The Ezra Klein Show

Democrats’ case for the government shutdown was just starting to break through to voters. Why fold now?

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html 

This column read was produced by Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Jack McCordick. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with mixing by Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also incl...

Democrats won big on Tuesday. It looks like the MAGA coalition has started to crack.

Ezra is joined by his column editor, Aaron Retica, to discuss the big lessons for Democrats as they eye the midterms next year, and whether an anti-MAGA playbook is coming into focus.

This episode contains strong language.

NOTE: We're recording an "Ask Me Anything" episode soon. You can send your question to ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com with the subject line "AMA." We'll consider any questions submitted on or before the morning of Monday November 11 at 10am ET.

...

Democrats don’t just need to win more people; they also need to win more places. And that requires a different kind of thinking.

Mentioned:

"How Liberalism Wins" by Ezra Klein

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Claire Gordon, Marie Cascione and Kristin Lin. Fact...

Israeli forces still occupy half of Gaza. In the cease-fire deal, Israel agreed to fully withdraw its presence there once Hamas fully demilitarized. But Amit Segal thinks that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon. Instead, he believes Gaza will end up divided. So what does that really mean? What are the implications?

Segal is the chief political analyst for Channel 12 News in Israel and is known to be quite close to the Netanyahu government. He writes the newsletter It’s Noon in Israel and is the author of the book “A Call at 4 a.m.: Thirteen Prime Minist...

The “Democratic penalty” should scare the hell out of Democrats.

The Democratic Party brand has become toxic in certain parts of the country, especially with working- class voters. The Center for Working-Class Politics has actually measured this so-called “Democratic penalty,” and found it’s in the double digits in some Rust Belt states.

So what should Democrats do about it?

One theory says that Democrats were once economic populists and just need to be again. Another theory says that the working class feels left behind and looked down on by a Democratic Party that has m...

President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard from red states into blue cities isn’t just a partisan attack; it’s also a geographic one. In the 2024 election, Donald Trump won rural areas by 40 percentage points. And you could see what’s been happening in Washington, D.C., and Chicago as a rural political coalition militarily occupying urban centers. The rural-urban divide in America has become so big it’s dangerous — for our politics, and for democracy. And yet, just a few decades ago, this divide didn’t exist. Urban and rural areas voted pretty much in lockstep. And for Democr...

Every Israeli-Palestinian peace deal has failed. Could Trump’s be any different?

On Oct. 10, the Israeli cabinet approved a cease-fire deal brokered by the Trump administration, Turkey and Qatar. Since then, the living Israeli hostages have come home. Nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israel have been freed. Israeli forces have partially withdrawn from the Gaza Strip, and they’re allowing in more desperately needed aid. This is finally, hopefully, the end of this war.

But that was just the first part of the deal. The next phase is a lot more ambitious — and ambiguous. And while Presid...

Eliezer Yudkowsky is as afraid as you could possibly be. He makes his case.

Yudkowsky is a pioneer of A.I. safety research, who started warning about the existential risks of the technology decades ago, – influencing a lot of leading figures in the field. But over the last couple of years, talk of an A.I. apocalypse has become a little passé. Many of the people Yudkowsky influenced have gone on to work for A.I. companies, and those companies are racing ahead to build the superintelligent systems Yudkowsky thought humans should never create. But Yudkowsky is sti...

The government shutdown is the Democrats’ first big strategic bet of Trump’s term.

Not everyone in the party agreed that shutting down the government was the right move or that health care was the right message. So why did they ultimately pick this fight? What are the risks? And what could Democrats learn here that might help shape their strategy for the midterms and beyond?

Jon Favreau, a former Obama speechwriter and a current co-host of “Pod Save America,” joins me to discuss.

Mentioned:

"Off Message” by Brian Beutler

“What th...

There’s a serious high-stakes policy fight at the heart of this.

The Democrats didn’t pick a fight over authoritarianism or tariffs or masked immigration agents in the streets. They picked one over health care. And the issue here is very real. Huge health insurance subsidies passed under President Joe Biden are set to expire at the end of this year, threatening to make health care premiums skyrocket and kick millions off their insurance.

Neera Tanden was one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act and has worked in Democratic policymaking for decades. She...

Brian Eno’s music opens up worlds I love to step into during trying times. And this conversation with Eno did the same thing.

