Kelli Wessinger | Vox

Obama’s top Iran negotiator on Trump’s screwups

2026-04-14T15:54:49-04:00

“It’s hard to believe that someone”s going to keep negotiating with you if the two other times, they’ve attacked in the midst of negotiations,“ former Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman said on Vox’s Today, Explained. | Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images

President Donald Trump, in between blockading the Strait of Hormuz and posting blasphemous AI images of himself as Jesus, claims he still wants to strike a deal with Iran’s government to end the current conflict, reopen the Strait, and curtail the country’s nuclear program.

So far, he’s been unsuccessful — and during his first term in office, he tore up the US’s previous nuclear agreement with Iran, negotiated under Barack Obama in 2015.

To find out how the US and Iran got to yes last time — and why they haven’t under Trump — Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with former Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, who led the Obama administration team that got a nuclear deal with Iran.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What do you think it would take for the US to get a new deal with Iran right now?

It depends on what the objectives are for the president and for Iran. Right now, President Trump wants to make sure Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapon. He wants to open the Strait of Hormuz, he wants to stop Iran from funding proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis in Yemen, because he thinks they create a risk for Israel, who is our ally and all of the countries in the Gulf region.

Iran, on the other hand, has control of the Strait of Hormuz, so they’re looking to maintain that leverage because it allows them to project power in the region. They want to ensure that they maintain a right to enrichment and they want to be able to continue to have relationships with Hezbollah and Hamas and the Houthis.

There’s a big gap and it’s curious, because the negotiation team on our side is quite small. The negotiation team on their side includes people like Abbas Araghchi, who was my counterpart during the 2015 negotiations. He’s now the foreign minister and he knows every single detail of that deal.

Back when you were negotiating with Iran, were there moments looking back when you thought, This is just not going to happen?

Absolutely. There were many points along the way where I said to my counterparts, “If you can’t do it, you can’t do it.”

We thought we were very close to a set of parameters and the supreme leader at the time gave a speech and set out a whole new set of parameters that I think surprised even his foreign minister.

We had to figure out how we could get from where we were, which we thought was on our way to a deal, to now consider what the supreme leader had publicly said.

We know, in part because President Trump articulated this early and often, that there were some Americans who thought we could have gotten a better deal with Iran. What do you hear as the main complaint and what do you say to those critics?

“All of this has cost everyday average Americans much more out of their pocketbooks.”

The critics say that the strongest part of the deal only lasted for 15 years. They wanted it to last forever. We argued that it gave us what is called a one-year breakout timeline so that we would have a year — if somehow we discovered Iran was cheating, which we thought was highly unlikely — to do something about it.

I think some critics wanted to go to war. They thought they could create a regime change. We constantly said to the United States Congress, if we risk war, it could close the Strait of Hormuz, it could increase the gas prices, it could take down the international economy, it could mean the lives of our military and an enormous cost to our economy and to American citizens.

Are the right people at the negotiation table?

I find it difficult to believe that Vice President Vance, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner can be successful in two weeks. I fully suspect that the negotiations will continue beyond two weeks if they get any traction at all.

I think part of the reason the vice president is there is because Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who has no formal role in the government, don’t have credibility with Iran because twice before when they were negotiating with Iran, we attacked.

It’s hard to believe that someone’s going to keep negotiating with you if the two other times, they’ve attacked in the midst of negotiations.

Is there a risk this time around that the US comes out weaker and Iran comes out stronger?

I think it’s very hard to be that reductive. There are parts of Iran that are weaker. They don’t have the navy they once had. They don’t have the missile programs they once had. They don’t have the nuclear programs they once had.

They can rebuild all of that and if they get millions of dollars in tolls and sanctions relief from the United States, they will be able to rebuild all that capacity faster. But at the moment they have been set back.

The United States, in my view, has been set back. We have just spent billions of dollars. We have reduced our inventory of weapons that we may need for other theaters. We have undermined our alliances. We have put Russia and China in stronger positions. We have removed oil sanctions from Russia and oil sanctions from Iran, already putting money in their coffers, giving Russia more money so they can prosecute their horrible and illegal war against Ukraine.

All of this has cost everyday average Americans much more out of their pocketbooks. The regime in place in Iran now is more hard line than the one before, if you can believe it, and may decide it must have a nuclear weapon in order to deter future attacks.

If Iran decides it wants a nuclear weapon, I can assure you many other countries, even some of our closest friends around the world, will think they need a nuclear weapon as well.

