Democracy on ICE? The mood turns in America
Economist Podcasts
The Economist
4.3 • 5K Ratings
🗓️ 30 January 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On the streets of Minneapolis, in polls and in the halls of Congress, disapproval of President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda is mounting. Democrats won a near-term battle on funding—for now—but a wider war awaits. Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s leader, appears to be positioning his daughter ever more visibly as his successor. And remembering Mark Tully, a veteran BBC correspondent in India.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Economist |
| 0:02.0 | Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from The Economist. |
| 0:12.0 | I'm your host, Jason Palmer. |
| 0:15.0 | Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. |
| 0:31.5 | Figuring out the plans of Kim Jong-un, North Korea's God King, is a famously speculative business, |
| 0:40.3 | but we look closely at how he may be playing an early game of positioning his daughter as his successor. And for more than 20 years, Mark Tully was the BBC's Delhi Bureau Chief, insisting on |
| 0:45.9 | balance through times in which that was all but impossible. |
| 0:49.9 | Our obituaries editor looks back on the career of a man who came to be known as the voice of India. |
| 0:57.0 | First up, though. |
| 1:10.0 | America reached a very dangerous place this week, not just with the killing of Alex |
| 1:15.4 | Pretti at the barrel of a federal agent's gun in Minneapolis, just two weeks after Renee Good |
| 1:20.7 | died the same way, and not just with the administration's vilification of those citizens |
| 1:26.1 | and the plain misdirection about who was at fault. |
| 1:29.6 | The peril was also, boringly, yet essentially, in Congress. |
| 1:34.1 | Would a big funding package for the ICE immigration agency get through with all of this going on? |
| 1:40.1 | In the end, there was a subtle shift. |
| 1:42.9 | Democrats pushed back, threatened a government shutdown, |
| 1:46.0 | and one, temporarily at least. The only leverage Americans have seen recently, the only |
| 1:51.7 | institutional check on the administration's immigration agenda. In Minneapolis, there's |
| 1:57.4 | a new boss of that agenda. Tom Holman, the so-called borders are, with |
| 2:01.6 | this generation's version of, mistakes were made. |
| 2:04.6 | Nothing's ever perfect, anything to be improved on. And what we've been working on is making |
... |
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