TrumpWatch with Jesse Lent: Recent Episodes
WBAI 99.5fm, New York City's Pacifica radio station
TrumpWatch with Jesse Lent is produced by WBAI 99.5FM Pacifica Radio New York. Join us as we take a deep dive on a different aspect of the Donald Trump administration in each episode.
On December 7, 2016, “TrumpWatch with Jesse Lent” debuted on WBAI 99.5fm, New York City's Pacifica station. Through 127 episodes, we did our best to cut through the bluster coming from the White House to help you figure out the concrete ways that our country has been changed by Donald Trump and his administration. For our final show, we take your calls on how the resistance to this president has changed protest movements in the US.
Of all the consequences of climate change that we know about, one that rarely gets discussed is its affect on the affordable housing crisis. Back in June, President Trump (who has denied the existence of global warming throughout his presidency) signed an executive order aimed at “tearing down red tape in order to build more affordable housing.” But as reported in Teresa Wiltz’s article for The Pew Charitable Trusts Statewide blog, “Climate Change Is Making the Affordable Housing Crunch Worse,” the administration’s refusal to engage in efforts to reduce carbon emissions is creating larger issues than red tape to contend with. On this week’s TrumpWatch, Teresa Wiltz explains why climate change is making the housing crunch even worse.
On Monday, attorneys general for 19 states and the District of Columbia announced a lawsuit against the Trump administration in the hopes of blocking a sweeping new rule which would allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement to indefinitely hold migrant families in detention. But will it work? On this week’s TrumpWatch, immigration reporter for Reuters Mica Rosenberg unpacks this blue state attempt to block President Trump’s border policy in the courts.
Veterans of the US Armed Forces will have a harder time receiving green cards than currently active service members, according to a new report from Yeganeh Torbati, Isaac Arnsdorf and Dara Lind of ProPublica. Since Veterans Affairs officials declined to step in to exempt their members from a Trump administration policy restricting green cards for low-income immigrants, vets will not be entitled to any of the exemptions open to currently enlisted military personnel. On this week’s TrumpWatch, Yeganeh considers what the reporting of her and her ProPublica colleagues tells us about the way this federal agency is being run in the Trump era.
On Aug. 12, the Trump administration announced plans to change how it how it enforces the Endangered Species Act, the landmark 1974 law believed to have rescued the bald eagle, the grizzly bear and the American alligator from going extinct. On this week’s TrumpWatch, Ben Lefebvre, author of the POLITICO article “Trump administration eases endangered species rules,” helps break down what this new interpretation will mean for the effort to save threatened animals.
With all eyes trained on former special counsel Robert Mueller’s testimony before Congress, we take a look at the issue that got us here—Russian interference in the 2016 election. According to Adam Piore, author of the July 23 Newsweek article “Russia Is Using Cold War Strategy to Undermine the Faith of Americans in the 2020 Election—Will It Work?” the strategy being deployed ahead of the 2020 presidential election has disturbing echoes of 2016. While a July 18 Brennan Center for Justice report entitled “Federal Funding Needs for State Election Security” highlights dangerous vulnerabilities in the voting systems of six states. Join us for a conversation on the state of US elections today with Adam Piore of Newsweek and Christopher R. Deluzio, a co-author of the Brennan Center study, on this week's TrumpWatch.
Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney reportedly told attendees at a recent fundraising retreat in Chicago that he doesn't attempt to control the President’s tweeting, time or family. Instead, according to the July 15 Washington Post article “‘His own fiefdom," he is building his own power base in Washington through a formerly inactive White House office called the Domestic Policy Council. On this week’s TrumpWatch, Lisa Rein, a reporter covering federal agencies and the management of government in the Trump administration for the Washington Post, helps break down her reporting on Mulvaney’s efforts and considers their ramifications for American politics.
On July 1, when ProPublica reporter A.C. Thompson revealed the existence of a secret Facebook group of 9,500 Border Patrol agents with posts joking about migrant deaths and illustrations of the President sexually assaulting a Congresswoman, the public backlash was swift and severe. Acting secretary of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan promised to hold accountable “any employee found to have compromised the public’s trust.” But according to reporting by Ted Hesson and Cristiano Lima of POLITICO, the existence of the group had been an open secret among Customs and Border Protection officials for years. This week on TrumpWatch, Ted discusses what we know about the now-defunct group, who knew about it and what it tells us about the prevailing culture among Border Patrol agents.
With the third acting defense secretary President Trump has placed in the position within the past month looking like he will be forced to temporarily resign and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo playing an increasingly active role in interactions with longtime US adversaries like Iran and North Korea, it is currently difficult to determine exactly where our foreign policy ends and military policy begins. On this week’s TrumpWatch, Adam Weinstein, national security editor for The New Republic, helps untangle who has the President’s ear when it comes to international relations.
With major news developments arriving fast and furiously theses days, it’s easy to forget that the US is actively engaged in a trade war with China. President Trump will head to Osaka, Japan for the G-20 summit this week and he has threatened additional tariffs if Chinese President Xi Jinping won't meet with him there. On this week's TrumpWatch, Soumaya Keynes, US economics editor for The Economist and co-host of the Trade Talks podcast, examines what effect President Trump’s tariffs on China are having on their economy and ours.
On June 13, two oil tankers that had just passed through the Strait of Hormuz were damaged after an explosion struck both ships. The US government was quick to blame Iran for the attack on The Kokuka Courageous, a tanker owned by Japan and en route to Singapore and The Front Altair, a Norwegian-owned tanker on its way to Taiwan. And while both President Trump and Iranian president Hassan Rouhani say they do not want war, the inflammatory statements coming from their respective administrations appear to be at odds with that goal. In this episode of TrumpWatch, Julian Borger, world affairs editor for the Guardian, breaks down what is happening to diplomatic relations between the two countries and explains how the President’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal could affect what happens next.
As congressional Democrats clash over whether or not to impeach the President following the controversial release of the Mueller report, there appears to be one politician surprisingly supportive of the idea—the President himself. In his June 11 article “Trash-talking Trump aims to weaponize impeachment,” senior White House reporter for POLITICO Darren Samuelsohn spoke to a dozen people in President Trump's inner circle in an attempt find out why he appears to be so supportive of the idea. On this week’s TrumpWatch, Darren explains why the President could be genuinely pleased if and when impeachment proceedings start up in the House.
Last week, President Trump announced plans to roll out a 5 percent tariff on “all goods coming into our country from Mexico” in retribution for what he described in a Twitter post as that nation’s role in the “illegal immigration problem.” When the President threatened to tack on an additional 5 percent for every month Mexico refuses to engage in border enforcement up to his administration's standards, many Republican lawmakers, long seen as being from the party of free trade, clearly were not happy. Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma told POLITICO that the Trump administration is “trying to use tariffs to solve every problem but HIV and climate change.” But will their displeasure translate into action in Congress? In this episode of TrumpWatch, Amber Phillips, a reporter for the Washington Post political blog The Fix discusses the storm brewing on the hill over tariffs and considers whether it could affect the nearly unanimous support the President has enjoyed from his party throughout his time in office.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court agreed to what the Washington Post described as a “compromise on a restrictive Indiana abortion law,” allowing the state to regulate disposal of the “remains” of an abortion. Nine other states have passed similar laws restricting women's reproductive rights. Will the Supreme Court, presumably a more conservative body now that President Trump’s two appointments (Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch) have been sworn in, overturn or undermine Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision protecting access to a safe and legal abortion? In this installment of TrumpWatch, Staci Fox, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Southeast talks about where this fight is headed.
Last month, the Supreme Court heard arguments over whether to allow a question on the 2020 census that asks whether the person filling out the form is a US citizen. In this installment of TrumpWatch, Wennie Chin and Paul Westrick of the New York Immigration Coalition, one of the original plaintiffs in that case, discuss what the consequences of a citizenship question would look like.
