What the Shutdown Is Really About

There are two pieces to this episode. First, a tour of what Donald Trump has done — and what he has backed down from doing — over the last few days. There’s a lesson there. Perhaps Democrats are starting to learn it.Then I wanted to hear the view of Trump’s first weeks back in office from someone on the right — someone who agrees with many of Trump’s policies, but also understands how the government works and who cares about our Constitution.Yuval Levin is the director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute. His latest book is “American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation — and Could Again.” What struck me about our conversation is that, on the one hand, Levin is less alarmed about much of what’s happening than I am. But on the other hand, he’s a lot less impressed by what Trump is actually getting done — and how these moves are likely to work out for him — than most Democrats I know. It’s a perspective very much worth hearing.Mentioned:“Don’t Believe Him” by Ezra KleinBook Recommendations:The Rhetorical Presidency by Jeffrey K. TulisWhy Congress by Philip WallachThe Extinction of Experience by Christine RosenThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Elias Isquith and Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

5 Feb 1h 19min

Look closely at the first two weeks of Donald Trump’s second term and you’ll see something very different than what he wants you to see.Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This audio essay for “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by our supervising editor, Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Jack McCordick. Mixing by Isaac Jones. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Kristin Lin and Aman Sahota. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Aaron Retica. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

2 Feb 14min

MAGA has long been hostile to Big Tech. So now that Big Tech is shifting rightward, what does that mean for MAGA?“We’re seeing a true political coalition having to navigate very, very big questions about how to keep themselves together,” James Pogue told me. He’s a contributing writer at Times Opinion who has been covering the intellectual ferment on the New Right for years. And he just published a great piece about the tensions between the techno-optimists and skeptics within the MAGA coalition.In this conversation, we cover a lot: How the New Right’s intellectual scene has evolved, the renewed fascination with Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto, why some of the most passionate critics of tech are also the most online, how Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fits into this world, the New Right’s ideas about masculinity and how much Donald Trump cares about any of this.Recommendations:Regime Change by Patrick Deneen“God’s Socialist” by Darryl CooperBetween Two Fires by Stephen PyneThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

28 Jan 1h 34min

On the first day of President Trump’s second term, he signed a record 26 executive orders. Some of them were really big. Others feel more likely messaging memos. And still others are bound to be held up in the courts. So what does it all amount to? What exactly in America has changed?In a former life, I co-hosted a podcast called “The Weeds” with other policy wonks at Vox, including Dara Lind and Matthew Yglesias. We’ve since gone our separate ways; Lind is currently a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, and Yglesias is the author of the Substack newsletter Slow Boring. But since this was such a big policy week, I wanted to get some of the band back together.In this conversation, we discuss how much Trump’s immigration orders will actually change our immigration system; whether any of Trump’s orders address Americans’ concerns over prices; how serious Trump actually is about tariffs; and more.Book Recommendations:The Fifth Risk by Michael LewisDemon Copperhead by Barbara KingsolverEveryone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan BlitzerLeft Adrift by Timothy ShenkWhy Nothing Works by Marc J. DunkelmanMiddlemarch by George EliotThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu and Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

25 Jan 1h 3min

There’s a quieter transition happening beneath the pageantry of this week’s inaugural events — a transition not of power per se but of the rules around how power in Washington works. And the new rules look very different from the old ones.In this conversation, I’m joined by Aaron Retica, an editor at large for New York Times Opinion (and my column editor), to discuss what President Trump’s inaugural address and first round of executive orders signal about the administration to come. We talk about the end of birthright citizenship and the renegotiation of American belonging, why Trump is so fixated on Greenland and the Panama Canal, his retro-futurist vision of American power, the unsettling arrival of a new tech oligarchy and more.Mentioned:“What’s Wrong with Donald Trump?” by Ezra Klein“Democrats Are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.” by The Ezra Klein Show, with Chris HayesThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

22 Jan 48min

Trump is a master at wielding attention. He’s been owning news cycles and squatting in Americans’ minds for much of the last decade. And for his second term he has an ally in Elon Musk, a man with a similar uncanny skill set.Trump and Musk seem to have figured out something about how attention works in our fragmented media age — and how to use it for political and cultural power — that Democrats simply haven’t. So what is it? What do they understand about attention that their opponents don’t?Chris Hayes is the host of MSNBC’s “All In,” and has written a forthcoming book, “The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource.” And he’s a brilliant thinker on how our modern attention economy works and what it’s doing to our politics.We discuss what Hayes sees as a revolution happening to our attention, which he compares to the Industrial Revolution in its scale and impact; why the old rules about attention in politics no longer apply; the key insight Trump had about attention that fueled his rise; why Musk didn’t really overpay for Twitter; and how Democrats can compete in this new attentional world.Mentioned:“Your Mind Is Being Fracked” by The Ezra Klein Show with D. Graham Burnett“The Great Crypto Crash” by Annie LowreyBook Recommendations:Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil PostmanHow to Do Nothing by Jenny OdellRejection by Tony TulathimutteThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

17 Jan 1h 13min

Joe Biden wanted to show Americans that there was a better path than Trumpism. He worked to build a “foreign policy for the middle class.” He centered industrial policy. He took a more competitive tack with China. He kept America out of wars. The hope was that if Americans saw foreign policy serving their interests, then that would dim the appeal of someone like Donald Trump.Then Trump won again — stronger than ever.Jake Sullivan is Biden’s national security adviser and one of the key architects of this foreign policy for the middle class. In this conversation, I ask him to walk me through why he thinks the country is better off today than it was four years ago. We discuss the status of America’s relationship with China and the risk of a future war; whether the U.S. should have used its leverage to force Ukraine to the negotiating table; how the enormous arms support of Israel serves U.S. interests; what Trump’s re-election says about Bidenism; and more.Mentioned:Brookings speechBook Recommendations:Science, the Endless Frontier by Vannevar BushNexus by Yuval Noah HarariThe Situation Room by George StephanopoulosThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Elias Isquith, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

14 Jan 1h 8min

The preview we’ve had into Donald Trump’s second administration already feels, by American standards, disturbingly abnormal: Picking a former “Fox and Friends” host for defense secretary. Billionaire after billionaire trekking to Mar-a-Lago to curry favor with the president-elect. The Washington Post withholding an opposing endorsement. Meta ending its third-party fact-checking.But all of this is actually pretty normal — not in the U.S. but in many other countries. Researchers call them personalist regimes, in which everything is a transaction with the leader, whether it’s party politics or policymaking or the media. It’s a style of politics that follows different rules, but there are still rules. And understanding personalist politics, and their tried-and-true playbook, is a way to help make the next four years legible.Today’s guest is one of the leading scholars on personalist regimes, in both their democratic and their authoritarian forms. Erica Frantz is a political scientist at Michigan State University and a the co-author, with Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Joseph Wright, of “The Origins of Elected Strongmen: How Personalist Parties Destroy Democracy From Within.” In this conversation, we discuss what personalist regimes are and how they operate, the personalist qualities of Trump and the signs of democratic backsliding that Frantz thinks Americans need to track in the coming weeks and years.This episode contains strong language.Book Recommendations:Dictators at War and Peace by Jessica L. P. WeeksAutocracy Rising by Javier CorralesThe Trumpiad by Cody WalkerThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

10 Jan 1h 6min