The Gray Area with Sean Illing

In the aftermath of Trump’s bizarre, dangerous North Korea tweets, I’ve been fixated on a question: Should Trump be removed from office? The mechanisms we have for curbing a dangerous presidency are limited, at least as we normally think about them. Though legal scholars argue over the founders’ intent, impeachment is thought to be a remedy for executive criminality, while the 25th Amendment is only meant to be used amid physical and mental incapacitation. But what if neither condition is present? What if the United States of America — a nuclear hyperpower — just puts the wrong person in the job? What if we make a mistake — now or in the future — that is not clearly driven by breaches of law or catastrophic changes in health? What remedies does our system offer? What would the cost of invoking those remedies be? Chris Hayes is the host of MSNBC’s All In, and he’s also an unusually thoughtful analyst of political institutions and systems. So I asked him back to the podcast to talk about this question, and a few more. We cover the infighting between different factions of the Democratic Party, the signs that congressional Republicans are growing some backbone, and the reports that Trump’s closest aides are conspiring to keep him from doing too much damage to the country. This is a great conversation about some topics you’re going to hear a lot more from me on soon. Enjoy! (One note: This conversation was recorded a few days before the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, which is why you don’t hear us cover it. But Trump’s reaction to the rally only underscores many of the points we make in this podcast.)  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Michael Bennet is an accidental senator. He was unexpectedly appointed to fill an open seat after Ken Salazar joined the Obama administration. He had never run for elected office before, or served in a legislative body. Perhaps that’s why he’s always, in my experience, been appropriately shocked by how the US Congress actually works. Since joining the Senate (and winning reelection in 2010 and 2016), Bennet has become one of its more effective members. He was part of the Gang of Eight that authored the immigration reform plan that passed the body, and he’s known for working well with both Republicans and Democrats. And yet, he is despairing over the state of the institution in which he serves. This is a conversation about why Congress is broken, and what broke it. We discuss money, partisanship, the media, the rules, the leadership, and much more. We talk about what Bennet thinks House of Cards gets right (hint: it’s the sociopathy) and whether President Trump’s antics are creating some hope of institutional renewal. There’s a lot of good stuff in this conversation, and I don’t want to spoil it. Suffice to say, if you care about the US Congress in this age — and you should — this is a discussion worth hearing. Books: Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yascha Mounk is a lecturer at Harvard, a columnist at Slate, and the host of The Good Fight podcast. He’s also an expert on how democracies backslide into illiberalism — which was the topic of our first conversation on this podcast. But when Mounk and I last spoke, fears of Trump’s illiberal instincts seemed to have been overblown. This was an administration too incompetent to be authoritarian. But Mounk made a prediction then that has, I think, been borne out: Trump’s illiberal instincts would be catalyzed by his failures, not his successes. As Trump finds himself frustrated by Congress, and by the FBI investigation, and by Robert Mueller’s inquiry, and by White House leakers, he lashes out at the system he thinks is unfairly, even dangerously, constraining him. Of late, Trump’s illiberalism has made a comeback — he’s giving speeches calling for more police brutality, he fired an FBI director who threatened him, he’s attacking his own attorney general for doing too little to shield him from investigation, he’s demanding vast changes to congressional rules, he’s calling for administration lawyers to begin exploring the reach of his pardon powers, and he's running a White House where the clear guiding principle is loyalty to Trump rather than loyalty to country. But as Mounk and I discuss in this podcast, that’s not the scary part. The scary part isn’t Trump’s illiberalism but the political system’s acceptance of it. If you had read off Trump’s list of offenses as a hypothetical 12 months ago, you would’ve been told that neither Congress nor the public would allow any of this to go unpunished. But Trump remains around 40 percent in the polls and his support among congressional Republicans has barely wavered. This is a lesson that goes far beyond Trump: We’re learning that American politics is much more vulnerable to, and much less offended by, leaders who want to subvert the rule of law than we thought. It may be that Trump is too impulsive and short-tempered to take advantage of that fact. But will that be true of his successors, too? As you’ll hear in this podcast, as Mounk and I were discussing that question, we got news that Trump had fired his chief of staff, Reince Priebus, and replaced him with Gen. John Kelly. You’ll get to hear us react to that in real time. Enjoy!  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