Eno is a trailblazing musician and producer who’s worked on seminal records by U2, David Bowie, the Talking Heads and Coldplay, among others. But Eno isn’t just a great collaborator with other artists; he’s also a great collaborator with machines. He’s been experimenting with music technology for decades. Long before we started worrying about ChatGPT replacing human creativity, Eno was tinkering with generative systems to pioneer ambient music – a genre that h...

The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates was harshly critical of my response to Charlie Kirk’s assassination. In an article in Vanity Fair, he suggested I was whitewashing Kirk’s legacy, comparing it to the whitewashing of the Southern cause after the Civil War.

So I wanted to have Coates on the show to talk out our disagreement, as well as some deeper questions that I think exist underneath it about the work of politics.

What should the left do about the fact that so many Americans share Kirk’s views? What kinds of disagreements should we try to...

This is McCarthyism 2.0. 

Since Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the Trump administration has been speed-running an attack on the “radical left.” And the tactics it has been using are darkly reminiscent of the Red Scare of the 1940s and ’50s. So what can that period teach us about the current moment and what the Trump administration might do next? How far could this go? 

Corey Robin is a political theorist at Brooklyn College. He’s an expert on McCarthyism and the author of the book “The Reactionary Mind,” one of the most insightful books you can read on the Trum...

The Utah governor is trying to model a different kind of leadership in a very dangerous political moment.

The Trump administration seems intent on using the assassination of Charlie Kirk to crack down on what it calls “the radical left.” But Spencer Cox doesn’t believe that suppression will make Americans safer.

For years now, Cox has been thinking seriously about our toxic political culture and what the path out of it could be. So I wanted to have him on the show to talk about how he responded in the hours and days after the sh...

This is an episode in two parts. First, my thoughts on Charlie Kirk’s murder, now that I’ve had a few days to process it, and to see the unfolding reactions and responses on both sides. Then a conversation with Ben Shapiro — one that was recorded shortly before Kirk’s assassination, but that has a different significance after it.

This episode contains strong language.

Mentioned:

“Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way” by Ezra Klein

Dominion by Tom Holland

“What J.D. Vance Believes” by Ross Douthat

Book Recomm...

In a few weeks the government’s funding will run out. If Democrats vote for a new spending bill, they will be funding Trump’s autocratic takeover. What should they do?

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html

This column read was produced by our executive producer, Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Jack McCordick. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, wi...

Trump was losing in the courts. He’s not anymore.

In the early months of the administration, the courts were proving a powerful check on President Trump, blocking many of his boldest actions. But those were the lower courts. In the past few months, the Supreme Court has weighed in, and it has handed Trump win after win after win.

So what do these decisions enable the president to do? And why is the Supreme Court giving Trump what he wants?

To pull all this apart, I’m joined by Kate Shaw. She is a...

ICE now has the biggest budget of any law enforcement agency in America.

“ICE and Customs and Border Protection have long been the most rogue, kind of renegade and certainly pro-Trump police agencies in the federal government,” explained Radley Balko, a journalist who’s covered policing for decades. “What I think we are seeing right now is Trump is attempting to build his own paramilitary force. They want people whose first, ultimate loyalty in this job is going to be to the president.”

Balko is the author of “Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s...

“Make America Healthy Again” is a great idea — somebody should try it.

A lot of the concerns animating the MAHA movement — chronic disease, the unhealthiness of the American diet, how profits warp our health care system — are serious issues. But Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hasn’t taken major actions to address them. Instead he’s gutted funding for scientific research, including nearly $500 million dedicated to mRNA vaccine development, throwing a huge amount of possibly lifesaving research in limbo.

How did we get here? What are the politics that allowed Donald Trump to preside over Operation Warp Speed, th...

I do my best to respond to your critiques of some of our recent episodes.

We got an overwhelming response to my interviews with the Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, the national conservativism theorist Yoram Hazony and the human rights lawyer Philippe Sands on whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. So in this subscriber-only Ask Me Anything I answer some of the biggest critiques we received, as well as other listener questions on the Democratic Party’s political strategy, how the ideas in “Abundance” are rippling out in the world and the strange experience I had doing a Munk...

What is going on with the economy right now?

There are a lot of mixed signals. President Trump slashed taxes, but he’s also bringing in a lot of money through tariffs. Inflation is creeping up, but the stock market keeps rising. Eye-wateringly large investments are flowing to A.I., which could lead to an explosion of productivity but also mass job loss. And then Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after a disappointing jobs report, raising concerns that the government’s data on the economy might get shakier.

