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But in this Substack Live conversation, independent pollster G. Elliott Morris tells John Harwood that those counseling Democrats to move toward the center have got it wrong. There are no “median voters” there, as he describes to Harwood – just people who pay little attention, have mixed views, and want strong leaders.

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Watch the full conversation to hear Harwood and Morris also discuss Trump's unpopular Iran war, and the chances that Republicans might lose both chambers of Congress in the 2026 elections.

Morris can also be found on his Substack, Strength In Numbers.

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This was a live conversation on Zeteo.com and the Substack app, where subscribers could ask questions. Be sure to subscribe to catch the next Substack Live.

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In this Substack Live, John Harwood speaks with ex-Republican and The Bulwark’s editor-at-large Bill Kristol about the broadening political opposition to Trump in the run-up to the 2026 midterm elections.

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Kristol tells Harwood that while he thinks Democrats will have victory in the midterms, “I don’t think that crushes the MAGA movement. I think it stalls it.”

The conversation between Harwood and Kristol was live on Zeteo.com and the Substack app, and both took questions from subscribers in the live audience.

Share your thoughts on the discussion in the comments below, and be sure to keep an eye out for the next Substack Live. Free subscribers can watch a 4-minute preview. Consider upgrading to a paid subscription and never hit a paywall again!

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On Donald Trump’s first inauguration day, I wrote a New York Times op-ed I thought would prove prescient. I suggested his movement wouldn’t last.

After all, he owed his flukish victory to shrinking segments of America: whites, evangelical Christians, less-educated voters. Demographic, social, and cultural change would keep shrinking them, notwithstanding their supercharged enthusiasm in 2016. Trump’s 2020 defeat seemed to vindicate that analysis.

Then Trump’s second victory made me doubt. Not only did he capture every electoral battleground in 2024, he won the popular vote by augmenting his MAGA base with new Black, Hispanic, and young supporters.

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I’ve stopped doubting now. It’s not going to last much longer.

Trump’s shambolic second presidency has shown more vividly than ever what a MAGAfied America represents. And Americans don’t like what they see.

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“This is beyond me… if you have a government who can decide which protests you can cover, which you can’t… then this whole thing is over.”

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Lemon joins Zeteo’s John Harwood for a Substack Live conversation about being targeted by Trump’s Justice Department – and much more, including:

• The increasingly overt racism driving the Trump administration – and the role it may have played in Lemon’s arrest

• MAGA’s threat to the First Amendment through media consolidation, regulatory pressure, and bullying reporters

• Self-censorship inside the mainstream press: “The corporate owners said it… we want to move CNN to the right. One of them said, ‘We want CNN to be more like Fox News.’”

• How independent media can stand up for press freedom

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In this Substack Live conversation, Zeteo contributor John Harwood speaks with former Obama White House Special Counsel for Ethics Norm Eisen, who says Trump’s rapacious authoritarianism has improved the odds that legal and public pressure can halt his lawlessness.

Instead of slowly “boiling the frog” like subtler autocrats, Eisen says, Trump has “microwaved the frog” and ignited a potent backlash.

The conversation between Harwood and Eisen was live on Zeteo.com and the Substack app, and both took questions from subscribers in the live audience. Share your thoughts on the discussion in the comments below, and be sure to keep an eye out for the next Substack Live.

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Norm Eisen can also be found on the Substack, The Contrarian.

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Watching masked ICE paramilitaries shatter car windows, abuse peaceable immigrants, and shoot protesters dead, millions of Americans wonder: How did we get here?

Cratered support for Donald Trump’s immigration policy makes it clear: Most of us do not want to be here. Anxiety about the changing face of America is one thing, dystopian street violence quite another.

We got here because of two Big Lies that Trump and MAGA allies tell. One casts immigrants as violent criminals; the other depicts them as welfare chiselers bankrupting the government at the expense of American taxpayers.

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Trump has slung the former smear from the day in 2015 when he first infected the body politic by condemning Mexican immigrants as “rapists” who are “bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime.” By the fall of 2024, he had escalated the demagoguery to cartoonish levels, falsely accusing Haitian immigrants of eating the household pets of their neighbors in Springfield, Ohio.

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Halting and reversing it, Raskin says, requires a pitched political battle every single day: “We’re in the fight of …

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This week, I just can’t make myself write again about the brutality, corruption, and dishonesty of Donald Trump’s presidency. My soul needs a break.

