Trump

You Can Thank George W. Bush’s War on Terror for Donald Trump (with Spencer Ackerman)

01 Feb 2023
Read the transcript of the first part of our interview with Spencer Ackerman on the War on Terror: https://jacobin.com/2023/02/war-on-terror-bush-trump-911-islamophobia

War on Terror W/ Spencer Ackerman Part 3

20 Sep 2021
Episode three of The Dig’s War on Terror trilogy with Spencer Ackerman: Decadence, Trump, and Biden.

Jesus and John Wayne w/ Kristin Kobes Du Mez

12 Aug 2021
Dan interviews historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez on her book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. “Having replaced the Jesus of the Gospels with the vengeful warrior...

Right Riot with Nikhil Pal Singh and Joe Lowndes

11 Jan 2021
Nikhil Pal Singh and Joe Lowndes discuss and debate today’s American Right: what sort of threat does the Far-Right pose? How does it relate to the Republican Party and to the neoliberal imperial Center? What...

Ruins of Neoliberalism with Wendy Brown

24 Oct 2020
Political theorist Wendy Brown on how neoliberalism attacked society and democracy and in doing so laid the foundation for right-wing authoritarianism and nihilism.

Who Got Bailed Out with Eric Levitz

30 Mar 2020
Dan interviews New York magazine writer Eric Levitz on the big corporate bailout that gave workers precious little to survive the corona crisis.

Mistaking Identity Politics

18 Jul 2018
Checking your privilege. Invisible knapsacks. Intersectionality. In his new book from Verso, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump, Asad Haider questions the terms and concepts that underpin much liberal and left...

The Trump Doctrine and Its Mandarin Detractors

29 Jun 2018
Stephen Wertheim, a Lecturer in American and international history at Birkbeck, University of London, breaks cuts through the suffocating foreign policy debate that shapes American Empire under Trump.

Child Casualties of the Border War

22 Jun 2018
Vox immigration reporter Dara Lind, one very bright spot in an often disappointing landscape of mainstream immigration journalism, discusses the historical, political and legal context of Trump’s family separation policy. Dan also just wrote a...

Real Sanctuary Means Ending Mass Policing with Kade Crockford

25 Mar 2018
Perhaps nothing has more defined the monstrosity of Donald Trump than his racist demonization and targeting of immigrants from Mexico, Muslim-majority countries and those nations he deems to be “shitholes” or, according to another account,...

That Trump Book Tho with Patrick Blanchfield

13 Jan 2018
Your first Diglet of the new year, and we’re talking about that Trump book. At n+1 Patrick Blanchfield makes the case that Fire and Fury is not, as some might think, a bunch of meaningless...

Peace Can Happen in Korea with Tim Shorrock

05 Dec 2017
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Clintonism's Dreadful Legacy with Robert Reich

01 Dec 2017
Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s Labor Secretary, explains one of Clintonism’s most dreadful results: President Trump. The new film available on Netflix, is Reich’s quasi-autobiographical documentary about the origins of contemporary political-economic inequality. The premise that...

Corey Robin: Trump's Reactionary Mind

24 Oct 2017
@CoreyRobin points to a tension that has defined conservatism from the get-go, between two competing conceptions of virtue and nobility: one defined by political and military distinction and another by entrepreneurial  acumen and accumulated wealth....

Stephen Wertheim: America Was Never Exceptional But We Used to Think It Was

19 Sep 2017
Trump is normal in more ways than people care to admit, but he is different in that he parts from the bedrock ideology of American exceptionalism that has governed this country from its violent founding....

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández: On DACA

08 Sep 2017
Immigration law scholar @crimmigration breaks down the lies, misdirections and bigoted absurdities conveyed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions when he announced that the Trump Administration would cruelly make some 800,000 young people who came to...

Alex Pareene: Trump’s Happy Place Is Racism

25 Aug 2017
Dan talks to Splinter Politics Editor Alex Pareene about his recent piece “Charlottesville Was a Preview of the Future of the Republican Party” and about why Phoenix is Trump’s happy place. This second weekly episode...

Christy Thornton: Confronting the Neoliberal Narco-State in Mexico

08 Aug 2017
With Trump, Mexico is the symbol and source of so many things that are wrong with the United States. Oftentimes, these stories told about Mexico in the United States aren’t just wrong but serve to...