Why people are having such strong reactions to Lindy West’s new memoir

2026-03-27T18:14:16-04:00

West performs onstage at the Larkin Comedy Club on June 4, 2017, in San Francisco, California. | FilmMagic/FilmMagic

You might remember feminist writer Lindy West from her days on X (né Twitter) yelling at sexist, anti-fat trolls. Or from her book Shrill. Now, West is back with Adult Braces, a memoir detailing her journey, a literal road trip, to accepting her husband’s request to open up their marriage. Except it wasn’t really a request, as West tells it. And this time, people across social media had very strong opinions about it.

Slate senior writer Scaachi Koul joined Today, Explained co-host Noel King to talk through the internet’s reaction to West’s new book, and all that came after.

Below is an excerpt of Koul’s conversation with Today, Explained, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Tell me about Adult Braces.

It’s a very digestible book. Adult Braces is Lindy’s memoir. This is her fourth book. She’s written a lot of political polemics, social polemics, a lot of personal writing, but this is some of her most personal. It’s a memoir about her taking a cross-country road trip, but also about her reformatting her marriage and turning towards polyamory with her husband.

Why do you think [the polyamory] has got people so upset here?

I think there’s a few trains of controversy here, and some is legitimate and some is really not. So the illegitimate complaints are kind of about this narrative having to do often with Lindy’s weight. She’s fat. She writes a lot about being fat. Or some people are saying that it has a lot to do with gender. Her partner, Aham, who is her husband — Aham goes by he/him and they/them — is nonbinary. So there’s been a lot of needless jabs at this particular facet of the story.

The other side of it is that the story that Lindy tells in this memoir — and all we really have to go on is what she tells us — is pretty brutal to her. Their entry into polyamory is not necessarily honest. A lot of people have been using the word “coercive polyamory.” It’s not a term I’ve ever heard before, but the idea that you kind of tell your partner, “it’s this or nothing.”

She’s clearly a reluctant participant for the first spell of their jaunt into polyamory. They meet someone, he falls in love with her first, and then she also falls in love with this person, Roya. And now the three of them are together.

When we frame this as it was coercive, as she was talked into it. There’s an opposite side of this that says: No, Aham, her husband, was honest with her right from the beginning, and she sort of hoped that it would never come to pass.

It’s clear that he told her, A condition of our marriage will be polyamory.

I think she understood some of the risks. She’s an adult. Lindy does not want to be infantilized. She said that several times — that she had and has autonomy, and these are her decisions. I believe that they are her decisions.

I want to bring the third into this, as the marriage did: Roya. Tell me about where Lindy starts with Roya, where Lindy ends with Roya, and why you think the ending has also made people uncomfortable.

When Roya is brought into the picture, it is true that Aham had more than one other girlfriend in addition to his wife. And so Lindy is a little…I would say she was reticent to kind of learn anything about this person and was sort of like, go do what you must. Aham starts to travel to Portland once a month to spend a weekend with Roya.

He has a big medical issue come up while she’s touring, and Roya is there to help. That starts to change the nature of their dynamic. Lindy talks a lot about — Wow, is this what it’s like to get a wife? Somebody who’s so organized, who takes care of the medical details and listens to me?

Over time, they start to develop a friendship, and then their relationship turns, and it becomes romantic. It fundamentally reshapes the entire nature of their polyamory and of their marriage and of their family. And then after that, Roya, she moves into the woods with them, and that’s where she is now.

You went out to the place where the family lives now. You wrote a profile of Lindy West. When you were there, did you push her at all on the question of coercion?

She preempts that question. I think it’s something that people have already said to her. She says that that’s just not true, and I kind of understand what she’s saying, which is, How can I prove it to you other than living in this life?

But if you try to write anything to convince other people, especially when it comes to memoir, it will feel dissatisfying. And I know that intimately. There’s only so much I can do. What I can offer is a perspective and a version of events. But as soon as I cross a threshold into feeling like I’m evangelizing for something, if you don’t believe me about my own experience, then it doesn’t mean anything.

I think people look at Lindy as a one-way mirror in a lot of ways. They see themselves in her. And when she makes decisions — when anybody in that position, [whether] a celebrity, influencer, writer, [or] creative, makes decisions that their audience doesn’t like, [that audience] takes it really personally.

Lindy is someone who I think a lot of people, especially her fan base, have viewed as bombastic and confident and bawdy and fun. And [then] compare that with the version that we read in Adult Braces — who is anxious and insecure, and being harmed by this person in her life.

As the audience, your proxy is her. You feel defensive of her.

What do you think about this argument that Lindy West’s memoir about coming to polyamory is like the death of millennial feminism?