When 2020 presidential hopeful Senator Bernie Sanders appeared in a Fox News town hall on April 15, many of his supporters saw it as an inspired attempt to reach across the political divide. Yet, for one regular viewer of the cable news channel, long decried by media critics as being a mouthpiece of the Republican agenda, Sen. Sanders was not welcome. “So weird to watch Crazy Bernie on Fox News,” President Trump tweeted the following morning. “Not surprisingly, Bret Baier and the ‘audience’ was so smiley and nice. Very strange.” Trump even added, “what’s with Fox News?” in a subsequent tweet later that day. As anyone who even remotely follows cable news knows, Fox News has given the President nearly blanket support for even his most controversial policies and was an enthusiastic booster throughout his campaign. Is a change brewing at the President’s favorite network? On this week’s TrumpWatch, Daniel Lippman discusses his recent POLITICO article co-written with Eliana Johnson “Trump's Fox News love fest hits a rough patch.”
On April 10, President Trump signed two executive orders meant to speed up the construction of pipelines like the Keystone XL (KXL) and other methods of transporting oil and natural gas across borders. For residents of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, thousands of whom remain trapped after weeks of flooding caused by rising waters, the announcement was a slap in the face. Oglala Sioux Tribe Tribal Chair Julian Bear Runner told reporter Alleen Brown of The Intercept that Trump's latest executive orders felt "like being kicked while we’re down.” In this episode of TrumpWatch, Cheyenne River tribal chairman Harold Frazier joins Alleen and Jesse for a discussion of how the President's actions will affect indigenous people throughout the region .
On Monday, White House officials reclassified the elite military force the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist group. It is the first time in US history that a sitting president has accused a foreign government of terrorism. But is this move, which raised eyebrows coming on the eve of Israeli elections, just another presidential norm left shredded on the floor of the Oval Office or something more significant? On this week’s TrumpWatch, the diplomatic correspondent for the Washington Post Carol Morello examines what the reclassification of the IRGC will mean for relations between the US and Iran.
On Friday, President Trump stated in a series of tweets, “I will be closing the border, or large sections of the border, next week,” adding “we lose so much money with them, especially when you add in drug trafficking etc., that the border closing would be a good thing!” On this week’s TrumpWatch, Fernando Garcia, founder and executive director of the Border Network for Human Rights (BNHR) an immigration reform and human rights advocacy organization based out of El Paso, Texas, talks about the way the proposed border closure would affect the work he and the BNHR are doing.
Last Friday, President Trump announced on Twitter that he was ordering the Treasury Department to withdraw new sanctions on North Korea. But as there were no “additional large-scale sanctions” on North Korea like the ones the President claimed were currently in the works, the tweet sent his staff into a state of confusion according to a report from Bloomberg News. On this week’s TrumpWatch, Jenny Town, a research analyst at the Stimson Center and managing editor of 38 North, helps clarify what is happening in the murky waters of US-North Korea relations.
For the past two years, Republicans lawmakers in Congress have given the President nearly unanimous support. Yet, according to Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Michael Shear’s March 14 New York Times article “Congress Has a Breaking Point. This Week, Trump Might Have Found It.” the seams are starting to show in the blanket support President Trump has been enjoying. On this week’s TrumpWatch, Sheryl considers what three recent bipartisan measures, all passed with the help of defecting Republicans, tell us about the current state of Trump's influence on the Hill.
With both President Trump and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions previously vowing to reduce Department of Justice (DOJ) investigations into areas like local law enforcement, few Americans would be shocked to discover that civil rights enforcement has decreased at the agency under the Trump administration. Yet according to a VICE News report by Rob Arthur, DOJ civil rights prosecutions have dropped 60 percent in the first two years of the Trump administration compared to President Obama's time in office and are 50 percent lower than they were during George W. Bush’s presidency. On this week’s TrumpWatch, Rob considers what this reduction means for Americans' right to equal protection under the law.
With 16 states, the ACLU, the Sierra Club and the Southern Border Communities Coalition all suing President Trump in at least four different lawsuits over his declaration of a national emergency over what he describes as "illegal immigrants streaming across the southern border," this appears to be yet another battle headed for the Supreme Court. On this week’s TrumpWatch, Washington Post reporter Amy B. Wang unpacks what the President declaring a national emergency means in both the long and short term.
According to a new Center for Public Integrity analysis, from the time the Republican tax plan was unveiled on November 2, 2017 until the end of the year, dozens of billionaires and millionaires gave a total of $31.1 million to Republican members of Congress, a sharp increase from what they gave in previous years during that same period. On this week’s TrumpWatch, reporter Peter Cary, one of the authors of the Center for Public Integrity study, examines whether Republican donors bought the passage of the tax bill by withholding their political contributions until it was passed.
As President Trump weighs another government shutdown or declaration of a national emergency over his demands for a border wall and considers the increasingly expansive Special Counsel, there is no shortage of potential calamities swirling around his second State of the Union address. On this week’s TrumpWatch, White House reporter for POLITICO Gabby Orr returns to the program to break down the President’s remarks and consider what they tell us about his agenda.
The federal government is back open for business. But from the 15,000 migrant children being detained in the US, according to a report in the Guardian, to the Commerce Department effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census to President Trump’s threats of a second government shutdown over funding for a wall on the southern border, immigration remains the dominant political issue of the day. This week on TrumpWatch, Senior Director of Immigrant Rights Policy at the New York Immigration Coalition Anu Joshi explains the ways that activists are battling the Trump administration's punitive immigration policy in the courts.
With Democrats picking up 40 seats in the midterm elections, the party currently holds a commanding 36-seat majority in the House of Representatives. On this week's TrumpWatch, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of the book “It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America” David Cay Johnston returns to the show to explore what the new House majority will mean for the mounting investigations of the President.
As President Donald Trump approaches the two-year anniversary of his inauguration, it is indisputable that he has changed many of the norms of the office. On this week's TrumpWatch, Robert Costa, the host of “Washington Week” on PBS and a national political reporter for the Washington Post, reflects on the ways this President has reshaped the executive branch in his first two years in office.
Donald Trump’s prime-time Oval Office speech on Tuesday night employed a sensationalistic tone that was a departure from the way past presidents have used this forum. On this week’s TrumpWatch, reporter Noah Lanard of Mother Jones fact checks the President’s claims like “criminal gangs, drug smugglers and human traffickers are streaming across our southern border."
On Dec. 22, President Trump shut down the federal government in response to Senate Democrats' refusal to include $5 billion to fund a border wall as part of their 2019 budget. With national parks and museums closed along with all “nonessential” government agencies, the shutdown is being felt across all areas of public life. In this episode of TrumpWatch, White House reporter for POLITICO Gabby Orr explains the course of events that got us here.
With a President in the White House using social media in a way that's never seen before from a world leader, a difficult question has arose for broadcast journalists—who should be the voice of Donald Trump’s Twitter account? On this week’s TrumpWatch, we consider which voice would work best to verbalize President Trump’s Twitter activity with some help from a very special guest.
In the new documentary “Our New President,” director Maxim Pozdorovkin (“The Truth About Killer Robots,” “Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer”) tells the story of Donald Trump’s rise to political power entirely through the use of state-sponsored Russian TV news. Equal parts cautionary tale and absurdist farce, “Our New President” is the mirror image of the Russiagate coverage that has dominated American nightly newscasts for the last two years. In this episode of TrumpWatch, Maxim reflects on what the Russian media portrayal of Trump can tell us about that country's broader perceptions of the President.
On this week’s TrumpWatch, White House correspondent for McClatchy News and board member of the White House Correspondents' Association Anita Kumar reflects on how a new set of rules for journalists covering the White House released by President Trump’s communications staff have changed her job in the two weeks since they were issued.
Since 1990, American presidents have been required by law to oversee a major report on climate change called the National Climate Assessment featuring research from 13 federal agencies and 300 scientists. Despite plans to release the findings in December as is standard practice, the Trump administration opted to rush the 1,600-page report out the day after Thanksgiving. On Monday, President Trump told an AP reporter, “I don’t believe it.” On this week’s TrumpWatch, Umair Irfan, staff writer for Vox, considers the environmental consequences for a president who says he doesn’t believe global warming is a threat.
You can find footage of President Donald Trump weighing in on just about any issue other than homelessness. Yet an increasing number of economists have raised the issue of whether Trump’s budget cuts to the social safety net have led to a jump in the number of homeless people in America’s richest cities unseen since President Ronald Reagan employed similar cost-cutting measures in the 1980s. On this week's TrumpWatch, Esme Deprez, co-author of the Bloomberg Businessweek article “The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities,” explores what effect Trump administration policies are having to exacerbate the epidemic of homelessness in the most prosperous of the nation’s urban centers.
