The Ezra Klein Show

The Three Forces Deranging the Economy in 2025

23 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This is the strangest economy I’ve seen in my lifetime. If you just looked at the macro data — the jobs numbers, G.D.P., the stock market — thin...

The Opinions: Bernie Sanders and Ruben Gallego

19 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What will America’s story be after President Trump? My colleague David Leonhardt did a great series on that question this year, talking to a number ...

What Does It Mean to Give Well?

16 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

“This lightbulb went off that almost no one was asking these questions.”In 2006, Elie Hassenfeld and a few of his friends pooled some money they w...

Best Of: Zadie Smith on Populists, Frauds and Flip Phones

12 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This is one of my favorite conversations in recent memory — with the writer Zadie Smith. Smith is the author of novels, including “White Teeth,”...

The Contradictions of Gavin Newsom

10 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Gavin Newsom is the 2028 Democratic front-runner. That’s what many of the polls and the Polymarket betting odds say.It’s been widely believed that...

Interesting Times: She Exposed Epstein and Shares MAGA’s Anger

02 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

My colleague Ross Douthat talks to the journalist who exposed Jeffrey Epstein. This episode of “Interesting Times,” with the Miami Herald investi...

Best Of: The ‘Quiet Catastrophe’ Brewing in Our Social Lives

25 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The holidays are an unusually social time, filled with parties and family get-togethers. But for most of the year, we feel isolated and unsatisfied wi...

Fareed Zakaria Thinks Steve Bannon Got One Thing Right

21 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

On Monday night, in front of a live audience, I talked to Fareed Zakaria about the different political age he believes we’ve entered. Zakaria is th...

Patti Smith on the One Desire That Lasts Forever

18 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Patti Smith, “the Godmother of Punk,” has lived a wild life and accumulated so much wisdom in the process. In the 1960s and ’70s, Smith was a fi...

Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and the Right’s ‘Groyper’ Problem

14 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Is this the future of MAGA?Tucker Carlson’s interview with the white nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes has caused a firestorm on the right. Carlso...

What Were Democrats Thinking?

10 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Democrats’ case for the government shutdown was just starting to break through to voters. Why fold now?Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezra...

The Blue Wave Cometh?

07 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Democrats won big on Tuesday. It looks like the MAGA coalition has started to crack.Ezra is joined by his column editor, Aaron Retica, to discuss the ...

This Is How the Democratic Party Beats Trump

02 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Democrats don’t just need to win more people; they also need to win more places. And that requires a different kind of thinking.Mentioned:"How Liber...

The Israeli Right’s Plan to Carve Up Gaza

28 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Israeli forces still occupy half of Gaza. In the cease-fire deal, Israel agreed to fully withdraw its presence there once Hamas fully demilitarized. B...

Can Economic Populism Save the Democratic Party?

24 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The “Democratic penalty” should scare the hell out of Democrats.The Democratic Party brand has become toxic in certain parts of the country, espec...

The Rural Power Behind Trump’s Assault on Blue Cities

21 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard from red states into blue cities isn’t just a partisan attack; it’s also a geographic one. In...

Can the Israel-Hamas Deal Hold?

17 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Every Israeli-Palestinian peace deal has failed. Could Trump’s be any different?On Oct. 10, the Israeli cabinet approved a cease-fire deal brokered ...

How Afraid of the A.I. Apocalypse Should We Be?

15 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Eliezer Yudkowsky is as afraid as you could possibly be. He makes his case.Yudkowsky is a pioneer of A.I. safety research, who started warning about t...

Jon Favreau on Where the Democrats Went Right

11 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The government shutdown is the Democrats’ first big strategic bet of Trump’s term.Not everyone in the party agreed that shutting down the governme...

What the Shutdown Is Really About

08 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

There’s a serious high-stakes policy fight at the heart of this.The Democrats didn’t pick a fight over authoritarianism or tariffs or masked immig...

A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno

03 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Brian Eno’s music opens up worlds I love to step into during trying times. And this conversation with Eno did the same thing.Eno is a trailblazing m...

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Bridging Gaps vs. Drawing Lines

28 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates was harshly critical of my response to Charlie Kirk’s assassination. In an article in Vanity Fair, he suggested I was wh...

