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Right after the news broke that Robert Francis Prevost was elected as the new Pope of the Roman Catholic Church, the internet produced lots of evidence that he has promoted articles critical of JD Vance and Donald Trump, and even expressed sympathy for George Floyd. That prompted MAGA figures to erupt in anger. They attacked the new Pope as anti-Trump pro-open borders, a Marxist, and soft on thugs and drug dealers, as Media Matters documented. We talked to the excellent political theorist Matt McManus, who was raised in the church and regularly wrestles with the intellectual roots of today’s right wing, including in his 2023 book, The Political Right and Equality. He explains what Vance gets wrong about Catholic teaching, why it’s so inimical to Trumpism, and how today’s pro-Trump influencers and “post-liberal” Catholic intellectuals alike are refusing to reckon with what MAGA has truly become. Listen to this episode here.

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There's a new American Pope—one who has been openly critical of the U.S. government. What does this mean for Trump? Meanwhile, in the background of this major news from the Catholic Church, Trump is striking tariff deals with the UK. But is the deal all that Trump says it is? Norm Ornstein and David Rothkopf are back to break down all the latest—from the Vatican to the White House. Tune in for all this and more.

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President Donald Trump erupted on Truth Social this week when it became clear that MAGA loyalist and insurrectionist Ed Martin’s nomination for U.S. Attorney for Washington D.C. is in trouble. Trump even called GOP Senators to demand their support. But then GOP Senator Thom Tillis announced his opposition, leading even staunch Trump loyalists to concede he might not survive. MAGA personalities lashed out in response. Lost in this saga has been the basic reason we don’t want a MAGA-brained January Sixer in such a crucial law enforcement role in the first place. We talked to former prosecutor Kristy Parker, counsel at Protect Democracy. She explains why this position is so critical to the legal order, why Martin has no business in it, and why she has cautious optimism that Trump’s assault on the rule of law might ultimately get repelled.

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Thanks to President Trump’s policies, a confluence of events is set to absolutely clobber rural America. First there’s Trump’s trade war. On Tuesday, Trump unleashed a bizarre set of ramblings that indicated he’s fine with letting it drag on forever, our exporters be damned. Meanwhile, there are new signs that farmers in Trump country are already getting hammered. The House GOP’s planned cuts to Medicaid will likely pose a massive problem for rural hospitals. And big GOP cuts to food stamps will also inflict pain on rural areas. We talked to Matt Hildreth, executive director of RuralOrganizing.org  and a veteran Democratic operative in rural areas. He explains why the perfect storm of policies bearing down on rural America is unusual, and reflects on whether his party will be able to translate this into real gains—or whether this will once again prove a chimera. 


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Health and science are under siege. The attack on long-held principals of science and our healthcare system certainly isn’t new, but they have reached a fevered pitch under this administration. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Laurie Garrett and Dr. Kavita Patel join David Rothkopf to diagnose the problems and examine the severe consequences of this moment. 

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President Donald Trump is angry at longtime GOP strategist Karl Rove. That’s because Rove delivered Trump a stern on-air warning about his sliding approval ratings. What caught our attention, though, is what Rove said about immigration in particular. Rove suggested that Trump is in trouble on what’s supposed to be his best issue, and offered a striking explanation for it that surely got under Trump’s skin. This comes as Trump also delivered another diatribe about the Supreme Court for suggesting he does not have absolute power to deport millions with zero due process, suggesting he and Stephen Miller will cling to their deeply unpopular course of action no matter what. We talked to Lakshya Jain, co-founder of the Split Ticket election site, who explains how Trump is rapidly losing his onetime advantage on immigration, why this is such a momentous shift, and how Democrats can capitalize.


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Arun Majumdar is the inaugural Dean of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability at Stanford University and previously served as Founding Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) and Chair of the Secretary's Advisory Board at the US Department of Energy. He is one of the United States' top energy experts and an accomplished institutional leader. Join host David Sandalow as he talks with Dean Majumdar about the AI work underway at the Doerr School, power demand for AI, AI's potential impacts on climate change mitigation, teaching in the AI era, and much more.