On Tuesday, the FBI revealed that hate crimes in the U.S. rose 17 percent in 2017, the third consecutive year that figure has gone up. The report cites 7,175 hate crimes for the year, yet according to Arjun Singh Sethi, author of “American Hate: Survivors Speak Out,” considering the tendency of state and federal agencies to underreport such incidents, the number is most likely much higher. On this week’s TrumpWatch, Arjun looks at the role President Trump has played in the spike in hate violence observed in this country since his rise to power and considers what can be done to reverse this disturbing trend.
The 2018 election was the most hotly anticipated midterm in decades. But what do the results mean for the President and his policy agenda? On this week’s TrumpWatch, Paul Kane, senior congressional reporter for the Washington Post, helps break down how the first Democratic majority in the House of Representatives in eight years and a larger Republican majority in the Senate will shape the next two years of the Trump presidency.
On Saturday, the New York Times revealed a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) memo on a proposed Trump administration plan to redefine the way the federal government recognizes gender. By reclassifying a person’s sex based solely on the genitalia they were born with in the federal civil rights law called Title IX, HHS could restrict access to civil rights protections in schools, health care and other social services. On this week’s TrumpWatch, Sarah McBride, national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, the largest civil rights organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people in the US, explains what this change in federal policy would mean.
“If hackers target this November’s midterm elections, the consequences could be far more serious than the mostly quiet probing of 2016 and would fall on an electorate that has yet to receive a full reckoning of Russia’s attack,” reads Mother Jones reporters AJ Vicens and Pema Levy's latest article “The Midterm Elections Are in Serious Danger of Being Hacked, Thanks to Trump. Hackers could try to create chaos by causing machines to malfunction, deleting properly registered voters, or even going so far as manipulating vote totals.” On this week’s TrumpWatch, Pema discusses critical vulnerabilities in America’s voting system.
When Justice Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court on Saturday, despite moving Senate testimony from Dr. Christine Blassey Ford that he had sexually assaulted her when they were teens, the country divided along mostly partisan lines on whom they believed and what they thought of the outcome. One issue that got little discussion in the controversy over Kavanaugh was the 5-4 conservative majority he brings to the highest court in the land will mean for environmental regulation in America. On this week’s TrumpWatch, Jay Michaelson, legal affairs columnist for The Daily Beast, discusses his op-ed "Kavanaugh and Supreme Court to Planet: Drop Dead."
According to most major surveys, Republican candidates for the US House of Representatives have a tough hill to climb in November in districts without overwhelming support for the President. Attempting to put some daylight between them and Trump to appeal to independents, while not alienating the President’s core base of supporters is no small task. But in an article published Oct. 2 entitled “The double lives of vulnerable House Republicans: A recording obtained by POLITICO highlights the conflicting advice GOP members in tough districts are getting,” Rachael Bade reveals that some members of the House’s right-wing Freedom Caucus, namely Virginia Congressman Dave Brat, appear to be attempting to have it both ways—painting themselves as moderate Republicans while praising extreme right views and personalities at private campaign rallies. On this week’s TrumpWatch, Rachel considers what this phenomenon means for the 2018 election.
Much of the mainstream news coverage about President Trump’s second address to the United Nations General Assembly focused on the waves of laughter heard in the audience of world leaders after he made the claim that he “has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.” But, after telling the crowd he “didn’t expect that reaction, but that’s okay,” the President proceeded to lay out a plan for US foreign policy more isolationist than anything seen from the US in decades. On this week’s TrumpWatch, White House reporter David Nakamura of the Washington Post examines the greater significance of what was said in President Trump’s speech and what it means for US foreign policy moving forward.
Back in July, when President Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court, he appeared poised to sail through his Senate confirmation hearing thanks to a solid Republican majority. Yet, days before the Senate vote on Kavanaugh ascending to the high court, a confidential letter sent to Sen. Diane Feinstein written by Clinical Psychology Professor at Palo Alto University Christine Blasey Ford alleged that the Supreme Court nominee attacked her and tried to remove her clothing while he was drunk at a party in 1982 when they were both high school students, allegations Kavanaugh has told Reuters were “completely false." On this week’s TrumpWatch, Stef W. Kight of Axios considers whether the allegations could sink Kavanaugh's nomination.
Though his backstory is largely unknown, Vice President Mike Pence is often portrayed as the rational tactician, a mirror image to President Trump’s unrestrained id. But in his new book "The Shadow President: The Truth About Mike Pence,” co-written with Michael D'Antonio, Peter Eisner pushes back on this public perception and fleshes out the VP’s backstory with results that are illuminating. A former political editor for the Washington Post, Peter looks at exactly who Mike Pence is and what has motivated him in his career path in this installment of Leonard Lopate at Large on WBAI.
On this week’s TrumpWatch, health and environment reporter Sharon Lerner of The Intercept discusses her latest article “How a DuPont Spinoff Lobbied the EPA to Stave Off the Use of Environmentally Friendly Coolants” and explains how a new generation of DuPont coolants could threaten public safety for decades to come.
On Tuesday, US Court of Appeals judge for the DC Circuit Brett Kavanaugh will head to Capitol Hill for his Senate confirmation hearing to become the next US Supreme Court justice. But as Kavanaugh appears poised to sail through the Senate thanks to a narrow Republican majority in the Senate, a new report from the nonprofit organization Public Citizen has uncovered a striking pattern of deference to corporate power in his 12 years as an appellate judge. In this episode of TrumpWatch, Mother Jones staff writer Stephanie Mencimer discusses her August 29 article “Study says Brett Kavanaugh Inevitably Rules for Whoever Is More Powerful” and examines the ways that the Supreme Court could shift if he is confirmed.
“I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew [President Trump’s senior advisor for policy Stephen Miller], an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country,” writes Dr. David S. Glosser in his August 13 op-ed for the online publication POLITICO entitled "Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle." A retired neuropsychologist and former faculty member of Boston University School of Medicine and Jefferson Medical College, Dr. Glosser felt he could no longer remain silent on the Trump administration's immigration policies which Miller helped to formulate and that he felt would have kept his own relatives out of the country. On this week's TrumpWatch, Dr. Glosser talks about what drove him to write a scathing indictment of his own nephew and shares the migration story of of Stephen Miller’s family.
In this episode of TrumpWatch, Professor of Politics at Occidental College Peter Dreier discusses his article for the nonprofit online publication Rewire.News entitled “Want White Working Class Voters to Support Democrats? Strengthen Unions” and explains why statistical data prove that labor unions hold the key to Democrats succeeding at the ballot box in 2020 and beyond.
President Donald Trump tweeted back in March that “trade wars are good and easy to win.” But from alienating America’s closest allies to his increasingly hard-line rhetoric towards China and Iran, is the President making irreversible changes to the global economy? On this week’s TrumpWatch, US economics editor for The Economist and co-host of the weekly podcast “Trade Talks” Soumaya Keynes considers what it means that “the world trading system is under attack,” as the title of one of her recent articles reads, and what the permanent fallout could be.
In less than two weeks, Republicans in Congress have put forth 12 different measures aiming at loosening enforcement of the Endangered Species Act. As reported by Mother Jones assistant editor Jackie Flynn Mogensen, “on Thursday, the House passed an Interior appropriations bill that would cut funding for environmental and science programs by $400 million, prohibit funding to introduce grizzly bears into the North Cascades (one of only five grizzly ‘recovery zones’) and remove the gray wolf from the List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife under federal law.” On this week’s TrumpWatch, Jackie describes multitude of ways that GOP lawmakers are attempting to loosen protections for animals facing extinction.
While most of the coverage of the President’s joint press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland on Monday focused on what was widely seen as Trump’s deference towards the Russian president, the former KGB officer was hardly a shrinking violet when his time came to take the microphone. On this week’s TrumpWatch, Joshua Keating, a reporter for Slate and author of the book “Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood,” takes a deep dive on what Putin could be trying to say with his comments in Helsinki.