Trump Is Building the Blue Scare

24 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This is McCarthyism 2.0. Since Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the Trump administration has been speed-running an attack on the “radical left.” A...

Spencer Cox Wants to Pull Our Politics Back From the Brink

19 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Utah governor is trying to model a different kind of leadership in a very dangerous political moment.The Trump administration seems intent on usin...

Ben Shapiro and I Talk Political De-escalation

16 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This is an episode in two parts. First, my thoughts on Charlie Kirk’s murder, now that I’ve had a few days to process it, and to see the unfolding...

If Democrats Have a Better Plan, I’d Like to Hear It

07 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In a few weeks the government’s funding will run out. If Democrats vote for a new spending bill, they will be funding Trump’s autocratic takeover....

The Supreme Court Is Backing Trump's Power Grab

02 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Trump was losing in the courts. He’s not anymore.In the early months of the administration, the courts were proving a powerful check on President Tr...

Trump Is Building His Own Paramilitary Force

27 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

ICE now has the biggest budget of any law enforcement agency in America.“ICE and Customs and Border Protection have long been the most rogue, kind o...

MAHA Is a Bad Answer to a Good Question

22 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

“Make America Healthy Again” is a great idea — somebody should try it.A lot of the concerns animating the MAHA movement — chronic disease, the...

Behind Trump and Vance Is This Man’s Movement

01 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Vice President JD Vance gave a speech recently that deserved more attention than it got. Accepting an award at a right-wing think tank, he argued that...

Best Of: Barbara Kingsolver on ‘Urban-Rural Antipathy’

29 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

“It’s so insidious, people don’t realize it,” Barbara Kingsolver told me, describing the prejudice against “country people.” Kingsolver is...

Is Decarbonization Dead?

25 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Biden passed the most ambitious climate legislation in American history. Trump just shredded it. What does that mean for the future of renewable energ...

Why American Jews No Longer Understand One Another

23 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The consensus that held American Jewry together for generations is breaking down. That consensus, roughly, was this: What is good for Israel is good ...

Why Trump Can’t Shake Jeffrey Epstein

17 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

MAGA has been infighting over the Jeffrey Epstein files. And that’s because the conspiracy theories around Epstein hit at the very core of MAGA’s ...

Why Does My Mind Keep Thinking That?

11 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

I have had a meditation practice for about 15 years now. I started hoping it would calm me down, and it has. But it’s also made me more aware of the...

How the Attention Economy Is Devouring Gen Z — and the Rest of Us

08 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani are both proof of how the ability to capture attention is power. And the attention economy isn’t reshaping just poli...

The Disaster That Just Passed the Senate

02 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is a bad piece of legislation. It includes trillions of dollars in tax cuts that are very much tilted to...

Mamdani, Trump and the End of the Old Politics

28 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Zohran Mamdani created a new anti-establishment playbook — in his use of social video, his focus on affordability and his position on Israel.   H...

A New Middle East?

25 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

For decades, Israel has wanted American support to bomb Iranian nuclear sites. But U.S. presidents, both Republican and Democrat, have resisted — un...

Is This America’s Golden Age? A Debate.

20 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Kevin Roberts, Kellyanne Conway, Ben Rhodes and I battled it out a few weeks ago on a stage in Toronto. This was for a Munk Debate on the motion: “...

Sarah McBride on Why the Left Lost on Trans Rights

17 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

President Trump’s actions against transgender Americans have been stunningly wide-ranging. They’ve also been popular.Trump has sought new restrict...

Ehud Olmert on Israel's Catastrophic War in Gaza

11 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It is impossible to overstate how hellish life in Gaza has been for the past 20 months.The death count is above 50,000 people — more than 15,000 of ...

Best Of: Salman Rushdie Is Not Who You Think He Is

06 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This is one of my favorite episodes of the show in recent memory. It’s a conversation with the author Salman Rushdie about the experience of losing ...

The Emergent Trump Doctrine

03 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Trump has been making some foreign policy moves I didn’t entirely expect. He seems determined to get a nuclear deal with Iran. He’s been public ab...