We can have feelings about anybody’s relationship as it is displayed to us. We are entitled to that, especially when we’re being offered a commodity like a book which you purchase. But one person’s personal story, discomfort, misery, contentment, fulfillment, or lack of fulfillment does not speak to the end of a social movement that was knit together over several decades, and has more to do with Lindy West’s corner of the internet.

Social movements flex. They change. I don’t think it’s the death of anything. It is just where that version of it maybe ended up.

You’re already paying for Trump’s Iran war

2026-03-10T15:17:15-04:00

The price per gallon of gas is shown on a sign at a station on March 9, 2026, in Miami. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images

President Donald Trump continues to give mixed messages about the war in Iran. But what is clear is the impact that the conflict is already having on the US and global economies.

Oil prices, which briefly crested $100 a barrel on Monday, are higher than we’ve seen in years. People are already seeing the impact at the pump, with average gas prices above $3.50 per gallon. But the impact doesn’t stop there: It also means that the price of, well, everything, can go up.

Mike Bird, Wall Street editor for The Economist, told Today, Explained co-host Noel King that higher prices, if they endure, are likely to cause a problem for Trump and the GOP in the approaching midterm elections.

Below is an excerpt of Bird’s conversation with Today, Explained, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Is the war in Iran already affecting the US economy?

Yes, is the short answer. Oil prices move very quickly to account for future conditions and current conditions, and that is fed almost immediately into gas prices. If you own a car, if you’ve been to fill it up recently, you will have noticed it was more expensive than the last time.

People who spend money on gas have less money to spend on other things. That also feeds into all manner of other things but the most visible immediate term impact is on gas prices.

Why don’t we go into all manner of other things while we’re here?

Energy’s an input good. The amount of energy you consume is mostly not in the form of gasoline. It’s embodied in products in all sorts of things that you purchase, even things that you wouldn’t consider as being energy intensive.

Agricultural goods require fertilizer, they require tractors. Everything that’s manufactured, it’s made somewhere and uses some amount of energy. So the feed-through from energy prices really hits every consumer item. Almost everything is affected by energy.

How long does it take? If I were to go to the grocery store today, am I going to find that eggs and vegetables are more expensive?

You probably wouldn’t find that immediately, if only because a lot of the supply chain activity around what you see in the store today will have begun before the attacks on Iran began.

These things feed through with a long and variable lag time. Some things will be appreciating relatively soon in the store and some things it might take months, maybe even more than a year.

“From an affordability perspective, this is now the second major supply shock caused directly by actions that the administration’s taken.”

If you imagine something like fertilizer costs, which are very closely pegged to the price of oil, [they] affect the amount of food produced in various parts of the world. You won’t start to see those lower amounts of food produced for quite a long time and the price effects won’t be seen for quite a long time.

What about the markets? The markets, fair to say, are kind of always whipsawing, but [they] always go back up, right?

Markets tend to, in the long term, go back up. It’s just whether you can see it through to the long term. There are not many extended periods — say, 10 years — in American equity market history where you weren’t looking at positive returns afterwards. There are a couple, most of them quite a long time ago.

There’s been a lot going on in markets already this year. It’s been generally down the past few days because of all of this volatility.

The bigger question is, is this something that’s going to be over by the end of the week and there’s going to be an embarrassing withdrawal and a walkback? Or is it something we’re going to be talking about in six months time?

Now we should talk about President Trump. What do we hear him saying about his war with Iran and his affordability agenda?

There’s been a lot of muddled communication from the White House over the past few days when it comes to oil prices. The president has asked investors and the American public to look through what he calls short-term effects.

One thing we did see with the tariffs last year is there is this idea that the market is a disciplining factor on the president — that basically, he doesn’t like seeing the red line go down, that there is only so much of the sort of negative press that he’s willing to put up with.

Last year, it allowed for the reduction of tariffs. The tariffs didn’t go away. Obviously the tariffs [are] still really largely in place by various means. So what that means for something as complicated as this, because it’s a military endeavor, is very unclear.

Let’s say we want to envision a world where we can get oil prices back down to where they were three weeks ago. What has to happen?

The main question in terms of how quickly things go back to normal is how long this goes on in the first place. The longer it goes on, the more difficult it becomes to get this production all going again.

You can’t just switch it on and off overnight. You don’t have all the workers required ready to go. If it does drag into weeks and months, I think it’s not a linear process. It can get worse and worse depending on how long it lasts.

How do we see the president’s critics seizing on his refusal to acknowledge that he has not provided an end in sight at this point?

From an affordability perspective, this is now the second major supply shock caused directly by actions that the administration’s taken.

