The New Yorker Radio Hour24 Jun 2025

America’s Oligarch Problem

A mega-donor to the Republican Presidential campaign, Elon Musk got something no other titan of industry has ever received: an office in the White House and a government department tailor-made for him, with incalculable influence in shaping the Administration. But even with Musk out of Washington, it remains a fact that the influence of wealth in America has never been greater. As one case in point, Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” is estimated to raise or leave flat the taxes of about 57 million households, while the top five per cent of earners will have their taxes cut by more than $1.5 trillion. From his perch in Washington, Evan Osnos has for years been looking at the politics of hyper-wealth. While the wealthy have always held outsized influence, Osnos explains how tech tycoons, in particular, sought far greater influence under Donald Trump’s second Administration. “These are guys who really believed that they were the greatest example of entrepreneurship,” he tells David Remnick, “and that all of a sudden they found that, no, they were being called monopolists, that they were being accused of invading people's privacy, that in fact they had been blamed for the degradation of democracy, of our children’s emotional health, of our attention spans. They suddenly saw that there was a new President who would not only forgive any of those kinds of mistakes and patterns of abuse but would in fact celebrate them, and would roll back any of the regulation that was in their way.” Osnos’s new book, collected from his reporting in The New Yorker, is “The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich.”

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(1048)

Rahm Emanuel Says Israel’s Path Is “Not Sustainable Politically”

Rahm Emanuel is a Democratic Party elder, having served in the Clinton and Obama Administrations and as mayor of his native Chicago for two terms. He’s a centrist known for valuing political wins over...

17 Jul 36min

How an Estimated Seven Hundred Thousand People Have Died from DOGE’s U.S.A.I.D. Cuts

The Department of Government Efficiency, better known as DOGE, has officially been terminated. Its July 4th sunset date was part of Donald Trump’s original executive order that created the agency, whi...

12 Jul 31min

The World Cup, the Knicks, and LeBron James’s Fate: An All-Time Summer in Sports

With all the sports news at play this summer, from the New York Knicks winning the N.B.A. Finals to Donald Trump having a direct impact on FIFA’s decisions during the World Cup, it’s time for a deep d...

10 Jul 18min

The Sounds of Summer, with Fred Armisen

The comedian Fred Armisen has a thing for sound: he’s a former punk-rocker who gets a lot of comic mileage from doing accents, and he released an album of sound effects—a modern update of a novelty ge...

7 Jul 17min

Alicia Keys’s New York Musical Goes on National Tour

The unofficial anthem of New York City is “Empire State of Mind,” the Jay-Z song with that unforgettable hook, sung by Alicia Keys. So it was only fitting that when New York celebrated the Knicks’ N.B...

3 Jul 32min

From The Political Scene: Donald Trump’s Dangerous Politicization of America’s Spy Agencies

The Washington Roundtable is joined by Jeff Stein, the veteran political reporter and founding editor of the newsletter “Spytalk,” to examine Donald Trump’s appointment of Bill Pulte as the new acting...

30 Jun 36min

America at 250: A View from Britain, with “The Rest Is History”

Americans tend to see the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War as milestones in world history that inaugurated the era of modern democracy. But the British, unsurprisingly, see these ...

26 Jun 49min

From Critics at Large: Steve Spielberg's Blockbusters

When “Jaws” hit theatres in 1975, no one—neither the studio executives involved nor the film’s twenty-six-year-old director, Steven Spielberg—was betting on its success. But it dominated at the box of...

23 Jun 51min