Our Lives Are an Endless Series of 'And'

30 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This is a bit of a strange episode. It’s an attempt to explore the difficulty of everything we’re supposed to feel in a day. We’re in a time whe...

The Growing Scandal of $TRUMP

28 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Steve Bannon famously talked about using “muzzle velocity” as a strategy: doing so much so quickly that you overwhelm the ability of the media to ...

Trump’s Big Budget Bomb

23 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is the cruelest and most irresponsible piece of domestic legislation to be seriously proposed in my lifetime.When ...

How Groupthink Protected Biden and Re-elected Trump

21 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This episode is about a seemingly simple question: Was there a Joe Biden cover-up?Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book argues there was. “Orig...

Is Trump Losing? A Debate

16 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Is Donald Trump eroding American democracy and consolidating power for himself? Or is he trying to do that and failing? Is this what sliding toward au...

‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’

13 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

I honestly don’t know how I should be educating my kids. A.I. has raised a lot of questions for schools. Teachers have had to adapt to the most inge...

Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism

09 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A good rule of thumb is that whatever Margaret Atwood is worried about now, the rest of us will likely be worried about a decade from now. The rise of...

How a Red-District Democrat Is Navigating Trump

06 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is one of just 13 Democrats to represent a district that Donald Trump won. Her distinctive economic message, an...

Trump vs. the Dollar

02 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The U.S. dollar is the lingua franca of the global financial system. The fact that so much of the world relies on our currency has long been understoo...

Abundance and the Left

29 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

“Abundance,” the book I co-wrote with Derek Thompson, hit bookstore shelves a little over a month ago, and the response has been beyond anything I...

Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics

25 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

I have no earthly idea how to describe this conversation. It’s about religion and belief – at this moment in our politics, and in our lives more g...

The Very American Roots of Trumpism

23 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

After last week’s episode, “The Emergency Is Here,” we got a lot of emails. And the most common reply was: You really think we’ll have midterm...

The Emergency Is Here

17 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The president of the United States is disappearing people to a Salvadoran prison for terrorists: a prison built for disappearance, a prison where ther...

Tom Friedman Thinks We’re Getting China Dangerously Wrong

15 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

My colleague Tom Friedman thinks we’re screwed.That’s the first thing he told me when recounting his recent trip to China. It’s not just because...

Trump’s Tariffs, Market Panic and What Comes Next

11 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

After a week of market chaos, President Trump pulled back from the brink. But he didn’t pull that far back. He left a 10 percent tariff on most of t...

Paul Krugman on the ‘Biggest Trade Shock in History’

05 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The tariffs President Trump unveiled this week were both bigger than most people expected and a lot more confusing. These aren’t the flat tariffs he...

‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’

01 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

There’s something of a policy revolution afoot: As of March, more than a dozen states — including California, Florida and Ohio — have passed bil...

What Is DOGE’s Real Goal?

25 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency is great branding. Who could be against a more efficient government? But “efficiency” obfuscates...

The Origins of Abundance

21 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

To mark the release of our new book “Abundance,” my co-author Derek Thompson had me on his podcast, “Plain English,” to talk about it. We’re...

Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won

18 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

After the last election, there were all kinds of theories about where Democrats went wrong. But now, four months later, we have a lot more data – an...

Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?

14 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It’s hard to understand the economic logic of President Trump’s tariffs. In our last episode, we tried, but with limited success. And that might b...

Why Trump’s Tariffs Won’t Work

12 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Wall Street thought Donald Trump was bluffing about his tariff plans. The stock market rallied after his election. But the reality has started setting...

There Is a Liberal Answer to Elon Musk

09 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Right-wing populism thrives on scarcity. The answer is abundance. But a politics of abundance will work only if Democrats confront where their approac...

This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test

05 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The economy has started blinking red. President Trump’s tariffs have been roiling markets. Consumer sentiment was already down. G.D.P. forecasts are...

The Government Knows AGI is Coming

04 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Artificial general intelligence — an A.I. system that can beat humans at almost any cognitive task — is arriving in just a couple of years. That’...

The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy

01 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

If you’re looking for a single-sentence summation of the change in America’s foreign policy under Donald Trump, you could do worse than what Trump...