At least in politics, this is an era of awful arguments. Arguments made in bad faith. Arguments in which no one, on either side, is willing to change their mind. Arguments where the points being made do not describe, or influence, the positions being held. Arguments that leave everyone dumber, angrier, sadder. Which is why I wanted to talk to Julia Galef this week. Julia is the host of the Rationally Speaking podcast, a co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, and the creator of the Update Project, which maps out arguments to make it easier for people to disagree clearly and productively. Her work focuses on how we think and argue, as well as the cognitive biases and traps that keep us from hearing what we're really saying, hearing what others are really saying, and preferring answers that make us feel good to answers that are true. I first met her at a Vox Conversation conference, where she ran a session helping people learn to change their minds, and it's struck me since then that more of us could probably use that training. In this episode, Julia and I talk about what she's learned about thinking more clearly and arguing better, as well as my concerns that the traditional paths toward a better discourse open up new traps of their own. (As you'll hear, I find it very easy to get lost in all the ways debate and cognition can go awry.) We talk about signaling, about motivated reasoning, about probabilistic debating, about which identities help us find truth, and about how to make online arguments less terrible. Enjoy! Books: Language, Truth, and Logic by A.J. Ayer Seeing Like a State by James Scott The Robot's Rebellion by Keith Stanovich  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart calls the 8,000-person Cook County Jail the largest mental health institution in the country. Thirty percent of its inmates have diagnosed mental health issues, and the number with undiagnosed conditions is thought to push the true percentage much higher. So perhaps it’s not surprising that Dart chose Dr. Nneka Jones Tapia, a psychologist, to run it. What is surprising is that Jones Tapia is the first mental health profession to run a jail. In this conversation, we talk about how the justice system looks when you begin with a mental health lens — how you balance punishment and treatment, how you think about personal responsibility versus mental instability, and how you manage the tension between what we use jail for and what we should use jail for. Enjoy! Books: The Bible The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth by M. Scott Peck, M.D.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Now that I've gotten Eddie Izzard to re-derive his famed "cake or death?" routine in real time, I'm ending this podcast. Always good to go out on top. Okay, maybe I won't actually end it. But this episode was a thrill to do. Eddie Izzard has long been one of my favorite comics. I've watched his specials more times than I can count. And this conversation was a real pleasure. Izzard — whose new memoir, Believe Me, is now on shelves — thinks fast, and not always linearly, so we covered a lot of ground. Among our topics: - How he ran 27 marathons in 27 days, and why he did it - His process for writing jokes - Why he wants to run for parliament, and how he's taken inspiration from Al Franken's career - His techniques for borrowing confidence from his future self - What he learned as a street performer - Why so many of his routines are based on history and anthropology - His off-the-cuff and hilarious explanation of World War I - The thought process that led to his famous "cake or death?" routine - His gender identity, and how he integrated it into his act early on - How he managed being the first transgender person many Americans ever saw - Who excites him in comedy now - His thoughts on the recent British election And much more. Enjoy this conversation. I certainly did. Books! Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll Great Expectations by Charles Dickens Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Senate GOP’s health care bill — officially known as the Better Care Reconciliation Act — will lead to 22 million fewer people with health insurance and plans with such high deductibles that low-income people won’t be able to afford them. On the bright side? Massive tax cuts for the rich. It’s not a widely popular vision — the bill is struggling to attract Republican support, and is polling between 12 and 17 percent. But it does have defenders. Chief among them is Avik Roy, a past guest on this podcast and the co-founder of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity. The bill’s passage, Roy said, would be "the greatest policy achievement by a GOP Congress in my lifetime.” I am, to say the least, not a fan of this legislation. So I asked Roy to return to the podcast to discuss it. I wanted to hear the best possible case for the bill. In this conversation, we discuss the Better Care Reconciliation Act, but also the broader health care philosophies that fracture the right. We talk about Roy’s disagreements with the CBO’s methodology, as well as the many, many ways he thinks the Senate bill needs to improve. We talk about the ways the GOP has moved left on health care policy without coming to a consensus about what the policy is meant to