The AI, Energy and Climate Podcast is a special series from the DSR Network sponsored by NEDO and hosted by David Sandalow, Inaugural Fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.


AI for Climate Change Mitigation Roadmap -- https://www.icef.go.jp/roadmap and transitiondigital.org/ai-climate-roadmap. 

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President Trump has recently been erupting at Fox News over its new poll finding him with 55 percent disapproval. Trump described Fox’s pollster as “Trump hating” and demanded that the firm be “investigated.” Stephen Miller subsequently called for the pollster’s firing. Guess what: Fox News has gotten the message. As Trump’s poll numbers for other news organizations have steadily worsened, Fox personalities have begun going to great lengths to deny what the numbers clearly show. This highlights a problem that is trending toward a fiasco for MAGA: As Trump’s tariffs and other policies take their toll on Trump voters and everyone else, his approval will slide further, forcing Fox News to deceive the network’s own viewers about what they themselves increasingly are experiencing from Trump’s presidency. We talked to Matt Gertz of Media Matters, who has been chronicling Fox’s poll denial. He explains what Trump’s anger at Fox means for the network, how Fox personalities are coping, and why all these dynamics will get much worse. 


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Big news: A federal judge just ruled that President Donald Trump’s renditions under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act are illegal. It’s a crucial moment in the battle against Trump’s lawlessness. Meanwhile, Stephen Miller ranted wildly at the media for daring to ask hard questions about the wrongfully-deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, falsely stating as fact that he’s an “MS-13 terrorist” and raging at the very idea that migrants he labels “terrorists” should get due process. It’s a clear sign of Miller’s certainty that he can label anyone a “terrorist” by fiat and that the administration can get away with literally anything. We talked to the great legal commentator Leah Litman, author of Lawless, a new book about the Supreme Court. She explains why the ruling suggests the courts may not give Trump the deference he’d hoped for as commander in chief to reinvent reality to carry out his illegal renditions—and why Miller’s project may be in the process of seriously overreaching.

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On this week’s special DSR-Words Matter mash up episode, Ed Luce and Norm Ornstein join David Rothkopf to talk about all the chaos of the Trump administration. What is going on with Mike Waltz’s “promotion” to the UN, and who is next on the Trump chopping-block? How are leading Democrats responding to this ongoing mess? Tune in for all this and more.

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We just learned that President Donald Trump’s economy contracted in the first quarter. Trump unloaded twice over this bad news, attempting to blame Joe Biden for it. Meanwhile, some of Trump’s aides went full North Korea, bowing down before him and offering adulation in shockingly abject terms. So how long do Trump’s advisers think they can keep him in a protective cocoon, shielding him from the realities of his disastrous reign? We talked to New Republic senior editor Alex Shephard, who has a good new piece arguing that Trump’s unpopularity will only get worse, due to basic structural facts about his presidency. He explains why the sycophancy of Trump’s aides is only working against him—and why insulating him against outside facts will only get harder and more damaging.


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After the news broke that Amazon might publicly clarify the costs that President Trump’s tariffs are imposing on its products, Trump instructed his White House press secretary to publicly threaten the company. Trump also called Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to express his displeasure, and one adviser told CNN that “he was pissed.” Amazon immediately shelved the plan, and Trump openly gloated about Bezos bending the knee, an unnerving signal of more autocratic bullying ahead. Meanwhile, a new PRRI poll sheds fascinating light on public opinion about Trump’s authoritarianism, with a majority now seeing him as a “dangerous dictator.” We talked to Melissa Deckman, the CEO of PRRI, who explains what the new data really tells us about the public’s revulsion at Trump’s abuses of power—and why episodes like this one are only exacerbating it. Listen to this episode here.


