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.
This week, Donald Trump returned from the first major foreign trip of his second term.
The Waves also discusses the Riverside Church controversy and the case of Sarah Milov.
Israel has imposed a complete block on humanitarian aid into Gaza since March 2, with hundreds of trucks with lifesaving aid waiting at the border. Now many of Gaza’s kitchens have closed, and Palestinians face mass starvation as rations run low. We speak with Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University, author of Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine.
House Republicans have successfully pushed forward President Trump’s budget proposals to slash Medicaid and food stamps, putting millions of low-income Americans at risk. Anthony Wright, executive director of Families USA, a healthcare consumer advocacy organization, says the $715 billion reduction is “literally the biggest cut to the Medicaid program in history.
In his first live interview since his release from ICE detention, Columbia University student and Palestinian activist Mohsen Mahdawi recounts the traumatic experience of his arrest and incarceration. Mahdawi, a green card holder who was born and raised in a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, was arrested in Vermont on April 14 when he appeared for what he was told would be a citizenship interview, and spent more than two weeks in U.S.
The Waves also discusses the Riverside Church controversy and the case of Sarah Milov.
We speak with a Salvadoran journalist who fled El Salvador along with others from the acclaimed news outlet El Faro after Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele threatened to arrest them for exposing how Bukele had made secret deals with Salvadoran gangs. Bukele has run the country under a so-called state of exception since 2022, detaining nearly 80,000 people accused of being in gangs, largely without access to due process.
Israel has imposed a complete block on humanitarian aid into Gaza since March 2, with hundreds of trucks with lifesaving aid waiting at the border. Now many of Gaza’s kitchens have closed, and Palestinians face mass starvation as rations run low. We speak with Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University, author of Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine.
A major new report by U.S. academics analyzes Israel’s occupation of Palestine under the legal framework of the crime of apartheid. The report was intentionally released on Nakba Day — the day that marks the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes during Israel’s violent founding in 1948. Citing dozens of experts, human rights organizations and judicial decisions, it concludes that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians “meets the legal threshold of apartheid.
The Trump administration has suspended refugee resettlement for most of the world, but welcomed 59 white South African Afrikaners Monday who were granted refugee status. President Trump claims Afrikaners face racial discrimination — even though South Africa’s white minority still own the vast majority of farmland decades after the end of apartheid — and claims they are escaping “genocide.
The Waves also discusses the Riverside Church controversy and the case of Sarah Milov.
We speak with 22-year-old Palestinian journalist Abubaker Abed in Ireland after he evacuated Gaza last month suffering from malnutrition and under threat for his reporting on Israel’s genocide. Abed describes himself as an “accidental war correspondent” and hoped to become a sports journalist and commentator before the start of the war, but spent much of the last two years reporting on daily death and destruction.
We speak with a Salvadoran journalist who fled El Salvador along with others from the acclaimed news outlet El Faro after Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele threatened to arrest them for exposing how Bukele had made secret deals with Salvadoran gangs. Bukele has run the country under a so-called state of exception since 2022, detaining nearly 80,000 people accused of being in gangs, largely without access to due process.
Amid President Donald Trump’s visit to the Middle East, we continue our interview with DAWN’s Sarah Leah Whitson and HuffPost’s Akbar Shahid Ahmed about Trump’s acceptance of a luxury plane gifted to him by the Qatari government, nuclear negotiations with Iran and Saudi Arabia, a less cooperative relationship with Israel and more.
We look at President Donald Trump’s diplomatic visit to the Middle East and discuss his administration’s foreign policy in the region with Akbar Shahid Ahmed, senior diplomatic correspondent for HuffPost, and Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of DAWN. As Trump sells U.S. military power in the Gulf in exchange for investments in U.S. businesses, they warn that Trump’s transactional business philosophy is spreading to the administration’s dealings around the world.
The Waves also discusses the Riverside Church controversy and the case of Sarah Milov.
