Is the Presidency Broken?
John Dickerson joins Matt, Jeff, and politics writer Elaina Plott to discuss whether the job of the president has become impossible.
April 27, 2018
51 min
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Episode 44 · April 27, 2018
Is the Presidency Broken?
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The Atlantic Episodes Around April 27, 2018
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51:58This episodeIs the Presidency Broken?
Summary
“We are a president-obsessed nation, so much so that we undermine the very idea of our constitutional democracy,” writes John Dickerson in his May cover story in The Atlantic. “No one man—or woman—can possibly represent the varied, competing interests of 327 million citizens.” Have we heaped so much upon the president that the job has become impossible? Is Trump testing the office in valuable ways? And if the presidency is broken, how do we fix it?
Links
- "The Hardest Job in the World" (John Dickerson, May 2018 Issue)
- “Scott Pruitt Bypassed the White House to Give Big Raises to Favorite Aides” (Elaina Plott and Robinson Meyer, April 3, 2018)
- "Letter to Joseph Hooker from Lincoln, January 26, 1863" (Library of Congress)
- Educated (Tara Westover, 2018)
- Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It (Chris Clearfield and András Tilcsik, 2018)
- Lincoln in the Bardo (George Saunders, 2017)
- “There’s Something Funny About Tiffany Haddish” (Caity Weaver, GQ, March 26, 2018)
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