Lawfare Daily: How the World Sees Trump’s America with Eve Fairbanks and Madeleine Schwartz
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 26 May 2026
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On today’s episode, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Eve Fairbanks, a writer and journalist based in Johannesburg, South Africa, and Madeleine Schwartz, founder and editor-in-chief of The Dial, a magazine of international writing, to discuss The Dial’s forthcoming book, “How We See it: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump” (out June 9 from The New Press). They speak about several essays in the collection, which is made up of contributions by journalists from around the world who probe their home countries’ complex relationships with the United States—relationships made even more complex under the current administration. They also dive deep on Fairbanks’s essay on the South African perspective.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm Tyler McBrion, managing editor here at Lawfare. You might recognize my voice |
| 0:09.6 | from our coverage of Donald Trump's New York criminal trial, a podcast series called |
| 0:14.6 | Escalation that I co-hosted with Lawfares Ukraine Fellow Anastasia Lapata, or the occasional |
| 0:20.1 | episode of Rational Security in the Lawfare |
| 0:22.3 | podcast. Here at Lawfare, we have many unofficial mantras, but I want to talk about one of them, |
| 0:28.9 | which is, we'll tell you when to panic. Look, I get it. The pace of news these days can feel |
| 0:35.5 | relentless. We hear over and over that we live in unprecedented |
| 0:39.5 | times, and in many ways we do. But if everything is an emergency, nothing is an emergency. And that's why |
| 0:47.1 | I'm so grateful for lawfare. To help me parse whether something in the headlines is awful but |
| 0:52.7 | lawful, whether it's a novel legal interpretation, |
| 0:55.6 | or whether it's just a blatant violation of the law. When it comes to understanding our world today |
| 1:01.6 | and what to do about, well, everything, that distinction can make all the difference. Unfortunately, |
| 1:10.0 | our unprecedented times come as an independent and fact-based media is under threat. |
| 1:15.9 | Fortunately, though, that's where you come in. |
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| 1:54.8 | Thanks for considering. Just from the very fact that our currency doesn't depend as much on the shift of another currency, I mean, South Africa has to know. |
... |
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