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President Donald Trump is growing angrier over polls that keep showing him tanking. On Monday, he raged that polls sponsored by media outlets are “COMPROMISED AND CORRUPT.” He even quoted one of his own pollsters saying that surveys from The New York Times and The Washington Post are “FAKE POLLS,” something his pollster clearly hatched to calm his anger. So to what degree are the people around Trump simply lying to him about his disastrous reign? They’re deceiving him about the state of public opinion, and Stephen Miller is plainly seducing Trump into believing the Supreme Court sided with him on the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case, when it didn’t. We talked to journalist Michael Cohen, author of a new piece for his Truth and Consequences Substack about this problem. He explains how we know Trump’s aides are keeping him in a state of delusion, and why that’s heading to an alarming place. 

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Thirty-two years after Jensen Huang founded NVIDIA, the company is at the center of the AI revolution and the third-most valuable company in the world. Jensen -- as he is known throughout his company and the IT industry -- is shaping the future of AI and countless applications of AI. In this episode, Jensen talks with host David Sandalow about how AI can help solve energy and climate problems, AI's power consumption, the intelligence infrastructure of the future, and more.    


The AI, Energy and Climate Podcast is a special series from the DSR Network sponsored by NEDO and hosted by David Sandalow, Inaugural Fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.


AI for Climate Change Mitigation Roadmap -- https://www.icef.go.jp/roadmap and transitiondigital.org/ai-climate-roadmap. 

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Over the weekend, President Trump raged on Truth Social at judges who are ruling that Trump must follow the law in the case of wrongfully-deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia and others illegally deported to prisons in El Salvador. Trump again threatened to dispense with due process for migrants. Yet this comes even as Trump admitted in a new interview that he’s open to bringing Abrego Garcia back and retrying him for deportation through lawful channels. For Trump to acknowledge he has this option while nonetheless threatening to end due process for Abrego Garcia and other migrants is a dark development. All this comes as two new polls show Trump badly losing the war of public opinion over all these illegal renditions. We talked to Chris Newman, a lawyer for the Abrego Garcia family, who powerfully explains why Trump is losing the war over public opinion, how Trump is importing Bukele-style authoritarianism into the United States, and why Trump will ultimately lose in court.


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The last several administrations have faced an exponentially increasing need to grapple with the issue of artificial intelligence. But how does a government address a technology that affects nearly all corners of society, and what does this second Trump administration need to do to meet the moment? Vice president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation Daniel Castro joins David Rothkopf to consider these questions and more. 


This material is distributed by TRG Advisory Services, LLC on behalf of the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates in the U.S.. Additional information is available at the Department of Justice, Washington, DC.

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President Donald Trump just made some new public statements about the Russia-Ukraine war, and they were thoroughly unimpressive. At one point, he seemed to get angry at Vladimir Putin over a massive new Russian attack on Ukraine, calling on Putin to “STOP.” But then in remarks to reporters, he openly suggested that he doesn’t expect Russia to make any serious concessions at all in the quest for peace. This striking public admission badly undercuts Trump’s “master dealmaker” mystique, and wrecks the illusion he’s cultivated that he expects genuine concessions from both sides. We talked to Ben Burgis, a columnist at Jacobin and a podcaster who has a good new piece for MSNBC.com analyzing Trump’s negotiating strategy. Burgis explains why Trump’s approach is likely to be counterproductive at best—and why it could produce catastrophic long-term results. 


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Published 2025-04-24

Lessons in Kakistocracy

53 min
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On this week’s episode of Words Matter, founder of Talking Points Memo Josh Marshall joins Norm Ornstein to discuss everything wrong with the Trump administration. What is so uncanny about Trump’s foreign policy towards Russia and Ukraine? What message are we signaling to our allies? And how much worse could this all become? Tune in for all this and more.