Natasha Sarin is t...

In December 2023, when South Africa accused Israel of genocide before the International Court of Justice, I thought it was wrong to do so. Israel had been attacked. Its defense was legitimate. The blood was on Hamas’s hands.

But over the last year, I have watched a slew of organizations and scholars arrive at the view that whatever Israel’s war on Gaza began as, its mass assault on Palestinian civilians fits the definition of genocidal violence. This is a view now held by Amnesty International, B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and the president of the International Associ...

Mahmoud Khalil was a leader in Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests. In March, he was arrested by ICE agents and held for more than 100 days in a Louisiana detention facility. The Trump administration claims Khalil is deportable — even though he has a green card, married to a U.S. citizen — because he poses a threat to U.S. foreign policy goals.

Khalil’s alleged offense here is speech.

Khalil is out now on bail, and he’s still speaking. I wanted to hear what he had to say.

Mentioned:

A Letter From Pales...

Vice President JD Vance gave a speech recently that deserved more attention than it got. Accepting an award at a right-wing think tank, he argued that there’s a fundamental brokenness in how we define who is an American. He explained that this is the root of many of our country’s problems: a national identity that has become too broad.

That was also a core idea of the 2018 book “The Virtue of Nationalism,” which caused a sensation on the right. Its author, the Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazony, went on to build a movement. For years, he has h...

“It’s so insidious, people don’t realize it,” Barbara Kingsolver told me, describing the prejudice against “country people.” Kingsolver is one of those “country people,” as well as a literary legend in her own time, who set out to write the “great Appalachian novel.” And I think she did. 

“Demon Copperhead” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2023, and we taped this conversation later that year. And I wanted to re-air it because the divide between rural and urban America remains just as strong today, and as relevant to our politics. And Kingsolver might be the country’s sharpest and most poignant...

Biden passed the most ambitious climate legislation in American history. Trump just shredded it. What does that mean for the future of renewable energy in America? Where does the climate movement go from here? And is it too late for us to avert climate catastrophe? 

To answer these questions, I invited onto the show two climate experts: Jesse Jenkins, who is a leading climate modeler and a professor at Princeton University, where he runs the Princeton ZERO Lab, and Jane Flegal, who is the executive director of the Blue Horizons Foundation and served on the Biden administration’s c...

The consensus that held American Jewry together for generations is breaking down. 

That consensus, roughly, was this: What is good for Israel is good for the Jews; anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism; and there will someday soon be a two-state solution that reconciles Zionism and liberalism — or, at the very least, Israel is seeking such a solution.

Every single component of that consensus has cracked. And as I've been talking to people from different walks of American Jewish life — politicians and rabbis and activists and analysts and journalists — what I realize is there is nothing...

MAGA has been infighting over the Jeffrey Epstein files. And that’s because the conspiracy theories around Epstein hit at the very core of MAGA’s whole worldview.

Today’s episode looks closer at that worldview. Will Sommer has been tracking conspiracies for years now. He was a reporter at The Washington Post and is now at The Bulwark, and he’s the author of “Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America.”

In this conversation, we discuss the rise of QAnon, Donald Trump’s slippery relationship to the more conspiracy-min...

I have had a meditation practice for about 15 years now. I started hoping it would calm me down, and it has. But it’s also made me more aware of the strangeness of my mind. Certain thoughts emerge seemingly out of nowhere. Many of them return again and again. Why? And what relationship should you have to your thoughts when you realize you’re not the one controlling them?

Mark Epstein is a psychiatrist and also a Buddhist. He’s spent decades observing the mind through those two distinct traditions, and has written many books that helped build...

Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani are both proof of how the ability to capture attention is power. And the attention economy isn’t reshaping just politics; it’s also reshaping the actual economy: the crypto market, A.I. venture capital, and how people, especially Gen Z, are making career decisions. Kyla Scanlon has emerged as a leading theorist on the economics of attention and is herself a member of Gen Z. She is the author of the book “In This Economy?” and Kyla’s Newsletter on Substack. I asked her on the show to walk us through her theory of the att...

President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is a bad piece of legislation. It includes trillions of dollars in tax cuts that are very much tilted toward the rich, along with savage cuts to Medicaid, nutrition assistance and green energy.

