Browse our archive by

There are 57 results for "Politics"

Prologue

There’s a political parable about Hillary Clinton that’s made the rounds this year. Host Ira Glass interviews contributor Jack Hitt, who says that in this parable you can see almost every version of Hillary that exists in the popular imagination: the A student, the opportunist, the mastermind, the rat fink, the pragmatist, the truth-twister.

Prologue

Ira talks about what’s alarming him about this year’s election: facts seem less meaningful than they ever have, and the gap between the mainstream media and right-wing media’s versions of the world have never seemed further apart. CNN’s Jake Tapper explains what it was like to be on the air live when Donald Trump tried to take a huge, obvious lie and pass it off as the truth.

Prologue

A year ago, we did a story about a study that found that a simple 20-minute conversation could change someone’s mind about controversial issues like gay marriage and abortion. But a few weeks after we aired the story, the study was discredited.

Act One: Lies Become the Truth

Ira's quest continues. He calls his Uncle Lenny, who gets his news from Fox and the Wall Street Journal, and lives with an entirely different set of facts, and Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration expert at the CATO Institute, who explains that the central issue in Donald Trump’s candidacy is based on something that isn’t true.

Act Eight: Greenville South Carolina

We’ve been talking to Trump voters all year—a time during which they’ve watched their candidate’s chances evolve from laughable, to likely, to striking distance, to victory. Producer Zoe Chace checks in with a father and son who’ve been Trump supporters since February, when their guy was an underdog.

Prologue

There’s a seismic, historic change going on in the Republican party this year. Producer Zoe Chace tells Ira about a place you can eavesdrop on a group of Republican friends as they fret and argue about that change week after week: a podcast called Ricochet.

Act Two: Judges with Grudges

In this election year we look at the story of one small ballot initiative, in one state. We heard this referendum would gut Georgia's Judicial Qualifications Commission (JQC), an independent organization that investigates ethics complaints about judges.

Act Three: Aw, Do We NAFTA?

Ira explains that when Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton all seemed to be against free trade agreements, he got genuinely confused. Is free trade good or bad? Was NAFTA good or evil? Are we down with TPP? He asked Jacob Goldstein of NPR’s Planet Money podcast to explain, once and for all, the pros and cons of free trade.

Act Two: Metro-North Train

Producer Neil Drumming talks to someone who was not happy with the results of Tuesday’s election. Janelle, who’s black, is bracing herself for the coming days.

Act Three: Trump Tower

Producer Karen Duffin visits someone who actually knows the man who’s going to be President: Donald Trump’s neighbor.

Act Four: Los Angeles

Producer Jonathan Menjivar listens in on parent-teacher conferences the day after the election at a bilingual school in Los Angeles.

Act Five: Long Island

For some people, this election wasn’t just about choosing a politician. It was about choosing their new boss.