Advertise on podcast: Diane Rehm: On My Mind

Diane Rehm started her career at WAMU 52 years ago as a volunteer.  In 1979, she began hosting WAMU’s local morning talk show, Kaleidoscope, which was renamed The Diane Rehm Show in 1984.  The Diane Rehm Show grew from a local program to one with international reach and a weekly on-air audience of nearly 3 million.  In 2016, Diane decided to step away from daily live radio, and brought her unique mix of curiosity, honesty, intimacy and four decades of hosting experience to the podcast world with On My Mind. In 2020, during the heart of the pandemic, Diane launched a new project to help engage an audience stuck at home. The Diane Rehm Book Club met monthly on Zoom and featured panel discussions, as well as author interviews. Guests included Ann Patchett, Isabel Wilkerson, Anthony Doerr and Isabel Allende.   Now, she takes the microphone one last time at WAMU to say farewell. You can find an archive of interviews from The Diane Rehm Show and On My Mind at dianerehm.org.  You can find an archive of book club discussions on Diane's YouTube channel.

This is Diane’s final episode of On My Mind. She will be moving on from WAMU on May 2, after more than 50 years at the station.  So, who better to have as her guest for this last interview than Susan Page?  Susan Page and Diane have both traced the comings and goings of Washington for decades, Page at USA Today, Diane in public radio. And they often had the good fortune of sitting down together to talk about politics, and more importantly, what the actions of our government mean to you, the public.  Diane says she can’t think of another time in the history of this country when those types of conversations that lay out facts and seek truth meant more than they do today.  Susan Page joins Diane as she bids farewell to public radio to talk about the first hundred days of the Trump presidency – and what to expect from the next hundred. 

Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin was first elected to the House in 2016, just as Donald Trump ascended to the presidency for the first time. Since then, few Democrats have worked as aggressively to hold the president accountable for what he sees as violations of law and constitutional order.  Raskin led the second impeachment trial of President Trump for his actions on January 6th and now acts as the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.  When elected to the position in December, Raskin vowed to use what power he had to “advance the legislation, amendments and arguments that will block a further descent into MAGA chaos.”  Though he acknowledges the criticism from many Democratic voters that the party seemed stunned into silence during early days of Trump’s second term, he tells Diane, “It’s not like that anymore, nobody is asleep now!” On this week’s episode of On My Mind, Diane speaks with Rep. Raskin about Trump’s defiance of court orders, DOGE’s access to private data and the Democratic response.

Can the courts act as a check on the Trump administration’s power?  Though this question is not new, it has taken on an urgency as the case of a Maryland man accidentally deported to a prison in El Salvador has highlighted the White House’s increasingly combative stance towards the judiciary.  This week Trump’s team appeared to flout a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court that said the government must “facilitate” Kilmer Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S. Days later, a federal court judge threatened to hold the government in contempt for “doing nothing.” “This country was built on checks and balances,” says Joan Biskupic, chief Supreme Court analyst for CNN and author of several book about our judicial system, including Nine Black Robes. “If we don’t have checks on what a very powerful executive branch is doing right now,” she warns, “we don’t have the same democracy we had.”  Biskupic joins Diane to talk about what might come next in the legal showdown over the administration’s recent deportations and what it means for the legitimacy of the courts. 

President Trump announced yesterday he is delaying the reciprocal tariffs he had imposed on dozens of countries for 90 days. But, he said, he is ratcheting up pressure on China, which he has accused of ripping off the United States for decades.  This came a week after “Liberation Day,” when Trump declared a national emergency to pave the way for the most sweeping trade duties since 1910. This move had sent global markets into a tailspin and unleashed a flood of concern from the business community.  Though Trump’s announcement caused an initial recovery on Wall Street, Jeff Stein warns that it might not last.  Stein is the White House economics reporter at The Washington Post.  He warns, “We could still very well still be flirting with a recession, we could be flirting with permanent damage to our relationship with our allies, to our credibility to get things done on the world stage.” Stein joins Diane to explain what all this chaos means for global trade, the U.S. economy and what could happen next. 

Johnson & Johnson was founded in the late 1800s and grew into one of the most trusted brands in America for its baby powder, Tylenol, Band-Aids, then cutting edge pharmaceuticals. Today, the company is worth more than $380 billion. But behind the success, says investigative journalist Gardiner Harris, lies a wake of deceitful and dangerous corporate practices that have threatened the lives of millions. “These guys are incredibly intimidating,” he says of the company. “And when they don’t succeed in buying you off, which is what they have done over the decades for  doctors, journalists and lawyers, they sue.” Harris is a former pharmaceutical reporter for The New York Times. He has spent decades looking into the long history of lies, cover-ups and malfeasance of Johnson & Johnson. He joins Diane to talk about his new book, No More Tears. 

The pressure campaigns of the Trump administration are beginning to bear fruit.  Last week saw two major institutions acquiesce to the president’s demands after actions taken by the White House threatened to undermine their budgets, workforce and, in some cases, ability to perform core business.  The first was Paul Weiss, a major law firm that some accuse of trading pro bono work on behalf of Trump causes to maintain business ties to federal agencies. The second was Columbia University, which agreed to terms laid out by the government in exchange for the restoration of funding that had been slashed earlier this month.  Hailed as victories by Donald Trump, Isaac Stanley-Becker, staff writer at The Atlantic, says these are just two of the highest profile examples of the ways the president has learned to wield fear as a political tool. While Donald Trump has always used scare tactics in his exercise of power, Stanley-Becker explains, what we are seeing now is different from his first term, marked by name-calling and social media bullying.  “What I think is especially significant,” says Stanley-Becker, “is the use of government assets and government resources -- and denying those as a bargaining chip to bring these institutions to heel.” Stanley-Becker joins Diane to talk about his recent piece for The Atlantic, “The United States of Fear.” 

Nearly 7 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s disease. By 2050, this number is projected to rise to nearly 13 million.  For years, research into the disease remained underfunded -- and patients who received a diagnosis had few options when it came to treatment. But in recent years, that has begun to change.  “There are exciting developments in the research field at each stage of our lives that affect the strength of our brain and the ability of the brain to resist brain challenges,” says George Vradenburg. Vradenburg is chairman of the non-profit UsAgainstAlzheimer's, which he co-founded in 2010 with his late wife, Trish. He joins Diane for a conversation about his hopes and fears for Alzheimer’s research, and how the Trump administration could change those. 

Donald Trump’s love-hate relationship with the news media was on full display throughout his first term. He screamed “fake news” at negative coverage and labeled journalists the “enemy of the people.” But lately, he has taken his campaign beyond the court of public opinion, filing lawsuits against ABC, CBS, The Des Moines Register, and the Pulitzer Board. David Enrich is the business investigations editor for the New York Times. He says Trump’s legal actions are part of a broader conservative movement to undermine First Amendment protections for the press.  The effort is being led, he says, by politicians, billionaires and corporations – and may soon make its way to the Supreme Court. He joins Diane tells the story in new book, Murder the Truth.

In the weeks preceding President Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress Tuesday night, the administration was busy – taking an axe to federal agencies, imposing tariffs on neighboring countries, and reversing course on U.S. support for Ukraine. But we heard little about these issues from the president in this speech.  What the president did do was tick off a list of accomplishments, including money saved through contracts cancelled and fraud exposed – many of these examples exaggerated or simply untrue.  Norman Ornstein is a political scientist and co-author of several books on our politics, including the 2012 New York Times bestseller It’s Even Worse Than It Looks. He says that many Trump voters couldn’t see the ways that government impacted their lives. But, he adds, “If Trump succeeds as he’s already doing in disrupting so many of these areas, Americans are going to be jolted.” Norman Ornstein joins Diane on today’s episode of On My Mind to offer his take on what he sees coming and the Democrats’ response.