Instead, consider a decent person who has spent decades trying to make the federal government an instrument for helping less fortunate Americans. Yes, such people exist, though that can be hard to remember sometimes.

I refer to Gene Sperling, one of those public servants around long enough to be vaguely familiar, if not famous. He has advised the last three Democratic presidents on economic and social policy. He’s not abandoning his work even though he’s out of power at age 67.

Georgetown University has announced the launch of an “Economic Dignity Lab” at its McCourt School of Public Policy. Sperling, who has championed the concept of economic dignity for years, created the Lab to cultivate ideas for improving Americans’ living standards amid the looming disruptions of artificial intelligence.

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In this Substack Live, Harwood and Acosta discussed the anti-American extremism of this authoritarian presidency and how the media should cover it.

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“If Trump can go after Don, he can go after just about anyone,” Acosta tells Harwood.

The conversation between Harwood and Acosta was live on Zeteo.com and the Substack app, and both took questions from subscribers in the live audience. Share your thoughts on the discussion in the comments below, and be sure to keep an eye out for the next Substack Live.

Jim Acosta can also be found on his Substack, “The Jim Acosta Show.”

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In this Substack Live with John Harwood, the former Westchester County DA explains why juries tend to give so much leeway to law enforcement cases. She also breaks down why ICE agents don’t have absolute immunity, as Vice President JD Vance has suggested.

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The conversation between Harwood and Rocah was live on Zeteo.com and the Substack app, and both took questions from subscribers in the live audience. Share your thoughts on the discussion in the comments below, and be sure to keep an eye out for the next Substack Live.

Paid subscribers can watch a 5-minute preview. Consider upgrading to a paid subscription and never hit a paywall again!

EDITOR’S NOTE: This conversation was recorded before the latest tragic shooting in Minneapolis.

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In 1980, Republican candidate Ronald Reagan ousted Democratic President Jimmy Carter by consolidating the political realignment that followed the civil rights movement.

Reagan used symbolism to court aggrieved white conservatives, delivering a “states’ rights” speech in the infamous Mississippi town where Ku Klux Klansmen had murdered three civil rights workers 16 years earlier. But his rhetoric reflected the 20th-century evolution in right-wing racial politics, from raw and ugly to sly and subtle.

The following year, a young White House aide explained that evolution in an interview:

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘n*****, n*****, n*****,’” Lee Atwater began. “By 1968, you can’t say ‘n****r’ – that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like ‘forced busing,’ ‘states’ rights’…abstract.”

“Now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these…totally economic things. A byproduct of them is Blacks get hurt worse than whites. ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing.”

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Cynical though it was, the shift reflected progress; modern America had made overt racism broadly unacceptable. That’s why conservative politicians took umbrage when journalists like me spotlighted their veiled appeals.

Nearly a half-century later, Donald Trump’s throwback administration has discarded the veils. Its essence, in plain sight, is white supremacy enforced with violence.

The 79-year-old president also conjures even more repugnant demons. Before his rise, comparing political opponents to Nazis was famously considered too shrill and extreme to be credible.

That’s no longer true. With words, actions, and appointments, Trump invites those comparisons.

Trump 2.0 Rips Off the Mask

After serving in Trump’s first term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, retired Gen. Mark Milley called him “fascist to the core.” Former White House chief of staff John Kelly says Trump yearned for military leaders like Hitler’s generals, and insisted, “Hitler did some good things.” (A spokesperson for Trump at the time denied he made the remarks.)

Trump 2.0 shows what they were talking about. His mass deportation campaign, sending masked paramilitaries to rough up and snatch suspected immigrants off the street, has even one high-profile supporter seeing shades of the Nazi agents Hitler deployed to maintain the purity of what he called the genetically-superior Aryan “master race.”

“Are we really gonna be the Gestapo: ‘Where’s your papers?’” Joe Rogan asked his Trump-friendly audience this week. “Is that what we’ve come to?”

Much more fills out the picture.

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The administration’s National Security Strategy warns European countries of “civilizational erasure” if immigration turns them “majority non-European.” That’s a euphemism for majority non-white – the same prospect for America that Trump uses to arouse supporters.

His on-again, off-again unofficial adviser, Elon Musk, whose maternal grandparents reportedly backed the Nazis, endorsed social media posts calling for “white solidarity” and immigrant “remigration” while mourning the lost benefits of apartheid in his native South Africa. A stiff-armed Musk gesture during Trump’s inaugural festivities last year resembled a Nazi salute.