President Ronald Reagan appointed two men for the Supreme Court in 1987. The first, Robert Bork, was rejected by the Senate by a 42 to 58 margin for his conservative views on personal privacy and the court's landmark Roe v. Wade decision that protects access to legal abortion. Reagan’s second nominee, Robert Kennedy, was confirmed by a 98-0 majority. After a 30-year tenure on the bench, Justice Kennedy set off a firestorm in Washington, DC last month when he announced he was retiring from his post where he was the Supreme Court justice long considered the “swing vote” by observers on both sides. With President Donald Trump announcing former Kennedy clerk Brett Kavanaugh as his judicial nominee on Monday, the highest court in the land appears poised to make a major swing to the right, that is, if he can get confirmed. On this week’s TrumpWatch, Mark Walsh of SCOTUSblog considers which type of candidate Kavanaugh is.
Susan McWilliams is a professor of politics at Pomona College and the granddaughter of Carey McWilliams, editor of The Nation magazine from 1955 to 1975. It was during that time that Hunter S. Thomson published his legendary article "Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs" for the publication. In a recent op-ed for The Nation entitled “This Political Theorist Predicted the Rise of Trumpism. His Name Was Hunter S. Thompson,” she writes that "this year, when people asked me what I thought of the election, I kept telling them to read 'Hell’s Angels.'" On this week's TrumpWatch, Professor McWilliams expands on why the “gonzo” journalist’s work on the motorcycle club continues to be such an effective window into the psyche of the President’s core base of supporters.
It’s been nearly two months since former CIA director and Kansas congressman Mike Pompeo was sworn in as the 70th secretary of state. Though the general sentiment at the State Department may be that he is an improvement from his inexperienced predecessor Rex Tillerson, according to a June 25 report by Nahal Toosi, foreign affairs correspondent for POLITICO, Pompeo’s role representing the US internationally may not be as much of a step up as initially thought. On this week's TrumpWatch, Nahal explains why many career diplomats have been troubled by the former U.S. Army officer’s actions in his short time helming the State Department.
Last month, when federal officials revealed that they had lost track of nearly 1,500 unaccompanied minors who had arrived on the southern border alone without their parents, the admission caused a national outcry. On Monday, when ProPublica reporter Ginger Thompson released audio she obtained of 10 Central American children separated from their parents by immigration authorities at the border, that outcry turned into an uproar. Yet, according to an exclusive report from Anita Kumar, White House correspondent for the news agency McClatchyDC, the actual number of children that the US Office of Refugee Resettlement has lost is actually much greater. On this week’s TrumpWatch, Anita expands on the disturbing findings in her article “US officials likely lost track of nearly 6,000 unaccompanied migrant kids.”
Though it only includes 393 words, the signed agreement that resulted from President Donald Trump’s June 12 meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore was hailed as a big win by both sides. The President tweeted the day after the summit that there was “no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea” and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the administration expected “major disarmament” by Kim’s military before the end of Trump’s first term, as reported in the Washington Post. North Korean state media also hailed the meeting as a major victory, describing a “step-by-step and simultaneous” process aimed at achieving peace and “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” But where do the U.S. and North Korea actually stand in the effort to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula? On this week’s TrumpWatch, Jesse talks to Jenny Town, a research analyst at the Stimson Center and managing editor of 38 North.
Back in 2016, after the lack of safe drinking water in Flint, Michigan was declared a federal state of emergency it became a major talking point on the presidential campaign with candidates from both parties visiting the city for highly publicized photo ops. Yet, 500 days into the Trump presidency many Flint residents still don’t have safe drinking water. According to a study released last month by the non-profit organization Environmental Working Group, they’re not alone. 110 million Americans could currently have contaminated water coming out of their faucets. But will this be on the minds of voters as they enter the ballot box for the 2018 midterm elections? On this week’s TrumpWatch, Jesse talks to Intercept reporter Sharon Lerner whose article “Toxic Drinking Water Becomes Top Campaign Issue for Midterm Candidates Across the U.S.” examines the role unsafe H2O could play in the midterms by focusing on three congressional races where it looks poised to play a major role.
On May 29, the New England Journal of Medicine published a Harvard University study that estimates the number of deaths in Puerto Rico caused by Hurricane Maria as over 4,600, more than 70 times the official estimate provided by the Puerto Rican government. On this week’s TrumpWatch, Jesse speaks to Arelis Hernandez, a politics and government reporter for the Washington Post who was in Puerto Rico the week Maria struck the island.
It's been a year since Special Counsel Robert Mueller began his investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives in the 2016 election and (at least as far as public perception goes) the picture is foggier than ever. According to an online survey of registered voters released Wednesday by the polling group Navigator, 59 percent of Americans don’t believe Mueller has uncovered any criminal activity despite five guilty pleas and 17 criminal indictments already handed down by the special counsel and his team. With the constant barrage of breaking news on the Russia investigation leaving even professional political pundits flummoxed, it’s not hard to see why Mueller’s efforts are being misunderstood if not outright ignored by anyone who isn’t a political junkie. In this week’s TrumpWatch, Jesse takes a look at what we know one year in with David Corn, Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones and the co-author of the book “Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump.”
On his new album “Anger Management,” Colorado-based singer-songwriter Gerry Spehar takes aim at President Trump with a directness not often heard in country music. Formerly one half of the Spehar Brothers, Gerry performed heavily throughout the Midwest in the 1970s, sharing bills with giants of the genre like Boz Scaggs, Merle Haggard and Townes Van Zandt. But nothing in his musical past is as overtly political as “Anger Management.” His second solo album is both a dedication to that great folk hero of protest music Woody Guthrie and a refutation of the DOnald Trump presidency. In a special one-hour episode of TrumpWatch, Gerry talks about the feelings of dissent that inspired “Anger Management,” along with what it means to be a protest singer in the Woody Guthrie tradition now that the son of the folk hero's landlord (as immortalized in the Woody Guthrie song “Old Man Trump”) is the president of the United States.
At a rally in Washington, Michigan on Saturday, President Donald Trump seemed to relish the crowd chants of “Nobel!”--a reference to his upcoming meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and a historic summit the previous day between Kim and his South Korean counterpart, President Moon Jae In of South Korea. But how much credit does Trump, who was engaged with a vicious war of words with Kim less than six months ago, deserve for this recent diplomatic display on the Korean Peninsula? On this week’s TrumpWatch, Jesse talks to David Smith, Washington DC bureau chief of The Guardian.
Last week, 131 representatives and 39 senators signed a congressional resolution calling on Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt to resign. But, according to Amy Harder of Axios, whether Pruitt stays in his role at the EPA or goes his controversial agenda of slashing environmental regulations will continue as long as there is a Republican in the White House. On this week’s TrumpWatch, Amy reviews some of the most consequential actions Pruitt has taken while overseeing the EPA.
In 2017, when President Trump authorized the firing of 59 Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian air base in retaliation for its alleged role in a sarin gas attack both British and French government agencies reportedly had soil samples confirming that chemical weapons had been used, violating international law. Yet, when US forces launched coordinated airstrikes with the UK and France on Friday to take out three facilities in Syria believed to be researching, developing and storing chemical weapons, the proof was a lot less solid. On this week’s TrumpWatch, Colum Lynch and Elias Groll, co-authors of the Foreign Policy article “How Social Media Built the Case for Trump’s Strike on Syria,” examine the evidence used to justify this new round of air attacks by the US and its allies.
From the time he announced his intention to run for president, in June of 2015, Donald Trump has consistently linked rape with undocumented immigrants. But while the President has repeatedly called Mexicans rapists without any evidence to support his claims, according to a new investigative report by Alice Speri of The Intercept, it is actually U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers that are sexually assaulting undocumented immigrants. Alice’s article “Detained, Then Violated: 1,224 Complaints Reveal a Staggering Pattern of Sexual Abuse in Immigration Detention. Half of Those Accused Worked for ICE,” parses the hundreds of reports of sexual abuse filed by those who allege that they were raped while in custody. On this week’s TrumpWatch, Jesse talks to Alice about the disturbing accounts she uncovered and examines what can be done to stop this.
On April 4, 1968, the legacy of civil rights in America changed in an instant when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed by an assassin’s bullet at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. On this week’s TrumpWatch with Jesse Lent on WBAI, Larry Hamm, chairman and founder of the People’s Organization for Progress reflects on the struggle for black equality in the 50 years since the slaying of Dr. King.