In terms of the president’s opponents and critics, the most important thing to start thinking about is how much this affects the midterm elections. If you see people paying significantly more for gas, seeing prices rise across the economy as they have for the past few years, that is going to be pretty bad for the Republicans electorally.

The influencer circus around Nancy Guthrie’s home

2026-03-06T14:36:57-05:00

A tribute for Nancy Guthrie in front of the KVOA news station on March 3, 2026, in Tucson, Arizona. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Nancy Guthrie, mother of Today host Savannah Guthrie, has been missing for over a month now. While the investigation remains active, with no new breaks over the past several weeks, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department in Arizona has returned some of its police officers back to their previous positions. The media circus outside of Nancy’s house left with them.

That isn’t the case for everybody, however. There are social media influencers still milling around the missing Guthrie’s home, waiting for a break in the case. And they’re not just waiting — but trying to actually solve the case. They’re looking for clues while their followers give their own theories that can verge into outrageous.

Slate’s Luke Winkie told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram that he “thinks people think that this case could be solved despite the fact that it’s not, and that has driven a lot of the speculation.”

Below is an excerpt of Winkie’s conversation with Today, Explained, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Tell us where you went and tell us what it looked like.

I flew into Phoenix, Arizona, jumped in a rental car, took out my phone, and I tapped in Nancy Guthrie’s address. I drove to Tucson, about an hour and a half away, all pretty ordinary. And then I took this one right turn onto a street, and immediately, there were all these cars parked on the side of the road. There were drones overhead — media people just kind of wandering around. There’s people filming front-facing camera videos and talking to their streaming setups. There’s not a police barricade or anything. Anyone can just show up there to cover the case.

Is there something about this Nancy Guthrie case that is particularly potent for these true crime tribes? Is it just that her daughter’s super famous?

This is a galactically famous person, almost like in the subconscious of America. And we live in kind of a low trust culture right now, and I think people are maybe more eager to believe that maybe the sheriff doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Maybe the FBI has bungled this. So maybe you’re more inclined to think that a couple YouTubers might be getting to the bottom of something or are focusing on something that authorities out there have missed.

Did you get a sense being out there how much people wanted to solve this case versus how much they just wanted it to drag on for the views?

I can’t say that the influencers wanted it to drag on for the engagement, but I do think that the longer it went on, in some ways that was more validating for some of the influencers, in the sense that it let them kind of exist within this narrative, that I’m the one that’s going to be able to solve this. I remember there was this one guy, Jonathan Lee Riches, JLR, he goes by, and the longer I was out there, his content stopped being so much about Nancy Guthrie and started being about [the authorities]: “I understand people have to have health and fitness, but would you go — like if you’re the sheriff — would you go to the gym and work out, just like, the next day when Nancy goes missing? He’s been there for days, like working out in the morning.”

What’s funny about that is here we are a month and a couple of days out from Nancy Guthrie being abducted, and none of them have figured it out! What are the influencers doing out there?

“The top guy out there, JLR, was getting almost 80,000 concurrent views of people just staring at a static [shot] of Nancy Guthrie’s house.”

Most influencers are literally just setting up a camera in front of her house and talking to a chat box that is filled with people that are tuning in to basically stare at Nancy Guthrie’s house and wait for updates to trickle in, or to share random theories they saw on Twitter, or to pass along rumors.

And you might think, why would anyone tune into that? [But] clearly there is a market for this. The top guy out there, JLR, was getting almost 80,000 concurrent views of people just staring at a static [shot] of Nancy Guthrie’s house. I talked to another guy out there who’s from California; he drove out there and his reasoning [was]: No one was taking the night shift.

How different is that, I guess, from CNN being out there and not breaking any new news?

This is the thing I found myself thinking about a lot, because you are right. The engagement [from the audience] is really good; you were covering the biggest story in the world, and if you are in the game of true crime, this is where you want to be. You have kind of the veneer of giving the people what they want. I’m out here covering this story and piping it to the people that trust me on true crime.

I didn’t get a great sense that ultimately what these influencers were doing and what these cable news entities were doing were especially different. I think at the end of the day, everyone was sort of milling around Nancy Guthrie’s house waiting for the sheriff to show up to make their statements.

You could say they’re not hurting anyone, but they kind of are — because haven’t they gassed up certain theories to the detriment of alleged suspects who weren’t even suspects?

A good example is the sheriff, when I was out there, made a statement kind of reiterating that they had ruled out Nancy Guthrie’s immediate family as suspects in this investigation. And that’s because there’s been all this speculation that someone close to Nancy Guthrie might’ve been the person to abduct her.