“Remember who you are,” the Labor Department implored in a social media post containing an English-language variant of an old Nazi rallying cry. “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage.”

ICE recruits new muscle with $50,000 signing bonuses to repel “foreign invaders.” Homeland Security posted a dreamscape beckoning Americans to envision life “after 100 million deportations.”

The administration feeds the anger of struggling white men by casting them as the real victims of racial discrimination. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chair Andrea Lucas dangles reparations by publicly inviting them to file complaints.

It all shows the presence of appointees like Paul Ingrassia (“I do have a Nazi streak”) and Darren Beattie (“competent white men must be in charge”) – whose appalling baggage would have rendered them unemployable under previous presidents, including Trump 1.0 – is not accidental.

Nor is the violence with which masked ICE agent Jonathan Ross killed Renee Nicole Good. Not long after the killing, another agent approached a woman filming his activities with an ominous warning: “Have you not learned from the past couple of days?” A fundraising appeal on Ross’s behalf attacked “anti-American traitors like Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (who is Jewish).”

Trump’s paramilitaries use intimidation and brutality to thrill supporters and punish targets. That formula applies abroad as well, for suspected drug smugglers (slaughtered in the ocean), foreign adversaries (invaded for seizure of natural resources), and NATO allies (threatened with conquest).

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“We live in a world, in the real world…that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” fanatical Trump adviser Stephen Miller declared in a CNN interview. The president sent that message by pardoning January 6 convicts who attacked police at the Capitol.

Among those pardoned: Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, who spoke at Trump’s New Jersey golf club after federal prosecutors described him as a white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer. Before becoming Trump’s FBI director, Kash Patel appeared eight times on the podcast of a man who posted a picture of Hitler’s Mein Kampf captioned, “visionary leadership.”

Trump’s biography provides context.

His father, the son of German immigrants, was once arrested at a KKK event in New York (Donald Trump denied his father was arrested). Trump first gained national notoriety when a Republican president’s Justice Department sued him for anti-Black discrimination in apartment rentals (the case was eventually settled). He has long linked virtue and success to “the right genes.”

The late Ivana Trump once reportedly noted a remarkable book her then-husband kept near his bedside. It was My New Order, a collection of Hitler’s speeches.

John Harwood is the former chief Washington correspondent for CNBC and White House correspondent for CNN. He has interviewed every president from George H.W. Bush to Joe Biden. Sign up for ‘The Stakes with John Harwood’ to get all of his columns in your inbox.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.

Don’t Miss It: If you’ll be in the DC area later this month, Zeteo is hosting a special LIVE in-person event you won’t want to miss to discuss ICE, the Epstein files, Trump, Venezuela, Iran, and more: Join Mehdi, Swin, Rep. Ro Khanna, Joy Reid, Jim Acosta, Sarah Matthews, and Miles Taylor for a powerful evening at the Howard Theatre in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, Jan 20, 2026!

Click HERE for tickets

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Join Zeteo’s John Harwood in a live conversation with Julie K. Brown, for years the leading journalist on the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, this Friday at 2pm ET/ 11am PT/ 7pm GMT. They’ll talk about what Trump is trying to hide in the Epstein files and take your questions.

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Forty years of covering politics and government in Washington leave me wondering: Where’s my cut of the fraud?

You’d think I’d know by now. But actually I only learned of my missing vigorish days ago from Elon Musk, when he angrily answered my social media post on the deadly costs of his “Department of Government Efficiency” fiasco.

“You just want your fraud money, you pos scammer,” declared the world’s richest man. (POS, if you don’t already know, stands for “piece of shit.”)

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Alas, as with most things outside of Tesla, SpaceX, and Starlink, Musk has no idea what he’s talking about. I get no “fraud money.” Unlike this colossal weirdo, whose companies have received at least $38 billion in government funding over the years, I do no business with Uncle Sam beyond reporting what public officials do.

But the snark Musk sent to 231 million followers on his social media platform reveals a lot about his warped psyche and that of the MAGA movement itself.

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Heather Cox Richardson, author of the newsletter ‘Letters from an American’, spoke with Zeteo’s John Harwood about the two visions of America that have competed throughout our history: the welcoming message of freedom and equality for all etched on the Statue of Liberty, and the crimped conception of “real Americans” preserving power over their “inferiors.”

