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Okay. Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Favro. You probably know Abby Phillip as the host of News Night on CNN, where she expertly and gracefully moderates what you might call boisterous panel discussions that often turn into viral moments.

She's also one of the most thoughtful journalists covering Trump, or at least attempting to, right now.

And on top of that, she's also out with a fascinating new book that I'm loving, a dream-deferred Jesse Jackson and the fight for Black political power about Reverend Jackson's groundbreaking presidential campaigns in the 1980s.

And importantly, what those campaigns can teach us about where the Democratic Party is today and where it needs to go.

For all those reasons, I've been really eager to have her on the show,

and I'm so happy I was able to get some time when she visited L.A. on Thursday.

Here's our conversation. Hope you enjoy.

Abby, welcome to Pod Save America.

Hey, thanks for having me. A lot of people might know you from your job at CNN as the lead anchor and host of CNN Newsnight. But you're also the author of a brand new book, A Dream Deferred Jesse Jackson in the Fight for Black Political Power, which is now on sale.

Yes. Exciting. We'll get into that in a bit. I just want to start with some questions about your day job. You've been covering politics for a long time now. Yeah. Since 2010, 2011? 2010. Yeah, it's back. I was young. You were in the White House. Yeah, I was going to say. So it was like we were both young, but I was younger, actually.

I know, I know. Yeah, I mean, I was young enough that you had no idea who I was at that time. Well, you know, once I went into the White House, I didn't know who anyone was. Right. I was just stuck in there all day. So you were a political reporter throughout the Obama administration, 2016 election, the highly functioning democracy that we've had since then.

In terms of processing, analyzing, reporting the news, how does 2025 compare to everything before it?

Like, do you feel like covering Trump's second term is just an acceleration of the craziness

that's been building for a decade, or does it feel like something new?

...