Intro

The Washington Roundtable discusses the unprecedented corruption of the federal government, including Trump Administration members’ self-enrichment through cryptocurrency schemes and the inaugural committee, and the gutting of parts of the government that are responsible for rooting out self-dealing from public life. It is a level of corruption so “outright” and “brazen,” the staff writer Evan Osnos says, that it constitutes “a new phase in American politics.” 

This week’s reading:

• “Mike Waltz Learns the Hard Truth About Serving Donald Trump,” by Susan B. Glasser
• “How Donald Trump Is Expanding His Authority While Shrinking the Government,” by Jon Allsop
• “What Canadians Heard—and Americans Didn’t,” by Adam Gopnik
• “Trump’s Deportees to El Salvador Are Now ‘Ghosts’ in U.S. Courts,” by Jonathan Blitzer
• “Will the Trump Tariffs Devastate the Whiskey Industry?,” by Charles Bethea
• “A Life-Changing Scientific Study Ended by the Trump Administration,” by Dhruv Khullar
• “The Bureaucratic Nightmares of Being Trans Under Trump,” by Grace Byron
• “How Trump Is Helping Tycoons Exploit the Pandemic,” by Jane Mayer (July, 2020)

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.