The Ezra Klein Show

After last week’s episode, “The Emergency Is Here,” we got a lot of emails. And the most common reply was: You really think we’ll have midterm elections in 2026? Isn’t that naïve?

I think we will have midterms. But one reason I think so many people are skeptical of that is they’re working with comparisons to other places: Mussolini’s Italy, Putin’s Russia, Pinochet’s Chile.

But we don’t need to look abroad for parallels; it has happe...

The president of the United States is disappearing people to a Salvadoran prison for terrorists: a prison built for disappearance, a prison where there is no education or remediation or recreation, a prison where the only way out, according to El Salvador’s justice minister, is in a coffin.

The president says he wants to send “homegrown” Americans there next.

This is the emergency. Like it or not, it’s here.

Asha Rangappa is a former ...

My colleague Tom Friedman thinks we’re screwed.

That’s the first thing he told me when recounting his recent trip to China. It’s not just because of the trade war that President Trump is escalating right now. Friedman believes the whole Washington consensus on China — that the country is a hostile adversary — is dangerous and based on an outdated understanding of what China now is. He saw how China’s manufacturing and technology hav...

After a week of market chaos, President Trump pulled back from the brink. But he didn’t pull that far back. He left a 10 percent tariff on most of the world and launched a trade war with China. It’s unclear what he will do after this 90-day pause or what countries need to do to satisfy him. But one thing that is very clear now is that our economy is subject to one man’s whims.

How are businesses supposed to adapt to this new reality...

The tariffs President Trump unveiled this week were both bigger than most people expected and a lot more confusing. These aren’t the flat tariffs he proposed during the campaign. And they aren’t reciprocal tariffs, as he claimed in his Rose Garden speech. So what is Trump actually doing here?

I knew my former colleague Paul Krugman would have some thoughts. Krugman is a Nobel laureate trade economist who was a New York Times Opinion...

There’s something of a policy revolution afoot: As of March, more than a dozen states — including California, Florida and Ohio — have passed bills or adopted policies that aim to limit cellphone usage at school. More are expected to follow.

Jonathan Haidt is the leader of this particular insurgency. “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” his book exploring the decline ...

It’s our first subscriber-only “Ask Me Anything” of the year. The show’s executive producer, Claire Gordon, joins me to discuss your questions about the risk of a constitutional crisis and how Democrats, businesses and universities are responding to President Trump. 

Thank you to everyone who sent in questions. And if you aren’t a New York Times subscriber but would like to be, just go to https://www.nytimes.com/subscription.

This ep...

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency is great branding. Who could be against a more efficient government? But “efficiency” obfuscates what’s really happening here.

Efficiency to what end? Elon Musk, President Trump and DOGE’s boosters have offered various objectives — cutting the deficit, eliminating fraud and abuse, creating a leaner and more responsive government. But DOGE’s actions in the past two months don’t seem t...

To mark the release of our new book “Abundance,” my co-author Derek Thompson had me on his podcast, “Plain English,” to talk about it. We’re on book tour right now, so we’re doing a lot of talking about this book. But this conversation is different. It’s just Derek and me, and we get into the story of how the book came together, and all the people and ideas that influenced us – a kind of intellectual history of the abundance agenda...

After the last election, there were all kinds of theories about where Democrats went wrong. But now, four months later, we have a lot more data – and it tells a few clear stories.

David Shor is the head of data science at Blue Rose Research, a Democratic polling firm, which does an enormous amount of surveying of the electorate. A few weeks ago, Shor was walking me through a deck he made of key charts and numbers that explain the el...

It’s hard to understand the economic logic of President Trump’s tariffs. In our last episode, we tried, but with limited success. And that might be because the logic here isn’t entirely economic at all.

So we wanted to spend an episode looking at Trump’s economic policies through a wider lens.

Gillian Tett is a columnist at The Financial Times and a member of its editorial board. She’s also a trained anthropologist with a Ph.D. And s...

Wall Street thought Donald Trump was bluffing about his tariff plans. The stock market rallied after his election. But the reality has started setting in. Trump is doubling down on tariffs, even as he warned Americans that the economy may experience a “period of transition,” insisting this is just short-term pain.

So what exactly is Trump’s theory here? And how much pain should we expect?

Answering those questions requires a bit of a...

Right-wing populism thrives on scarcity. The answer is abundance. But a politics of abundance will work only if Democrats confront where their approach has failed. 

This audio essay is adapted from my forthcoming book, “Abundance,” which I wrote with Derek Thompson. You can preorder it here. And learn more about our book tour here.

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Sub...

The economy has started blinking red. President Trump’s tariffs have been roiling markets. Consumer sentiment was already down. G.D.P. forecasts are predicting slower growth. And on Tuesday night Trump declared to Congress and the nation that things had never been better.

Something was different about this speech. The level of baldfaced lying. The way Republicans cheered along. How uncomfortable and uncertain Democrats seemed. It wa...

Artificial general intelligence — an A.I. system that can beat humans at almost any cognitive task — is arriving in just a couple of years. That’s what people tell me — people who work in A.I. labs, researchers who follow their work, former White House officials. A lot of these people have been calling me over the last couple of months trying to convey the urgency. This is coming during President Trump’s term, they tell me. We’re n...

If you’re looking for a single-sentence summation of the change in America’s foreign policy under Donald Trump, you could do worse than what Trump said on Wednesday:

“The European Union was formed in order to screw the United States. That’s the purpose of it. And they’ve done a good job of it. But now I’m president.”

Trump seems to loathe America’s traditional European allies even as he warms relations with Russia. He’s threatened ta...

In 2016, when Donald Trump won the first time, a little-known book became an unexpected phenomenon. It was “The Revolt of the Public,” self-published two years earlier by a former C.I.A. media analyst, Martin Gurri. Gurri, who is now a visiting research fellow at the Mercatus Center, argued that a revolution in how information flowed was driving political upheavals in country after country: The dynamics of modern media ecosystems n...

After the elections, I started asking congressional Democrats the same question: If the elections had gone the other way, if they had won a trifecta, what would be their first big bill? In almost every case, they said they didn’t know. That’s a problem.

Democrats are in the opposition now. That means fighting the worst of what Trump is doing. But it also means providing an alternative. So one thing I’m going to do this year is talk ...

What happens when ambition no longer checks ambition?

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, ...