At a recent gathering of Swiss business executives in the White House, the CEO of Rolex presented President Trump with a gold-plated desk clock.
The CEO of a precious-metals company presented the president with an engraved gold bar.
They were not the official representatives of Switzerland’s economic agenda – but the following week, their government announced a trade deal that drastically lowered the U.S. tariff on imported Swiss goods from 39 percent to 15 percent – now on par with the European Union.
So were the gifts appropriate for the U.S. president to accept?
We hear from University of Minnesota law professor Richard Painter – formerly the chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush.
For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.
This episode was produced by Tyler Bartlam and Brianna Scott, with audio engineering from Simon Laslo-Jansson. It was edited by Patrick Jarenwattananon. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.
Today's podcast notes eerily similar stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post on Trump's supposed troubles with MAGA—leading us to ask, is there such a thing as MAGA without Trump or independent from Trump? Give a listen.
Tucker Carlson’s interview with the white nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes has caused a firestorm on the right. Carlson and Fuentes’s friendly chat about American Jews — whether they fit into this country or were loyal to Israel above all — was the kind of conversation that for decades would have been unimaginable among mainstream figures in politics. And by crossing that line, Carlson was making a statement — about the power of Fuentes’s movement and the future of MAGA.
To help me think through this, I wanted to talk to the political writer John Ganz. He’s studied the roots of antisemitism on the right and has followed the evolution of MAGA closely. He’s behind the newsletter Unpopular Front and the author of “When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s.”
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Ashley Braun. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Marina King and Jan Kobal. 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.
Democrats release a new batch of Jeffrey Epstein's emails—including messages suggesting that Trump knew what Epstein was doing and spent time with one of his victims. Republicans fire back with 20,000 more pages of documents, Trump insists it's all a hoax, and Congress moves toward a vote that could force DOJ to release the full Epstein files. Jon and Dan break down how bad this is for Trump and his vanity building projects, the government's belated reopening, the lingering shutdown hangover, the future of ACA subsidies, and a sneaky provision that would let eight GOP senators sue the federal government. They also discuss Trump's disastrous interview with Laura Ingraham, his baffling affordability pivot, and MAGA outrage over Kash Patel using an FBI jet as his own private shuttle service. Then, Texas State Rep. James Talarico stops by to talk about why he's jumping into the Democratic primary to unseat Senator John Cornyn.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
The revolutionaries include the pamphleteer writing in his study, the journalist, the agitator, the organizer, the campus activist, the theoretician, the philanthropist.
The government “shutdown” and the so-called threat to the food stamp program may be abated for now, but we need to understand why this program has metastasized in recent years. James Bovard tells us why.
A group of National Guard members in Ohio are using an encrypted group chat to work out how they're feeling as President Trump deploys Guard troops to several U.S. cities.
It’s become a place for existential questions about their service, careers…and country.
NPR’s Kat Lonsdorf flew to Ohio to meet some of them.
For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Email us at considerthis@npr.org.
This episode was produced by Vincent Acovino, Erika Ryan, and Connor Donevan with audio engineering by Simon-Laslo Janssen. It was edited by Alina Hartounian and Courtney Dorning. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.
November 11 was once known as Armistice Day, the day set aside to celebrate the end of WWI. In this essay Rothbard discusses the war as the triumph of several Progressive intellectual strains from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Drop Site News journalist Murtaza Hussain joins to discuss a trove of documents which shows Jeffery Epstein's close relationship with Israeli intelligence, and which lends credibility to accusations that he may have been Mossad. Drop Site News has now reported four stories detailing Epstein's role in selling Israeli surveillance technology to Cote D'Ivoire & Russia, sending coded emails telegraphing drop-offs with Israeli intelligence in New York, and even hosting an Israeli spy at his NY apartment. Recorded hours before the House's release of Epstein emails showcasing his relationship with Trump, Larry Summers, & other powerful politicos, this episode surfaces an aspect of the story that the mainstream media is still unwilling to acknowledge: The Israel/Epstein connection.
