Start Making Sense

Listen HERE
Norman Lear, who created All in the Family, reflects on why it succeeded in the Age of Nixon—and on what is different about political satire in the Age of Trump.
Plus: The Nation’s Zoë Carpenter reports on Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley, who has taken the lead in fighting for an alternative to the GOP’s repeal and replacement of Obamacare.
And: Amy Goldstein of The Washington Post discusses what happened when Paul Ryan’s hometown lost its GM plant. Her new book is Janesville.

Listen HERE
The “new normal” of daily disasters for the White House make Trump more dangerous and irrational, Sasha Abramsky says, and more likely to adopt fascistic tactics.
Plus: conservatives argue that the courts have gone too far in rejecting Trump’s travel ban as an unconstitutional attack on Muslims—David Cole of the ACLU responds.
And Guardian columnist Paul Mason analyzes the British elections in the wake of Trump’s trip to Europe, which he calls “disastrous.”

Listen HERE
All budgets are political statements—Trump’s, submitted to the House on Tuesday, represents a cruel attack on the weakest and most vulnerable, in order to slash taxes for the wealthiest. And the assumptions behind the claim that it is “balanced” could generously be called “unusual.” George Zornick comments.
Plus: The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that two of North Carolina’s congressional districts had been gerrymandered to weaken the black vote in the state. Ari Berman explains.
Also: Trump’s weekend visit to Saudi Arabia was an embarrassment in many ways, and sinister in others. Joshua Holland has the details.

LISTEN HERE
Could the Democrats remove Trump from office?  Should they?  Harold Meyerson comments on the politics of impeachment, and the lessons of the Democrats’ successful effort to remove Nixon, and the Republicans’ failed effort to remove Clinton.

Also: D.D. Guttenplan reports on the Democrats’ efforts to flip a Republican House seat in the special election in Montana on May 25. The special election pits Democrat a bluegrass musician named Rob Quist against a multimillionaire.

And Amy Wilentz comments on Ivanka’s new book, Women Who Work. She calls it “a collated collection of bogus ideas and self-help puffery and platitude.”

Listen HERE
The leading histories of the conservative movement don’t account for the Klan enthusiasts and the “tribunes of white rage” that Trump mobilized and that he represents—that’s what Rick Perlstein argues in a mea culpa on behalf of historians of American politics.
Also: the rock-star appeal of Modern Monetary Theory for the Sanders generation. Atossa Araxia Abrahamian says that, if money is understood correctly, “debt is not the end.”
And Heather Ann Thompson talks about the Attica prison uprising of 1971 and its legacy—her book Blood in the Water won The Nation Institute’s Ridenhour award.

Listen HERE
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel about the United States after a right-wing coup has installed a theocratic regime, is now a 10-part series on Hulu.  The TV version is shocking, scary, and surprisingly relevant in Trump’s America.  In this interview, she recalls how and why she wrote the book—in 1984—and what in the TV version seems most resonant today.

Also: Katha Pollitt says “It’s not ‘McCarthyism’ to demand answers on Trump, Russia, and the election.”

And for our Ivanka Watch segment, Amy Wilentz comments on Ivanka’s debut on the world stage with her first official foreign trip—to the W20 in Germany, where she was booed.

Listen HERE
“We’ll either save, or doom, the planet, during the Trump administration.” That’s what Bill McKibben says—he’s an organizer of the Climate March in Washington on Sunday, April 29.

Also: 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump, despite his obvious failings as a Christian. Frances Fitzgerald examines evangelicals’ earlier history in politics, including their support for a Democrat—the “born-again” Jimmy Carter. Her new book is The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America.

Plus: Andrew Bacevich looks at America’s longest war. Our fight in Afghanistan, which began 15 years ago, shows no sign of ending, despite the recent dropping of “the mother of all bombs.”

Listen HERE
Subscribe on iTunes

Listen HERE
In the Rust Belt, “they hated Hillary”—that’s what Tom Frank found on his recent book tour for the paperback edition of Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?
Also: Is Ivanka Trump responsible for her father’s attack on Syria? Amy Wilentz comments on the president’s reliance on his daughter—and his son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Plus: Now that Neil Gorsuch has been sworn in as a Supreme Court justice, Ari Berman reviews the big picture of the battle for voting rights.

Listen HERE
How we got from the events in Ferguson to the election of you-know-who: Chris Hayes talks about race, incarceration, and politics in his new book  A Colony in a Nation—Salon called it “a dark book for a dark time.”

Plus: Although Trump was the least Christian of all the Republican candidates, white evangelicals voted for him overwhelmingly, despite the work of some prominent evangelical leaders.  Sarah Posner of the Nation Institute analyzes the political deal that evangelicals made—she wrote about the issue last month for The New Republic.

And Gary Younge explains what it’s been like talking about kids killed by guns—on call-in shows on talk radio.  His book Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives recently won the Anthony J. Lukas Prize.