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Can AI help discover new materials, leading to dramatic breakthroughs in clean energy technologies? In Episode #1 of our deep dive on this topic, host David Sandalow explored the potential for breakthroughs with Taylor Sparks, a professor at the University of Utah and host of the Materialism Podcast, and Colin McCormick, Principal Scientist at Carbon Direct, a professor at Georgetown University and author of the materials innovation chapter in the Artificial Intelligence for Climate Change Mitigation Roadmap (Second Edition). In this episode, David, Taylor and Colin discuss the barriers that must be overcome to realize that potential as well as possible risks. The episode ends with some interesting book recommendations by Taylor and Colin!


The AI, Energy and Climate Podcast is a special series from the DSR Network sponsored by NEDO and hosted by David Sandalow, Inaugural Fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.


AI for Climate Change Mitigation Roadmap -- https://www.icef.go.jp/roadmap and transitiondigital.org/ai-climate-roadmap. 

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Suddenly, President Donald Trump appears to be retreating or getting knocked back on multiple fronts. Trump is considering whether to slash his tariffs on China. Elon Musk is stepping back from the administration. Federal scientists are admitting the Measles outbreak is worse than previously acknowledged. And the leaks about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are intensifying. All this comes as a new poll finds broad public opposition to Trump’s abuses of power—revealing a surprise weakness in an area that savvy observers assured us voters don’t care about. We talked to Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, author of The Hopium Chronicles, who has been urging his party to make Trump’s weakness central to their understanding of this fraught moment. Rosenberg explains why Trump is caught in a vicious downward cycle, where the opposition is successfully mobilizing, and how to coax Democrats to fight back harder.


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We have to ask: is dysfunction an official policy of this administration? With key officials handing out sensitive information like it’s candy and ever-changing tariff policies, our national security is facing unprecedented self-inflicted challenges. Kori Schake, Ed Luce, and Rosa Brooks join David Rothkopf to break down what makes this moment so perilous. 

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On Tuesday, largely due to President Trump’s tariffs, the International Monetary Fund downgraded its projections for economic growth in a big way. Meanwhile, we’re already starting to see layoffs. All that comes as newpolls show Trump cratering on the economy. Trump is now shifting blame to Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell for the tariff fallout. But those attacks are only rattling markets and investors more, backfiring on Trump. We talked to one of the best economic commentators out there, Washington Post columnist Heather Long, author of a new piece on how Trump’s “tariff madness” is likely to drive us into a recession. She explains why the prognosis is so grim—and why Trump is in a bind with no easy way out.


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President Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, is imploding again. We just learned that he shared still more highly sensitive data on a private signal chat. A GOP Congressman just basically called for his resignation. And a former chief Pentagon official who is a Trump supporter himself also tore into Hegseth’s tenure, calling it a “full-blown meltdown.” That triggered a furious response from Donald Trump Jr., who declared this turncoat critic “exiled” from the Trump movement. Other MAGA figures raged at Hegseth’s critics as well. We talked to Juliette Kayyem, a former national security official under Barack Obama. She takes us through this latest scandal and explains why the profoundly unfit Hegseth will become a much, much bigger problem for Trump—with no easy way out for the president. 


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What could make dramatic, transformational changes in the fight against climate change? One answer -- breakthroughs in the materials sciences that result in even better and cheaper clean energy technologies. Can artificial intelligence tools help produce such breakthroughs? Join host David Sandalow for a deep dive into this topic with Taylor Sparks, a professor at the University of Utah and host of the Materialism Podcast, and Colin McCormick, Principal Scientist at Carbon Direct, a professor at Georgetown University and author of the materials innovation chapter in the Artificial Intelligence for Climate Change Mitigation Roadmap (Second Edition).  


The AI, Energy and Climate Podcast is a special series from the DSR Network sponsored by NEDO and hosted by David Sandalow, Inaugural Fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.


AI for Climate Change Mitigation Roadmap -- https://www.icef.go.jp/roadmap and transitiondigital.org/ai-climate-roadmap. 