The conversation between Richardson and Harwood was live on Zeteo.com and the Substack app, and both took questions from subscribers in the live audience. Please share your thoughts on the discussion in the comments below, and be sure to keep an eye out for the next Substack Live.

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Nearly 10 years ago, before Donald Trump hijacked American politics, I interviewed a leading Republican who viewed his party’s presidential front-runner with barely-concealed contempt.

House Speaker Paul Ryan mocked Trump’s pledge that Mexico would finance his border wall. More fundamentally, he contrasted the candidate’s noxious immigration message with America’s founding principle of equality, opportunity, and liberty for all.

“This is the first nation built on an idea, not on an identity,” Ryan told me. “Not on an identity on class, on race, on religion – on an idea … That’s what’s great about this country.”

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Today’s Republican Party, reshaped by Trump, does not believe that. His radical presidency now tests whether the rest of America does.

The country has moved toward this moment for years, as demographic change brings us inexorably toward becoming a majority-minority nation. In the realm of “identity politics,” now a commonplace pejorative, it involves the biggest issue of all: the identity of America itself.

The struggle has flared throughout our history. Waves of immigration, the abolition of slavery, and the civil rights movement all triggered fierce opposition from white Protestants fearing change and seeking to protect their cultural primacy.

Groups such as the mid-19th century Know-Nothings (targeting Irish-Catholic immigrants) and the early 20th century Ku Klux Klan (targeting Blacks, immigrants, Catholics, Jews) mounted the most virulent resistance. Broader swaths of the country shared their unease about the society’s evolution.

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But they’ve never erased the message inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” And by the late 20th century, conservative Republican icon Ronald Reagan reinforced them by providing legal status to three million undocumented immigrants.

“You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman,” Reagan explained, quoting a constituent. “You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”

“Thanks to each new wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity,” he concluded, “we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier.”

Trump first won the presidency by rejecting the sentiments of Reagan and Ryan. His second presidency rejects them in ever-uglier terms.

He scorns immigrants from “shithole countries” he called “filthy, dirty, disgusting” – citing Somali-Americans. He deploys masked paramilitaries to chase down Latinos. He targets efforts large and small to remedy disadvantage among Blacks, even ending free admission to national parks on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and instead making his own birthday admission-free.

His administration’s objective sits in plain sight. Its recently-published National Security Strategy warns that Europe risks “civilizational erasure” if it becomes “majority non-European.” Trump stokes that same panic about America.

While halting most immigration, Trump makes an exception for whites from South Africa, once-infamous for its white supremacist political system known as apartheid. His close ally Elon Musk, a South Africa native, (falsely) claims whites there face “genocide.”

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Musk’s father, who defends apartheid as some on the American far-right downplay the evils of slavery, warns of disaster if US whites become out-numbered. “You want to go back to the jungle?” Errol Musk asked a CNN interviewer.

Trump acolytes in Congress echo the warning. Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama insists Muslims are “here to conquer” and advocates deporting them.

“Not all cultures are equal,” adds Florida Rep. Randy Fine. Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri defines Americans as “the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith.”

As every schoolchild learns, our Constitution forbids establishment of a national religion. But the diminished dominance of white Christians, who have fallen from more than 80% of the population to less than 50% in Trump’s lifetime, creates an ample audience for demagoguery.

Consider the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2025 American Values Survey. Seven in 10 of those PRRI calls “MAGA Republicans” say being a US-born Christian is important to being “truly American,” and that whites face as much discrimination as Blacks, according to data the organization provided to me.

Seven in ten MAGA Republicans don’t think immigrants should have “basic rights and protections” in the courts, and support masked ICE agents hunting them in unmarked vehicles. Seven in 10 want immigrants without legal status placed in internment camps before deportation.

Seven in ten agree that “immigrants are invading our country.” Among MAGA Republicans, a 55% majority wants the government to “declare America a Christian nation.”

But keep those numbers in perspective. In the PRRI survey, MAGA Republicans represent just 27% of the population. They’re dramatically out of step with everyone else.

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Among the other 73%, seven in ten prefer an America with a wide variety of religious faiths. Seven in ten say newcomers from abroad strengthen our society. Seven in 10 oppose ICE’s tactics, and say Trump is assaulting constitutional checks and balances and the rule of law.

In the final speech of his presidency, Reagan hailed America’s commitment to “breathe life into dreams” of immigrants. “Other countries,” he lamented, “cling to the stale past.”

