down their cities for a year or more. They can deliver food through the window through drones. They don’t care if you cut them off from certain things. So getting into that fight is very, very destructive.” This week’s reading: Trump’s Do-Over PresidencyThe Conservative Legal Advocates Working to Kill Trump’s TariffsAt the Smithsonian, Donald Trump Takes Aim at HistoryThe Trump Show Comes to the Kennedy CenterThe Other Side of Signalgate To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The former senator Sherrod Brown, of Ohio, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the tumult that Trump’s tariffs have inflicted on the global economy, and why progressives should not merely oppose the President’s trade policy but offer a clear alternative. “I've heard economists talk about these tariffs upending the global order on trade. Well, to a lot of workers, anything’s better than the global order on trade. It’s our policy problem as a country, and it’s our political problem for Democrats,” Brown says. They also discuss his latest project, The Dignity of Work Institute, a think tank dedicated to advocacy for the working class. This week’s reading: I Am Seeing My Community of Researchers DecimatedThe Other Side of SignalgateThe Trump Show Comes to the Kennedy CenterAt the Smithsonian, Donald Trump Takes Aim at History To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The microchip maker Nvidia is a Silicon Valley colossus. After years as a runner-up to Intel and Qualcomm, Nvidia has all but cornered the market on the parallel processors essential for artificial-intelligence programs like ChatGPT. “Nvidia was there at the beginning of A.I.,” the tech journalist Stephen Witt tells David Remnick. “They really kind of made these systems work for the first time. We think of A.I. as a software revolution, something called neural nets, but A.I. is also a hardware revolution.” In The New Yorker, Stephen Witt profiled Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s brilliant and idiosyncratic co-founder and C.E.O. His new book is “The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip.” Until recently, Nvidia was the most valuable company in the world, but its stock price has been volatile, posting the largest single-day loss in history in January. But the company’s story is only partially a business story; it’s also one about global superpowers, and who will decide the future. If China takes military action against Taiwan, as it has indicated it might, the move could wrest control of the manufacturing of Nvidia microchips from a Taiwanese firm, which is now investing in a massive production facility in the U.S. “Maybe what’s happening,” Witt speculates, is that “this kind of labor advantage that Asia had over the United States for a long time, maybe in the age of robots that labor advantage is going to go away. And then it doesn’t matter where we put the factory. The only thing that matters is, you know, is there enough power to supply it?” Plus, the staff writer Joshua Rothman has long been fascinated with A.I.—he even interviewed its “godfather,” Geoffrey Hinton, for The New Yorker Radio Hour. But Rothman has become increasingly concerned about a lack of public and political debate over A.I.—and about how thoroughly it may transform our lives. “Often, if you talk to people who are really close to the technology, the timelines they quote for really reaching transformative levels of intelligence are, like, shockingly soon,” he tells Remnick. “If we’re worried about the incompetence of government, on whatever side of that you situate yourself, we should worry about automated government. For example, an A.I. decides the length of a sentence in a criminal conviction, or an A.I. decides whether you qualify for Medicaid. Basically, we’ll have less of a say in how things go and computers will have more of a say.” Rothman’s essay “Are We Taking A.I. Seriously Enough?” appears in his weekly column, Open Questions. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Washington Roundtable discusses President Donald Trump’s invocation of emergency powers to enact sweeping tariffs and the ensuing global economic meltdown, in addition to how authoritarians have historically used economic control and coercion to strengthen their grip on power. The Roundtable also examines other spheres where Trump’s maximalist approach might make a mark, including immigration enforcement, the politicization of the military, and the potential seizure of Greenland. This week’s reading: Donald Trump’s Ego Melts the Global EconomyPete Hegseth’s Secret HistoryThe Truth About Donald Trump’s ‘Liberation DayHas Trump’s Legal Strategy Backfired?Fighting Elon Musk, One Tesla Dealership at a TimeHow Trump Is Helping Tycoons Exploit the Pandemic To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Sarah Larson joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the Tesla Takedown movement, protesting Elon Musk and Donald Trump, along with the political efficacy of targeting an electric-car company and why some protesters are borrowing tactics from the AIDS activist group ACT UP. This week’s reading: Fighting Elon Musk, One Tesla Dealership at a TimeThe Fired Student-Debt RelieversWhat Marine Le Pen’s Conviction Means for French DemocracyHow Donald Trump Throttled Big LawWhy Benjamin Netanyahu Is Going Back to War To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