And I talked to one guy out there who was a true crime streamer, and he told me, “Well, I go about things a different way. I like to have direct interaction with my viewers. So when the sheriff put out that statement, I put a poll in my chat saying like, Hey, do you believe the sheriff that her family had nothing to do with it? And in that poll everyone said that, No, I think their family still had something to do with it.”

It wasn’t like he was taking charge of saying, No, guys, listen, we can’t be talking about that, because the authorities ruled them out. They were still willing to kind of engage in that kind of speculation, which you could say is a little bit damaging and not necessarily helpful to solving the case.

It’s like doing your own research about vaccines, except you could ruin someone’s life, right?

I was talking to this guy who was an influencer, and we were talking about how streamers like him get accused of passing along misinformation. He had starred in an Inside Edition feature about how he and these other influencers were putting out these rumors, and how the police want them gone. I expected him to push back hard against the idea that he was spreading misinformation. And he did that a little bit, but that wasn’t really the thrust of his defense.

Instead, he told me that, Listen, I’m going to get things wrong. But I’m a true crime content creator, and that’s what makes true crime fun. To come up with a rumor and a theory and talk about that and explore it, and maybe it later [gets] debunked — that is kind of what we do here in true crime. The next day he was going to go investigate a golf course, because some of his viewers thought that Nancy Guthrie’s body might be stowed away in this golf course. I was chilled about how much I related to what he was saying, and how icky it felt, nonetheless.

Meet the toymaker who helped take down Trump’s tariffs

2026-02-26T16:22:12-05:00

A worker produces toys for export at the workshop of a toy company in Binzhou, Shandong Province, China, on March 10, 2024. | Costfoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Late last week, the Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s tariffs imposed under the federal International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) as unlawful. The Court did not, however, say how or when — or whether — the Trump administration will be required to return the money that was collected from the tariffs.

And for some small businesses, it was a lot of money. Learning Resources, which produces educational toys and is based in Illinois, relies on Chinese manufacturers to make their toys. With US tariffs on Chinese goods reaching a whopping 145 percent last year, Learning Resources senior vice president Stephen Woldenberg told Today, Explained co-host Noel King that the company had to pay upward of $10 million.

Woldenberg’s company ultimately took Trump to court; on Friday, the Supreme Court ruled in Learning Resources v. Trump that the tariffs were illegal.

Below is an excerpt of Woldenberg’s conversation with Today, Explained, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What was your reaction and the family’s reaction [to the ruling]? Did everyone go out for drinks?

It was surreal. We were not expecting a ruling on Friday, so I was actually in a one-on-one with my father, who’s the CEO, and at about 9:02, 9:03, I was refreshing the SCOTUSblog website. And I saw that it was about tariffs and so I interrupted him. And so from there it was a whirlwind, but one of the most gratifying parts of the ruling was the reinforcement of rule of law in our country.

How much did y’all have to pay in tariffs since they were announced about a year ago?

We’ve paid in excess of $10 million and the payments were still coming due up until Friday. In 2024, we paid just over $2 million in tariffs. Those were Section 301 tariffs that were imposed in the first Trump administration. Those continued into 2025. It was the incremental [increase] that was really disruptive.

“We’ve paid in excess of $10 million.”

When a product arrives in the US, the importer of record is responsible for paying the tariff. These tariff rates ranged all the way up to 145 percent at its peak, and that’s quite disruptive. No company can afford to pay 145 percent tariff and still sell a product at a price where a consumer would actually buy it. And so as these tariff rates spiked, it became increasingly more difficult to plan and execute on our business.

The bargain that you would’ve had to strike, as I understand it, is that in order to sell in the United States, you would’ve had to be charging your customers double or triple for a toy?

At its peak? It was. We were looking down the barrel at having to do that. In order to fund the tax bill, we had to cut expenses elsewhere. We had to cut marketing expenses, investments. We had to look to slow hiring, all to fund the tariff tax bill.

Like so many businesses, we crave certainty. And so when we didn’t have certainty into what our tax bill was going to look like, it became much more difficult to make investment decisions. It became much more difficult for us to move forward on investing in innovation, which is really what drives our business.

Coming into 2025, we were already working on resourcing our supply chain. The president was very clear on the campaign trail he was going to impose tariffs. We didn’t think it would get that far. We felt like it would settle in a little below that, but nevertheless, we took him seriously, and at his word, and we were beginning to look at resourcing our supply chain. So we already had people working on this project. However, after the tariff rate spiked 145 percent for goods manufactured in China, we really had to double down. It was make or break for us.

