Day: August 26, 2025

Another Governor, Illinois’ Pritzker, Stands up to Trump While Democratic Leaders in the House and Senate are MIA

We begin with another Democratic governor standing up to Trump while Democratic leadership in the House and Senate are AWOL and that is Illinois’ Governor Pritzker who bluntly told Trump to keep the military out of Chicago, adding “This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city, in a blue state, to try to intimidate his political rivals.” Joining us is David Faris, a professor of political science at Roosevelt University in Chicago and a regular contributor to Slate, The Week and Newsweek. He is the author of Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics and, most recently, The Kids Are All Left: How Young Voters Will Unite America. We discuss his latest article at the Nation, “American Democracy, RIP.”

After Trying to Terminate the Fed Chair, Trump Fires the First and Only Black Woman on the Fed, But She is Staying Put

Then, with Trump firing the first and only black woman to serve on the board of the Federal Reserve and a defiant Fed Governor Lisa Cook saying she’s staying put, calling Trump’s bluff after he failed to find a way to fire the Chairman of the Fed Jerome Powell, we assess this standoff with Robert Hockett, the Edward Cornell Professor of Law and Finance and a Professor of Public Policy at Cornell University. He has first-hand experience working at the International Monetary Fund and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and continues to consult for a number of US federal, state and local legislators and regulators. He drafted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal” resolution for the House of Representatives and officially advises her on economic policy. His latest books are Money from Nothing Or, Why We Should Stop Worrying About Debt and Learn to Love the Federal Reserve, Financing the Green New Deal: A Plan of Action and Renewal, The Citizens’ Ledger: Digitizing Our Money, Democratizing Our Finance and most recently Spread the Fed: Distributed Central Banking for Productive Monetary Policy.

How the U.S. Should Deal With the Way the World is, Not How We Wish It To Be

Then finally, we examine how the U.S. should deal with the way the world is rather than how we wish it to be and speak with Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at The Stimson Center, a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University and a nonresident fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point. With expertise in the politics of the Middle East, Russia, Europe, her work focuses on questions of grand strategy, international security, and the future of US foreign policy. She is author of Oil, the State, and War: The Foreign Policies of Petrostates and we discuss her latest book, out today, First Among Equals: U.S. Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World.