Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.
Donald Trump is shaking up his Cabinet, while his immigration agenda faces mounting pushback from the courts. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss.
The Waves also discusses the Riverside Church controversy and the case of Sarah Milov.
As the cases of international students and activists facing deportation begin to play out in the courts, Georgetown professor Nader Hashemi visited an ICE jail in Texas to speak with his colleague Badar Khan Suri, a Georgetown professor who was snatched by the Trump administration back in March. Suri is married to a U.S. citizen of Palestinian background.
More than 100 days into President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, we speak with the renowned abolitionist, author and activist Angela Davis, who discusses Gaza, Trump and more.
Davis, who spoke at a Jewish Voice for Peace conference in Baltimore on Thursday, says, “We find ourselves in a very difficult moment, a moment of grief, a moment of witnessing the apartheid and the genocide unfolding in a way that we had never imagined before.
People around the world celebrated May Day, International Workers’ Day, on Thursday, including hundreds of thousands in the United States. Unions and immigrant rights groups led rallies from coast to coast, in every state, with much of their anger directed at the Trump administration.
Workers and activists in New York demanded workers’ rights, freedom for Palestine and protections for immigrants.
A ship carrying humanitarian aid for the Gaza Strip sent out a distress signal overnight after it was bombed by drones in international waters near Malta. The Freedom Flotilla Coalition, the organizer of the voyage, is blaming Israel for the attack, which set the ship on fire, punched a substantial breach in its hull and cut off communication with those aboard. “We are dealing with a brutal attack on an innocent ship,” retired U.S.
The Waves also discusses the Riverside Church controversy and the case of Sarah Milov.
A U.S. military strike on a migrant detention center in the north of Yemen has killed at least 68 people, largely migrants from African nations, bringing the death toll from U.S. attacks on the country to over 250 since mid-March. Middle East researcher Helen Lackner says the number of deaths is likely twice the officially recorded number, as the United States has now conducted more than 1,000 strikes on Yemen “on an absolutely nightly basis.
The Trump administration has signed a deal with Ukraine to give the United States a long-term stake in the country’s oil, gas, coal and mineral resources as part of a joint investment fund with Kyiv. President Trump has sought to frame the agreement as repayment of U.S. military aid to Ukraine since the start of Russia’s invasion in February 2022.
As May Day protests call for worker and immigrant rights, we talk to a New York father whose 19-year-old son Merwil Gutiérrez, with an open asylum case, was detained in the Bronx and then flown with over 230 other Venezuelans to a mega-prison in El Salvador, where he is being held incommunicado. Witnesses to Gutiérrez’s arrest say authorities were searching for a different person but, upon encountering the teenager, decided to arrest him simply because he is Venezuelan.
Columbia University student and Palestinian activist Mohsen Mahdawi has been released on bail by a Vermont judge after more than two weeks in U.S. immigration custody. “I am saying it clear and loud to President Trump and his Cabinet: I am not afraid of you,” he told supporters as he left a Vermont courthouse.
The Waves also discusses the Riverside Church controversy and the case of Sarah Milov.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen reflects on the first 100 days of the second Trump administration, the president’s chaotic trade war, detentions and deportations of pro-Palestinian advocates and more. Nguyen has just released a new book of essays, originally delivered as lectures, that explore otherness and belonging in U.S. history. “I think otherness is a universal condition,” says Nguyen.
We mark 50 years since the end of the U.S. war on Vietnam with the acclaimed Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen. On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese troops took control of the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon as video of U.S. personnel being airlifted out of the city were broadcast around the world. Some 3 million Vietnamese people were killed in the U.S. war, along with about 58,000 U.S. soldiers.
Tech writer and critic Paris Marx discusses the first 100 days of the second Trump administration and the influence of billionaire Elon Musk at the helm of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which has slashed government programs and the civil service. Marx says even after Musk gave hundreds of millions to Trump’s reelection campaign, “it was hard to imagine that he would really play this outsized role in the actual governance of the country.