Did you ever consider moving manufacturing to the United States?

We’ve looked into it. It really isn’t possible in our industry at a price where a consumer would buy the product. When we’ve looked to manufacture products in the US before, we’ve sent items out for quotes, and they typically come back with prices that range from 10 to 20 times higher than what we would pay if we manufacture the product overseas.

We make products that, generally speaking, are under $40 for the consumer market. It’s difficult to imagine that consumers would buy our products at the price we would have to sell them at if we manufacture them in the US. And this is confirmed to us because if it was possible, we would see our competitors doing it. And we’re not.

The Supreme Court says [these tariffs were] not legal. Does that mean that your business is getting some money back?

We expect to. The administration has been clear several times in court and in writing that they [expected] to pay back the tariffs if the Supreme Court ruled [against it].

We’re going to let the process play out, but we know one thing, it was not difficult for them to take the money, and so we expect that they should be able to just turn the tubes around and send it right back to us.

What does the future look like for your company now?

The government reimposed tariffs over the weekend under a different statute: 10 percent on Friday, and then increased to 15 percent on Saturday. We didn’t expect or anticipate that after the ruling tariffs would go away.

Our general perspective on this is that if this is a revenue-raising exercise, they should go to Congress. Have Congress vote in daylight and allow people in the US to see the decision they have made to raise taxes on Americans.

If it’s really a national security concern, they should focus on the products that are most vital to national security, whether it be chips or cars or whatever it might be. But don’t take down toys in the process.

The mysterious symptom popping up in some GLP-1 users

2026-02-17T16:03:46-05:00

If you watched the Super Bowl, you might have noticed that a lot of the ads were for weight-loss drugs. Even Serena Williams was selling them. That’s because demand for GLP-1s has skyrocketed over the last year, with users more than doubling from 2024.

GLP-1s are relatively new and the industry is rapidly expanding, so we’re still learning more about their long-term effects. Users report fatigue and nausea as being quite common during use. But with more people using the drug, more side effects are popping up.

Dr. Sera Lavelle is a clinical psychologist who noticed several of her patients reporting a strange GLP-1 side effect: extreme apathy. She told Today, Explained co-host Jonquilyn Hill that it isn’t quite depression, but more of a “missing spark,” making people lose interest in things they previously loved.

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When did you first start noticing people having a psychological reaction to GLP-1s?

I first started looking into this about a year ago. It was kind of the same conversation with three different patients in the same week, and I started noticing they all had this flat affect. None of them were depressed, but each was saying things like, “Well, what’s the point?” “Maybe I don’t even care about that job promotion.” “I don’t know what it is, but I’m not even excited to go out with my friends.” And these three in particular had been on GLP-1s. And of course, you can’t make an inference based on three people, but it is what motivated me to start looking into more of the psychological effects, particularly around what we do and do not know about how GLP-1s affect dopamine and motivation-seeking behavior.

The other thing is that there’s a big difference between a person being depressed [versus the GLP-1 side effects], which they have started looking into. Does it affect suicidality and depression? You have to think about depression like, yes, it can be that kind of apathy feeling. However, depression really implies a negative affect: Like, I’m no good, I don’t feel like existing, right? That’s very different than a flatness.

It sounds like it’s not even sadness, it’s just nothing.

The same excitement you might get from, ‘Ooh, I’m going to eat this pizza later,’ or ‘Ooh, I’m going to see my friend later,’ you’re dampening this anticipatory response. So one of the theories in the literature is that it’s not just changing your appetite and metabolism, because, think about it, if it’s also helping gambling and shopping addictions, that can’t be just about metabolism.

So how are we making sense of this? That it is helping people not eat as much, they’re not getting that food noise, but they’re also not gambling and shopping. And of course we look at all three of those as negative, but what kind of positives might it be dulling? Because again, it doesn’t seem like it’s leading to something clinically diagnosable, like depression, that there’s more of these personal reports coming out of people saying, “I feel flat.”

I wonder how you think of GLP-1s. Is this a net negative? A net positive?

I have to think of it [as] very nuanced. I really hate that people are in the pro or negative GLP-1 camp. I see positives in terms of mental health for some people. I’ve worked with so many people with a history of binge eating disorder that might be a hundred pounds overweight, and it’s not just about them losing weight, looking good or being healthier, but those people have lost all psychological hope that it could ever change. If you are a hundred pounds overweight and you’re extremely upset about it and you’ve given up all hope, I think GLP-1s can be not just this physical lifesaver, but this light at the end of a tunnel for you.