Trump wants to define America by its past. But most Americans don’t, and as 2025 concludes, they still hold the power to stop him.

John Harwood is the former chief Washington correspondent for CNBC and White House correspondent for CNN. He has interviewed every president from George H.W. Bush to Joe Biden. Sign up for ‘The Stakes with John Harwood’ to get all of his columns in your inbox.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.

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Judd Legum, author of the newsletter ‘Popular Information’, spoke with Zeteo’s John Harwood on competing with, and sometimes beating ‘Big Media’; how journalists should handle Trump’s “flood the zone” strategy; and reporting what you cover without a caution filter.

The conversation between Legum and Harwood was live on Zeteo.com and the Substack app, and the two took questions from subscribers in the audience. Please share your thoughts on the discussion in the comments below, and be sure to keep an eye out for the next Substack Live.

Paid subscribers can watch the full video above. Free subscribers can watch a 5-minute preview. Consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support the work Zeteo does, and to never hit a paywall again.

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The United States had suffered all kinds of federal government corruption long before Donald Trump showed up in the White House.

Watergate exposed Richard Nixon’s abuse of the presidency for the purpose of keeping power. Iran-Contra showed how Ronald Reagan’s administration defied Congress to pursue a policy goal that lawmakers had outlawed. Abscam caught members of Congress taking cash bribes; in the Teapot Dome scandal, a Cabinet member did the same.

The Pentagon Papers revealed lies by multiple administrations to justify US involvement in Vietnam. In the My Lai massacre, that war produced ugly war crimes. And so on, since the nation’s founding 250 years ago.

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What distinguishes Trump’s second presidency is the breadth and depth of its crookedness – the enormous personal graft, of course, but also rampant abuse of power, subversion of the rule of law, violation of the Constitution, top-to-bottom dishonesty, and acts of violence, including murder. Over the last 11 months of 2025, he has conducted an orgy of corruption and criminality that threatens the American experiment itself.

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They said Washington lacked the competence to run it, that the nation couldn’t afford it, that it would impoverish the working class.

A “cruel hoax,” declared the Republican Party’s leader.

That’s how opponents denounced the creation of the Social Security system, which has become the most successful government program in American history. In 90 years of operation, Social Security has cut the poverty rate among senior citizens by four-fifths. It has never failed to deliver promised benefits, though Congress has expanded eligibility and benefit levels.

The same swing-and-miss hysteria returned in full force against the creation of medical insurance for the elderly. Anti-government conservatives cast Medicare as a step toward totalitarianism that would degrade medical care and damage the economy.

Wrong again.

The pattern, as a recent series of analytical papers makes clear, repeats again and again. The party that loathes government decries programs to solve social problems as dangerous, costly, and futile. Which leaves cutting taxes as its prescription for any ailment – a prescription that consistently fails to deliver.

The papers come from Co-Equal, an organization that seeks to fill a gaping hole in Washington policy discussions: rigorous assessment of how actual results of government policy compare to earlier political predictions. From Social Security to the Affordable Care Act, from the Reagan tax cuts to the Trump tax cuts, their conclusions were consistent: doomsaying about major new programs, and cheerleading about reducing tax rates, did not pan out.

Co-Equal is a non-partisan organization created by Democratic veterans of Congress and presidential administrations, who see government programs as tools for helping people. They’ve sought GOP participation. But modern Republicans see programs as pointless expenses, which is why party leaders will neither read nor learn from these analyses.

Social Security and Medicare have become so embedded in American life that neither needs defending. Even the most dogmatic of anti-government conservatives have lost hope of eliminating them.

But the 21st-century Affordable Care Act received the same treatment. Despite a hailstorm of Chicken Little warnings, Obamacare did not bankrupt the country, kill jobs, destroy employer-provided health insurance, or “collapse upon itself.” Congressional Republicans tried to repeal it at Donald Trump’s behest, they flinched; it was helping too many people.

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At the same time, Republicans put on their fright wigs about Wall Street regulation, too. Despite the financial crisis that triggered the worst downturn since the Great Depression, Republicans claimed tougher oversight would harm the economy, increase market volatility, inhibit borrowing, institutionalize bailouts, and create a “super-bureaucracy” in the guise of helping consumers.

So what followed the passage of the Democratic bill known as Dodd-Frank?

The longest streak of monthly job growth in American history, expanded small business lending and consumer credit, and reduced bank failures. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) obtained $21 billion in compensation for 200 million Americans preyed upon by financial firms.