Dara Lind: Trump's uncomfortable resemblance to Obama on immigration

11 Jul 2017
What Trump has accomplished is spread fear through immigrant communities and, with the Muslim and refugee travel bans, made bigotry the explicit cornerstone of immigration policy. But on immigration, as on other matters, Trump does...

Naomi Klein: No Is Not Enough

27 Jun 2017
Donald Trump appears to many in the guise of a terrifying aberration. But in reality, he is the outcome of trends that are far too normal. We need movements to come together to not only...

David Dayen: Consider the Vampire Squid

06 Jun 2017
Nothing that so exposes Donald Trump as a snake oil salesman as the fact that he ran a campaign pitched at white working-class anger toward so-called globalism and then stacked his administration with representatives from...

Peter Andreas: Trump's Wall Is Already Built

31 May 2017
Donald Trump won the presidency in significant part by pledging to do something that his predecessors had already mostly accomplished: building a big, beautiful wall on the border with Mexico. For liberals and centrists, the...

Dean Baker on Trump's Tax Plan for the Rich

04 May 2017
Why do Republicans only seem to care about deficits and debt when they’re trying to cut social welfare programs? Dan’s guest for this special episode is Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and...

Adam Johnson: All the fake news that’s fit to print

02 May 2017
The media has become a part of the story like perhaps never before. Journalist probing has irritated our touchy president. But media outlets have also played a role in Trump’s rise. During the campaign, cable...

Is Neoliberalism Over? With Nicole Aschoff

11 Apr 2017
Trump’s oligarchic regime is an extreme version of the imperial and economic vision that has guided presidents of both major parties. But the popularity of Trump’s chauvinist, xenophobic appeal points to a major crisis in...

Corey Robin on the Reactionaries' Minds Under Trump

28 Mar 2017
What a moment to read, or to re-read, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, Corey Robin’s 2011 collection of essays — especially if you need to disabuse friends and family of...

Charlene Carruthers: Fighting for Black Lives Under Trump

07 Mar 2017
Fighting for Black Lives Under Trump

Jed Purdy: The courts, Trump and politics in the context of ecological crisis

21 Feb 2017
All eyes have turned to the judiciary. It’s the one potential institutional check on Trump—aside, of course, from the shadowy national security state— at the federal level. The courts have the power to stop and...

Mark Blyth: How Austerity Brought Us Donald Trump​

14 Feb 2017
Mark Blyth wasn’t surprised by the rise of Donald Trump, nor Brexit, nor the crises spreading across Europe. He actually predicted them all. 

Fighting the Trump bans: Linda Sarsour and Nicholas Espíritu

31 Jan 2017
Today, we bring you two interviews. The first is with Nicholas Espíritu from the National Immigration Law Center, one of the groups mounting legal challenges against the ban, who will explain the legal and constitutional challenge...

Diane Ravitch on Trump, DeVos and the corporate ed reform agenda

29 Jan 2017
Donald Trump has nominated Betsy DeVos, a free-market, far-right Christian billionaire dedicated to privatizing public schools, to be his Secretary of Education. In her confirmation hearing, DeVos made it painfully clear that she has little...

Jacobin's All-Star Socialist Anti-Inauguration Extravaganza

21 Jan 2017
This week we re-broadcast Jacobin Magazine, Verso, and Haymarket Books’ anti-inauguration event from The Lincoln Theatre in Washington, DC. featuring Naomi Klein, Anand Gopal, Jeremy Scahill, Owen Jones, & Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.

Glenn Greenwald on Trump and the National Security State

10 Jan 2017
Presidents Bush and Obama both presided over an expansive War on Terror and a national security state with a lethal and global reach. Permanent war and warrantless snooping have become the bipartisan consensus backdrop of...

Trump didn't invent being terrible on immigration: César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández & Chris Newman.

21 Dec 2016
Donald Trump launched his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and pledged to build a “a big, fat, beautiful wall” on the southern border that, of course, Mexico is going to pay for. It’s no...

Why Trump Won: Stephanie Coontz, Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Matt Karp

06 Dec 2016
Donald Trump’s election was shocking, if actually not so surprising, and has prompted widespread protests against a cresting right-wing reaction taking shape as a strange and potent combination of white nationalism, make-believe economic populism, libertarian...