A Politics of Fear Defines Trump’s First Hundred Days in Office
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
WNYC Studios and The New Yorker
4.2 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 26 April 2025
⏱️ 31 minutes
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Summary
The Washington Roundtable discusses the first hundred days of President Trump’s second Administration, and the fear, pain, and outrage reverberating through U.S. politics. The clinical psychologist and longtime Department of Justice official Alix McLearen is helping distressed government workers connect with service providers during this time. She joins the roundtable to discuss how a politics of fear is shaping the lives of federal employees and ordinary citizens alike, and strategies for coping when psychological forces like fear and trauma become governing principles.
This week’s reading:
- “Waiting for Trump’s Big, Beautiful Deals,” by Susan B. Glasser
- “The Conservative Lawyer Defending a Firm from Donald Trump,” by Ruth Marcus
- “The Immigrant Families Jailed in Texas,” by Jack Herrera
- “The Cost of Defunding Harvard,” by Atul Gawande
- “Donald Trump’s Deportation Obsession,” by Jonathan Blitzer
- “The Guerrilla Marketing Campaign Against Elon Musk,” by Anna Russell
- “The Supreme Court Finally Takes On Trump,” by Ruth Marcus
To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to [email protected] with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.
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| 0:19.8 | Welcome to the political scene from The New Yorker, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. |
| 0:26.1 | I'm Evan Osnos, and I'm joined as ever by my colleagues Susan Glasser and Jane Mayer. |
| 0:31.2 | Hi, Jane, and hi Susan. |
| 0:32.7 | Hey, Evan. |
| 0:33.4 | Hey, they're great to be with you guys. |
| 0:38.0 | We were talking earlier this week about the right ways to mark 100 days of the Trump administration. |
| 0:44.7 | And we decide that the usual political measures really don't suffice. |
| 0:49.1 | They don't capture the impact that is resonating on the level of psychology for a lot of people. Call it what you |
| 0:56.2 | want. Fear, disgust, pain, outrage, paranoia. All of that is reverberating through our politics right now. |
| 1:03.8 | So what happens when these kinds of psychological forces become governing principles? How does that |
| 1:09.1 | impact us as a country on an individual level? How does |
| 1:12.5 | it impact the institutions that shape our lives? We wanted to put Washington on the couch today. |
| 1:18.0 | And in a moment, we'll be talking with a seasoned psychologist who's also seeking to understand |
| 1:22.7 | the sudden and very real stresses on people in the capital and across the country. |
| 1:27.5 | Before we bring on our guest, guys, a question for you both. |
| 1:30.8 | People are talking most of all, perhaps these days in D.C. about fear. |
| 1:35.3 | You've got judges and elected officials who are facing physical threats. |
| 1:39.0 | You've got law firms and media organizations that are coutowing to Trump. |
| 1:42.9 | But there's a much wider spectrum of emotions, actually, that I think we wanted to dig into. |
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