We speak with 22-year-old Palestinian journalist Abubaker Abed in Ireland after he evacuated Gaza last month suffering from malnutrition and under threat for his reporting on Israel’s genocide. Abed describes himself as an “accidental war correspondent” and hoped to become a sports journalist and commentator before the start of the war, but spent much of the last two years reporting on daily death and destruction.
“People are starving to death, and this is a fact that we are witnessing and experiencing nowadays,” says Oxfam’s food security coordinator in Gaza, Mahmoud Alsaqqa. More than 10 weeks after Israel instituted a total siege on Gaza, blocking all food and other aid from entering, hunger has reached catastrophic levels in the Palestinian territory.
As President Donald Trump meets with leaders in the Middle East this week, we look at how his administration and family have opened wide to foreign powers and wealthy interests willing to spend big to gain influence. Top buyers of Trump’s novelty cryptocurrency have spent millions as part of a contest to have dinner with the president. Trump’s sons Donald Jr.
We speak with Robert Weissman, co-president of the advocacy group Public Citizen, about President Donald Trump’s “corrupt deal” to accept a $400 million jumbo luxury jet from the royal family of Qatar — possibly the most valuable such gift a foreign government has ever given.
The Waves also discusses the Riverside Church controversy and the case of Sarah Milov.
We go to Memphis for an update after jurors acquitted three former Memphis police officers of the murder of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black father who died after the officers brutally beat him during a traffic stop in January 2023. The group beating was caught on video, provoking widespread outrage and calls for police reform.
Jewish Voice for Peace held its largest-ever national member meeting in Baltimore from April 31 through May 4, with more than 2,000 attending. We feature the address of Democratic Congressmember Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, the only Palestinian American member of Congress, who addressed the conference as it began.
We speak with Congressmember Bonnie Watson Coleman, one of three Democratic lawmakers the Department of Homeland Security has threatened to arrest after they went Friday to inspect a newly reopened private ICE jail. They are accused of assaulting ICE officers. This comes after federal agents arrested Newark Mayor Ras Baraka on trespassing charges after he joined their congressional delegation.
Mayor Ras Baraka of Newark, New Jersey, was arrested and detained by masked federal immigration police Friday when he joined three Democratic congressmembers set to tour a newly reopened 1,000-bed Immigration and Customs Enforcement jail run by GEO Group, which advocates say lacks proper permits. Baraka says he was asked to leave the premises and left the secure area to join a group of protesters in a public area outside the gate — when he was seized by officers in a chaotic scene.
The Waves also discusses the Riverside Church controversy and the case of Sarah Milov.
We go to Memphis for an update after jurors acquitted three former Memphis police officers of the murder of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black father who died after the officers brutally beat him during a traffic stop in January 2023. The group beating was caught on video, provoking widespread outrage and calls for police reform.
Ahead of the Mother’s Day holiday in the Untied States, we speak to Duha Latif, a mother of two children in Gaza, about life for mothers living under Israeli occupation and assault. Democracy Now! last spoke to Latif over a year ago, when she was attempting to evacuate Rafah with her family. She now resides in a tent in Khan Younis and struggles to feed her family as Israel’s blockade has created widespread famine throughout the Gaza Strip. “We are not living. We are enduring,” says Latif.
Survivors of sexual abuse by Catholic priests are calling for Pope Leo XIV to institute a zero-tolerance policy and for the church to investigate his handling of prior sexual abuse allegations. “He needs to be transparent. He needs to be honest,” says Peter Isely, a survivor of sexual assault by a Catholic priest and a co-founder of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. “Wait and see,” says James V. Grimaldi, executive editor of National Catholic Reporter.
The first U.S.-born pope has taken the name Pope Leo XIV. Chicago-born Cardinal Robert Prevost is also a naturalized citizen of Peru, where he served the church for two decades. He greeted 1.4 billion Roman Catholics and the world Thursday with a message of peace and has posted statements online in support of migrant rights and criticized the Trump administration. In the first part of our discussion, we go to Rome for an update from James V.