Chris Hayes: The Catastrophe of Trump

Chris Hayes: The Catastrophe of Trump

Plus, Joan Walsh on when politics came to late-night TV, 1968.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener
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We are in “one of the most perilous and fraught moments for American democracy since the mid-19th century,” says Chris Hayes; what’s hopeful is that “the movement we’ve seen in the streets is the largest protest movement in American history.” Chris of course hosts All In weeknights on MSNBC; he’s also editor at large of The Nation, and he spoke recently with Katrina vanden Heuvel at a Nation magazine online event.

Plus: Politics on TV–in 1968, when Harry Belafonte hosted The Tonight Show, for an entire week—and his guests included Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Also: Aretha Franklin. Joan Walsh, national affairs correspondent for The Nation, talks about the new documentary, The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts the Tonight Show—she’s one of the producers, and it’s streaming now on Peacock.

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The chaos and cruelty of the Trump administration reaches new lows each week.

Trump’s catastrophic “Liberation Day” has wreaked havoc on the world economy and set up yet another constitutional crisis at home. Plainclothes officers continue to abduct university students off the streets. So-called “enemy aliens” are flown abroad to a mega prison against the orders of the courts. And Signalgate promises to be the first of many incompetence scandals that expose the brutal violence at the core of the American empire.

At a time when elite universities, powerful law firms, and influential media outlets are capitulating to Trump’s intimidation, The Nation is more determined than ever before to hold the powerful to account.

In just the last month, we’ve published reporting on how Trump outsources his mass deportation agenda to other countries, exposed the administration’s appeal to obscure laws to carry out its repressive agenda, and amplified the voices of brave student activists targeted by universities.

We also continue to tell the stories of those who fight back against Trump and Musk, whether on the streets in growing protest movements, in town halls across the country, or in critical state elections—like Wisconsin’s recent state Supreme Court race—that provide a model for resisting Trumpism and prove that Musk can’t buy our democracy.

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In solidarity,

The Editors

The Nation

Start Making Sense Start Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon Wiener Jon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


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