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is a Producer for the Stay Tuned with Preet podcast.

This week on Stay Tuned, Preet sits down with historian Timothy Snyder, whose books On Tyranny and On Freedom are essential reading for anyone trying to make sense of our moment. Speaking the day after Viktor Orbán’s stunning defeat in the Hungarian elections, Snyder had a lot to say about its significance:

“I think folks in the U.S. who are centrist, who are liberal, who are on the left, may not understand that Orbán was the sun in the solar system of MAGA. Trump, Putin, Vance, Orbán, along with others, comprise a large network, which has been broadly documented, involving the transfer of Russian oil money, the sharing of political memes, the support of think tanks. The thing which passes for right-wing nationalism in the United States is largely a set of internationalists who are trading ideas, who are trading money, and who are learning from one another. And so the obvious significance of Orbán losing in Hungary is that it’s demoralizing for Trump and Vance. Because he’s basically their daddy. They learned from him, not the other way around.”

But the other reason Orbán’s defeat matters, Snyder says, is that it punctures the myth of inevitability. Trump and Vance believe that history is over, that their version has prevailed, Snyder argues. This is a familiar fallacy, he notes, and history inevitably issues a corrective—which, in this case, came in the form of the election results in Hungary. “The fact that at the center of their universe, which is Budapest, someone could get absolutely thumped like this in an election,” Snyder says, “that shows them that, hmm, maybe history isn’t on their side. Maybe God isn’t on their side.”

Preet presses Snyder on one of his more provocative recent claims: that “some variant of terrorism is Trump’s best bet” for holding onto power through the midterms. Snyder doesn’t back down. He points to what just happened in Hungary (Orbán’s last-ditch false-flag terrorism stunt, claiming Ukrainian sabotage of a pipeline) and to Putin’s rise, which was enabled by the Russian secret services bombing their own apartment buildings and blaming Chechens. We can no longer afford to be credulous at the prospect of such things happening here.

“This happens in the world,” Snyder says. “And it’s done by the people whom Trump admires. And we, as Americans, can’t do the thing we keep doing, which is saying, oh, there are some things that happen in history, or in foreign countries, but we’d like to reserve the right to be surprised when they happen in the United States.”

The reason Orbán’s stunt failed was because the Hungarian opposition was clear-eyed about the possibility and vigilant for signs of it. And there was another point on which the Hungarian opposition didn’t waver: their insistence that there would be legal consequences for abuse of power. “It’s one of the things that Magyar said in his victory speech,” Snyder tells Preet. “And I think the Democrats have to be ready to say it, too. There are people committing crimes in the United States right now who are not being prosecuted and who are not afraid of being prosecuted. And if you want to deter further abuse, especially around the November election, you do have to make it clear that on the other side, there will be prosecutions.”

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A NOTE FROM THE PRODUCER

is the Deputy Editor for Stay Tuned with Preet Bharara.

What is Trump’s psychology of war? What does it mean to let personal instincts override intelligence assessments? And is he seeking an off-ramp in Iran?

This week on Stay Tuned, CNN’s chief national security analyst Jim Sciutto joins Preet to discuss how the Iran war fits into the return—and transformation—of great power conflict.

They explore Trump’s “all force all the time” strategy and the extent to which it’s undermining our alliances, perhaps irreparably:

“In every interaction, like think back to the trade negotiations, both with friends and foes, whether it’s Canada or China, right? He’s like, I’m going to destroy your economy in effect, unless you give in. I’m going to put punishing sanctions on your steel, your cars, et cetera, unless you give in. Trump’s calculation seems to be, if I push them enough, they’re going to yield. Similar with Iran here, but it actually hasn’t worked.”

Plus, what is China learning from the U.S.’s military engagements abroad and how might it take advantage of the current moment?

Sciutto: “There’s a direct connection between Ukraine and Taiwan…China is watching Russia’s experience there to measure, not just on the battlefield, what war looks like, like for instance now that it’s all about drones, right? But also how the world reacts, what the economic costs are, how long the US stays in it. Does it stay in it to win it or does it eventually lose interest and kind of back off? All these things contribute to its calculation as to whether, eventually, it takes a shot at Taiwan. Or Xi could calculate, there’s the US wrapped up in the Middle East again. And depleting its missile supplies…So, you know, the Taiwanese are nervous.”

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Become a paying member to get access to Preet and Joyce Vance’s weekly Insider podcast and more exclusive content. On this week’s Stay Tuned bonus, exclusively for paying subscribers, Preet and Jim Sciutto discuss the controversy surrounding press coverage at the Defense Department.

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A NOTE FROM THE PRODUCER

Paquette is a producer for the Stay Tuned with Preet podcast.

This week on Stay Tuned, Preet sits down with one of the most celebrated nonfiction writers of our time: Michael Pollan. They discuss Pollan’s new book, A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness. It is Pollan’s tenth book, and, in many ways, his most ambitious to date.

Referring to a point Pollan makes in his book, Preet notes that it’s “entirely possible to go through life without worrying about the problem of consciousness.” It’s true: consciousness is the water we swim in. It is, paradoxically, both the thing we know most intimately and the thing we think about least. But our inattention has become a luxury we can no longer afford, Pollan says.

“Our consciousness today is in some trouble,” he tells Preet. “It’s being polluted in certain ways…You have social media, with these algorithms that are pressing our buttons continually, getting us to think things we didn’t want to think, but we’re sort of addicted to. And now we’re entering into these emotional relationships with chatbots. I see these things as endangering what’s wonderful about consciousness, which is the fact that we have this space in our heads where we have complete freedom of thought. We can think and feel anything we want. No one can stop us. And it’s private—no one has access to it if we don’t want them to. What a great gift. And it’s in trouble.”

