Don’t Believe the Election Myths
On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Branko Marcetic on media narratives that misrepresent what happened.
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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 Branko Marcetic to discuss media narratives that misrepresent what happened.
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
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris pauses while speaking during a campaign rally at the Rawhide Event Center on October 10, 2024, in Chandler, Arizona.
(Brandon Bell / Getty Images)The one good thing about defeat is you can learn some lessons. But what if the lessons you learn are the wrong ones? In the wake of Donald Trump winning the presidential election, pundits and Democratic strategists have already been drawing lessons.
Unfortunately, as Branko Marcetic documents in a recent piece in Jacobin, many of these lessons are in fact myths, designed to exculpate those responsible for the electoral disaster while scapegoating groups that have much less power. On this episode of The Time of Monsters, I was very happy to talk to Branko about both election myths and the mythmakers who spin them.
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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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