The New Yorker staff writer Benjamin Wallace-Wells joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the decline of DOGE, what Elon Musk’s exit from the White House means for its work, and the initiative’s legacy in the long run. Plus, the assassination of the Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark Hortman, and the growing trend of impersonating law enforcement.

This week’s reading:

• “What Did Elon Musk Accomplish at DOGE?,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells
• “The Minnesota Shootings and the Dangerous Trend of Impersonating Law Enforcement,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells
• “The Trump Crackdown on Elected Officials,” by  Jonathan Blitzer
• “What Is Israel’s Endgame with Iran?,” by Robin Wright
• “The Military’s Birthday Parade Rolls Quietly Through Trump’s Washington,” by Antonia Hitchens 

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to [email protected].

The New Yorker recently published a report from Sudan, headlined “Escape from Khartoum.” The contributor Nicolas Niarchos journeyed for days through a conflict to reach a refugee camp in the Nuba Mountains, where members of the country’s minority Black ethnic groups are seeking safety, but remain imperilled by hunger. The territory is “very significant to the Nuba people,” Niarchos explains to David Remnick. “They feel safe being there because they have managed to resist genocide before by hiding in these mountains. And then you start seeing the children with their distended bellies, and you start hearing the stories of the people who fled.” The civil war pits the Sudanese Army against a militia group called the Rapid Support Forces. Once allies in ousting Sudan’s former President, the Army and the R.S.F. now occupy different parts of the country, destroying infrastructure in the opposing group’s territory, and committing atrocities against civilians: killing, starvation, and widespread, systematic sexual violence. The warring parties are dominated by Sudan’s Arabic-speaking majority, and “there’s this very, very toxic combination of both supremacist ideology,” Niarchos says, and “giving ‘spoils’ to troops instead of paying them.” One of Niarchos’s sources, a man named Wanis, recalls an R.S.F. soldier telling him, “If you go to the Nuba Mountains, we’ll reach you there. You Nuba, we’re supposed to kill you like dogs.”

The Washington Roundtable discusses President Trump’s deployment of uniformed troops in Los Angeles, the Administration’s attempt to blur the distinction between the military and law enforcement, and this weekend’s parade in D.C. to celebrate the Army’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary, which also happens to be the President’s seventy-ninth birthday. Plus, the handcuffing of California Senator Alex Padilla at a press conference given by Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security. “To suddenly see this guy being thrown around on the ground—it really brought back all of the feelings I’ve had about living in places like Egypt and in China,” says the staff writer Evan Osnos. “When the highest office-holders in the land start to get brutalized, that just tells you that really anybody out there is being treated in much harsher ways.” 

This week’s reading:

• “Donald Trump’s Dictator Cosplay,” by Susan B. Glasser
• “Donald Trump Enters His World Cup Era,” by Jon Allsop
• “Looking for the National Guard in Los Angeles,” by Emily Witt
• “Immigration Protests Threaten to Boil Over in Los Angeles,” by E. Tammy Kim
• “The Farmers Harmed by the Trump Administration,” by Peter Slevin
• “The Victims of the Trump Administration’s China-Bashing,” by Michael Luo
• “The Department of Veterans Affairs Is Not O.K.,” by David W. Brown

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to [email protected] with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

Michael Luo, an executive editor of The New Yorker, joins the show as guest host. He sits down with Peter Hessler, a staff writer who spent more than a decade living in and writing about China. They discuss the Sinophobic history behind the Trump Administration’s threats to revoke Chinese students’ visas, how the COVID pandemic reshaped the U.S.-China relationship, and how escalating tensions between the United States and China stand to change the global order. 

This week’s reading:

• “The Victims of the Trump Administration’s China-Bashing,” by Michael Luo
• “The Uncertain Future of a Chinese Student at Harvard,” by Peter Hessler
• “Looking for the National Guard in Los Angeles,” by  Emily Witt
• “The Farmers Harmed by the Trump Administration,” by Peter Slevin
• “The Private Citizens Who Want to Help Trump Deport Migrants,” by Jessica Pishko
• “An Inside Look at Gaza’s Chaotic New Aid System,” by Isaac Chotine

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to [email protected].

When Donald Trump made an alliance with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., he brought vaccine skepticism and the debunked link between vaccines and autism into the center of the MAGA agenda. Though the scientific establishment has long disproven that link, as many as one in four Americans today believe that vaccines may cause autism. In April, Kennedy, now the Secretary of Health and Human Services, shocked the medical community and families across the country when he said that his agency would uncover the cause of autism—the subject of decades of research—once and for all. That news came even as Kennedy oversees drastic cuts to critical medical research of all kinds. Dr. Alycia Halladay, the chief science officer of the Autism Science Foundation, talks with David Remnick about the initiative, and the problems with focussing on environmental factors such as vaccines or mold. She also discusses why debunked claims and misinformation have such a powerful hold on parents. “You will do anything to help your child, so if it means a bleach enema”—referring to one extremely poisonous and falsely touted treatment—“and you think that’s going to help them, you’ll do it. It’s not because these people don’t love their children. It’s because they’re desperate.”

The Washington Roundtable discusses the fallout from the messy rupture between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, how battles between maximalist rulers and the mega-wealthy have unfolded in history, and how this week’s fighting could portend a new, more combative phase of American oligarchy. They talk about America’s new Gilded Age, drawing on “The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich,” a new book by Evan Osnos, just out this week.

