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Impolitic with John Heilemann
Published by Audacy | Puck
- News
- Politics
Join Puck’s chief political columnist, MSNBC/NBC News national affairs analyst, and best-selling author John Heilemann as he roams the corridors of power and influence in America on this twice-weekly interview show, taking you behind the scenes and beyond the headlines with the people who shape and shift our culture: icons and up-and-comers, incumbents and insurgents, moguls and machers in the overlapping worlds of politics, entertainment, tech, business, sports, media, and beyond. The conversations are rich and revealing, unrehearsed and unexpected … and reliably impolitic. A Puck-Audacy joint, new episodes drop every Wednesday and Friday.
Listen on Apple PodcastsRecent episodes
- Lis Smith: Michigan as Microcosm of Democratic Mishegas
John welcomes back Democratic strategist Lis Smith to discuss the intra-party factional civil war playing out in the Michigan Senate primary. Best known as the communications guru who helped turn Pete Buttigieg into a national figure, Smith served as a key adviser in the primary to state senator Mallory McMorrow, who left the race a month ago, giving Lis a prime, up-close perspective on the two remaining candidates—former public health official Abdul El-Sayed and congresswoman Haley Stevens—and why their heated, bitter, lavishly funded fight has turned into a microcosm of the burgeoning ideological battle among Democrats from coast to coast.
- Introducing: Money Moves with Jill Schlesinger
There’s a lot of dopey financial advice out there. Jill Schlesinger is here to call it out, answer your questions, break down the financial news that actually matters, and help you manage your money without losing your mind. No jargon. No judgment. Just clear, actionable financial guidance about saving, investing, buying a home, managing your career, and deciding how to spend your hard-earned dollars. When it’s time to panic, Jill will tell you. When everyone else is panicking and you shouldn’t be, Jill will tell you that too. Your money. Your move. Let’s go.
- Jonathan Swan: “He’s Just Gonna Do What He Wants To Do”
John welcomes New York York Times White House reporter Jonathan Swan to discuss his runaway No. 1 bestseller, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” co-authored with Maggie Haberman, and how the reporting in the book illuminates Trump's inability to bring a tidy end to the war in Iran, fixation on election-related conspiracy theories, and pronounced disinterest in the economic struggles of ordinary voters. Swan also reveals the strategy behind his Emmy-winning TV interview with Trump in 2020—and how a fringe Australian politician with a yen for kangaroo feces fueled his meteoric rise in journalism.
- Adam Jentleson: Senate Campaign Sturm und Drang in Maine, Michigan & Beyond
John welcomes Senate savant and Searchlight Institute president Adam Jentleson to discuss the Democrats’ fraught path to retaking control of the upper chamber. A former speechwriter for John Kerry and John Edwards, comms director for Harry Reid, and chief of staff to John Fetterman, Jentleson explains Searchlight’s mission of breaking the hold of entrenched interest groups on his party; that rejecting litmus tests and embracing ideological heterodoxy are key to building a stable Democratic governing majority; his confidence that, despite Graham Platner’s implosion, Susan Collins is going down in Maine; his worries that the blue team will fumble the ball in Michigan; and why “nobody is doing it better now” than Zohran Mamdani.
- Peter Baker & Susan Glasser: Is Trump Trying to Tank the GOP?
John welcomes back the John and Yoko (Ike and Tina? Sonny and Cher?) of Beltway journalistic power couples, the New York Times’s Peter Baker and The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser, to try to make sense of a presidency that increasingly appears to be politically nonsensical. Against the backdrop of Trump's recent actions at home and abroad, Peter and Susan ponder a theory that no one quite believes but for which the evidence—from his mercurial conduct of the war in Iran to his doubling down on ICE’s deadly tactics, obsessive focus on election-related conspiracy theories, and more—is at least superficially compelling: that the president is engaged in a concerted campaign to sabotage the Republican Party.