But then we can’t talk about that person the same as the person who struggles with anorexia, who is abusing it because it’s their dream drug. It makes them not think about food. People with anorexia traditionally hate even thinking about food. They hate feeling hungry. It scares them. So if you’re already a hundred pounds, you hear that, oh, now I can take a pill that’s going to make me not think about food or feel hungry at all. To me, that’s a huge problem. So net positive, net negative within society? Probably equal. Whereas I think there’d be a net positive in some populations and a very net negative in others.

There are lots of physiological things we’re still learning about weight gain and weight loss, but the psychological impacts seem just as complex and difficult to manage.

They’re really complicated. Do we as a society think of obesity as strictly metabolic, or do we think of it as strictly psychological, like a binge eating disorder? But what you’re finding even with GLP-1s is that if there is a psychological component to it, that it’s more emotional eating, stress, as opposed to in response to the sight or taste of food, it’s not going to be as effective, and you’re more likely to go back to the same behaviors after going off of them.

If you have a client that’s taking GLP-1s, what’s something you want them to look out for?

I have very mixed feelings about it. There are patients I would recommend going on them for psychological reasons. Sometimes people do need a break from that food noise. It is so overwhelming. However, you want to do a lot of prep work if they’re ever planning on going off of them, because especially a person who’s kind of frantic at the idea of that food noise, of those cravings, thinking something’s wrong with them, if they get them when you go off, that’s going to be, I dunno, two to four times more intense than prior to even going on them. What you’ll find is then if they go off of them, they don’t remember what they were like before and they go, “Oh, see, I was always like this.” And it can then reinforce this idea that there’s something wrong with them. So I think a lot of preparation about going off of them and what it’s going to be like for you when your cravings return, and what are you going to do if those actually feel quite intense, and normalizing the fact that it’s going to be intense so that they know to prepare for that.

Do you ever worry that we’re going to live in a society where, like, 80% of people have that flat sort of nothing feeling?

Could it get so normalized within society that it creates this large impact? I am not willing to be fearful of that. I think it would find its place the way that we had a lot of fear that Prozac would do that to everybody, and maybe it was over-prescribed at a certain point, but it kind of found its place within society.

I do have concerns about the health impact. Doctors are saying, “Okay, well, take your GLP-1s and this is going to make you less motivated for food, but we somehow expect you to have more motivation to change your diet and to exercise.” If it’s gonna dampen your desire to kind of eat, isn’t it also going to dampen your desire, like that high you get from working out, or that [thought], “Hey, I wanna be healthier, maybe I should go for a salad.” If you think the only reason to eat better is to lose weight and something else is making you lose weight, that might actually give you inherently less motivation to eat better.

The Art of the Steal

2026-04-14T17:30:16-04:00

President Donald Trump speaks with reporters before departing from the White House in Washington, DC, on February 6, 2026. | Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images

President Donald Trump seemingly cannot let the 2020 election go. Despite winning convincingly in 2024, including, for the first time in his political career, the popular vote, he remains fixated on the idea that he also won four years prior, against former President Joe Biden.

Now, a year into his second term, Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has reportedly dedicated months to finding new “evidence” that 2020 was stolen from him (it was not).

Trump’s continued preoccupation, along with a raid on an Atlanta-area elections office last month, has raised concerns about what Trump could have planned for the 2026 midterms this November. As CNN’s Marshall Cohen told Today, Explained co-host Astead Herndon in a recent episode, Trump’s desire to avoid another defeat could result in a “worst-case scenario”: “He might try to put his thumb on the scales, use government powers, use federal authorities to try to influence the process,” Cohen said.

What has Trump been saying about the midterms?

He made a lot of news just a few days ago when he went farther than he’s ever gone before. Trump told a radio host that:

The Republicans should say, “We want to take over. We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many — 15 places.” The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.

He said 15 states. He didn’t say which ones, but we can guess. He said that he was talking about the states that have the big “fraud problem,” which presumably is a lot of the states that he lost in 2020, many of them run by Democratic governors. He’s [also] been saying that [elections] should be nationalized. That’s really not constitutional or even practically viable, but it shows you where his mind’s at.

How did Democrats respond to Trump’s claims?

Democrats pretty swiftly, by and large, came out and said that this is crazy and unconstitutional. I was at a conference, the National Association of Secretaries of State, in [Washington,] DC. They do it every year, but the vibes were completely different this year because all of the Democratic secretaries are terrified and strategizing for this potential assault by Trump on the integrity of the midterms.

