The Trump administration completes the largest single-state immigration enforcement action in U.S. history.
The two Pennsylvania Senators, Democrat John Fetterman and Republican Dave McCormick find common ground amid a crisis point for Democrats in the polls.
Thanks for making The Daily Signal Podcast your trusted source for the day’s top news. Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and never miss an episode.
Trump has been making some foreign policy moves I didn’t entirely expect. He seems determined to get a nuclear deal with Iran. He’s been public about his disagreements with Benjamin Netanyahu. He called Vladimir Putin “crazy.” And he keeps talking about wanting his legacy to be that of a peacemaker.
So what, at this point, can we say about Trump’s foreign policy? What is he trying to do, and how well is it working? If he succeeds, what might his legacy be?
Emma Ashford is a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, a foreign policy think tank, and the author of the forthcoming book “First Among Equals.” She comes from a school of thought that’s more sympathetic to the “America First” agenda than I typically am. But she’s also cleareyed about what is and isn’t working and the ways that Trump is an idiosyncratic foreign policy maker who isn’t always following an “America First” agenda himself.
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
You can find the transcript 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.html
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
In the past few weeks, Qatar has been all over the news with flashy headlines of a $400 million luxury jet that the country gifted to President Donald Trump. It symbolized their opulence and eagerness to please the U.S.
But 40 years ago, Qatar was a country with a gross domestic product (GDP) of a few billion dollars. Since the 19th century, it has been run by the Al Thani family, which can trace its roots in the region back thousands of years.
Qatar was long considered a backwater. The main industries were fishing and pearls. It was impoverished for the vast majority of its history. Its royal family was dwarfed by rivals in Saudi Arabia.
Then everything changed. It turned out that the largest liquified natural gas field was sitting just off the coast of Qatar. And with the help of American energy giants like ExxonMobil, Qatar began exporting LNG in 1997.
In a few decades, Qatar’s GDP grew exponentially. Today it’s over $200 billion. Qatar hosts the main air base for American forces in the Middle East. It hosted the World Cup in 2022. And it’s embarking on a series of business and military deals with the U.S.—earmarked at $1.2 trillion.
There are a lot of petro-states in the region. Some, like Saudi Arabia, exceed Qatar’s wealth by hundreds of billions. But what Qatar has chosen to do with its money—morality aside—is farsighted. Qatar has chosen to focus a huge amount of money and resources on influence.
In the past 15 years, Qatar has developed a sophisticated apparatus to embed itself into American society in a way that would shock most Americans. They’ve done it by investing in our politicians, universities, newsrooms, think tanks, lobbying firms, and corporations—all on an unprecedented scale.
In all, the tiny Gulf nation has spent almost $100 billion to establish this influence.
So what’s the problem? Well, Qatar’s push to buy influence has made their connection to the Muslim Brotherhood ever more alarming and apparent.
Frannie Block and Jay Solomon published a massive investigative report on Qatar’s seismic influence strategy for The Free Press. It’s called “How Qatar Bought America.”
Today on Honestly, I ask Jay and Frannie how Qatar built this ecosystem, what they want in return, and what it has already gotten them.
OA1163 - No really. That's a real stat. It may actually be WORSE than that. So uh... how in the hell? Professor Valena Beety is here to break it down. She's done a ton of great work in this area, and has a new legal research paper, "Unfit": Gender, Ableism and Reproductive Wrongful Convictions by Valena Elizabeth Beety, which goes into this and much more!
Content note:this episode does involve discussion of events where young children died. We don't dwell on these events much at all other than to mention them as needed.
The Northwest Coast of North America is a treacherous place. Unforgiving coastlines, powerful currents, unpredictable weather, and features such as the notorious Columbia River bar have resulted in more than two thousand shipwrecks, earning the coastal areas of Oregon, Washington, and Vancouver Island the moniker “Graveyard of the Pacific.” Beginning with a Spanish galleon that came ashore in northern Oregon in 1693 and continuing into the recent past, Wrecked: Unsettling Histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific (University of Washington Press, 2025) by Dr. Coll Thrush includes stories of many vessels that met their fate along the rugged coast and the meanings made of these events by both Indigenous and settler survivors and observers. Commemorated in museums, historical markers, folklore, place-names, and the remains of the ships themselves, the shipwrecks have created a rich archive. Whether in the form of a fur-trading schooner that was destroyed in 1811, a passenger liner lost in 1906, or an almost-empty tanker broken on the shore in 1999, shipwrecks on the Northwest Coast opens up conversations about colonialism and Indigenous persistence. Dr. Thrush’s retelling of shipwreck tales highlights the ways in which the three central myths of settler colonialism—the disappearance of Indigenous people, the control of an endlessly abundant nature, and the idea that the past would stay past—proved to be untrue. As a critical cultural history of this iconic element of the region, Wrecked demonstrates how the history of shipwrecks reveals the fraught and unfinished business of colonization on the Northwest Coast.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
In the last few weeks, the Supreme Court has dealt more than half a million migrants a serious blow to their ability to live here in the U.S. legally. In separate orders, the court allowed the Trump administration to lift deportation protections for Venezuelans, Cubans, Nicaraguans and Haitians living here under two programs — humanitarian parole and Temporary Protected Status. While the court’s orders are only temporary, it’s little comfort to the hundreds of thousands of people who are now newly vulnerable to deportation. Dara Lind, asenior fellow at the American Immigration Council, explains what happens next.
And in headlines: Federal authorities charged a man suspected of an antisemitic attack in Colorado with a federal hate crime, the Supreme Court declined to hear two gun rights cases, and representatives for Ukraine and Russia met in Istanbul for peace talks.
We're talking about how immigration officials are stepping up enforcement, even in the face of backlash.
Also, we'll tell you what a suspect has told investigators about his flamethrower attack in Colorado this week.
Plus, where tourists had to run from a volcanic eruption, what's included in a first-of-its-kind reparations package, and why one of the biggest names in podcasting is hanging up the mic.
Those stories and even more news to know in about 10 minutes!
Join us every Mon-Fri for more daily news roundups!
The health care of 10 million Americans is at risk as President Trump's massive tax cut legislation makes its way to the Senate. Will Majority Leader John Thune be able to cobble together a bill that the "Medicaid moderates," budget hawks, and hardliners can all agree on? Meanwhile, Stephen Miller freaks out at ICE leadership for failing to detain and deport enough immigrants, corporate America begins cutting ties with law firms that bent the knee to Trump, and Democratic presidential hopefuls begin testing the waters. Jon and Lovett embrace the schadenfreude, discuss the lies Speaker Mike Johnson is peddling to win over his Senate colleagues, and evaluate Senator Joni Ernst's "we're all going to die" message to her constituents. Then, Jon talks to Senator Brian Schatz about putting an end to Democratic navel gazing and fighting to stop Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill."