And on Tuesday, July 1, the Senate passed it in a 51-50 vote, with Vice President JD Vance as the tiebreaker.

But bad policy only matters if people know about it, and a lot of people don’t — partly because there are an overwhelming number of provisions, and partly because the Trump administration is already flooding the zone with...

Zohran Mamdani created a new anti-establishment playbook — in his use of social video, his focus on affordability and his position on Israel.   

His assumed victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, trouncing the former governor Andrew Cuomo, was one of the biggest political upsets in years. And while the electorate in this case is pretty specific, I think it still points to some tectonic changes in Democratic politics.  

My friend Chris Hayes, the host of MSNBC’s “All In With Chris Hayes,” came on the show earlier this year to talk about his book “The Siren...

For decades, Israel has wanted American support to bomb Iranian nuclear sites. But U.S. presidents, both Republican and Democrat, have resisted — until President Trump. So, what changed? And what are the likely consequences of that decision?

Aaron David Miller is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a longtime diplomat in the region. He joins me to discuss recent events and how the latest attacks on Iran have changed the balance of power in the Middle East.

This episode contains strong language.

Book Recommendations:

Master of th...

Kevin Roberts, Kellyanne Conway, Ben Rhodes and I battled it out a few weeks ago on a stage in Toronto. 

This was for a Munk Debate on the motion: “Be it resolved, this is America’s Golden Age.” It might not surprise you that I was arguing the negative, alongside Rhodes, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama and the co-host of “Pod Save the World.” Roberts and Conway were on the other side. Roberts is the president of the Heritage Foundation and an architect of Project 2025. Conway was Donald Trump’s senior counselor in his first term. 

...

President Trump’s actions against transgender Americans have been stunningly wide-ranging. They’ve also been popular.

Trump has sought new restrictions on trans people in sports, schools, the military, prisons and medical care, and in government documentation. And a recent poll found that a majority of Americans approve of how Mr. Trump is handling trans issues — far above how he is handling his presidency generally. On trans-related issues, Americans’ opinions have moved right since 2022. What led the trans-rights movement to suffer not just a major electoral loss, but also a sweeping loss of public support?

Sarah Mc...

It is impossible to overstate how hellish life in Gaza has been for the past 20 months.

The death count is above 50,000 people — more than 15,000 of whom are children — and at least 1.9 million of Gaza’s 2.1 million people have been displaced over and over again. Starvation is rampant. Hospitals are either damaged or closed; there are only 2,000 remaining hospital beds.

Nearly two years after the atrocities of Oct. 7, Israel still has no plan for the day after the conflict ends. Instead, it is escalating its assault on what remains of Hamas and seizing territory to expand its se...

This is one of my favorite episodes of the show in recent memory. It’s a conversation with the author Salman Rushdie about the experience of losing control of your identity in the world. This happened to Rushdie in the most extreme way. But many of us know some milder version of this — and increasingly so in the age of social media. Rushdie’s story is hard to wrap your mind around. When he published his fourth novel, “The Satanic Verses,” in 1988, he was a literary star. And then the Ayatollah of Iran issued a fatwa calling for his assassinat...

Trump has been making some foreign policy moves I didn’t entirely expect. He seems determined to get a nuclear deal with Iran. He’s been public about his disagreements with Benjamin Netanyahu. He called Vladimir Putin “crazy.” And he keeps talking about wanting his legacy to be that of a peacemaker. 

So what, at this point, can we say about Trump’s foreign policy? What is he trying to do, and how well is it working? If he succeeds, what might his legacy be? 

Emma Ashford is a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, a foreign po...

This is a bit of a strange episode. It’s an attempt to explore the difficulty of everything we’re supposed to feel in a day. We’re in a time when to open the news is to expose yourself to horrors — ones that are a world away, others that are growing ever closer, or perhaps have already made landfall in our lives. And then many of us look up from our screens into a normal spring day. What do you do with that?

But that’s not new or exceptional. It’s the human condition. It exists for a...

Steve Bannon famously talked about using “muzzle velocity” as a strategy: doing so much so quickly that you overwhelm the ability of the media to cover it. I think what the Trump family is doing with crypto is muzzle velocity for corruption.

What they’re doing isn’t necessarily illegal. It would be if these were official campaign donations; the sums involved are so large, and the buyers include foreign nationals. But the Trump family is making this money personally. And they’re doing it across so many different crypto ventures, it’s almost impossible to keep track.