When President Donald Trump held a joint press conference with Gov. Ricardo Rossello of Puerto Rico at the White House in October, exactly one month after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, he was asked how he would rate his administration’s response to the devastating storm on a scale of one to 10. The President gave himself a 10. Yet for the thousands of Puerto Ricans still stranded without power or adequate access to food or clean water, the federal response to Maria had been anything but. On this week’s TrumpWatch, Jesse talks to Danny Vinik, assistant editor of The Agenda at POLITICO, whose March 27 article “How Trump favored Texas over Puerto Rico: A POLITICO investigation shows a persistent double standard in the president’s handling of relief efforts for Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Maria” explores how the Trump administration treated the U.S. island territory differently than the 28th state.
On February 17, at a gun control rally held in front of the Broward County Courthouse, Stoneman Douglas senior Emma Gonzalez gave an impassioned plea for students to stand up and demand action for her slain classmates after a student went on a shooting rampage on February 14 that killed 17 and wounded 17. The clip was viewed over 3 million times on YouTube. But Gonzalez was just getting started. Along with her schoolmates Alfonso Calderon, Sarah Chadwick, Emma González, David Hogg and Cameron Kasky, she started the organization Never Again MSD with the goal of ending school shootings in the US permanently. With Never Again MSD’s first major demonstration, The March For Our Lives happening in Washington, DC and across the country on Saturday, Jesse talks to Josh Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition To Stop Gun Violence, about how the Parkland students have changed the political calculus of the gun debate in this country.
Back in September, when Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, 44 percent of local residents were left without safe drinking water. But according to Sarah Laskow, author of the Atlas Obscura article “The Hidden Problems With Puerto Rico’s Water Supply,” the island’s water infrastructure was already in deep trouble before Maria hit, from a combination of leaky pipes, a high concentration of toxic Superfund sites and the natural geography of the area. On this week’s TrumpWatch, Jesse asks Sarah how we got here and what it will take to get Puerto Rico’s water system to work for all of the people living there.
What does it mean to have someone in charge of the third largest government agency (with over 240,000 employees and a roster that includes the Secret Service, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Coast Guard) whose main qualification is her unfettered loyalty to President Trump? On this week’s TrumpWatch on WBAI, Jesse considers this question with Jonathan Blitzer of The New Yorker. Jonathan spoke to seven current and former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) staff members for his March 1 article “How the DHS Secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, Became One of President Trump’s Fiercest Loyalists.”
President Trump had been in office for three months when he called Washington Post reporter Robert Costa on his cellphone to inform him that a Republican bill to overhaul the healthcare system was dead. The previous October, when a tape of Trump talking crudely in 2005 to “Access Hollywood” host Billy Bush threatened to derail his 2016 campaign, Trump gave his first interview to the entrenched journo. Again and again the President has demonstrated his trust in the 32-year-old journalist by speaking to him on the record, despite Costa’s refusal to shy away from reporting unflattering developments within the administration. In 2017, Robert replaced Gwen Ifill as the host of PBS's “Washington Week” after the groundbreaking journalist died from endometrial cancer the previous year. In this installment of TrumpWatch, Jesse talks to Robert about the ways that Washington, DC has changed during the Trump presidency.
After Year One of a presidency that could be described in several ways, “uneventful” not among them, there was no shortage of material for President Trump to select from for his first State of the Union address. But although the President’s speech was promoted as an attempt to bring the fiercely divided political parties together, what he chose to include—from a veiled negative reference to professional athletes protesting police killing of unarmed black people to his announcement that he had just signed an executive order to keep the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba open—was divisive rhetoric to put it mildly. On this week’s TrumpWatch, Jesse examines the meaning behind the President’s remarks with White House correspondent for Reuters Ayesha Rascoe.
It was the image of a pink pussy hat on the head of a Harriet Tubman statue in Harlem that set Taylyn Washington-Harmon off. Seeing the civil rights icon’s image coopted for a specific brand of modern feminism was something she found wrong on so many levels that it inspired her to write the Self magazine op-ed “Not My Pussy Hat: Why I Didn't Participate in the Women's March This Year.” In a special one-hour episode of TrumpWatch, Jesse asks Taylyn whether the 2018 Women’s March marginalized women of color and what event organizers could do to send a more inclusive message to the masses. We also take your calls on the ways that white women can be allies for black women on issues like pay inequality and systemic racism.
Since taking office, President Donald Trump’s administration has been making aggressive moves to do eliminate President Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, with Justice Department officials recently asking the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to overrule a federal court decision protecting the program. So, what does this all mean for DACA enrollees (the "dreamers") as they watch this legal fight play out in real time? On this week’s TrumpWatch, Jesse talks to Camille Mackler, director of immigration legal policy for the New York Immigrant Coalition (NYIC) about what the legal fight over DACA will mean for those enrolled in the program and their families.
President Trump is constantly making headlines about the latest Obama-era program he’s eliminating, the international agreements he is doing away with or whichever historical norms he’s choosing to ignore on a given day. But what is the action in this constant flurry of activity that he will be best remembered for? On this week’s TrumpWatch, Jesse looks at which of the President’s actions will be the most transformative with Michael Grunwald, senior staff writer for Politico Magazine and the author of the article “Donald Trump Is a Consequential President. Just Not in the Ways You Think.” He’s also the creator of the publication’s Did-It-Matter-Meter, assessing both the immediate and far-reaching consequences of the President's actions.
What happened in 2017? Depending on whom you talk to, President Donald Trump’s first year in office was an unprecedented success or a historic failure. But in what quantifiable ways has he changed life in the United States and beyond? As the smoke clears from this unprecedented shift in American politics, Jesse talks to New York Magazine reporter Nick Tabor. His article “55 Ways Donald Trump Structurally Changed America in 2017” aims to catalog the changes to the way the country is run that have taken effect in the last year.
For the last TrumpWatch with Jesse Lent of 2017, we decided to revisit one of our favorite interviews--Jesse’s conversation with Kurt Andersen, the host of the Peabody Award-winning public radio program “Studio 360” and co-author (with Alec Baldwin) of the Trump parody novel “You Can't Spell America Without Me: The Really Tremendous Inside Story of My Fantastic First Year as President Donald J. Trump (A So-Called Parody).” This portion of the interview was originally cut for time.
On Thursday, the FCC voted to approve Chairman Ajit Pai’s plan to eliminate the so-called net neutrality rules preventing Internet service providers from speeding up access to some websites while slowing down or blocking others. On a straight party-line vote of 3 to 2, the five FCC commissioners didn’t just do away with net neutrality regulations passed under the Obama administration, but went a step further, voiding the original document supporting a free and open online experience. In this week’s TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent speaks to Washington Post reporter Brian Fung about what happens now that net neutrality has become a thing of the past in the US.
Earlier this month, the New Jersey chapter of the immigrant advocacy nonprofit Make The Road released a study entitled “ICE in the New Jersey Courts." The study found that since Donald Trump has become President, 78 percent of survey respondents have had clients that say they are too scared to attend criminal court due to fear of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in the courts. As for the concrete effect on the judicial system, more than half of those surveyed reported having clients who have skipped an appearance in municipal or criminal court due to fear of ICE. In this episode of TrumpWatch on WBAI New York 99.5FM, host Jesse Lent speaks to Lauren Herman, a staff attorney for Make The Road New Jersey who co-authored the study, about what ICE’s courthouse arrests will mean for the justice system.
Last Saturday in the early morning hours, Senate Republicans passed a bill containing the most substantial changes to the US tax code in several decades with a 51-49 vote almost entirely along party lines. The 479-page tax bill, the final version of which included what Democratic Senator Jon Tester of Montana described as “hand-scribbled policy changes on it that can’t be read” was dropped on the Senate only a few hours before they were asked to vote on it. Though the bill now goes to conference with both the Senate and the House of Representatives to resolve differences between the versions approved by the two Congressional bodies before it is sent to the President’s desk, most Washington DC insiders see little chance of the Republican tax reform plan failing to be ratified in a version close to what the Senate just approved. So what does that mean or the rest of us? In celebration of the 50th episode of TrumpWatch with Jesse Lent, we welcome back one of our favorite guests, David Cay Johnston, the author of “The Making of Donald Trump” and founder of the nonprofit news site DCReport.org, to break down the major changes afoot in America's tax code.
