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Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is ‘Start Making Sense.’  I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the show: Trump is not the worst president when it comes to constitutional rights and civil liberties; Woodrow Wilson was worse.  Adam Hochschild explains why – starting with Wilson jailing thousands of people whose only crime was speaking out against the president.  Adam’s most recent book is American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis. But first: Harvard is taking the lead in the universities’ resistance to Trump.  Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan, will explain – in a minute.[BREAK]J.D. Vance…

The Democratic National Committee is pledging to give tens of thousands of dollars monthly to every state party across the country, emphasizing red states over blue ones, in an expansive — and expensive — push to make Democrats competitive from Alaska to Florida.The D.N.C. will spend more than $1 million a month on the 50-state program, which is increasing the organization’s monthly cash donations to state parties in red states by 50 percent and in blue states by 30 percent.The extra money to red states, the D.N.C. argues, is to build long-term infrastructure in places where it is currently lacking…

DigiKey is one of the world’s largest marketplaces for electronic components, shipping global orders from a single warehouse in Thief River Falls, Minn. Dan Koeck for NPR hide caption toggle caption Dan Koeck for NPR THIEF RIVER FALLS, Minn. — Every few nights, Teri Ivaniszyn jolts awake, her mind racing. She never expected to be a tariff expert, but here she is, keeping a notepad by her bedside for groggy 2 a.m. math on how her company can stay in business. “I wake up in cold sweats about tariffs,” Ivaniszyn says. It’s a new thing, and she laughs about it.…

Rethinking Rural / April 23, 2025 Trump promised to address the opioid epidemic and restore small towns to health and prosperity. The president has betrayed those who placed their trust in him. Ad Policy California farmers face an uncertain financial future as the Trump administration’s tariffs threaten to upend fruit and vegetables exports of fruits and vegetables and increase prices of farming equipment.(Justin Sullivan / Getty Images) The damage done just in the Trump administration’s first three months could fill the National Archives—assuming that department still exists. Many of those moves, including the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a…

A pump jack in New Mexico’s San Juan Basin. This is one of the country’s oldest federal lands drilling areas. Many oil company executives celebrated Donald Trump’s return to the White House. But now expectations of higher profits are fading amid fears of a recession. Kirk Siegler/NPR hide caption toggle caption Kirk Siegler/NPR FARMINGTON, N.M. — The San Juan Basin, in the northwestern part of the state, is one of the oldest federal lands drilling areas in the U.S. It’s a huge swath of barren, brown high desert that first started booming in the 1950s. Today, some 40,000 wells pockmark…

The chaos and cruelty of the Trump administration reaches new lows each week. Trump’s catastrophic “Liberation Day” has wreaked havoc on the world economy and set up yet another constitutional crisis at home. Plainclothes officers continue to abduct university students off the streets. So-called “enemy aliens” are flown abroad to a mega prison against the orders of the courts. And Signalgate promises to be the first of many incompetence scandals that expose the brutal violence at the core of the American empire. At a time when elite universities, powerful law firms, and influential media outlets are capitulating to Trump’s intimidation,…

Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Atlantic, sharply criticized President Trump’s “erratic” trade policies on Wednesday, saying that they risk “doing so much damage around the world” and that most Americans do not support them.“The unpredictability is just awful for everybody around the world,” Mr. Branson told reporters from British news outlets during a business trip to Saudi Arabia. “It’s just erratic, unpredictable, which is very, very difficult for business to deal with.”He added: “An unsettled world is not good for anybody. People delay decisions on investment and spending.”Mr. Branson’s comments were striking because many business leaders have avoided direct…

Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat for two decades and a leading liberal voice on Capitol Hill, announced on Wednesday that he would not seek re-election next year, closing out a 44-year congressional career focused on immigration, the federal justice system and anti-smoking initiatives.The decision by Mr. Durbin, 80, was widely expected and will immediately touch off a crowded competition for a rare Senate vacancy in his solidly blue state. It also intensifies a generational shift in the chamber as he becomes the fifth sitting senator to announce a retirement, all of them over the…

Britain will not rush into a trade deal with the United States or change its food or car safety standards, Rachel Reeves, the British chancellor of the Exchequer, said in Washington on Wednesday.When asked about reports that the Trump administration wanted Britain to lower its tariffs on cars to 2.5 percent from 10 percent, Ms. Reeves said only that she wanted to reduce trade barriers between Britain and other countries.The British government has been pursuing a U.S. trade deal as it hopes to soften the economic blow that British businesses are facing from higher tariffs imposed by President Trump on…

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Wednesday called for major overhauls to the missions of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank but said the United States remained committed to maintaining its leadership role at the global economic institutions.The comments, at a speech on the sidelines of the spring meetings of the I.M.F. and the World Bank, come at a moment of concern among policymakers that the Trump administration could withdraw the United States entirely from the fund and the bank.The United States has upended the global trading system in recent months, and the views of the Trump administration on…