Live from Princeton: A Contrarian Quartet

Talking Feds

Harry Litman

News, Politics, Government

4.8 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 9 February 2026

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Contrarian stalwarts Norm Eisen, Asha Rangappa, and Jen Rubin join Harry for a special episode filmed in front of a live audience at Princeton University. They begin with the cataclysmic fall of the Washington Post and what it shows about Trump's power to demolish even the most powerful civic institutions. From there, they turn to the deportation effort, which seems to be running itself into the ground, and Trump's latest noises about election interference. They end with some measured but forceful optimism for American democracy in 2026. A video version of this episode is available on YouTube. Mentioned in this episode: The Contrarian: ⁠https://contrarian.substack.com/ The Contrarian’s YouTube: ⁠https://youtube.com/@ContrarianNews⁠ Democracy Defenders Fund: https://www.democracydefendersfund.org/⁠ Asha's Substack: https://asharangappa.substack.com/ Asha's podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/its-complicated/id1434320092 The New York Times piece on lawsuits against the administration: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/us/trump-administration-lawsuits.html⁠ Image credit: Sameer Khan, Fotobuddy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode is brought to you by Vanta.
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0:26.6	Get started today at Vantor.com.
0:29.6	Welcome to TalkingFeds brought to you live from Princeton University.
0:41.3	Okay, we've got a fantastic episode. I just want to first start by thanking Kim and the program in law and Norman of Thinking and her fantastic staff, including Kim Murray.
0:56.3	She's made this whole thing possible.
1:02.7	We're hosting our periodic roundtable with colleagues drawn from the deep bench of the contrarian, which just marked one year of really excellent pro-democracy journalism.
1:09.4	So much happens every week, as Kim said. So just to set up very quickly
1:13.2	what we'll be talking about the news we'll focus on. Jeff Bezos, some of you may have heard,
1:19.8	gutted the Washington Post laying off a third of the paper staff, presumably welcome news
1:25.1	to Donald Trump, whose administration has gone after journalists relentlessly, most recently with the unprecedented indictment of Don Lemon.
1:35.3	Meanwhile, Trump repeated comments about nationalizing elections.
1:40.6	Steve Bannon, his ally, is promising that ICE and U.S. troops will swarm polling places during the midterms.
1:48.9	And ICE continues to run rampant in Minnesota, and the overload of cases is exhausting judges, and even the lawyers tasked with supporting it, one of whom quit with the valediction.
	...

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