The Liberal Party in Canada had been massively trailing in the polls. Then it pulled off a victory that seemed impossible just two months ago, largely thanks to one man: President Donald Trump, who repeatedly threatened to make Canada the 51st state.
The Waves also discusses the Riverside Church controversy and the case of Sarah Milov.
Social Security recipients could soon see their benefits interrupted or delayed as a flood of cuts hits the agency, thanks to the efforts of Elon Musk and DOGE. Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor who served as Social Security commissioner under President Biden, says the system is on the brink of collapse as the Trump administration pushes out thousands of staffers and peddles lies about who actually benefits from its services.
On Friday, FBI agents arrested a county judge in Milwaukee and charged her with obstructing justice and concealing an individual from arrest. After an undocumented immigrant, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, appeared before her in court on an unrelated misdemeanor charge, Judge Hannah Dugan learned that ICE agents were waiting in the hallway outside her courtroom to arrest him.
The award-winning Palestinian American journalist and author Sarah Aziza has released a new book, The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders, in which she examines her recovery from an eating disorder from which she nearly died in 2019, linking it to the generational trauma experienced as part of her Palestinian family’s history of exile. Aziza was born in the U.S. as a daughter and granddaughter of Gazan refugees.
Organizers across the United States are planning a massive day of May Day protests against the Trump administration. Organizers say that they have broad support from groups targeted by the administration, including immigrants, federal workers and more. “Instead of attacking only one community … they are attacking everybody at the same time, and that enabled us to gather a really broad coalition,” says Jorge Mújica, strategic organizer for Arise Chicago.
The Waves also discusses the Riverside Church controversy and the case of Sarah Milov.
We speak with two brothers who are fighting Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI over its massive data center in Memphis, Tennessee, used to run its chatbot Grok. The facility is next to historically Black neighborhoods and is powered by 35 pollution-spewing methane gas turbines the company is using without legal permits. Musk says he wants to continue expanding the project.
Social Security recipients could soon see their benefits interrupted or delayed as a flood of cuts hits the agency, thanks to the efforts of Elon Musk and DOGE. Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor who served as Social Security commissioner under President Biden, says the system is on the brink of collapse as the Trump administration pushes out thousands of staffers and peddles lies about who actually benefits from its services.
On Friday, FBI agents arrested a county judge in Milwaukee and charged her with obstructing justice and concealing an individual from arrest. After an undocumented immigrant, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, appeared before her in court on an unrelated misdemeanor charge, Judge Hannah Dugan learned that ICE agents were waiting in the hallway outside her courtroom to arrest him.
The Trump administration has deported three U.S. citizen children to Honduras: a 4-year-old who was actively receiving treatment for a rare form of stage 4 cancer, his 7-year-old sister, and a 2-year-old girl who was separated from her father and expelled with her undocumented pregnant mother. The mothers were coerced into taking their U.S. citizen children and prohibited from communicating with other family members or their lawyers until they arrived in Honduras.
The Waves also discusses the Riverside Church controversy and the case of Sarah Milov.
We speak with two brothers who are fighting Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI over its massive data center in Memphis, Tennessee, used to run its chatbot Grok. The facility is next to historically Black neighborhoods and is powered by 35 pollution-spewing methane gas turbines the company is using without legal permits. Musk says he wants to continue expanding the project.
We speak with acclaimed director Ryan Coogler about his latest film Sinners, which is set to be one of the biggest box office hits of the year. Starring Michael B.
Cuts by the Trump administration are putting children at risk, according to a new report by ProPublica. The administration has cut funds and manpower for child abuse investigations, enforcement of child support payments, child care and more. On top of that, Head Start preschools, which offer free child care to low-income parents, are being severely gutted. Democracy Now! speaks with ProPublica reporter Eli Hager on his investigation into Trump’s “War on Children.