The conversation ranges widely, from the question over whether there is such a thing as “a self”—a stable, enduring “I” that exists across time—to plant sentience (turns out, plants can hear and see; they can be anesthetized by the same chemicals that anesthetize us) to the therapeutic promise of psychedelics to the question of whether artificial intelligence can ever be truly conscious. (Pollan’s answer: no, and for a reason that may surprise you.)

But one of the conversation’s most striking moments comes when Pollan frames what he sees as the historical stakes of our moment. He believes we’re fast approaching an inflection point, one of those occasional paradigm shifts (in the Kuhnian sense of the term), when humanity’s self-conception is fundamentally revised: this happened in 1543, when Copernicus presented his heliocentric theory, which argued that we were not the center of the universe; It happened in 1859, when Darwin published On the Origin of Species, which argued persuasively that we were not divinely created but naturally selected. It happened in the early twentieth century, when Freud showed us that we were not the masters of our own minds

We are at another such crossroads today, says Pollan.

“I think we’re coming up against a tremendous challenge to our sense of who we are as humans,” he tells Preet. “We’ve got two things going on simultaneously. One is, whether AI is really conscious or not, we’re going to believe they’re conscious, because they’re very good at fooling us. I mean it’s already happening, people are falling in love with chatbots…So you have this imputation of consciousness to machines. On the other side, you have this extension of consciousness to many more creatures. Most vertebrates now are regarded as conscious…So we’re being pressed from two sides, and our sense of specialness is under challenge. I think we’re approaching this Copernican moment where we’ll have to figure out who the hell are we? What makes us unique? What does it mean to be human?”

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Become a paying member to get access to Preet and Joyce Vance’s weekly Insider podcast and more exclusive content. On this week’s Stay Tuned bonus, exclusively for paying subscribers, Preet and Michael Pollan discuss why you can’t have life without death. Plus, whether it’s possible to control our own thoughts.

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A NOTE FROM THE PRODUCER

is a producer for the Stay Tuned with Preet and Insider podcasts.

Are we letting other countries “out-America” us?

According to Senator Cory Booker, we are. This week on Stay Tuned, the Senator joins Preet to explain what that phrase means and how we got to this point.

Booker: “There’s massive corporate concentration and growth in power. That power, especially thanks to Citizens United, is infecting our politics…If you look at the facts, this is no longer the best country to be born poor in on planet earth. There are a number of countries that are better in terms of social mobility, measurable index, in which people at the bottom can move.”

However, as Senator Booker explains, we are now witnessing an era in which baby boomer politicians are retiring, opening the door to a new generation of politicians at a time when the public is tired of the status quo.

Booker: “The question is, what is the next generation of leadership, the millennials and the Gen Xs, what are we going to stand for at a time that Americans writ large are tired of both parties?”

The solution appears to be in the Senator’s new book, Stand. In it, he shares personal stories about himself and those around him that embody what he sees as the ten most important virtues: agency, vulnerability, patriotism, truth, humility, community, creativity, perseverance, grace, and vision.

Booker: “It is time to renew America. It’s time to redeem the dream and you don’t do that by surrendering your values and your virtues. Virtues are strengths. Virtue is strategy. It’s how we win. And my book really is an instruction book. It’s both inspiration and instruction on how during some of our darkest times, American lightworkers were able to renew, to redeem, to heal, to overcome.”

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Become a paying member to get access to Preet and Joyce Vance’s weekly Insider podcast and more exclusive content. On this week’s Stay Tuned bonus, exclusively for paying subscribers, Preet answers listener questions. He explains whether the FCC can legally strip TV broadcasters of their licenses for coverage it doesn’t like. Plus, what’s the deal with Trump’s Florsheim shoe pressure campaign?

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A NOTE FROM THE PRODUCER

Paquette is a producer for the Stay Tuned with Preet podcast.

This week on Stay Tuned, Preet is joined by David French, opinion columnist for The New York Times and one of the most consistent conservative critics of President Trump. French is an Iraq War veteran, evangelical Christian, and Harvard-trained constitutional lawyer. In 2015, after twenty-one years of legal practice, French left the law for National Review; he subsequently co-founded The Dispatch, where he was senior editor until joining the Times in 2023.

French talks about the distinction between a just war and a legal war, what turned so many Reagan Republicans into MAGA Republicans (rarely is it conviction), the emotional bond between Trump and his base, and why he’s convinced that Americans will soon tire of politics being treated as if it’s a blood sport.

French traces his break with the Republican Party to September 2015, when he wrote a short post criticizing the racialized language he was hearing at the first GOP primary debate. Within minutes, he says, hateful, doctored images of a family member began appearing online. He was quick to realize that we were witnessing a significant break from the political norms of the past.

“That made it very clear to people that this is not a normal political movement,” French tells Preet. “You’re not allowed to have what you might call normal political disagreement where you might argue intensely about this point or that point or which candidate you prefer. But at the end of the day, you’re gonna shake hands. We’re all Americans…[But] this was politics as blood sport. If you came out against MAGA, you had to be destroyed.”

When Preet asks why so many conservatives fell in line behind Trump, French says it’s a question that has troubled him for ten years, and one he’s not sure can ever be fully answered: “How many people’s conversion from Reagan conservatism to MAGA was genuine? And how much was the conversion just part of the process of intimidation, tribalism, and group dynamics?”

Over time, he’s arrived at a conclusion that is, by his own standards, unusually harsh. “There’s a lot of cowardice here,” he says. He knew these people before. He had been in conversations with them about their ethics, their morals, where their limits were — and he watched them exceed those limits so completely that they became unrecognizable. “There are people who were Never Trumpers like me in 2016 who by 2020 were trying to help him steal the election. Which is extraordinary.”