Last week, Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai submitted a proposal to dismantle the net neutrality rules put in place by the Obama administration. In her Nov. 22 article “F.C.C. Plan to Roll Back Net Neutrality Worries Small Businesses,” New York Times reporter Tiffany Hsu examines the effect that rolling back net neutrality regulations could have on smaller online retailers that depend on a fair and open Internet. This week on TrumpWatch, Jesse talks to Tiffany about some of the less obvious ways the fight at the FCC could effect our daily lives.
In September of 2017, Trump famously asked the crowd at an Alabama rally "wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, 'get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out, he's fired?'" Though there is undoubtedly a long history of activism in professional sports, from Muhammad Ali to LeBron James, the current controversy began last season when Colin Kaepernick, then a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, refused to rise for the national anthem at the start of games to highlight police brutality and the killing of unarmed African-Americans. Kaepernick has yet to sign with an NFL team after becoming a free agent earlier this year. In a special one-hour episode of TrumpWatch, Jesse speaks with Dr. Harry Edwards, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, about the role athletes have played in the struggle for civil rights in America. A longtime consultant for the San Francisco 49ers and the Golden State Warriors, Dr. Edwards organized the Olympic Project for Human Rights, which inspired African-American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos to raise a fist in the "Black Power salute" during the playing of the United States national anthem at a medal ceremony during the 1968 Summer Olympic Games in Mexico City.
What goes into creating an iconic impression? Does assuming the personality of a subject, even to make fun of them, allow you any new insight into their way of thinking? On this week’s TrumpWatch, Jesse Lent talks to Alec Baldwin whose impression of Donald Trump on “Saturday Night Live,” has become the definitive impression of the 45th President. In addition to discussing what it’s like to perform as someone he admittedly dislikes, Alec compares playing Trump to some of his other iconic roles. Jesse also speaks with Kurt Andersen, the host of “Studio 360” on Public Radio International, who co-authored a new Trump parody book with Alec entitled “You Can't Spell America Without Me: The Really Tremendous Inside Story of My Fantastic First Year as President Donald J. Trump.”
When special counsel Robert Mueller announced indictments for Donald Trump’s former campaign adviser, Paul Manafort and campaign aide Rick Gates and unsealed a plea deal made for false statements by campaign volunteer George Papadopoulos, it led to more questions than answers. Tasked by the Justice Department back in May to pursue alleged Russian efforts to help Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election and investigate any possible collusion between Trump campaign staff and Moscow, Monday’s announcement was the first major public move that Mueller has made. This week, in a special one-hour episode of TrumpWatch, Jesse examines what this week’s developments tell us about the direction that the Mueller investigation is taking with national security journalist Marcy Wheeler who wrote the Intercept article “George Papadopoulos’s Plea Deal Is Very, Very Bad News for Attorney General Jeff Sessions” and POLITICO senior investigative reporter Josh Meyer, whose own Oct. 30 piece is entitled “Kremlin likely cultivated Trump adviser, experts say.”
What makes Steve Bannon tick? What drives a man as feared and hated by liberals and conservatives as he is beloved by the army of “alt-right” white nationalist followers he’s cultivated as executive chairman of the far-right leaning news and opinion website Breitbart? Is President Trump’s former chief strategist “The Great Manipulator” as Time branded him in a February cover story or the “virulently anti-establishment revolutionary out to destroy the administrative state,” as he was described in a New York Times article from back in April? And is Bannon’s political activity since being fired motivated purely by his core beliefs, as his public persona would seem to imply, or is he simply acting out of his own self-interest? According to this week’s guest Anita Kumar, White House correspondent for the news agency McClatchyDC, the answer isn’t so easy to determine. Yet, there's one thing most political reporters seem to agree on--Steve Bannon still has the President’s ear.
Returning to Washington DC aboard Air Force One after touring the devastation Hurricane Maria unleashed on the US territory of Puerto Rico, President Trump told reporters his administration has “only heard ‘thank yous’ from the people" there. Though the locals may appreciate the help, according to Abby Maxman, the president of Oxfam America, the US chapter of the international confederation of charitable organizations focused on fighting global poverty, "clean water, food, fuel, electricity and health care are in desperately short supply and quickly dwindling and we’re hearing excuses and criticism from the administration instead of a cohesive and compassionate response.” On this week’s TrumpWatch, Jesse talks to Scott Paul, humanitarian policy lead for Oxfam about the Trump administration’s relief efforts in Puerto Rico and why the members of his organization believe they have been so poor that there was a need to take the unusual step of speaking out.
From calling Mexicans rapists and criminals at his campaign kick-off, to three different travel bans restricting travel from majority-Muslim nations, from alleged violations of the emoluments clause to the ongoing probe into collusion with the Russian government in the 2016 election, from the "Access Hollywood" tape to the Iran nuclear deal, from the NBA to the NFL, there sometimes seem to be as many reasons given for why President Donald Trump must be removed from office as there are protest movements. In a one-hour special State of the Resistance edition of TrumpWatch, Jesse discusses what lessons activists can learn from the history of radical anti-fascist protest throughout the last century with Mark Bray, a former Occupy Wall Street organizer, Dartmouth College lecturer and author of the book "Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook" and Barbara Ann Radnofsky, a retired trial lawyer, the first woman in Texas history to run as the Democratic candidate for the US Senate and the author of "A Citizen's Guide to Impeachment" about what remedies are available within the current political system to remove a sitting president from office.
Earlier this week at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City, President Donald Trump took the opportunity of his first address to the General Assembly to rail against the Iran nuclear deal reached during President Barack Obama’s administration. “The Iran deal was one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into,” President Trump told the room of world leaders. “Frankly, that deal is an embarrassment to the United States and I don't think you've heard the last of it. Believe me.” Political analysts were practically unanimous in their belief that President Trump was signifying plans to find Iran in breech of a nuclear agreement negotiated by President Barack Obama and six other major nations in 2015, before the Oct. 15 deadline. On this week’s TrumpWatch, Jesse talks to Parisa Hafezi, chief Iran correspondent for Reuters, about where President Trump’s bluster towards Iran is leading us. Typically Based in Ankara, Turkey, Parisa is currently in New York City to cover the U.N. General Assembly and was in attendance for the President’s speech on Tuesday.
"With approximately 142 Americans dying every day, America is enduring a death toll equal to September 11 every three weeks,” reads an interim report submitted to the White House earlier this month by President Trump’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis, led by New Jersey governor Chris Christie. The report prompted the President, speaking from his Bedminster, N.J. golf club on Aug. 10, to declare the opioid crisis a “national emergency.” Yet there has been little in the way of concrete action in the month since Trump's pronouncement. On this week's TrumpWatch, Jesse’s guest Jonah Walters, a researcher at the quarterly magazine Jacobin, wonders if this lack of action is better than a lot of what the commander-in-chief has in mind. In his article “Ending the Opioid Crisis,” Jonah studies this national issue by exploring the local toll it has had on his hometown of Williamsport, PA.
On April 26, 2017, when Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for his Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke to review 27 national monuments designated by the three previous Presidents, he made it clear that he already had a plan on how to proceed. Specifically calling out his predecessor Barack Obama for federal overreach, President Trump pledged to "return" significant parts of the land included in these monuments to the states, despite the fact that these areas have been federally run since being seized from indigenous peoples in the early history of the American West. With Zinke submitting his report (which predictably recommended scaling back federal control over several of the tracts of public land on the list) to the White House on Aug. 24, the future of these national monuments is uncertain. In this week's TrumpWatch, Jesse talks to Brian Calvert, the editor-in-chief of High Country News, a Colorado-based magazine that covers the American West, about the nationally preserved lands the Trump administration is poised to hand over to the states. His editorial, “The Trump administration's national monuments 'review' is a sham,” was published in the Guardian last week.
Back on July 26, When President Donald Trump tweeted that he would be implementing a ban on transgender troops serving in the U.S. Armed Forces, military officials made it clear that there would be no change in policy without an official order to the Pentagon. Last Friday, the President made that order. In this week's TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent unpacks what the ban will mean for trans soldiers currently serving as well as for transgender citizens considering enlisting and how likely it is that the new rule will be reversed in the courts with Bobby Hodgson, a staff attorney at the ACLU of New York. The ACLU is currently suing the Trump administration, claiming the President's transgender military ban violates the constitutional rights of six active duty service members.