A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics

25 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In 2016, when Donald Trump won the first time, a little-known book became an unexpected phenomenon. It was “The Revolt of the Public,” self-publis...

A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently

18 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

After the elections, I started asking congressional Democrats the same question: If the elections had gone the other way, if they had won a trifecta, ...

The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours

16 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What happens when ambition no longer checks ambition?Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find transcripts (post...

What if Trump Just Ignores the Courts?

11 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We are moving into the next phase of Donald Trump’s presidency. Phase 1 was the blitz of executive actions. Now comes the response from the other pa...

What Elon Musk Wants

07 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Elon Musk has been on a slash-and-burn tear through the federal government — gaining access to I.T. systems, dismantling U.S.A.I.D. and unleashing a...

The Breaking of the Constitutional Order

05 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

There are two pieces to this episode. First, a tour of what Donald Trump has done — and what he has backed down from doing — over the last few day...

Don't Believe Him

02 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Look closely at the first two weeks of Donald Trump’s second term and you’ll see something very different than what he wants you to see.Thoughts? ...

MAGA’s Big Tech Divide

28 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

MAGA has long been hostile to Big Tech. So now that Big Tech is shifting rightward, what does that mean for MAGA?“We’re seeing a true political co...

Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did

25 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

On the first day of President Trump’s second term, he signed a record 26 executive orders. Some of them were really big. Others feel more likely mes...

So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means

22 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

There’s a quieter transition happening beneath the pageantry of this week’s inaugural events — a transition not of power per se but of the rules...

Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.

17 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Trump is a master at wielding attention. He’s been owning news cycles and squatting in Americans’ minds for much of the last decade. And for his s...

Biden Promised to ‘Turn the Page’ on Trump. What Went Wrong?

14 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Joe Biden wanted to show Americans that there was a better path than Trumpism. He worked to build a “foreign policy for the middle class.” He cent...

Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’

10 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The preview we’ve had into Donald Trump’s second administration already feels, by American standards, disturbingly abnormal: Picking a former “F...

Burned Out? Start Here.

07 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

I like to begin each year with an episode about something I’m working through more personally. And at the end of last year, the thing I needed to wo...

Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest

27 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

I have a tendency to end the year feeling pretty worn out. And that’s partly because I struggle to rest properly throughout the year, to build rest ...

What I’m Thinking at the End of 2024

24 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

There’s a lot to process as 2024 draws to a close. In our end-of-year Ask Me Anything, the supervising editor of “The Ezra Klein Show,” Claire ...

Yes, Biden’s Green Future Can Still Happen Under Trump

20 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In 2022, President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, ushering in, by some estimates, nearly half a trillion dollars of investment in green ene...

‘A Sword and a Shield’: How the Supreme Court Supercharged Trump’s Power

17 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Donald Trump will enter office at a time when presidential power has significantly expanded, because of a string of Supreme Court decisions in recent ...

Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics

13 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This election felt like the peak of the TV-ification of politics. There’s Trump, of course, who rose to national prominence as a reality-TV characte...

Best Of: Why the Far Right Is Thriving Across the Globe

06 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

It was possible to see Donald Trump’s first election victory as some kind of fluke. But after the results of this election, it’s clear that Americ...

It's the Corruption, Stupid

03 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Right after the election, I talked about how the results reminded me of 2004. George W. Bush won re-election that year — and unlike four years earli...

Would Bernie Have Won?

26 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

There are a lot of different opinions about how the Democratic Party should rebuild after the blow of Donald Trump’s victory. And for the next two e...

In This House, We’re Angry When Government Fails

22 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The core conflict in our politics right now is over institutions. Democrats defend them, while Republicans distrust them, and seek, in some cases, to ...

Trump Kicks Down the Guardrails

19 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

I’ve been watching since the election to see what timeline we’re in. And Donald Trump’s first wave of selections for appointees were pretty stra...

About the Coming Paywall

02 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In a couple weeks, the archives of our show will only be available to subscribers. Here’s why that’s happening and what to expect. To learn more,...

Coming Soon: The Ezra Klein Show

13 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Every Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation about something that matters. How do we address climate change if the political s...