The conversation turns to the war in Iran, and to French’s argument that the war is constitutionally illegitimate, even if the need to prevent threats posed by the Iranian regime are real and valid. As a JAG officer who reviewed bombing raids in Iraq, French is precise about what was lost when Trump bypassed Congress:

“This isn’t some mere technicality…No, let me put it this way as bluntly as possible: A democracy that has public support behind its military forces is one of the most unbeatable forces in world history. If you look at the awesome power of Western democracy, with public support for armed conflict—that has, in many ways, been the peak of power in the modern world. But if you have a democracy without public support for its actions…it’s fragile, weak. And so this is directly related to the success of the entire enterprise.”

French also offers one of the sharper diagnoses of the Trump era’s origins, which is often said to be the result of a populist revolt. But the data suggests that this explanation is a canard, French says:

“If you look at the demographics…what actually happened in America was not a working class revolt. What actually happened…is that the extreme edges of both parties have remarkably similar demographics. They are disproportionately white, they are disproportionately wealthy, and they’re disproportionately well-educated…So a lot of America is being taken on this dysfunctional ride in American politics by a cohort of people who are not actually the suffering cohort…They took normal turbulence, turned it into an existential threat and now here we are.”

Despite all this, French isn’t without hope. He sees, in the Texas Senate primary, early signs of what he calls “a thermostatic reaction”: a cultural correction away from outrage and hysteria toward kindness and civility. He invokes the 1976 election, when a country exhausted by the “long, national nightmare” of the Nixon years chose Jimmy Carter, a Baptist Sunday school teacher who walked in his own inauguration parade and refused to have “Hail to the Chief” played.

French believes that moment will come again. He just doesn’t know how much damage will be done before it does.

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Become a paying member to get access to Preet and Joyce Vance’s weekly Insider podcast and more exclusive content. On this week’s Stay Tuned podcast bonus, exclusively for paying subscribers, Preet and David French discuss politeness and whether it’s French’s Achilles heel or his biggest strength.

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A NOTE FROM THE PRODUCER

Paquette is a producer for the Stay Tuned with Preet podcast.

This week on Stay Tuned, Preet sits down with Lloyd Blankfein, the former chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, for a far-reaching conversation on the economic impacts of the war in Iran, lessons from the 2008 financial crisis, and the current state of the markets (and why he thinks we’re due for another reckoning). Blankfein is out with his new memoir, Streetwise: Getting To and Through Goldman Sachs.

They open with Iran. How, in such moments of uncertainty, should people think about their investments? Blankfein says those issuing predictions are owed a healthy dose of skepticism; in moments like this one, he wants contingency plans, not forecasts: “When you’re trying to manage your risk, the last thing I want to hear is people’s opinions about the future.”

Where the outcome is genuinely uncertain, Blankfein hedges — a reflex born of decades in risk management. But where he feels the picture is clear, he doesn’t equivocate. Take the independence of the Federal Reserve: “Undermining the Fed is foolish,” he says flatly. The United States, he says, “Is a big borrower in the world. The question is always going to be, when we default on our debt, what are those dollars going to be worth? If they lose the protection of the Fed, our creditors are going to lend us at a much higher rate—or they’re not going to lend at all.”

The conversation then turns to his memoir. Blankfein grew up in the Linden Houses, a public housing project in East New York, Brooklyn. His father was a postal clerk. He got into Harvard at sixteen, the first in his family to go to college. “I was a bit of a late bloomer,” he tells Preet, “which is why I like reading biographies of late bloomers.” A college classmate told Blankfein that he’d been named “least likely to succeed,” a superlative Blankfein doesn’t dispute. He went to law school, practiced tax law, hated it, and only ended up at Goldman because the firm acquired J. Aron, the commodities shop where he’d landed after being rejected by Goldman itself.

Blankfein says he still identifies more closely with the car driver than the guy in the back seat. He wants to give his children everything he didn’t have, and then begrudges them for having it. “My wife has said, ‘Lloyd, they didn’t grow up the way you did, give them a break,’” he tells Preet. “And she’s 100% right.”

On the 2008 crisis, Blankfein is unapologetic. “If everybody had done what we did, we wouldn’t have had a banking crisis.” What followed was a reputational catastrophe: the Rolling Stone cover story, which characterized Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,” picketers outside his apartment, and a teacher calling him “Mr. Madoff.” Blankfein says that, while it didn’t hurt Goldman’s business, it took a personal toll: “I live on the street, my kids go to school.”

And then there’s the reckoning he sees coming. “We haven’t had a good gang war in the market for a long time,” he says, invoking The Godfather, “and a lot of kindling has built up on the floor of the forest.” He’s not predicting a crash. He’s saying the longer we go without one, the worse it will be.

The conversation ends with cosmology. Blankfein has been listening to lectures on particle physics and astrophysics, and confesses that contemplating two trillion galaxies has done more to humble him than anything on Wall Street. “I didn’t think I could feel smaller,” he says, “but I do.”

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Become a paying member to get access to Preet and Joyce Vance’s weekly Insider podcast and more exclusive content. On this week’s Stay Tuned podcast bonus, exclusively for paying subscribers, Preet and Lloyd discuss how AI is transforming the workforce, and why Blankfein thinks resisting technological progress is folly.

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A NOTE FROM THE PRODUCER

is a producer for the Stay Tuned with Preet and Insider podcasts.

Are Democrats their own biggest problem?

This week on the Stay Tuned podcast, The Atlantic staff writer Mark Leibovich joins Preet Bharara to discuss his recent piece, “Democrats Aren’t Built for This,” about why the Party can’t seem to get out of its own way.

