I'm David Remnick, host of the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is a bonus episode of our podcast featuring three of the great minds in literature today. Playwright Tony Kushner, poet Claudia Rankin, and the novelist Salman Rushdie.

I spoke with them at the public theater in Manhattan.

This was the first in a series of four evenings we're calling Public Forum a well-ordered nation.

We've invited artists and thinkers and journalists and politicians to discuss how culture can respond to politics in the age of Donald Trump. This is an edited

version of our conversation. Hi, I'm David Remnick from the New Yorker. Thanks. These are my fellow

co-conspirators and enemies of the people.

I'd like to start with all of you, but let's begin maybe with Claudia.

After this comment about enemies of the people, I'd like to know what you think this means,

what it means for all of us here in this room tonight, and what it means in particular for artists.

What kind of threat does it pose, if any?

I actually don't think it does pose a threat to artists because I feel that we are doing what we do.

And what we do is inside what is.

And this is just part of what is right now.

It's a lot of rhetoric coming at us every day.

And I don't, I really don't think that there is something special that we will do as audits.

There might be something different.

We will do as citizens.

Tony?

You agree?

I do.

I mean, everything is changing so rapidly on a daily basis now.

There are so many directions that, you know, calamity and catastrophe

...