“Our troops will fight to win," President Donald Trump said Monday night in his first first prime-time broadcast on a single policy issue. "We will fight to win. From now on, victory will have a clear definition.” Yet, as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson appeared to concede in public remarks the following day, the reality on the ground is not one that appears to present any possible clear victory. In this week's TrumpWatch, Rod Nordland speaks to Jesse from Kabul, Afghanistan (where he is the New York Times bureau chief) about his recent article "What an Afghanistan Victory Looks Like Under the Trump Plan."
On Saturday, after a 20-year-old Nazi sympathizer named James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others, President Donald Trump addressed the nation from his Bedminster, N.J. golf course. His statement that blame was shared by "many sides" was immediately called out for being insufficient by politicians of both parties, leading the President to call the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists "repugnant" in a revised statement on the issue on Monday. But the following day, Trump appeared to double down on his original comments that there was blame on both sides. On this week's TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent talks to Scott Marzano, a former U.S. Marine who served two tours of duty in Iraq and participated in the counter-protest in Charlottesville on Saturday. Scott was standing in the same crowd of counter-protesters as Heather Heyer when she was killed. Beyond sharing his first-hand account of the tragic event, the ex-Marine's offers his own impression of President Trump's response to the attack.
When President Donald Trump tweeted that "the United States Government will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. military," he called into question the fate of the estimated 12,800 troops currently in active service that would be affected. But are the President's stated reasons for the pledged shift in policy, the “tremendous medical costs and disruption,” supported by the facts? In this episode of TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent examines whether sexual orientation actually has a quantifiable effect on the cohesion of our fighting force with Nathaniel Frank, director of Columbia Law School's What We Know Project, a research initiative that collects scholarship on LGBTQ public policy and the author of “Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America” and Alexander Downes, an associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, where he teaches courses on international security and military effectiveness. His article “Would transgender troops harm military effectiveness? Here’s what the research says” was published on August 1 in the Washington Post.
This week, with Vice President Mike Pence casting the tie-breaking vote and Sen. John McCain of Arizona returning to the Capitol despite a brain cancer diagnosis and recent surgery to remove a blood clot over his left eye, Senate Republicans were able to secure the 50 votes needed to begin debate on bills repealing or replacing the Affordable Care Act. If they are able to pass legislation reversing President Obama's signature health care policy, President Donald Trump has vowed to sign it, as long as it is what he described to Fox News co-anchor Eric Bolling back in May as a "great plan." But what does this all mean for the future of health policy in America? In this week's TrumpWatch, Jesse talks to Russell Berman, senior associate editor at The Atlantic, about where the political battle over repeal and replace is headed.
As most Americans know, Donald Trump had a long and well-publicized business career before entering the political arena in his 70s. In part two of his interview with David Cay Johnston, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor-in-chief of DCReport.org and the author of "The Making Of Donald Trump," host Jesse Lent asks about Trump's past business ventures financial history, a subject on which Johnston is considered one of the nation's foremost authorities.
The ongoing Justice Department investigation into whether the Donald Trump campaign colluded with Russian officials in the 2016 presidential election has been splashed across the front page for months. But are the elite journalists at the forefront of this media frenzy missing the mark? In the first installment of a two-part interview, TrumpWatch" host Jesse Lent speaks with David Cay Johnston, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor-in-chief of DCReport.org and the author of "The Making Of Donald Trump" about what key aspects of the Russian collusion controversy are getting lost in the heat of the current political moment. His July 8 editorial, "Why Did We Create DCReport.org? Because Most News Coverage of the Trump-Putin Meeting Missed the Most Important Point," explored critical areas of Trump's relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin that have gone underreported by most major newspapers.
In December of 2017, when Donald Trump nominated retired General John F. Kelly to his current post of U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, he sailed through his Senate confirmation hearings, receiving the chamber's approval by a margin of 88 Senators to 11. But the stricter rules regarding airline travel coming out of the Department of Homeland Security under his watch and his full-throated support for the President's immigration policy, has left many Democrats with buyer's remorse. In this episode of TrumpWatch, Jesse talks to Jonah Walters of the quarterly magazine Jacobin about what Kelly's past can tell us about the man and his views on U.S. security policy.
On Monday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments when the nine Justices reconvene in the fall on whether President Donald Trump's Executive Order 13769, entitled Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States, (what the President himself has called a travel ban) is constitutional. Yet, they also lifted a stay on certain aspects of Trump's travel ban, overriding several federal appeals court decisions blocking the order. The ruling means anyone coming to the US from the six banned countries, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, will be forced to prove they have "bone-fide ties" to a local organization or citizen in order to gain entry until the final Supreme Court decision is handed down. According to Diala Shamas, a lecturer in law and a supervising attorney at Stanford Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic who works with Muslim communities in the United States, the SCOTUS ruling on Trump's travel ban is proof that the judicial branch cannot be the check on the President's agenda that many on the left were hoping it would be. Her op-ed “Lawyers alone can’t save us from Trump. The Supreme Court just proved it,” appeared in Tuesday's edition of the Washington Post. In this episode of TrumpWatch, Jesse talks to Professor Shamas about what the Supreme Court decision will mean in the immediate term, why it signifies the problems with expecting lawyers to be a bulwark against the President's agenda and what citizens can do to e resist the change in national immigration policy if the answer isn't in the courts.
On June 16, 2017, when President Donald J. Trump announced he would reverse the Obama-era loosening of the US embargo of Cuba, he raised major questions about what the change will mean for relations between the two countries. On this week's TrumpWatch, Jesse explores what the President's return to a harder line in U.S.-Cuba policy will mean for travel, trade and diplomatic relations between the two nations with Mimi Whitefield of the Miami Herald.
With the ongoing investigation of Trump administration ties to Russia dominating national news coverage, it can often appear like there is little time for reporters to investigate anything else. Among the litany of critical issues getting kicked off of the front pages of most major newspapers in America is the environment. President Trump and his EPA head Scott Pruitt promised to rollback reams of Obama-era regulations and so far they have made good on that promise. In this episode of TrumpWatch, Amy Harder, a reporter covering energy and environmental policy for Axios who writes the Harder Line weekly column, returns to the show to discuss which shifts in green policy have been overshadowed by the daily revelations of the investigation into Russian collusion.
On the eve of former FBI Director James Comey's Senate testimony, Jesse examines what it would take to bring impeachment proceedings in the House and what it would mean for the country with Norman Solomon, a co-founder of RootsAction Network who started a petition to remove President Trump from office that has received over 1.1 million signatures.
Despite celebrities from practically every corner of pop culture urging young people to vote in the 2016 presidential election, according to a study from the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning, half of Americans 18-to-29 chose not to. Considering that the same age group voted for Donald Trump's challenger, Hillary Clinton, by a margin of 55 to 37 percent, if more people under 30 had voted it very well could have altered the outcome. So, why did so many millennials decide to disengage with politics? In this special hour-long episode of TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent talks to a panel of six 20-somethings about how the nation has changed under the new President and if it has changed their own feelings about the American body politic.
Earlier this month, Republicans in the House of Representatives celebrated the passage of a bill that would repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act in a press conference with President Trump on the White House lawn. Yet, in their haste to fulfill years of campaign promises from Republicans in Congress and Trump himself, Speaker Paul Ryan decided to hold the vote on the bill before the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) had been able to estimate the cost. When the CBO's analysis was released on Wednesday, it found an estimated 23 million Americans will lose their healthcare over the next 10 years, only 1 million less people left uninsured than the original House bill which Ryan pulled back in March after he reportedly didn't have the votes. In this episode of TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent discusses the politics and the substance of the Republican plan to overhaul medical policy in the U.S. with Adam Cancyn, a healthcare reporter for POLITICO.
On May 16, 2017, when members of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's diplomatic escort attacked peaceful protesters at a demonstration outside Turkey's foreign embassy in Washington DC, Elif Genç was one of those caught up in the melee. On this week's TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent talks to the Kurdish women's social movement activist about her harrowing experience of being physically assaulted in plain sight by three of Erdogan's bodyguards and considers whether this signifies a change in the legal protections of peaceful protesters in the Donald Trump era.