Leibovich walks us through some of the most notable primary elections that took place earlier this week, explaining what made certain Democratic politicians, like James Talarico in Texas, successful at the polls.

Leibovich: “[Talarico] has a very strong unifying message…when you get outside the realm of politics and a person goes out into the world, into a restaurant, or is driving across the country, or needs a tire fixed or something, the vast majority of people, their impulse is to be neighborly and that’s a big word for Talarico, neighborly or neighbor. It is not to immediately go down some kind of Facebook chat group rabbit hole and yell at each other about politics.”

Then, Leibovich shares some of the biggest takeaways from his reporting. One recurring theme he points out: “Democrats have lost the working class.”

What can they do to make up for it?

Leibovich: “A party becomes defined by who their central figure, who their quarterback, becomes. Democrats haven’t really anointed an effective quarterback since Barack Obama and no one saw him coming, just like no one saw Donald Trump coming in 2016.”

The episode also features a conversation with The Washington Post foreign affairs columnist David Ignatius who joins Preet to discuss the US-Israeli strikes in Iran, the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and what comes next.

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Become a paying member to get access to Preet and Joyce Vance’s weekly Insider podcast and more exclusive content. On this week’s Stay Tuned podcast bonus, exclusively for paying subscribers, Mark delves into the Iran war’s effects on U.S. politics and whether Democrats will flip the Senate.

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A NOTE FROM THE PRODUCER

is a producer for the Stay Tuned with Preet and Insider podcasts.

President Trump just delivered the longest State of the Union address in all of history. But what did we learn?

This week on the Stay Tuned podcast, Yale history professor Joanne Freeman, Vox host and editorial director Astead Herndon, and former Deputy National Security Adviser and co-host of The Long Game podcast Jon Finer join Preet Bharara to break down the speech.

Joanne sets up the conversation by explaining why we’re all here in the first place: “The idea behind it is…the president needs to be reigned in. The president not only needs to inform Congress about the state of the nation, he needs to be accountable for it.”

Then, Preet and the other panelists zoom in, focusing on particular moments of the address that stood out to them. Was anything surprising?

Jon: “[Trump] had this almost aside about how we are still for legal immigration in America, which is not something he actually always says and not something I think certain members of his administration even believe, thinking about someone like Stephen Miller. I wondered whether that was an attempt to maybe not soften, but at least expand in a slightly more inclusive way his message on immigration, which as you say has been playing very badly in polls around the country.”

Were there overall themes?

Astead: “This year will be a referendum on him. And I don’t think his attempts to shift that to Democrats are really going to be what makes November…I don’t think this is going to be about some State of the Union gimmick. I think things like Minneapolis, things like tariffs, things like what he says every day matters a lot more.”

Why choose to spotlight certain matters of foreign policy, but not others?

Jon: “These speeches are often worth looking at for what is not focused on. He barely mentioned China at all. I think most national security professionals would say that is the defining issue of the moment, the biggest challenge facing the United States.”

And what was with Trump’s glorification of the military?

Joanne: “Making this a sort of applaud the military moment was a choice…If in this moment what we’re thinking about is, ‘Are we actually going to attack another country?’…You’re glorifying the military in a way that feeds into this particular moment.”

What did you think about the address? Any parts that caught your attention?

Listen to the episode to hear Preet, Joanne, Astead, and Jon discuss the rest of the speech, and as always, comment below with your thoughts and questions.

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Become a paying member to get access to Preet and Joyce Vance’s weekly Insider podcast and more exclusive content. On this week’s Stay Tuned podcast bonus, exclusively for paying subscribers, Astead, Joanne, and Jon delve into whether Trump believes his own lies.

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A NOTE FROM THE PRODUCER

is the Lead Editorial Producer for Stay Tuned with Preet and The Long Game podcasts.

In this week’s episode of the Stay Tuned podcast, Preet sits down with Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice for a candid conversation about leadership, decision-making, and what worries her most about the Trump administration.

Preet begins by asking what, amid all the turbulence, actually keeps her up at night. Rice points to “the abrogation of the rule of law” and a drift toward “a lawless society.” What has struck her most, she says, is not simply the agenda but “the speed and the efficacy” with which it has been implemented—and how little resistance it initially faced from political and civic institutions.

The heart of the episode is a deeper look at how policy decisions are really made inside the White House—and how much that depends on who the president is. Having served under three different presidents, Rice offers a rare comparative perspective. “Policymaking should be a team sport in service of a president and the broad strokes of his agenda,” she tells Preet. But that only works if a president welcomes dissent. Strong leaders, she argues, want advisers who are “willing to honestly express their views, even when they may not be what one expects the president wants to hear.”

The conversation also turns to immigration. Rice emphasizes that we are a nation of immigrants and argues that the framework for comprehensive reform “is not complicated.” It must include legal pathways to come to the United States, secure borders, targeted and lawful enforcement focused on those who have committed crimes, and a structured process for long-settled undocumented residents to regularize their status. The difficulty, she suggests, lies less in policy design than in political will.

More broadly, the episode leaves listeners with a larger question: If we are on the brink of lawlessness, what will it take to preserve our democracy?

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Become a paying member to get access to Preet and Joyce Vance’s weekly Insider podcast and more exclusive content. On this week’s Stay Tuned podcast bonus, exclusively for paying subscribers, Rice turns the tables on Preet, asking how to respond to what she calls the “rapid evaporation” of democratic guardrails.

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A NOTE FROM THE PRODUCER

Paquette is a producer for the Stay Tuned with Preet podcast.

This week on the Stay Tuned podcast, Douglas Brinkley—presidential historian, Rice University professor, and author of more than twenty books on the American experience—joins Preet Bharara to discuss why we’re living in the era of “peak presidential power,” what Minneapolis revealed about the limits of executive authority, and what it means when a president seems incapable of giving up power.

