The Ezra Klein Show

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.

Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is the cruelest and most irresponsible piece of domestic legislation to be seriously proposed in my lifetime.

When you think about this bill, you should think about risk. It would increase our risk of a fiscal crisis by adding a hefty sum to our nation’s debt, at a time when we’re alienating the countries that typically buy our debt. It would slash food stamps and strip health insurance from millions of people, increasing the risk that the safety net won’t be able to catch any of us, at a time when Pr...

This episode is about a seemingly simple question: Was there a Joe Biden cover-up?

Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book argues there was. “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again” details how Biden’s top advisers closed the circle around him and tried to conceal the extent of his decline.

But I think the story here is more complicated. If Biden’s top advisers were misleading the public, I think they were also lying to themselves. And if there was a cover-up, it had a lot of holes...

Is Donald Trump eroding American democracy and consolidating power for himself? Or is he trying to do that and failing? Is this what sliding toward authoritarianism looks like? Or is this what a functioning democracy looks like? And how can you tell the difference?

Two articles came out recently that offer very different perspectives on these questions. In Vox, Zack Beauchamp wrote a piece called “Trump Is Losing,” which argues that Trump’s efforts to cow his enemies and consolidate power are not organized or strategic enough to make a serious dent in our democratic system. In The Ne...

I honestly don’t know how I should be educating my kids. A.I. has raised a lot of questions for schools. Teachers have had to adapt to the most ingenious cheating technology ever devised. But for me, the deeper question is: What should schools be teaching at all? A.I. is going to make the future look very different. How do you prepare kids for a world you can’t predict?

And if we can offload more and more tasks to generative A.I., what’s left for the human mind to do?

Rebecca Winthr...

A good rule of thumb is that whatever Margaret Atwood is worried about now, the rest of us will likely be worried about a decade from now. The rise of authoritarianism. A backlash against women’s social progress. Climate change leading to social unrest. Advertising permeating more and more of our lives.

We originally released this episode back in March 2022. But just like Atwood’s work, it somehow only got more relevant with time. 

Atwood is the author of at least 17 novels, including the classic “The Handmaid’s Tale,” as well as 20 books of poetry and nine co...

Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is one of just 13 Democrats to represent a district that Donald Trump won. Her distinctive economic message, and a willingness to buck her own party, helped her win re-election. But now the reality of the Trump era is coming home.

Gluesenkamp Perez faced raucous crowds at town halls in Washington State recently, with some of her more liberal constituents furious that she isn’t opposing the administration more forcefully. At the same time, the White House has started making economic arguments that sound very similar to ones that she’s made – that we should...

The U.S. dollar is the lingua franca of the global financial system. The fact that so much of the world relies on our currency has long been understood as our exorbitant privilege — the reason we have so much leverage in the global economy and are able to borrow at lower interest rates.

But the Trump administration has a much more complicated relationship with the dollar. It has come to see dollar dominance as a burden we bear on behalf of the rest of the world. But in its attempts to move away from dollar dominance, is th...

“Abundance,” the book I co-wrote with Derek Thompson, hit bookstore shelves a little over a month ago, and the response has been beyond anything I could have imagined. And it’s generated a lot of interesting critiques, too, especially from the left. So I wanted to dedicate an episode to talking through some of them.

My guests today are both on the left but have very different perspectives. Zephyr Teachout is a law professor at Fordham University and one of the most prominent voices in the antimonopoly movement. Saikat Chakrabarti is the president and co-founder of New Consen...

I have no earthly idea how to describe this conversation. It’s about religion and belief – at this moment in our politics, and in our lives more generally.

My guest and I come from very different perspectives. Ross Douthat is a Catholic conservative, who wrote a book called “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” I’m a … Californian. But I think everyone would enjoy this conversation — believers, skeptics and seekers alike.

Some questions touched on: Is the Trump administration Christian or pagan? How do Christian Trump supporters reconcile the cruelties of this administration with their faith? Can rel...

After last week’s episode, “The Emergency Is Here,” we got a lot of emails. And the most common reply was: You really think we’ll have midterm elections in 2026? Isn’t that naïve?

I think we will have midterms. But one reason I think so many people are skeptical of that is they’re working with comparisons to other places: Mussolini’s Italy, Putin’s Russia, Pinochet’s Chile.

But we don’t need to look abroad for parallels; it has happened here.

Steven Hahn is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at New York University a...

The president of the United States is disappearing people to a Salvadoran prison for terrorists: a prison built for disappearance, a prison where there is no education or remediation or recreation, a prison where the only way out, according to El Salvador’s justice minister, is in a coffin.

The president says he wants to send “homegrown” Americans there next.

This is the emergency. Like it or not, it’s here.

Asha Rangappa is a former F.B.I. special agent and now an assistant dean and senior lecturer at the Yale Jackson School o...

My colleague Tom Friedman thinks we’re screwed.

That’s the first thing he told me when recounting his recent trip to China. It’s not just because of the trade war that President Trump is escalating right now. Friedman believes the whole Washington consensus on China — that the country is a hostile adversary — is dangerous and based on an outdated understanding of what China now is. He saw how China’s manufacturing and technology have advanced so far that in many ways it now surpasses the United States’.

In this conversation, Friedman walks me through the ad...

After a week of market chaos, President Trump pulled back from the brink. But he didn’t pull that far back. He left a 10 percent tariff on most of the world and launched a trade war with China. It’s unclear what he will do after this 90-day pause or what countries need to do to satisfy him. But one thing that is very clear now is that our economy is subject to one man’s whims.

How are businesses supposed to adapt to this new reality? What is this new reality?

Peter R. Orszag is the...

The tariffs President Trump unveiled this week were both bigger than most people expected and a lot more confusing. These aren’t the flat tariffs he proposed during the campaign. And they aren’t reciprocal tariffs, as he claimed in his Rose Garden speech. So what is Trump actually doing here?

I knew my former colleague Paul Krugman would have some thoughts. Krugman is a Nobel laureate trade economist who was a New York Times Opinion columnist for 25 years. He now writes an excellent newsletter on Substack, where he’s been trying to make sense of the theori...

There’s something of a policy revolution afoot: As of March, more than a dozen states — including California, Florida and Ohio — have passed bills or adopted policies that aim to limit cellphone usage at school. More are expected to follow.

Jonathan Haidt is the leader of this particular insurgency. “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” his book exploring the decline of the “play-based childhood” and the rise of the “phone-based childhood,” has been on the New York Times best-seller list for a year. It feels, to me, like we’re finally...

It’s our first subscriber-only “Ask Me Anything” of the year. The show’s executive producer, Claire Gordon, joins me to discuss your questions about the risk of a constitutional crisis and how Democrats, businesses and universities are responding to President Trump. 

Thank you to everyone who sent in questions. And if you aren’t a New York Times subscriber but would like to be, just go to https://www.nytimes.com/subscription.

This episode contains strong language.

Mentioned:

“A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently” by The Ezra Klein Show with Jake Auchinclos...

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency is great branding. Who could be against a more efficient government? But “efficiency” obfuscates what’s really happening here.

Efficiency to what end? Elon Musk, President Trump and DOGE’s boosters have offered various objectives — cutting the deficit, eliminating fraud and abuse, creating a leaner and more responsive government. But DOGE’s actions in the past two months don’t seem to align with any of those goals.

Santi Ruiz is the senior editor at the Institute for Progress and the author and host of the “Statecraft” podcast and newsletter. He’s t...

To mark the release of our new book “Abundance,” my co-author Derek Thompson had me on his podcast, “Plain English,” to talk about it. We’re on book tour right now, so we’re doing a lot of talking about this book. But this conversation is different. It’s just Derek and me, and we get into the story of how the book came together, and all the people and ideas that influenced us – a kind of intellectual history of the abundance agenda. And I thought the audience of this show might find this interesting too.  

This episode of “Plain...

After the last election, there were all kinds of theories about where Democrats went wrong. But now, four months later, we have a lot more data – and it tells a few clear stories.

David Shor is the head of data science at Blue Rose Research, a Democratic polling firm, which does an enormous amount of surveying of the electorate. A few weeks ago, Shor was walking me through a deck he made of key charts and numbers that explain the election results. And I thought this would be good to do in public. Because this is information th...

It’s hard to understand the economic logic of President Trump’s tariffs. In our last episode, we tried, but with limited success. And that might be because the logic here isn’t entirely economic at all.

So we wanted to spend an episode looking at Trump’s economic policies through a wider lens.

Gillian Tett is a columnist at The Financial Times and a member of its editorial board. She’s also a trained anthropologist with a Ph.D. And she brings both perspectives into this conversation — exploring Trump’s policies as economics, as well as power...

Wall Street thought Donald Trump was bluffing about his tariff plans. The stock market rallied after his election. But the reality has started setting in. Trump is doubling down on tariffs, even as he warned Americans that the economy may experience a “period of transition,” insisting this is just short-term pain.

So what exactly is Trump’s theory here? And how much pain should we expect?

Answering those questions requires a bit of a tariffs primer. And the economist Kimberly Clausing kindly agreed to come on the show, walk through the basics, and help me make s...

Right-wing populism thrives on scarcity. The answer is abundance. But a politics of abundance will work only if Democrats confront where their approach has failed. 

This audio essay is adapted from my forthcoming book, “Abundance,” which I wrote with Derek Thompson. You can preorder it here. And learn more about our book tour here.

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

The economy has started blinking red. President Trump’s tariffs have been roiling markets. Consumer sentiment was already down. G.D.P. forecasts are predicting slower growth. And on Tuesday night Trump declared to Congress and the nation that things had never been better.

Something was different about this speech. The level of baldfaced lying. The way Republicans cheered along. How uncomfortable and uncertain Democrats seemed. It was as if, watching it all, you could feel something rupturing.

My editor, Aaron Retica, joins me to talk through Trump’s fifth address to Congress.

This...

Artificial general intelligence — an A.I. system that can beat humans at almost any cognitive task — is arriving in just a couple of years. That’s what people tell me — people who work in A.I. labs, researchers who follow their work, former White House officials. A lot of these people have been calling me over the last couple of months trying to convey the urgency. This is coming during President Trump’s term, they tell me. We’re not ready.

One of the people who reached out to me was Ben Buchanan, the top adviser on A.I. in the...

If you’re looking for a single-sentence summation of the change in America’s foreign policy under Donald Trump, you could do worse than what Trump said on Wednesday:

“The European Union was formed in order to screw the United States. That’s the purpose of it. And they’ve done a good job of it. But now I’m president.”

Trump seems to loathe America’s traditional European allies even as he warms relations with Russia. He’s threatened tariffs on Canada and Mexico while softening his rhetoric on China. And he seems fixated on the idea of ter...

In 2016, when Donald Trump won the first time, a little-known book became an unexpected phenomenon. It was “The Revolt of the Public,” self-published two years earlier by a former C.I.A. media analyst, Martin Gurri. Gurri, who is now a visiting research fellow at the Mercatus Center, argued that a revolution in how information flowed was driving political upheavals in country after country: The dynamics of modern media ecosystems naturally created distrust toward institutions and elites, and this was fueling waves of revolt against the status quo. The problem, though, was that though these dynamics could destroy existing poli...

After the elections, I started asking congressional Democrats the same question: If the elections had gone the other way, if they had won a trifecta, what would be their first big bill? In almost every case, they said they didn’t know. That’s a problem.

Democrats are in the opposition now. That means fighting the worst of what Trump is doing. But it also means providing an alternative. So one thing I’m going to do this year is talk to Democrats who are trying to find that alternative — an agenda that meets the challenges of the mome...

What happens when ambition no longer checks ambition?

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

You can find transcripts (posted midday) 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.

This audio essay for “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by our supervising editor, Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original m...

We are moving into the next phase of Donald Trump’s presidency. Phase 1 was the blitz of executive actions. Now comes the response from the other parts of the government — namely, the courts.

A slew of judges, some of them Republican appointees, have frozen a number of the administration’s most aggressive actions: the destruction of U.S.A.I.D., the spending freeze, DOGE’s access to the Treasury payments system and the executive order to end birthright citizenship, to name just a few.

The administration has largely — though not entirely — been abiding by these court...

Elon Musk has been on a slash-and-burn tear through the federal government — gaining access to I.T. systems, dismantling U.S.A.I.D. and unleashing a firehose of attacks on his platform, X, accusing the bureaucracy of various conspiratorial crimes.

As this all unfolds before our eyes, it’s hard to believe that Musk, not that long ago, was a conventional Obama-era liberal. How did a guy who cared about climate change and going to Mars, whose companies were buoyed by government largess, become Donald Trump’s most unapologetic soldier? What does he hope to do with a...

There are two pieces to this episode. First, a tour of what Donald Trump has done — and what he has backed down from doing — over the last few days. There’s a lesson there. Perhaps Democrats are starting to learn it.

Then I wanted to hear the view of Trump’s first weeks back in office from someone on the right — someone who agrees with many of Trump’s policies, but also understands how the government works and who cares about our Constitution.

Yuval Levin is the director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American...