This week’s reading:

• “The Musk-Trump Divorce Is as Messy as You Thought It Would Be,” by Susan B. Glasser
• “Donald Trump’s Politics of Plunder,” by Evan Osnos
• “The Sublime Spectacle of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Social-Media Slap Fight,” by Jessica Winter
• “The Private Citizens Who Want to Help Trump Deport Migrants,” by Jessica Pishko
• “Can Public Media Survive Trump?,” by Jon Allsop

Tune in wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker staff writer Ava Kofman joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss her recent Profile of the iconoclastic right-wing blogger Curtis Yarvin. They discuss Yarvin’s desire to end American democracy by installing a monarch, whether his provocations can be seen as trolling, and how his writings have found a receptive audience among conservative politicians and the tech élite. “Obviously, Yarvin’s influence on the right is great, and maybe can’t be overstated,” Kofman says. “But, at the same time, a lot of these ideas he’s getting from having conversations with powerful people in Silicon Valley and with powerful people in Washington.”

This week’s reading:

• “Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America,” by Ava Kofman
• “Democracy Wins a Referendum in South Korea,” by E. Tammy Kim
• “Josh Hawley and the Republican Effort to Love Labor,” by Eyal Press
• “Trump Makes America’s Refugee Program a Tool of White Racial Grievance,” by Jonathan Blitzer
• “Elon Musk’s Vanishing Act,” by Jon Allsop

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to [email protected].

Lesley Stahl, a linchpin of CBS News, began at the network in 1971, covering major events such as Watergate, and for many years has been a correspondent on “60 Minutes.” But right now it’s a perilous time for CBS News, which has been sued by Donald Trump for twenty billion dollars over the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris during the 2024 Presidential campaign. Its owner, Paramount, seems likely to settle, and corporate pressure on journalists at CBS has been so intense that Bill Owens, the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” and Wendy McMahon, the head of CBS News, resigned in protest. Owens’s departure was “a punch in the stomach,” Stahl tells David Remnick in a recent interview, “one of those punches where you almost can’t breathe.” And far worse could happen in a settlement with Trump, which would compromise the integrity of the premier investigative program on broadcast news. “I’m already beginning to think about mourning, grieving,” Stahl says. “I know there’s going to be a settlement. . . . And then we will hopefully still be around, turning a new page, and finding out what that new page is going to look like.” Although she describes herself as “Pollyannaish,” Stahl acknowledges that she is “pessimistic about the future for all press today. . . . The public has lost faith in us as an institution. So we’re in very dark times.”

This is the second installment of “How Bad Is It,” a recurring series in which the staff writer Andrew Marantz joins Tyler Foggatt to conduct a health check on American democracy. They discuss how Donald Trump has bullied media companies, why it’s troubling that some outlets are seeking to settle lawsuits with the Administration, and how the role of social media in public discourse has changed during the second Trump Administration. Plus, an interview with the prominent Hungarian journalist Márton Gulyás, who’s on the show to discuss a new bill making its way through the Hungarian parliament which is designed to quell the free press, and what a potential crackdown may tell us about the future of American media. 

This week’s reading:

• “Donald Trump’s Politics of Plunder,” by Evan Osnos
• “Donald Trump’s War on Gender Is Also a War on Government,” by Paisley Currah
• “The Criminalization of Venezuelan Street Culture,” by Oriana van Praag
• “J. D. Vance Warns Courts to Get in Line,” by Ruth Marcus
• “In Chicago, Will the Pope Bump Last?,” by Geraldo Cadava

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to [email protected].

The Northwestern history professor and New Yorker contributor Daniel Immerwahr joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the ways in which the COVID crisis deepened Americans’ distrust of institutional experts and propelled R.F.K., Jr., to the height of political power in the Trump Administration. Plus, they talk about how Anthony Fauci’s clashes and eventual reconciliation with AIDS activists in the nineteen-eighties and nineties could serve as a guide to repairing the rift between Americans who are skeptical of experts and the officials who set public-health policy today.

This week’s reading:

“R.F.K., Jr., Anthony Fauci, and the Revolt Against Expertise,” by Daniel Immerwahr

“Who Gets to Be an American?,” by Michael Luo

“The Stakes of the Birthright-Citizenship Case,” by Ruth Marcus

“Donald Trump’s Culture of Corruption,” by Isaac Chotiner

“The Mideast Is Donald Trump’s Safe Place,” by Susan B. Glasser

Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to [email protected].

Nearly a year ago, a Presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, moderated by Jake Tapper and Dana Bash of CNN, began the end of Biden’s bid for a second term. The President struggled to make points, complete sentences, and remember facts; he spoke in a raspy whisper. This was not the first time voters expressed concern about Biden’s age, but his decline was shocking to many, and suddenly Trump seemed likely to win in a landslide. New reporting by Tapper and Thompson reveals that the debate was no fluke at all. In “How Joe Biden Handed the Presidency to Donald Trump” (an excerpt from their new book “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again”), they lay out a case that the latter half of Biden’s Presidency was carefully stage-managed by his top aides; Biden would often end the workday as early as four-thirty.  “What [aides and] others would say is, ‘His decision-making was always fine.’ The job of the President is not just decision-making. It’s also communication,” Tapper tells David Remnick. “If you are a President . . . and you’re not able to go into a room full of donors and speak extemporaneously for ten minutes, then there’s something wrong. And that was happening in 2023.”