On this episode of the Time of Monsters, Chris Lehmann on what can strop Trump’s wrecking ball.
President Donald Trump talks to reporters from the Resolute Desk after signing an executive order to appoint the deputy administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration in the Oval Office at the White House on January 30, 2025, in Washington, DC.(Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
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Running for president last year, Donald Trump disowned Project 2025, the laundry list of radical demands gathered together by right-wing think tanks. Trump claimed Project 2025 had no influence on him and was only being raised by Democrats as a political attack. But now Trump is in power, he’s enacting an agenda of dismantling the welfare state that is following Project 2025 in close detail, as my Nation colleague Chris Lehmann documented in a recent column.
Chris and Jeet Heer talk about Trump’s mobilization of Christian nationalist ideologues in the service of a making the state subservient to big business. We also take up the remarkable supine Democratic Party response, and also possible sources of resistance in the courts, the federal government and, most crucially, from outraged public opinion mobilized into protest.
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Running for president last year, Donald Trump disowned Project 2025, the laundry list of radical demands gathered together by right-wing think tanks. Trump claimed that Project 2025 had no influence on him and was only being raised by Democrats as a political attack. But now that Trump is in power, he’s enacting an agenda of dismantling the welfare state that is following Project 2025 in close detail, as my Nation colleague Chris Lehmann documented in a recent column.
Chris and I talk about Trump’s mobilization of Christian nationalist ideologues in the service of a making the state subservient to big business. We also take up the remarkably supine Democratic Party response, and also possible sources of resistance in the courts, the federal government, and, most crucially, from outraged public opinion mobilized into protest.
Here's where to find podcasts from The Nation. Political talk without the boring parts, featuring the writers, activists and artists who shape the news, from a progressive perspective.
On this episode of the Time of Monsters, Jeet Heer is joined by Stephen Wertheim to discuss how 'America First' went from rhetoric to policy.
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During his first term in office, Donald Trump often talked about his radical America First agenda but in practice his foreign policy was that of a conventional Republican hawk. Just five weeks into his second term, there has been a marked shift. As Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, recently noted in The Guardian, Trump 2.0 is marked by a turn toward a foreign policy that is much more focused on the Western Hemisphere and away from Europe and more geared toward tariffs as a weapon of economic warfare. In other words, Trump has now found advisers who are willing to implement the core strategy of America First in a real way.
This shift has frightened many American allies, particularly the NATO countries and Mexico. Yet mixed with Trump’s advocacy of a new Manifest Destiny have been welcome indications that his administration will be more open to negotiating with Russia, Iran and perhaps even China.
To make sense Trump’s conflicting foreign policy messages and actions, I was happy to talk to Stephen Wertheim, who shares my belief that we need to distinguish between Trump’s rhetoric and his actions.
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Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.