accomplish. We talk about Medicaid, about welfare reform, and about how policymakers should think about the needy who are hard to help. We talk about the many ways the American health care system subsidizes the rich, and the way that money could be better used. Roy, I would say, is a lot more enthusiastic about the Senate bill in theory than in practice. After this discussion, I better understood why he sees the bill as a victory for Republicans who want their party to embrace universal health care, but I left thinking he was underrating the dangers of a party that isn’t united behind that vision implementing legislation like this. We discuss that, too. If you want to understand the GOP’s internal dynamics on health care, listen to this conversation. I cover this stuff for a living, and I learned a lot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

danah boyd is an anthropologist and computer scientist who studies the way people actually use technology. Not the way we wish we used technology, or the way we hope we will use technology, but the way we actually use it.“Technology,” she says, "is made by people. In a society. And it has a tendency to mirror and magnify the issues that affect everyday life.”boyd is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, the founder of Data & Society, a visiting professor at New York University, and a fantastically interesting thinker. She packs more insight into a blog post than many authors get into a book. I’ve been reading her and learning from her for a long time, so I’ve been looking forward to this discussion, and it didn’t disappoint.In this conversation, we discuss why fake news is so easy to believe, digital white flight, how an anthropologist studies social media, the reasons machine learning algorithms reflect our prejudices rather than fixing them, what Netflix initially got wrong about their recommendations engine, the value of pretending your audience is only six people, the early utopian visions of the internet, and so, so much more. Enjoy!Books:Jean Briggs's "Inuit Morality Play: The Emotional Education of a Three-Year-Old”Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”Margaret Mead's collection of her Redbook essays Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sen. Al Franken’s new book, Al Franken, Giant of the Senate, is the rare politician memoir that’s actually interesting. And note that I said interesting, not funny (though it is also funny).Most books by politicians are about how they’re not really politicians — they’re authentic, they’re honest, they shoot from the hip, they still remember what it was like growing up in a mill town raised by feral dogs and subsisting on nothing but hay.Franken’s book is the opposite: It’s the story of how he learned to be a politician, and even how he learned to respect politicians. It’s about realizing he couldn’t litigate his past comedy, about trusting his staff, about understanding why politicians act the way they do in interviews, about recognizing why the norms of the Senate matter.So this is an interview about what it’s like to be a politician, why perfectly nice and interesting people end up acting like all those other politicians after getting elected, and the role we as voters (and we in the media) play in it. If you’re interested in how politics actually works, you should listen.Books!Captured: The Corporate Infiltration of American Democracy by Sheldon WhitehouseHow Children Succeed: Confidence, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character by Paul ToughOur Kids by Robert Putnam Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Zephyr Teachout is a law professor at Fordham University, the author of Corruption in America, one of the lead lawyers in the emoluments case that’s been brought against Donald Trump, and a former gubernatorial and congressional candidate. Which is all to say that Teachout is someone who knows a lot about political corruption, and so we dive deep into that topic in this podcast.We talk about how political corruption was defined by the Founding Fathers, and why, during the Constitutional Convention, they discussed the threat posed by corruption more than they discussed the threat posed by foreign invasion. And we talk about the way today’s Supreme Court — in the Citizens United and related decisions — has narrowed the definition to be almost meaningless. Teachout is also one of the lead lawyers in the case being brought against Trump on his foreign profits and gifts — “emoluments” that, arguably, are unconstitutional. We go through that lawsuit — and its prospects and potential remedies — in some detail.We also dig into the role monopolies and related concentrations of industry power are playing in American life — this is an increasingly influential argument on today’s left, and Teachout does a nice job here explaining why.Finally, we talk a lot about an issue that I think today’s politicians wildly underestimate in importance: not corruption itself, but the appearance of corruption, and the way it’s rotting the public’s faith in the political system. How do you solve that? What are the possible unintended consequences of the solutions that get proposed?As they say, all that and more!Books:Middlemarch by George Eliot The Gilded Age by Mark TwainAll the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices