Donald Trump and JD Vance have a surprising closing message in the 2024 election: they are the antiwar candidate. About the rising conflict in the Middle East, Trump has said, “I wanna see it all stop, I wanna see the Middle East get back to peace.” On a podcast, Vance criticized the Biden “Even though they say they want to minimize Palestinian civilian casualties, they pursued the pathway that maximizes those casualties. They say that they're pro-Israel. They've pursued the pathway that has prolonged the war as long as possible, which is bad for Israel.”

This message is of course deeply cynical since Trump is planning on staffing his administration with hawks, as he did in his first term. But it might have appeal to undecided voters, who polls show are strongly antiwar.

To discuss why Democrats have ceded the peace vote to the GOP, I talked to Matt Duss, vice president of the Center for International Policy and frequent guest of the show.

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Jeet Heer is joined by David Klion to discuss 'The Apprentice' — a movie about Roy Cohn’s mentoring of a future president.

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Donald Trump is such a clearly defined figure — a walking, talking political cartoon — that it’s hard to imagine when he was someone different. Ali Abbasi’s new film, The Apprentice, gives us a Trump we’re not used to seeing, a young man who was unsure of himself and found his path thanks to the mentoring of Roy Cohn, the notoriously crooked lawyer and political fixer. David Klion, frequent guest of the podcast, reviewed the movie for The Nation. While David liked the movie more than I did, we both agreed it is well worth watching, with superb performances and a vivid evocation of the New York of the 1970s and 1980s. In our talk, we discuss what the movie says about Trump’s origins and also the Trump fatigue that has hurt the film at the box-office.

As the presidential election comes down to the wire, it’s hard to ignore evidence of Donald Trump is increasingly erratic behavior: his slurring of words, his freezing up during questions, his repeated cancellations of interviews, and the bizarre incident at a town hall in Pennsylvania, where Trump unexpectedly spent more than half an hour bobbing and tottering on stage to a selection of his favorite tunes. My Nation colleague Chris Lehmann wrote about this event. He joins me to talk about Trump’s cognitive slide and also the failure of elite institutions that are still enabling Trump, including the mainstream media and the Republican Party. We also take up the state of the race in general.

More than forty years in the making, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is the most divisive movie of our time. Some critics have hailed it as a major work while others dismiss it as a stinker. The film tells the story of Cesar Catilina (played by Adam Driver), a visionary architect who fights for his utopian urban plans against the entrenched forces of the status quo. Whether you like the movie or not, the uncontestable fact is it is rich in ideas and offers much to talk about.

To talk about the movie I spoke with The Nation’s architectural critic Kate Wagner. We discuss the movie’s relationship to early 20th century modernism as well as earlier movies such as Metropolis and the fiction of Ayn Rand. A major topic of conversation is the film’s reactionary gender politics.

The Israeli incursion into Lebanon has rapidly shifted from a bombing campaign into a ground invasion, one that the Pentagon now says might last for some time. This current escalation of the Middle Eastern conflict, which has also seen Iran and Israel trade blows, reflects the wider failure of Joe Biden’s bear-hug foreign policy. To discuss the conflict and also the prospect for change under a Kamala Harris presidency, I talked to Matt Duss, a seasoned foreign policy analyst at the Center for International Policy.

Joe Biden’s foreign policy team was hoping for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas before his term was over, perhaps as early as the end of September. This always seemed wishful thinking but now is almost impossible as Israel not only continues to fight in Gaza but has expanded its conflict with Palestinian forces in neighboring Lebanon. The expanding conflict once again raises the question of Biden’s bear-hug strategy, which the administration argues would help foster peace and restraint. This failure of this policy is likely to haunt who ever wins the White House in November.

To survey the dire scene and discuss the possibility of American involvement in yet another large Middle Easter war, I talked to Trita Parsi, executive vice-president of the Quincy Institute.

Kamala Harris and many other Democrats often warn that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. This is true enough, but it raises the question of how a ridiculous reality-TV star got in a position to be so dangerous. The excellent new podcast Master Plan shows that democracy has been under siege in the United States for decades due to a concerted effort to let corporations dominate the commanding heights of power. I talk to David Sirota, who along with the team at The Lever, created the podcast. We take up the crucial role of Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, whose influential 1971 memo created out a blueprint for big business to roll back democracy.

After the convention and on the cusp of a debate, the presidential election is a near dead heat. The polls show Kamala Harris has a slight edge, but it is well within the margin of error. This is a massive improvement over the performance of Joe Biden, who was on a path to a major defeat but it is by no means a guarantee of victory. To take up the state of the race, I talk to analyst Joshua A. Cohen, who writes for The Nation and runs the Ettingermentum newsletter.

We take up both what Harris has been doing right (which explains her quick rise in the polls) but also weaknesses in the Democratic Party’s messaging (which explain why the Democratic National Convention didn’t produce a significant bump). We then look towards the debate as a chance for Harris to more clearly define herself against Donald Trump and increase the size of her lead to win big.