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Melania Trump: Hero of the People?

Amy Wilentz on the first lady, plus Katha Pollitt on the politics of motherhood, and Lee Saunders on unions after Janus.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener

August 30, 2018

Amy Wilentz takes up the vital question, is Melania Trump a hero of the resistance—or an accomplice of evil? Is she edging “ever closer to open contempt for him,” as New York Times columnist Frank Bruni argues, and finding “increasingly clever ways to show it”? Or is she sticking with her role as wife to a racist tyrant with a clear history of infidelity—and lots of cash?

Also: Mothers and pregnant women are discriminated against, devalued, and punished—here at home, and around the world. Katha Pollitt talks about how that has happened—and why.

And as Labor Day approaches, we talk labor unions and politics with Lee Saunders, president of AFSCME. His union was the target of the Janus v. AFSCME decision by the Supreme Court in June, when it ruled, 5-4, that government workers who choose not to join unions may not be required to help pay for collective bargaining. Saunders explains what unions are doing to fight back—in the November election, and in the long run.

Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


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