Between the firing of FBI Director James Comey, the disclosure of highly classified information to Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and ambassador Sergey Kislyak and revelations of his alleged request to Comey to squash an investigation into his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, there's been more breaking news than ever this week on the ongoing saga of whether the Donald Trump administration illegally colluded with the Russian government. But with most major news outlets operating at code red, are key progressive issues being overshadowed by the nonstop news cycle? Jesse's guest John Tarleton, editor-in-chief of The Indypendent (indypendent.org) thinks so. In this episode of TrumpWatch on WBAI 99.5fm New York, John explains why it is important to not let the issues the left has been fighting for get lost in the chaos.
In a special one-hour edition of TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent takes your calls on what motive could be behind the President's firing of FBI Director James Comey and what it could mean for the investigation into Russian collusion with the Trump campaign in the hacking of the 2016 election.
Back in January, when President Donald J. Trump nominated top campaign contributor Betsy DeVos as his Education Secretary, the opposition was swift and mobilized. Charging that DeVos was unfit to hold the office since she had no experience working in public education and was a powerful advocate for charter schools, protestors blocked her from entering Jefferson Middle School Academy during her fourth day on the job. Yet in the four months since then, resistance efforts against Trump's secretary of education have often been overshadowed by other protest movements. And as the administration's actions to undo two signature programs of former first lady Michelle Obama promoting healthier school lunches proves, public education advocates' fears don't begin and end with Betsy Devos. On this week's TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent discusses the state of the public school system under President Trump with Basir Mchawi, a Queens College professor and the host of WBAI's Education At The Crossroads.
In this episode of TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent explores how Donald Trump is doing and what he has done as we approach the first major milestone of his presidency with POLITICO senior writer Michael Grunwald. His article "Trump’s First 100 Days: What Mattered, And What Didn’t" is a definitive breakdown of the flurry of events we've seen so far.
In an April 11 press conference in the border town of Nogales, Arizona, Attorney General Jeff Sessions proclaimed "we are living in a new era…the Trump era...the lawlessness, the abdication of the duty to enforce our immigration laws and the catch and release practices of old are over." But with nominees for deputy attorney general and associate attorney general (the second and third in the chain of command at the Department of Justice, respectively) still awaiting Senate confirmation and replacements for the 93 U.S. attorneys President Trump asked to resign still pending, will Sessions be able to implement the sweeping policy changes he is seeking at the Justice Department? In the 20th episode of TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent discusses how the Justice Department has changed under the Trump administration with three-time Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Sari Horwitz of the Washington Post.
As U.S. and Chinese armed forces rush to the Korean Peninsula, it's still unclear whether President Donald Trump is willing to engage militarily with Kim Jong Un in order to thwart the North Korean dictator's quest for a long-range nuclear weapon. In this episode of TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent examines what shape the Trump administration's foreign policy on North Korea is taking (and what government officials in China think of it) with Oriana Skylar Mastro, an assistant professor in security studies at Georgetown University whose work has been featured in The Atlantic, the New Republic and the Journal of Strategic Studies.
Net neutrality is an issue that can evoke anything from a passionate defense to a vacant stare, depending on who you're talking to. But did you know that last week Congress voted to allow Internet service providers (or "ISPs") to sell your personal browsing history to the highest bidder? In this week's TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent discusses net neutrality and finds out how to prevent your online history from being used as a marketing tool with Olivia Solon, a tech reporter for the Guardian.
On this week's TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent discusses the administration's ties to Russia and the Congressional investigations into them with Karoun Demirjian, a foreign policy reporter for the Washington Post and a former correspondent at the paper's Moscow bureau.
Like most Republicans in Congress, President Donald Trump ran on a pledge to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare). Yet, the current battle in the House of Representatives over Speaker Paul Ryan's bill to overhaul the national healthcare system has revealed divisions in the party on exactly how to do this. In this week's TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent discusses what is in the Ryan plan with POLITICO health care reporter Adam Cancryn, who also offers insight into the fight to get the bill passed in the House.
How different is President Trump's new executive order, nicknamed "Travel Ban 2.0" by several media outlets, from his original Jan. 28 action blocked by a panel of three 9th Circuit Court of Appeals judges? In this episode of TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent discusses the President's controversial immigration policy with Trina Realmuto, litigation director of the National Immigration Project at the National Lawyers Guild.
President Donald Trump received generally positive marks for the markedly more presidential tone he struck in his first address to a joint session of Congress. In this episode of TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent examines the substance of Trump's speech with New York Times congressional correspondent Jennifer Steinhauer.
President Donald Trump has continued to claim the 2016 election was rigged, despite no apparent evidence to support his claim. Rolling Stone investigative journalist Greg Palast believes that the President is half correct; it isn't the millions of undocumented immigrants Trump claims cast ballots for Hillary Clinton that got him elected, but the millions of Americans kept off the voter rolls due to a notoriously flawed database funded by the Koch Brothers called Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck. In this episode of TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent talks to Palast about uncovering what he believes is a widespread Republican-led effort to suppress minority voter turnout as documented in his film "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy."
As a candidate, Donald Trump made some bold claims on what his administration would do regarding immigration. In this episode of TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent talks to political analyst Armondo Gudino from the Drug Policy Alliance about pending immigration reform legislation he helped draft in the California State Assembly. Then, Rajib Miah of Harlem Copwatch and the coalition New York City Against Trump discusses the Know Your Rights event for undocumented immigrants his organization is sponsoring in Queens, NY on March 19.
In this episode of TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent discusses the resistance movement that is challenging the new administration with Tracy Clark, Jason Roer and Ashley Graham, the founders of the Fire The Fool Declaration Rally scheduled for April 1 in Washington DC.
In the premiere episode of TrumpWatch back in December, we examined the likelihood of President-elect Donald Trump's proposed Muslim ban coming to pass with Arun Kundnani, author of "The Muslims Are Coming: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror.” Now, following of the President's executive order on Jan. 28 banning immigrants from seven Muslim countries from entering the US, Mr. Kundnani returns to offer his thoughts on what further government actions on immigration may be on the horizon.
On this episode of TrumpWatch on WBAI 99.5fm Pacifica Radio New York, we open the phones for the first time and ask our listeners what they would tell President Donald Trump if they had a 30-second Oval Office meeting with the new President?
In the first-ever one-hour edition of TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent explores the new President's unorthodox speaking style with George Lakoff, professor of cognitive science and linguistics at UC Berkeley's graduate program and takes your calls on whether you think Trump's manner of expressing himself is strategic.
In this episode of TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent explores whether the Women's March On Washington, the day after Donald J. Trump became the 45th President of the United States, is an anti-Trump protest with Tabitha St. Bernard-Jacobs, youth initiative coordinator for the march and a member of the National Committee of organizers behind the Jan. 21 demonstration.
On January 11, 2017, former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson began his confirmation hearings with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in order to become the 69th US Secretary of State. In this episode of TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent takes a look at some of the controversy surrounding Tillerson's appointment, with New York Times Washington DC correspondent Jennifer Steinhauer.
CUNY School of Law professor Frank Deale and lecturer in law and political science at City College of New York's Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership R.B Bernstein were two of 1,226 faculty members from 176 different law schools in 49 states that sent a letter to the Senate Committee of the Judiciary urging them to block Sen. Jeff Sessions's nomination for attorney general. In this episode of TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent examines what effect Sessions could have on the Justice Department and talks to these two professors about why they decided to add their signatures to the letter.
(12/28/16) In this episode, host Jesse Lent discusses what role Indiana governor Mike Pence may play in Donald Trump's administration as vice president with Managing Editor of The New Republic Jeet Heer. We also open the phone lines for our first-ever call-in, on the topic of what issues you'd like us to cover on TrumpWatch.
(12/21/16) In this week's TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent examines what the new administration will mean for undocumented immigrants. Our guest, New Yorker reporter Jonathan Blitzer, spoke to illegal aliens living in New York City for his recent article "Undocumented Immigrants Brace For The Trump Administration."
(12/14/16) In this episode of TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent discusses what the President-elect's nominee for EPA head, Scott Pruitt, could mean for environmental policy in the US. Our guest is Amy Harder of the Wall Street Journal's Washington DC bureau.
(12/7/16) In the debut episode of TrumpWatch, host Jesse Lent examines what the new administration could mean for Muslims in the U.S. with Arun Kundnani, a scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library and author of the book "The Muslims Are Coming: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror."