Senator Jeff Flake tries use his newfound leverage to get a commitment to bring DACA to the Senate floor in exchange for his vote for the Republican tax bill. Things change at the last minute.
Senator Jeff Flake goes to the White House and discovers a president who seems to be very open to doing whatever immigration deal the senate brings him. He spends an optimistic 24 hours writing a bill with his bipartisan partners.
Senator Jeff Flake breaks from the plan and speaks openly about the bipartisan DACA proposal to the media before the president has a chance to sell the deal himself. Turns out, that’s not what actually kills the deal.
In the first half of the show, we documented a community that was worried about what might happen, theoretically, if undocumented immigrants arrived. In this act, Producer Zoe Chace looks at a community where the immigrants have already arrived – Rockville, Maryland.
In 2014, in the wake of losing the previous presidential election, the Republican Party had committed itself to immigration reform as its only path to winning elections in the future. Within two years, Donald Trump would be elected on the exact opposite platform, railing against immigration.
After this year’s election, Republicans in North Carolina went out looking for cases of voter fraud - all over the state. It was hard to find, hard to prove—until they stumbled across what could have been the best present ever: a seemingly clear-cut case of Democrats out to rig the election.
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.
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.
One way to understand the split inside the Republican party is to look at immigration. It’s this urgent, emotional issue for so much of the party these days.
Doug Deason is a political donor trying to make the biggest decision people like him make every four years – which presidential candidate to back. Producer Zoe Chace follows Deason through the unpredictable primaries of the 2016 election.
Ira talks to Tom, who regrets his vote on Brexit this week. And Zoe Chace talks to Harry Enten, a senior analyst at the website FiveThirtyEight, about Donald Trump.