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President Donald Trump’s case for leaving Kilmar Abrego Garcia to rot in an El Salvadoran prison continues to collapse. In bizarre, rambling remarks to reporters in which Trump talked about Abrego Garcia’s alleged ties to MS-13, Trump revealed the profound weakness of his own arguments. In particularly ugly fashion, Trump basically admitted he knows little about the supposed evidence linking him to the gang—even though this notion is central to the rationale for refusing to bring him back. Today's guest has done deep research into MS-13: Eric Hershberg, a professor of government at American University and a leading contributor to a major report on the gang. He takes us inside this organization—and explains how implausible the case tying Abrego Garcia to it truly is. 


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Original air date: April 26, 2024


At the Supreme Court and college campuses, leaders aren’t leading. As the court weighs incredibly consequential decisions and colleges grapple with divisive protests, we need clear leadership more than ever. Norm and Kavita discuss this unique problem and where we go from here.


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Original air date: April 24, 2024


The latest in our series of Bernard L. Schwartz PolicyForum events is here. In conjunction with the New Republic, we host Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg for an insightful conversation with DSR Network CEO David Rothkopf and The New Republic Editor Michael Tomasky. Don’t miss this fascinating conversation as Secretary Buttigieg gives his unique insight into some of the greatest challenges facing our country today.


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In an extraordinary escalation of President Trump’s rage at Harvard University, the administration just threatened to block Harvard from receiving foreign students if the university doesn’t provide extensive information on students to the government. Trump also erupted at Harvard on Truth Social, making all kinds of other threats. On another front, GOP Senator Lisa Murkowski openly admitted to a sense of widespread terror of retaliation: “We are all afraid.” We talked to Jeffrey Sachs of Acadia University, a shrewd observer of authoritarianism. He walks us through the details of Trump’s new threat toward Harvard, how it can be challenged, the true nature of Trump allies’ long-term game plan, and whether our institutions will crumble in the face of it all. 


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We’re not three months into this presidency and we’re already witnessing our democracy crumble. Trump’s administration continues to bless Putin with political gifts, our president is trying to hijack the IRS to punish Harvard University, and the administration continues to challenge the courts on the Abrego Garcia case. How can our president subvert the rule of law so flagrantly, and dismantle the institutions at the bedrock of our democracy? Norm Ornstein and David Rothkopf are back to break down everything from the past week and more.


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Donald Trump’s illegal deportations are running into more trouble. A federal judge just declared there’s probable cause to find the administration in criminal contempt over the removal of Venezuelans to El Salvador. Meanwhile, a Democratic Senator went to El Salvador to check on Kilmar Abrego Garcia and got a shocking response. And a new polling analysis has a warning for Trump: On immigration, he’s significantly weaker than he appears. We think all this has the makings of a fiasco for Trump: He is heading toward defying the courts on this issue, in a way that could provoke a large backlash. We talked to New Republic staff writer Melissa Gira Grant, author of a good piece on Trump’s use of spectacle on immigration. She deciphers the new ruling, why it’s pushing us toward a crisis, and how Democrats can try to make it all backfire on Trump.


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Harvard University has declared that enough is enough, and it’s now openly refusing to buckle to Trump’s command for subservience on multiple fronts. In response, Trump erupted on Truth Social like a petty tinpot dictator, raging that Harvard should lose its tax exempt status and worse. We think this reveals a hidden weakness: Trump and MAGA know that if institutions don’t capitulate to them, and band together to overcome their collective action problem, the Trump-MAGA assault could very well falter. If there’s some way out of our disastrous mess, it partly involves major institutions doing exactly this, in a concerted, sustained way. We talked to Jonathan Friedman, the managing director of the free expression program at PEN America, about the real nature of Harvard’s pushback, the prospects for more institutions following suit, and the potential for a real united front of resistance to disarm MAGA. 


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