But the conversation begins with music. Brinkley sits on the boards of the Bruce Springsteen Archives, the Woody Guthrie Center, and the Bob Dylan Center. Before turning to the weightier world matters (though not, Brinkley notes, matters of greater consequence: “Very few things matter more than discussing American culture”), he and Preet discuss Springsteen’s “Streets of Minneapolis,” Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl triumph, and the most important songs in America’s 250-year history.

One of Brinkley’s recurring subjects is the American presidency: how presidents have wielded power, expanded it, and, at key moments, seen it checked. He traces the arc of executive authority from George Washington, who had to “kind of invent the role” of president and define the executive branch’s boundaries, through Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation—”executive order number one”—to FDR, who saw his mandate as license to “throw everything against the wall to see what stuck.”

What’s different now is not just the volume of executive orders but their performative nature.

“What Trump realizes is the theater of the executive order,” Brinkley tells Preet. “You sign your name big, and it looks like you’re doing stuff. So you could be in the White House, but with television crews…He’s using [the Oval Office] as a hot box studio, showing that every day he’s doing all of these executive orders. Many are frivolous, aimed at stoking culture wars.”

But what sets Trump apart isn’t merely his appetite for power, it’s his apparent inability to relinquish it. Brinkley draws a comparison to LBJ, another president given to ruthlessness, who would regularly, famously, coax, cajole, and bully members of Congress, doing whatever it took to bend them to his will. The difference is that Johnson knew when to step aside.

Brinkley: “Johnson had the decency to not run for reelection in 1968 because he knew he had gotten America deep into Vietnam. You won’t see Donald Trump doing that. If anything, he’ll threaten a third term. Johnson knew how to give up power. And Trump seems unable to.”

When Preet asks about thoughtfulness in leadership—what it means, whether we still value it—Brinkley invokes Eisenhower, who, as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during the Second World War, set aside Sundays to personally read the names of every fallen soldier and write letters to their parents. He describes FDR’s “map mind”—Roosevelt possessed an encyclopedic grasp of geography that reflected his “thoughtful view of what it meant to be in the world.”

And Trump? Brinkley says, “He is the only truly unthoughtful president we’ve had. He does not read, he doesn’t care. He has no pets, he has no empathy. He’s only about himself.”

Brinkley sees signs that the Trump era may be entering a new phase. “There does seem to be diminishing returns,” he tells Preet, “because the outrage turns to nausea at some point.” Whether that nausea translates into political consequences remains to be seen—but Brinkley believes Minneapolis may have marked a turning point.

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Become a paying member to get access to Preet and Joyce Vance’s weekly Insider podcast and more exclusive content. On this week’s Stay Tuned bonus, exclusively for paying subscribers, Doug and Preet discuss the "pendulum swing" in American politics—how Trump pieced together his unlikely coalition, and why the next Democrat president will have to pass what Brinkley calls an "authenticity test."

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A NOTE FROM THE PRODUCER

Paquette is a producer for the Stay Tuned with Preet podcast.

This week on Stay Tuned, Anne Applebaum, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, staff writer at The Atlantic, and host of the podcast Autocracy in America, joins Preet to discuss why the ICE operations in Minneapolis may have changed the trajectory of the Trump era, and what it means when our closest allies start speaking of a “rupture.”

Applebaum has spent decades studying what happens when democratic institutions come under strain, and she believes the United States is in a genuinely perilous moment. She describes a “profound coarsening of the culture” that both made Trump possible and that he’s accelerated; a hardening of hearts in an era when people see millions of images of death and violence and tragedy every day, and click and move on. That coarsening, she argues, is part of the strategy: chipping away slowly, convincing people they aren’t really losing anything, and that it’s others who will suffer.

But Minneapolis, Applebaum argues, has been different.

“The Trump administration’s original idea was to use ICE as a kind of performative display of cruelty that would appeal to people or scare them…And then to have guys [on the streets of an ordinary American city] dressed for Fallujah…closing in on schools and daycare centers and threatening ordinary people who are committing the ‘crime’ of holding up their phones…I think it’s backfired in that it doesn’t look like a video game. It looks like thugs on an ordinary American street.”

The images alone were damning. And then the administration began lying about the people its agents had killed.

“Normally we mourn people who die in those circumstances,” Applebaum tells Preet. “When Renee Good was murdered…within minutes, [the administration was] slandering her…I mean, we didn’t even have time to find out what happened…and they immediately began campaigning around her, they put out very aggressive statements…Normally we mourn people who die in those circumstances. We don’t insult them…It wasn’t just that the administration was lying, they were violating some sense of very deep decency.”

The conversation also turns to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recent speech at Davos, where he warned that the world was witnessing not a transition but a “rupture”—and Applebaum shares that view. NATO, she says, “will never be the same.” Trade relationships and alliances that made America prosperous and powerful in the decades following the Second World War are fraying, not through a single dramatic collapse, but through a steady accumulation of decisions not to invest, not to partner, not to send staff. The damage, Applebaum warns, may take years to fully appreciate, much as Brexit’s true costs are only now coming into full view, a decade on.

For Applebaum, the rupture isn’t only geopolitical; it’s ideological: Trump has broken not just with allies abroad but with the conservative tradition itself. Whatever the second Trump administration is, it’s not the heir to Reagan or Burke. “Conservatives believe in conserving things and in moving slowly and in taking care not to smash things up because conservatives know that it can be hard to rebuild them,” she says. “This is a mentality much closer to the Bolsheviks.”

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is a producer for the Stay Tuned with Preet and Insider podcasts.

Could the recent events in Minnesota mark an inflection point for Trump and for the country?

This week on the Stay Tuned podcast, Preet Bharara puts this question to Financial Times U.S. national editor and columnist Ed Luce.

As Luce points out, the killings of Renee Good by an ICE agent and Alex Pretti by border patrol agents could prove to be different for one core reason: “Unlike other things that might legitimately outrage and instill foreboding into you and I and people who are on the news the whole time, this is visual.”

Even though Trump and senior officials, including Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and Pete Hegseth, might try to convince the public that this was an attack by a “domestic terrorist,” the videos have prompted widespread scrutiny and recent polls show the public views of these events and of immigration enforcement more broadly, are shifting.

Luce: “Some are tutored to disbelieve their own lying eyes. And you cannot overstate the degree to which psychology and perception can be manipulated by repetition. But I cannot see it through those eyes. I’m trying to look at this through clear spectacles. And I think most others have judging by the numbers, by the polls.”

The question is whether the Trump administration will respond to the public outcry or stay the course.

Luce doesn’t seem to think so: “I don’t think the people around Trump think in traditional electoral cycles or 22nd Amendment terms. I think they think in terms of regime change. And that to change regime, revolutionaries, the people who make history, aren’t looking at focus groups or day-to-day polls. They have a far bigger historic mission. And that is to uproot and change society.”

What do you think? Will we see the Trump administration alter its approach?

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A NOTE FROM THE PRODUCER

is a producer for the Stay Tuned with Preet and Insider podcasts.

“What in the hell has happened to ICE?”

This week on the Stay Tuned podcast, Preet Bharara poses this poignant question to former Assistant Director for Legislative Affairs at ICE, Elliot Williams. He joins Preet to discuss the evolution of ICE under the Trump administration and how far the agency has strayed from its core mission.

As Williams explains, “When you hire people who are unfit for the jobs they have—they’re not in good physical shape, they’re too old—you incentivize them behaving in a bad way by paying them gobs of money and giv[ing] them a mission that the government is simply not equipped to do. We are not equipped to remove a million people from the country a year, just in terms of the infrastructure that exists. When that happens, big civil rights violations are going to occur on a wide scale, and we are seeing it now.”

Can ICE still be fixed?

Williams draws on his years of experience at the agency to answer this question and more: “The fact that there is nobody watching the agency to say ‘too far’...That is something that even in the worst days of Obama immigration enforcement, at least there was a critical Congress led by Democrats really holding the agency accountable.”

Then, he shares his inspiration for writing his new book, Five Bullets: The Story of Bernie Goetz, New York’s Explosive ‘80s, and the Subway Vigilante Trial That Divided the Nation, and the lessons that still resonate today from the Goetz case.

Elliot: “The kinds of issues that characterized 1980’s New York still live with us today in different ways. We still are debating safety in cities...We’re still fighting about race. We are still fighting about vigilantism and where is the point at which it’s okay to step out and violate the law. And what’s old is new in many ways with the events back then and the events now, and it all ties together.”

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A NOTE FROM THE PRODUCER

is a producer for the Stay Tuned with Preet and Insider podcasts.

This week on the Stay Tuned podcast, Preet Bharara is joined by Rahm Emanuel. He’s had a longtime career in politics, serving in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, representing Illinois in the U.S. House, serving as mayor of Chicago, and, most recently, as U.S. ambassador to Japan. Now, he’s eyeing a run for presidency in 2028.

Rahm joins Preet to explain why many voters are feeling disillusioned with President Trump. He believes it can be summed up by three emotions: anger, discomfort, and betrayal. The most underappreciated being betrayal.

As Rahm explains, “Donald Trump said, ‘I’m going to drain the swamp,’ and he’s enlarged the swamp. Donald Trump said, ‘I’m going to be worried about your paycheck,’ and he’s worried only about his checkbook. Donald Trump told you he’s going to be America first, and he’s chasing his Nobel Peace Prize around the globe. And [Republicans] feel betrayed.”

So where do we go from here?

According to Rahm, the answer lies in Democrats’s approach. Whether they’re tackling immigration, the affordability crisis, education, or crime, the key lies in strong and clear leadership, and pushing away from what he describes as the “weak and woke” Party.

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A NOTE FROM THE PRODUCER

is a producer for the Stay Tuned with Preet and The Long Game podcasts.

We start the new year with Ian Bremmer — covering his annual Top Risks report, which has become something of a January ritual for the show. Ian is the founder and president of Eurasia Group and the creator of GZERO Media, but more importantly, he’s one of the clearest thinkers about how power actually works in the world — and how it breaks down.

This conversation was especially timely as Ian’s report was already drafted when events in Venezuela accelerated dramatically over the weekend, including the removal of Nicolás Maduro. In fact, Ian had written — before those events — that Maduro was “unlikely to survive the year in power,” a prediction he wasn’t shy about highlighting once the world caught up. That leads to a wide-ranging discussion about U.S. foreign policy under President Trump, what Ian calls the “Donroe Doctrine,” and why this moment is less about regime change than what he describes as “regime roulette.”

Preet and Ian discuss Ian’s number-one risk for 2026: what he calls a political revolution in the United States. Ian explains why he’s using language he hasn’t used before, why he believes the guardrails are weaker than many expected, and why — for the first time in his lifetime — he says we can’t be confident about what kind of political system the U.S. will end up with on the other side.

As always with Ian, there’s humor, bluntness, and a willingness to say what he thinks even when it’s uncomfortable — along with a clear-eyed explanation of why he still believes this political revolution is more likely to fail than succeed.

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A NOTE FROM THE PRODUCER

is a producer for the Stay Tuned with Preet and Insider podcasts.

This week on Stay Tuned, Dan Harris joins Preet Bharara. Dan is a former news anchor who had a panic attack on live TV—an experience that sent him down a very different path. He went on to write “10% Happier,” which yielded a whole universe: a meditation app, podcast, and Substack newsletter of the same name.

But why only 10% happier? Shouldn’t we be aiming for 20, 30, 50%? As Dan explains, the idea behind his book, and now his life motto, was a reaction to what he considers “the reckless over-promising of the self-help industry.” While others sell a silver bullet solution to happiness, Dan offers practical, achievable steps for “messy marginal improvement over time.”

Throughout the episode, Preet and Dan share personal anecdotes, on the value of quality friendships, the role of gratitude, and why it can feel so difficult to make new friends as an adult.

Dan: “I consider the crown jewels in my personal happiness to be the quality of my relationships. And we live in a lonely, tech-obsessed, individualistic culture. And many people, when they hear, as is said in every TED Talk, we’re social animals, this is the key to our happiness, they think, well, how do I do that?”

Then, Preet and Dan dig into news consumption: how to stay sane while being bombarded with grim headlines, how to avoid echo chambers, and how to navigate that one family member that’s on a different side of the political news spectrum.

Dan’s suggestions might surprise you…

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Become a member to get access to Preet and Joyce Vance’s weekly Insider podcast and more exclusive content. On this week’s Stay Tuned bonus, Preet and Harris chat about what gets in the way of Preet’s happiness.

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A NOTE FROM THE PRODUCER

Torrey Paquette is a producer of the Stay Tuned with Preet podcast.

This week on Stay Tuned, Jill Lepore—Harvard historian, Harvard Law professor, and staff writer at The New Yorker—joins Preet to discuss her new book, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution, and why she believes the abandonment of the constitutional amendment poses an existential threat to U.S. democracy.

“Our written constitutional system is based on the philosophy of amendment,” she tells Preet. “It’s based on the idea that things can always change. It may sometimes be necessary, might even be urgent; it might be a little change, might be a big change, might be an improvement, might be a correction, might be a repair, might be making moral amends.”

Consider how different things looked in 1954. In Brown v. Board of Education, the question turned on the Fourteenth Amendment. Chief Justice Earl Warren asked both sides to submit historical evidence on its meaning—then declared that evidence inconclusive. Even if it weren’t, he wrote, the Court couldn’t defer to history and tradition when history and tradition were exactly what needed overturning. He rejected originalism before it even had a name. Today, that reasoning would be unrecognizable.

Lepore traces how originalism emerged just as the formal amendment process was becoming impossible, offering a path to constitutional change while claiming to be its opposite. “One of the principal claims of originalists is that there are only this finite number of historical documents that determine the meaning of the Constitution,” Lepore says. “And most of those documents were not available to judges before the 1980s…That stuff, it’s not original.”

One result: the Supreme Court became the de facto mechanism for constitutional change. And once Americans grew accustomed to that distortion, others became easier to accept, Lepore says: “You have to…become willing to tolerate that deformity before you get to the current deformity, which is the one in which the president decides what the constitution means.”

The conversation also turns to one of the most misunderstood amendment sagas in American history: Prohibition. Lepore reframes it not as puritanical overreach but as a response to legal powerlessness—an attempt by women who couldn’t vote, own property, or press criminal charges against abusive husbands to protect themselves and their children from violence. “It’s not a crazy idea,” she says, “given there’s nothing else they can do.”

And they discuss America’s approaching 250th anniversary. In her travels to promote the book, Lepore has been asking Americans old enough to remember what the 1976 bicentennial was like. The Freedom Train and the tall ships top the list—especially for those who grew up in “the OG 13,” where the celebration loomed largest. (For her part, Lepore remembers Wilt Chamberlain’s sneakers, which sat aboard the Freedom Train alongside an original copy of the Constitution.) She notes how much civic infrastructure was built for that celebration, much of it through National Endowment for the Humanities funds. This time around? There may be fewer freedom trains and more Arcs de Trump. (Call it a Trump l’oeil: spectacle in place of substance.)

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Become a member to get access to Preet and Joyce Vance’s weekly Insider podcast and more exclusive content. On this week’s Stay Tuned bonus, Preet and Lepore chat about her reporting on the No Kings movement, whether rallies can still make a difference, and the lines she draws as a journalist in a political moment.

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A NOTE FROM THE PRODUCER

is a producer of the Stay Tuned with Preet podcast.

This week on the Stay Tuned podcast, Preet Bharara is joined by Anand Giridharadas. He is a writer, political analyst, author of four books, and founder of the Substack publication, The Ink.

They discuss Giridharadas’s latest article, “How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails,” in which he uncovers a difficult truth about the people in Jeffrey Epstein’s circle. He explains to Preet: “Many of them belonged to this kind of elite social network that was able to look away at the pain that Jeffrey Epstein had caused, at the abuse he had engaged in, because looking away was a superpower in this social network. It was an essential skill for a lot of these people.”

But what about the subset of billionaires who use their wealth for philanthropic purposes, like Bill Gates in his efforts to eradicate malaria?

Anand believes these folks aren’t exempt from criticism: “You think about someone like Bill Gates looking at the problem of public health and vaccines in COVID, and using his voice and clout in that moment to insist on patents. So there’s a looking at a problem, but because you are who you are as a billionaire, because you come with the interests and worldview you do, it is possible to look at and look away at the same time.”

He further emphasizes this by arguing that the wealthy exist under a subset of rules that simply don’t apply to the rest of the world: “Like 95% of people in this country feel very deeply the truth that they can make no mistakes…you can’t even make the mistake of getting sick. But if you are an economist who helps guide a deregulation agenda that tanks the economy, you will get promoted. If you are a foreign affairs expert who helps sell a war that turns out to be a lie, you will literally get a better professorship and TV gig. There is, in this country, a group of people who survive at the top no matter what.”