With congressional Republicans unwilling to put any checks on an Administration breaking norms and issuing illegal orders, the focus has shifted to the Democratic opposition—or the lack thereof. Democrats like Chris Murphy, the junior senator from Connecticut, have vehemently disagreed with party leaders’ reversion to business as usual. Murphy opposed Senator Chuck Schumer’s negotiation to pass the Republican budget and keep the government running; he advocated for the Democrats to skip the President’s joint address to Congress en masse. Murphy believes that the Democrats have a winning formula if they stick to a populist, anti-big-money agenda. But, he concedes, some of his colleagues are playing normal politics, “where we try to become more popular than Republicans. People like me believe that it won’t matter if we’re more popular than them, because the rules won’t allow us to run a fair election.” By attacking democratic institutions, law firms, and other allies, he thinks, Republicans can insure that their party wins indefinitely, as in failed democracies around the world. “If you think that democracy is the No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 story,” Murphy tells David Remnick, “then you have to act like it. You need to show that you’re willing to take a political risk.” Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Washington Roundtable is off today, and will be back next week. In the meantime, enjoy a conversation about the California governor’s new podcast venture, “This Is Gavin Newsom,” from Vanity Fair’s “Inside the Hive” podcast. Radhika Jones, the host and editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, talks with the magazine’s executive editor, Claire Howorth, and the “Hive” editor Michael Calderone about why Newsom is taking time off from running the world’s fifth-largest economy to talk to people such as Steve Bannon. Is he effectively reaching right-wingers and countering the MAGA media machine? And will the show help or hinder his chances of leading the Democratic ticket one day? To discover more from “Inside the Hive” and other Vanity Fair podcasts, visit vanityfair.com/podcasts. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The writer David W. Brown, who has long covered NASA and the space industry, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss Elon Musk’s takeover of NASA, the agency’s increasingly complicated relationship with SpaceX, and whether Donald Trump’s interest in sending people to Mars will spare the space program from DOGE’s downsizing. This week’s reading: Inside Trump and Musk’s Takeover of NASA“Don’t Believe Trump’s Promises About Protecting the Social Safety NetThe E.P.A. vs. the EnvironmentWe’re Still Not Done with JesusIs March Madness All Luck? To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Kaitlan Collins was only a couple years out of college when she became a White House correspondent for Tucker Carlson’s the Daily Caller. Collins stayed in the White House when she went over to CNN during Donald Trump’s first term, and she returned for his second. Trump has made his disdain for CNN clear—and he’s not a big fan of Collins, either. At one point during Trump’s first term, she was barred from a press conference; he called her a “nasty person” during a Presidential campaign interview. There’s never been a White House so overtly hostile to the press than the second Trump Administration, penalizing news organizations for not conforming to the President’s wishes. But, as Collins tells the staff writer Clare Malone, she believes that Trump is “someone who seeks the validation of the press as much as he criticizes them publicly. And so, you know, it doesn’t really bother me when he gets upset at my question.” Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Washington Roundtable speaks with with Michael Waldman, the president and C.E.O. of the Brennan Center for Justice, at N.Y.U. Law, to discuss the escalating attacks on the judiciary by President Trump and his allies. If the Administration ignores a legitimate order from a federal judge, as it has come close to doing, what can the courts do in response? This week’s reading: Donald Trump, Producer-in-ChiefWhy ‘Constitutional Crisis’ Fails to Capture Trump’s Attack on the Rule of LawThe Trump Administration Nears Open Defiance of the Courts To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The veteran courts reporter Ruth Marcus joins the host Tyler Foggatt to discuss the Trump Administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, why flights of Venezuelan deportees were sent to El Salvador, and how the defiance of federal court orders has set off a constitutional crisis. This week’s reading: The Trump Administration Nears Open Defiance of the CourtsThe Case of Mahmoud KhalilThe Long Nap of the Lazy BureaucratHundreds of Thousands Will DieThe Felling of the U.S. Forest Service To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Two weeks after the Inauguration of Donald Trump, Elon Musk tweeted, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into a wood chipper.” Musk was referring to the Agency for International Development, an agency which supports global health and economic development, and which has saved millions of lives around the world. “A viper’s nest of radical-left lunatics,” Musk called it. U.S.A.I.D.’s funding is authorized by Congress, and its work is a crucial element of American soft power. DOGE has decimated the agency with cuts so sudden and precipitous that federal workers stationed in conflict zones were stranded without safe passage home, as their own government publicly maligned them for alleged fraud and corruption. Courts have blocked aspects of the federal purge of U.S.A.I.D., but it’s not clear if workers can be rehired and contracts restarted, or whether the damage is done. In January, 2022, Atul Gawande, a surgeon and leading public health expert who has written for The New Yorker since 1998, was sworn in as assistant administrator for global health at U.S.A.I.D. He resigned as the new administration came to power, and is watching in shock as Trump and Musk make U.S.A.I.D. a guinea pig for the government-wide purge now under way. U.S.A.I.D. was, he admits, a soft target for MAGA—helping people in faraway countries. Gawande calls U.S.A.I.D. “America at its best.” But with Trump and Musk, “there’s a different world view at play here,” he says. “Power is what matters, not impact.” Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Washington Roundtable discusses the ideological underpinnings of Elon Musk’s DOGE with the former Democratic operative and San Francisco-based journalist Gil Duran. Duran writes about the so-called cognitive élite, the right-wing Silicon Valley technologists who want to use A.I. and cryptocurrency to unmake the federal government, on his newsletter The Nerd Reich. This week’s reading: The Most Powerful Crypto Bro in Washington Has Very Weird BeliefsThe New RepublicUncertainty Is Trump’s Brand. But What if He Already Told Us Exactly What He’s Going to Do?The Felling of the U.S. Forest ServiceTrump Is Still Trying to Undermine ElectionsWho Gets to Determine Greenland’s Future? To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The staff writer John Cassidy joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the recent meltdown of the U.S. stock market, Donald Trump’s long-standing support for tariffs, and what the potential death of an American-dominated free-trade system could mean for the global economy. This week’s reading: Will Trumpian Uncertainty Knock the Economy Into a Recession?Who Gets to Determine Greenland’s Future?What’s Next for Ukraine?Canada, the Northern Outpost of SanityCan Americans Still Be Convinced That Principle Is Worth Fighting For?Donald Trump's A.I. Propaganda To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Recently, the former New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez was sentenced to eleven years in prison for accepting bribes in cash and gold worth more than half a million dollars. He is the first person sentenced to prison for crimes committed in the Senate in more than forty years. Menendez did favors for the government of Egypt while he was the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, and intervened in criminal cases against the businessmen who were bribing him. In New York, he broke down in tears before a federal judge, pleading for leniency. Upon emerging from the courtroom, he made a thinly veiled plea to the man he had once voted to impeach. “President Trump is right,” Menendez declared to news cameras. “This process is political, and it’s corrupted to the core. I hope President Trump cleans up the cesspool and restores the integrity to the system.” WNYC’s New Jersey reporter Nancy Solomon explores how the son of working-class immigrants from Cuba scaled the heights of American politics, and then fell dramatically. But will he serve the time? Solomon speaks with the constitutional-law professor Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, who says, “It’s hard to know who Trump will pardon next. One of the more recent pardons was for the former governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich. He was a Democrat. . . . [Trump] seems much more interested in undermining anti-corruption laws left, right, and center.” Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Washington Roundtable speaks with Jeffrey Rosen, the president and C.E.O. of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit, about how America’s founders tried to tyrant-proof their constitutional system, how Donald Trump’s whim-based decision-making resembles that of the dictator Julius Caesar, and what we can learn from the fall of the Roman Republic. Plus, how the Supreme Court is responding to the Trump Administration’s broad claims of executive power. Rosen, a professor at George Washington University Law School, hosts the “We the People” podcast and is the author of “The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.” This week’s reading: Trump’s Golden Age of BunkTrump’s Disgrace,What Will Democratic Resistance Look Like?What Putin Wants Now To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The staff writer Eric Lach joins the guest host Andrew Marantz to discuss the alleged quid pro quo between Mayor Eric Adams and President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice. Plus, why the President keeps inserting himself into New York City politics and what to make of former Governor Andrew Cuomo’s bid for Gracie Mansion. This week’s reading: Donald Trump’s Golden Age of Bunk,Elon Musk Also Has a Problem with Wikipedia,What Will Democratic Resistance Look Like?Trump’s E.P.A. Seeks to Deny Science That Americans DiscoveredGrowing Up U.S.A.I.D.A Ukrainian Family’s Three Years of War To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Democrats in Washington have seemed almost paralyzed by the onslaught of far-right appointments and draconian executive orders coming from the Trump White House. But some state governors seem more willing to oppose the federal government than congressional Democrats are. In January, Governor Tim Walz, of Minnesota, tweeted, “President Trump just shut off funding for law enforcement, farmers, schools, veterans, and health care. . . . Minnesota needs answers. We’ll see Trump in court.” He’s only one of many Democratic governors challenging the federal government. Walz joins David Remnick to offer his analysis of why Democrats lost the 2024 election, why the Party has been losing support from men, and what Democrats need to do now that Donald Trump is back in the White House. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Washington Roundtable discusses the Trump Administration’s decision to bar the Associated Press from Presidential events, Jeff Bezos’s dramatic makeover of the Washington Post’s opinion section, and why freedom of the press matters. Plus, what journalists can do to meet this moment. This week’s reading: Why Aren’t We in the Streets?What Will Democratic Resistance Look Like?The Peril Donald Trump Poses to UkraineGrowing Up U.S.A.I.D.Trump’s E.P.A. Seeks to Deny Science That Americans Discovered To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The staff writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss why people around the world are having fewer and fewer children and how the issue of birth rates has become a rallying cry for the American right. Plus, the lack of political will on the left to contend with the issue; and the societal effects on South Korea, which has the lowest birth rates in the world. This week’s reading: The End of ChildrenThe Chaos of Trump’s Guantánamo PlanThe New Trump-Family MegaphoneMonth One of Donald Trump’s “Golden Age,”Team Canada’s Revenge, Served Ice-Cold Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices