Announcing the ‘After Trump’ Podcast

Today we are releasing the first episode in a podcast series of which I am deeply proud. It’s called “After Trump” and it’s based on the book Lawfare published last year by Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith: “After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency.”

You can subscribe to the show, produced in collaboration with the folks at Goat Rodeo, here. Here’s the first episode:

When Bauer and Goldsmith came to us with the idea for the book, we knew it would be far from an ordinary publication. The project was urgent; they were planning to write it quickly, and it would have to be published much faster than traditional publishers would ever contemplate. It would deal with a raft of high-profile matters in the newspapers every day: the range of issues on which then-President Trump was trampling on public expectations of the presidency and how to prevent such abuse in the future.

The book would also be dense. The authors were thinking about detailed legislative and executive branch proposals to address the problems that the Trump presidency raised. They were going to write actual legislative language, and they were proposing to do scholarly analysis at the speed of journalism. Our goal was to make the book as readable as possible given the intellectual ambition, but we also decided to think out of the box about how to deal with the density.

That’s where the podcast came in.

There are, after all, many Americans who are realistically not going to read hundreds of pages of historical and legal analysis—no matter how elegantly written—but who have as urgent and legitimate a need to think through post-Trump reform issues as do those who will. So we started thinking about how to capture some of the major themes of “After Trump” in a highly accessible format that would be actively fun to engage.

The result was the “After Trump” podcast, which will be a six-part limited series devoted to exploring some of the themes of the book and the proposals for reform it advances.

We were privileged to persuade Virginia Heffernan, who hosted Slate’s “Trumpcast” podcast for the last few years, to host “After Trump,” and we worked with a talented team from Goat Rodeo to produce it. We will be releasing an additional episode each of the next five weeks.

All of us at Lawfare hope very much you listen to, enjoy, and share it.