How can the public ensure the elite use their money for good? Is there such a thing as an ethical billionaire?

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Become a member to get access to Preet and Joyce Vance’s weekly Insider podcast and more exclusive content. You will also get exclusive access to the Stay Tuned bonus. This week, Giridharadas breaks down what he thinks makes NYC mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani so popular.

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A NOTE FROM THE PRODUCER

Jennifer Indig is a Lead Editorial Producer at Stay Tuned with Preet.

This week on Stay Tuned, Preet is joined by two familiar voices stepping into a new role: Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer, who have just launched their own podcast, The Long Game. They bring the sharp, unfiltered foreign-policy insight that defines their new podcast straight into this episode of Stay Tuned.

Their conversation opens with a deep dive into the fast-escalating standoff in Venezuela, where a U.S. aircraft carrier now sits off the coast and the Trump administration is actively weighing military options—including whether the United States might actually topple Nicolás Maduro. Jake and Jon walk Preet through what a strike could look like, why some in the White House are floating “decapitation strike” targeting Maduro himself, and how seriously to take talk of a land incursion. As Jake puts it plainly: “I think they intend to do this from the air… but they’re bandying about the phrase ‘decapitation strike,’ which is a fancy way of saying: take out Maduro.”

Even if boots on the ground are unlikely, they warn how easily a show of force can tip into a conflict no one claims to want. “There’s a laws-of-physics quality to this,” Jake says. “You do the boats, then the ports… there’s a natural logic that pushes you onto land.” Jon notes that toppling Maduro might be militarily straightforward, but the aftermath is the real danger: “We’re pretty bad at anticipating what comes next.”

Their discussion widens into Trump’s worldview—and why Venezuela is the rare left-wing dictatorship he seems eager to confront. Jake points to ideology and domestic politics: “Trump really likes right-wing dictators… left-wing dictators he kind of sees as Democrats.” Finer outlines the tug-of-war inside the White House, with Marco Rubio pushing for aggressive pressure abroad and Stephen Miller eyeing the crisis as justification for expanded domestic authority. The result, they argue, is an unpredictable and potentially volatile policy mix.

From there, the episode moves through other major national-security flashpoints including: the latest on the peace plan for Gaza; what U.S. allies and adversaries are learning from Trump’s approach; and a quick, unsettling look at how artificial intelligence is reshaping global conflict—from autonomous drone swarms to AI-enabled cyberattacks and battlefield logistics.

As always, comment below with your thoughts and questions.

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Become a member to get access to Preet and Joyce Vance’s weekly Insider podcast and more exclusive content. On this week’s Stay Tuned bonus, Preet and Jon Finer break down Trump’s recent meeting with Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the White House, revisiting the fallout from Jamal Khashoggi’s killing and what the encounter suggests about how the administration is handling its relationship with Saudi Arabia.

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A NOTE FROM THE PRODUCER

Torrey Paquette is a Producer at Stay Tuned with Preet.

This week on Stay Tuned, Preet is joined by Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times and CNBC, to unpack his new book 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash In Wall Street History—and How It Shattered a Nation.

They discuss:

• Contrary to what many of us believe, the crash was not a single day event, but a slow-motion catastrophe. And, once the dust had settled, people quickly moved on: it would be years before the crash rose to the level of historical importance. The New York Times didn’t even include it in their year-end review of 1929’s most important stories.

• Technological failure amplified the panic. Because the stock ticker fell four to six hours behind during the crash, traders were forced to make life-altering decisions based on wildly outdated information. Thousands of ordinary Americans flooded Wall Street not to witness history, but simply to understand what was happening to their money.

• Before 1919, taking on debt was considered a “moral sin” in America. When General Motors began offering car loans that year, it transformed the culture and opened the door to the credit-fueled boom—and eventual bust. Sorkin argues that debt remains the “singular through line” behind every major financial crisis, from 1929 to 2008 to today’s economy.

One of Sorkin’s ambitions with 1929, which he handily accomplishes, is helping readers understand that the people involved in the crash were fundamentally like us. It’s easy to sit in judgment of the past, but history shows this is folly.

Andrew: “I try to put myself in the shoes of these people living a hundred years ago, and I think, Was it immoral? With retrospect, obviously it all looks horrifically terrible. But at the time, there were no rules. [There was no regulation.]...The markets are a funny place. The stock market is people who are trying to outwit another person, right? So the buyer of a stock thinks they’re smarter than the person selling the stock, and the seller always thinks they’re smarter than the buyer, and…these pump and dump schemes and manipulation…this was just another form of outwitting the other side, right? And that’s not to take away from the immorality of it all, but it was just the normal course back then.”

Andrew: “One of my favorite moments when I was reporting and researching this book was reporting on Winston Churchill’s trip to New York during October of 1929. [This was a decade before he was prime minister.] He had got bitten by the bug, like everybody else, bought a lot of stock—and lost his shirt. And yet on his way home from the United States in that fall of 1929, he wrote about…how the optimistic nature of Americans was so different from [what he experienced] in the UK and other parts of the world. He didn’t look at our optimism as having gone too far—he thought it was one of the great benefits of the US. He looked at it as part of our resiliency. I think our optimism is a feature ultimately and not a bug—even when it takes us over the cliff occasionally.”

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Become a member to get access to Preet and Joyce Vance’s weekly Insider podcast and more exclusive content. On this week’s Stay Tuned bonus, Andrew Ross Sorkin dreamcasts the characters for a possible film adaptation of his new book.

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