- Jeff Blattner: A Tale of Two Confirmation Hearings — and Two Top-Tier Trump Toadies
John welcomes former Senate Judiciary Committee senior staffer and deputy assistant attorney general Jeff Blattner to discuss the confirmation hearings of Todd Blanche and Jay Clayton to be America's next attorney general and director of national intelligence, respectively. Blattner also explains how his friend and former Justice Department colleague Phil Weiser unexpectedly defeated Senator Michael Bennett in the recent Democratic gubernatorial primary in Blattner’s home state of Colorado—and what his mentor and former boss, Ted Kennedy, would have to say about Donald Trump’s America.
- Alex Wagner & Will Leitch: Platner’s Implosion & Trump’s Red Card
John welcomes back two blue-chip friends of the pod—Alex Wagner, host of Crooked Media’s “Runaway Country” and MS Now senior political analyst, and New York magazine columnist, MLB.com national correspondent, and Deadspin founder Will Leitch—to discuss, respectively, the spectacular self-immolation of Graham Platner’s Senate campaign in Maine and Donald Trump’s unwelcome intrusion into an otherwise wondrous World Cup.
- Maggie Haberman: The Hunter & The Hunted
John welcomes back New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman to discuss her runaway No. 1 bestseller, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” co-authored with Jonathan Swan; why the story of second-term Trump is less about how he’s changed than how he’s the same as ever, only more so; the degree to which retribution and self-enrichment are animating impulses of Trump 2.0; and the challenges of getting to the truth about a president for whom deceit and delusion are default settings.
- Tad Devine: 2016 Revisited, Bernie’s Legacy & Democrats’ Wet Hot Socialist Summer
John welcomes longtime Democratic strategist Tad Devine to discuss his new book “How the Democrats Screwed Bernie” and the long shadow cast by the 2016 primary between Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Devine, who served as Bernie’s chief strategist in that race, argues that his party has failed to learn its lessons, why it must, and how that failure helps explain the recent primary wins of democratic socialist insurgents against establishment Democrats.
- Bob Crawford: Avett Brothers, John Quincy Adams, & Other Joys of Americana
John welcomes Avett Brothers bassist Bob Crawford to discuss his new book, “America’s Founding Son: John Quincy Adams, From President to Political Maverick.” Crawford explains how JQA, after a mediocre single term in the Oval Office, blossomed into America’s “most extraordinary ex-president” and arguably its greatest all-around public servant; the evolution of his popular history podcast The Road to Now; and the genesis of the recent, seemingly unlikely collab between The Avett Brothers and Faith No More frontman Mike Patton.
- Chris Van Hollen: Hypocrisy, Complicity & the Democratic Rupture Over Israel
John welcomes Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen to discuss the increasingly deep fault line among Democrats over U.S. policy towards Israel. Van Hollen, who published a recent New York Times op-ed about why his party must abandon its “reflexive and unconditional” support for Israel, argues that Joe Biden’s handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was a stain on his foreign policy record; that Democratic presidential contenders who voted to fund Bibi Netanyahu’s war on Gaza will pay a steep political price; and that Democratic foreign policy hands who “refuse to acknowledge their complicity” in what he sees as a genocidal campaign should have no role in future Democratic administrations.
- Guy Cecil: Democratic Senate Math + Mamdanistan Goes National
John welcomes Guy Cecil, former chairman of Priorities USA Action and executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, to discuss his party's prospects for taking control of the US Senate -- and the national implications of Zohran Mamdani's endorsement trifecta in the New York Democratic primary.
- Eddie Glaude: Storybooks, Fairy Tales & America 250
John welcomes Princeton professor Eddie Glaude, Jr. to discuss his new book, "America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries.” Glaude lays out the historical pattern of evasion and erasure that the impending MAGA-soaked Semiquincentennial celebration fits into; the meaning of the book’s incendiary opening sentence (”I do not love America, and never have, especially now”); and Juneteenth's place on the commemorative calendar. On the heels of the Obama Presidential Center's opening, Glaude offers another controversial take: that 44’s tenure was little more than “Clintonism in blackface.”
