The Good Fight Club: Mamdani Mania, the Neverending Shutdown, and the Trump-Xi Summit

The Good Fight

Yascha Mounk

News

4.6 • 907 Ratings

🗓️ 1 November 2025

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Richard Aldous, Sabina Ćudić, and Damon Linker join Yascha Mounk to dissect this week’s news. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk, Richard Aldous, Sabina Ćudić, and Damon Linker explore the future of the Democratic Party, from midterm predictions to the unstoppable rise of Zohran Mamdani, the impact of the ongoing government shutdown, and the recent meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. Richard Aldous is Eugene Meyer Distinguished Professor of History at Bard. His latest books are The Dillon Era and Schlesinger. He hosts Persuasion’s books and ideas podcast, Bookstack. Sabina Ćudić is elected member of the National Parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina, vice president of the Foreign Relations Committee, vice president of the European liberals in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, and the president of Naša stranka, a progressive, social-liberal political party. Damon Linker is a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania and writes the subscription newsletter “Notes from the Middleground” at Substack. If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following ⁠⁠⁠this link on your phone⁠⁠⁠. Email: [email protected] Podcast production by Jack Shields and Leonora Barclay. Connect with us! ⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠Apple⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠Google⁠⁠⁠ X: ⁠⁠⁠@Yascha_Mounk⁠⁠⁠ & ⁠⁠⁠@JoinPersuasion⁠⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠Yascha Mounk⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠Persuasion⁠⁠⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠Persuasion Community Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'll be blunt and say that I think America brought and championed extreme sterility and Puritan spirit in politics, which lasted for many, many decades.
0:15.6	And us Europeans, we are much more used to seeing the dead French president's mistress sitting next to his wife at the funeral,
0:24.4	or a president marrying his high school teacher, or, you know, all kinds of variations that we had throughout Europe of that.
0:34.1	And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.
0:43.3	Thank you. And now the Good Fight with Yasha Monk. Welcome to the 10th installment of the Good Fight Club.
0:47.6	I'm joined today by our semi-regular co-host and panelist,
0:52.8	Sabina Tudits, who is a member of parliament in Bosnia,
0:56.3	Herzegovina. And since a week or two ago, the leader of our party, welcome Sabina.
1:01.2	Thank you. Thank you.
1:03.8	I am joined by Damon Linker, who is familiar to readers of persuasion because we often publish his
1:10.2	excellent articles and who is the
1:13.2	author and publisher of the Notes from the Middle Ground Substack. Welcome, Damon. Thanks for having me.
1:19.0	Good to be here. And I'm joined for the first time by the host of a rival podcast on the Persuasion Network
1:25.4	called The Bookstack. It's an excellent podcast.
1:28.3	He's also professor of history at Bard, Richard Aldous.
1:32.0	We're a fraternal podcast, Yash.
1:35.0	Pleasure to be here.
1:37.0	Welcome back, Richard.
1:38.3	So I thought that we would start with the looming, I don't know what the court, mid-term elections.
1:44.0	The midterm elections are next year. This is what the court, mid-term elections. The mid-term elections are next year.
1:45.6	This is half the way to the mid-term elections, the first electoral test for Donald Trump
1:51.3	since he was elected about a year ago.
	...

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