The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello and welcome to Slate's Political Gab Fest. The Welcome to the Kleptocracy

edition for December 1st, 2016. I'm Emily Bazelan. John and David are off somewhere. I'm not sure where, although I did have a great time doing a live show with them last night that listeners you will hear just before New Year's so that we can take a break for the holiday. And today I am joined by, at the moment, three people, Ruth Marcus, who is a columnist and deputy editorial page editor for The Washington Post. Hey, Ruth. Hi there. And Adam Davidson, who is a staff writer with The New Yorker. Hey, Emily. Hey. And Jacob Weisberg, who is the chairman of the Slate Group and the host of Trumpcast, the show that is going on for at least four years.

Don't remind me.

But very much worth listening to. So we're going to talk about three topics. Adam is going to

join us for the first topic. We're harnessing his finance and economics expertise.

And then we're going to let him go because he has a busy day. And on this week's show, we're harnessing his finance and economics expertise, and then we're going to let him go because he has a busy day.

And on this week's show, we will start by talking about Trump's business entanglements and conflicts of interest.

They abound. What does that mean about how to think about this presidency?

Then we're going to talk about Trump's recent cabinet appointments,

in particular, his selection of Tom Price to head the Department of Health and Human Services

and what that means for repealing and replacing Obamacare. And then we're going to talk about

what I've come to think of as Trump's Twitter spasms, his way of communicating with the public,

sometimes full of falsehoods and really seeming like propaganda, sometimes purely self-promotional,

not the way in which we're accustomed to get communications from our elected leaders.

And for Slate Plus, we're going to talk about a great question we got from listener Michael O'Shea about our reading habits.

Okay. So, Adam, conflicts of interests are flying around this president-elect. A few of the countries to be named Turkey, Argentina, India, Japan, the Philippines, Ireland, Scotland.

This is a businessman with property interests and developments all over the world, increasingly

selling his name and his brand to projects that he's not necessarily having ownership of,

but has an interest in their success.

And to just give one of the examples that has

struck me, in Turkey, there are these Trump towers in Istanbul. And after Trump called for a ban on

...