- Tim Miller: Trump’s Surrender & J.D.’s Blitzkrieg
John welcomes back Bulwark podcast host Tim Miller to discuss the putative deal to end the war in Iran and the efforts of J.D. Vance to sell it (and himself). Tim dissects the blowback to the deal within the GOP, Donald Trump's senescence, and Vance’s weeklong media blitz as he hawks his new book about Catholicism. Meanwhile, John describes his visit to the algae bloom on the Washington Mall, Tim sings Olivia Rodrigo, and both weigh in on the Knicks victory parade and Wemby’s turn in the barrel.
- Maya Wiley: “Trump’s DOJ Ain’t the Knicks”
John welcomes back Maya Wiley, president and CEO of the Leadership Council on Civil and Human Rights, to discuss the assault on the nonprofit sector by Donald Trump’s Justice Department. Wiley explains why the recent indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center isn’t just baseless and transparently political but part of a broader pattern. She also weighs in on Trump’s intent to undermine the midterm elections through bogus claims of fraud, his nomination of Todd Blanche to be Attorney General, and why his DOJ is everything the New York Knicks are not — inglorious, ill-motivated, and screamingly inept.
- Pablo Torre: How the Knicks Saved Their Season (and Sports Itself) by Reversing the Trump Curse
John welcomes back Pablo Torre, the Pulitzer Prize-winning host of Pablo Torre Finds Out to discuss the collision between the New York Knicks and Donald Trump—and why the team's electrifying Game 4 comeback was even more meaningful and miraculous than it looked. Pablo also explains why the World Cup has generated scant excitement so far, the long-run threat to the cultural primacy of sports posed by runaway financialization, and yet more evidence of Steve Ballmer’s flagrant efforts to skirt the NBA salary cap.
- Jonathan Weber: Booms, Bubbles, Busts & Doom Loops in the City by the Bay
John welcomes former Reuters head of West Coast news and global technology coverage Jonathan Weber to discuss his new book “City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco”—along with last week’s California primary, the rivalry between (and presidential ambitions of) Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom, and the rise of San Francisco’s popular new mayor, Daniel Lurie.
- Andrew Weissmann: Lies, Damned Lies & Lying Liars (Todd Blanche Edition)
John welcomes back former top Justice Department and FBI official Andrew Weissmann to discuss his recently published New York Times No. 1 best-seller “Liar’s Kingdom: How to Stop Trump’s Deceit and Save America.” Weissmann lays out the book’s proposals to criminalize election lies or disqualify politicians found guilty of them from seeking office again. He also weighs in on the Trump administration’s push for a $1.8 billion slush fund to pay off supposed victims of lawfare, its own pattern of politically motivated prosecutions, and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s central role in both.
- Chris Murphy: Everything Is Broken
John welcomes back Democratic Senator Chris Murphy to discuss his new book “Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America.” Murphy lays out his book’s argument that America is in the grip of a set of interlocking cults (the Cult of Profit, Cult of Everywhere, Cult of Technology, Cult of Consumerism, Cult of Credentialism, and Cult of Corruption) that have undermined our culture and democracy—and suggests creating a Cult of the Common Good to remedy what ails us. He also weighs in on the diplomatic quagmire in Iran and Donald Trump’s wildly prolific, deeply suspicious penchant for day trading.
- Jonathan Martin: Crooked Ken v. Tofu Talarico
John welcomes back Politico’s Jonathan Martin to discuss the Texas Senate race: how scandal-soaked Attorney General Ken Paxton thrashed incumbent Senator John Cornyn in the GOP primary run-off; Democratic nominee James Talarico’s “race against time” to define himself before Paxton's effort to cast him as a weak, weird, ultra-woke vegan sinks in with voters; and whether Democrats are once again chasing fool’s gold in Texas or the race is a genuine toss-up. JMart also unpacks the latest episode of his “On The Road” YouTube series, featuring Pennsylvania governor and likely 2028 presidential candidate Josh Shapiro.