A rare major Republican initiative also proved its worth. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief – George W. Bush’s push to diminish suffering and death in sub-Saharan Africa – did exactly that. Passed by large bipartisan majorities in Congress, PEPFAR has saved an estimated 25 million lives, prevented millions of HIV infections, and assisted millions of children orphaned by AIDS.

“It transformed HIV from a death sentence into a manageable chronic condition across much of Africa,” the Co-Equal analysis concluded.

Such successes have not tempered the increasing zealotry of Trump 2.0. Before bipartisan opposition intervened, Elon Musk’s reckless “Department of Government Efficiency” sought to slash PEPFAR funding. It crippled the CFPB, which assisted so many in the GOP’s working-class base. At a Cabinet meeting this week, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins declared she feels “gratitude and joy” from cutting food stamp benefits.

The modern GOP, relentlessly, seeks to reduce the tax burden on the most affluent Americans. They, not the working-class, control Republican policy-making.

Because describing it that way doesn’t win votes, Republicans use better-sounding pitches. Tax cuts will lift average families, create well-paying jobs, and boost economic growth - enough to increase, rather than decrease, government revenues.

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Their free-lunch claims have fallen flat. Republicans’ tax cuts have expanded income inequality and federal borrowing. The strongest sustained growth of recent decades occurred in the late 1990s after Democratic President Bill Clinton raised taxes.

Earlier tax hikes by former President George H.W. Bush had begun the hard work of reducing budget deficits. For that, anti-tax fanatics made him a Republican pariah.

Job creation under recent Democratic administrations has far outpaced that of Republican counterparts. For the last half-century, every Democratic president left office with a lower deficit than he inherited as a share of the economy; every Republican president departed with a higher deficit.

These facts don’t move Republicans now in power. Their patrons are too demanding, their ideology too calcified, their MAGA faithful too compliant, their information sources too detached from reality.

But reality can shove them out of power.

Americans outside the MAGA bubble know that Trump, while enriching himself in office, has not reduced the prices they pay. They know that jobs have grown less plentiful. They know his deportation thugs keep brutalizing peaceable immigrants because they see the videos. They know he isn’t focused on them.

How many know?

In a Gallup Poll published last week, 60% disapproved of Trump’s performance as president. Numbers like that can teach a political party a lesson, even if it doesn’t want to learn.

John Harwood is the former chief Washington correspondent for CNBC and White House correspondent for CNN. He has interviewed every president from George H.W. Bush to Joe Biden. Sign up for ‘The Stakes with John Harwood’ to get all of his columns in your inbox.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.

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“This is an authoritarian moment in our country like we have never had. That’s a fair, honest, impartial, accurate statement. And you could not say that on ABC or on any of the other corporate media.”

Like me, Terry Moran is a refugee from what we now call “corporate media.” We talked on Substack Live about what’s happened to us, what’s happened to our business, what’s the right way to engage with Donald Trump, and where politics and journalism in our country will go from here.

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Watch the full video above to hear us discuss:

• Terry’s tweet about Stephen Miller that would get him fired from ABC

• The end of my career at CNN

• Terry’s infamous interview with Trump, in which the president lied that Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s tattoos spelled out ‘MS-13’

• How we’re responsible for Barack Obama’s famous comment about Kanye West and Taylor Swift…

…and much more. Let us know what you think in the comments, and be sure to subscribe to catch my next Substack live.

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Amanda Litman has ideas. The co-founder of Run for Something, an organization that recruits Millennials and Gen Z to run for local office, joins John Harwood for a live conversation on Substack to discuss what went wrong with the shutdown, how litmus tests are up to primary voters, and why even energetic older progressives like Bernie Sanders need to step aside.

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They took audience questions and dug into a wide range of topics, including:

• What kind of politician can beat Donald Trump and MAGA

• Why the shutdown felt like ‘betrayal’: “This is a messaging failure as much as it is a practical failure.”

• Why Bernie Sanders should retire: “There’s only so much room at the top.”

• Why ideologies like ‘moderate’ or ‘socialist’ don’t matter

• Chuck Schumer’s flip phone

• Why you should run for office…

…and much more. Watch the full video above, let us know what you think in the comments, and be sure to subscribe to be notified about our next Substack live.

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Paid subscribers can watch the full video above. Free subscribers can watch a 4-minute preview. Consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support the work Zeteo does, and to never hit a paywall again.

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