Government & Politics

NYT's Shane Goldmacher says Trump doles out endorsements to Republican candidates to elevate allies, punish enemies and make the 'Big Lie', that the 2020 election was stolen, into a party litmus test.

Nomadland author and Atlantic journalist Jessica Bruder explains how health advocates and activists are preparing ways to provide abortions if Roe is either overturned or weakened by the SCOTUS.

Time magazine's Vera Bergengruen says Ukraine's citizen IT force, led by a 31-year-old minister of digital transformation, is blunting Russian disinformation and galvanizing international support.

White Lies author A.J. Baime tells the story of Walter White, a light-skinned Black man whose ancestors had been enslaved. For years White risked his life investigating racial violence in the South.

Appointed by President Clinton in 1997, Albright advocated for the expansion of NATO into the former Soviet bloc countries of Eastern Europe. She died March 23. Originally broadcast in 2003 and 2018.

Historian Mary Elise Sarotte tells how NATO expanded into Eastern Europe after the fall of the U.S.S.R, and is now obligated to defend nations near Russia's war in Ukraine. Her book is Not One Inch.

Yovanovitch was relieved of her post following a smear campaign orchestrated by Trump lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. She also testified at Trump's first impeachment. Her new memoir is 'Lessons from the Edge.'

New Yorker staff writer Masha Gessen says there's been an exodus from Russia in the last week and a half: "It's a sudden and drastic descent into a sense of having no country."

Denying that the Sandy Hook mass shooting had occurred became "a highly symbolic thing," Elizabeth Williamson says, author of the book Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth. "People did this for reasons of ideology. They did it for, in Alex Jones' case, profit. They did it for psychological reasons. There was a tribalistic bonding that happened around this."

Historian and former State Department official Michael Kimmage says the war in Ukraine is going "surprisingly badly" for the Kremlin: "It didn't get the politics of Ukraine right. It didn't expect the Ukrainians to fight." We talk about possible scenarios of how this conflict could end, and what that means for Ukraine, Europe and the U.S.

Journalist Anne Applebaum has been covering the war in Ukraine for The Atlantic. "I don't think that we will ever again smugly assume that borders in Europe can't be changed by force," she says.

Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice, says lawmakers in 27 states are considering hundreds of bills designed to limit voting or undermine the integrity of the election process.

In Civil Rights Queen, author Tomiko Brown-Nagin profiles Motley, a Black woman who wrote the original complaint in Brown v. The Board of Education and was on Martin Luther King's legal team.

Journalist Matthieu Aikins shed his own identity and traveled with his Afghan interpreter along smugglers' routes to reach Europe and escape the Taliban. His book is The Naked Don't Fear the Water.

Comic W. Kamau Bell takes Bill Cosby's fall from "America's dad" to sexual predator personally. In the four-part Showtime documentary series, We Need to Talk About Cosby, Bell grapples with Cosby's tainted legacy and his larger betrayal of the Black community.

Gitlin was part of the tumultuous student protest movement of the 1960s, and continued his commitment to social change through teaching and writing. He died on Feb. 5. Originally broadcast in 1987.

New York Times reporter Luke Broadwater says Trump and his allies were fixated on reversing the election: "It seemed like crazy stuff at the time ... but obviously it got extremely serious on Jan. 6."

New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters says the religious right and social conservatives "got basically everything that they wanted" from Trump's presidency. Peters' new book is Insurgency.

Across the U.S., educators are being censored for broaching controversial topics. Since January 2021, researcher Jeffrey Sachs says that 35 different states have introduced 137 bills limiting what schools can teach with regard to race, American history, politics, sexual orientation and gender identity.

Russell Shorto's grandfather was a mob leader in the industrial town of Johnstown, Pa. He spoke to Fresh Air in 2021 about the havoc that resulted from his grandfather's business dealings.