We spoke to a lot of officials. Some of them didn’t want to tell us what possibilities they were planning on preparing for; they said, I don’t want to give [Trump] any ideas. But they’re very afraid about possible troop deployments, which we’ve seen in California and Chicago. They’re also scared about ICE and [other] immigration enforcement agencies possibly being sent at the last minute when it might be too late to stop, but early enough to cause chaos and possibly intimidate or disenfranchise [voters].

The Republicans we talked to by and large are not afraid. They don’t think Trump’s going to do anything terrible. They applaud his efforts to clean up the voter rolls. They are supporting his efforts to require voter ID. They’re supporting his legislative priorities in terms of requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration.

There might be an air of intimidation that could play into 2026. Is there concern about that and do we know if that’s an explicit strategy from the White House?

When you talk to nonpartisan election experts, folks that are former election administrators, that is what they bring up. [Trump] doesn’t actually have to do all this stuff to make an impact. He can just threaten it because it is scary. People might ask themselves, Is it really worth it to go vote for some senator that I think is a bum or some member of Congress that I might not even remember? Like, What have they done for me lately? Am I going to risk getting detained for them, to vote for them? I could imagine that is going through people’s minds.

Are there other ways that you think Trump could influence or interfere with the midterms?

The Justice Department has sued more than a dozen states for access to their voter rolls — private data belonging to American citizens that the states are in charge of. The feds think that they have the power to access it, but so far they’ve been losing. There have been at least two cases — one in California, one in Oregon — where federal judges have rejected those attempts by the DOJ to get that data and the Democratic officials in those states say, we are not giving you this data.

The Republican officials that we’ve talked to in the states have said, We’re doing a very good job already keeping a very clean voter roll. We’ve purged a lot of people. They’re trying to make the case politely to the administration that we love the idea of what you’re doing, but please let us do it.

DOJ is not just in court. They have really ratcheted things up. A few weeks ago, Attorney General Pam Bondi made waves when she sent a letter to officials in Minnesota, basically offering a quid pro quo that the administration would pull back ICE from Minnesota in exchange for the voter rolls from Minnesota, which most election officials that we spoke to and nonpartisan experts say is bananas, like a hostage [threat]. The Minnesota secretary of state called it a “ransom note.”

How legitimate do you think the concern that Donald Trump will steal the midterms is?

Everyone should take this seriously, not because people should be conspiracy theorists, but because we’ve lived through this before.

I wouldn’t have necessarily said this in 2017, in the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency, but we have the benefit of 10 years’ [experience]. Donald Trump claimed the Iowa caucuses were rigged when he lost to Ted Cruz in 2016. He claimed that the popular vote was rigged against him when he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, also in 2016. He tried to overturn the 2020 election, which led to a violent insurrection.

That being said, the nonpartisan experts in election administration say that despite all this noise, despite all the fears, despite what you’ve been told that our system is garbage, it’s actually quite resilient. There are many safeguards. There are hardworking, Democratic and Republican officials and nonpartisan staff that run these elections. There are judges and courts that take this seriously as a firewall when people do try to get involved with some funny business, and that you should rest assured that your vote will be counted and will be counted fairly, despite all the drama.

Just how healthy is Donald Trump, really?

2026-02-06T15:53:57-05:00

A bruise can be seen on the back of President Donald Trump's left hand at the World Economic Forum on January 22, 2026 in Davos, Switzerland. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

President Donald Trump has been on the world stage for more than a decade now, during which he has given his fair share of rambling speeches — although he claims it’s a “brilliant” way of speaking. But is the rambling getting worse?

Since Trump returned to office a year ago, the internet has gone back and forth on whether the 45th and 47th president is healthy. The rambling paired with a mysterious bruise on his hand and swollen ankles has people wondering: Is Trump okay?

New York magazine’s Ben Terris, who recently wrote about Trump’s health, told Today, Explained co-host Astead Herndon that the answer was quite complicated.

What was the catalyst for this piece?

We’ve all been watching him for years now, but especially in the last year, there’s been more questions about him: his health, the bruising on his hands, the swollen cankles, the falling asleep in meetings.

Before sitting down with him, I’d been reading some books by members of his family. I talked to his niece, Mary Trump. Mary Trump says sometimes when she looks at Donald Trump speaking in the public square, she sees flashes of her grandfather when he had Alzheimer’s. I don’t know if he has it or not, but I wanted to ask him about it.

He started saying, “My father was so healthy; he had no problems. His heart couldn’t be stopped.” “He did have one problem though,” Trump told me. And he said, “Late in life, he had, what’s the word for it?” And he pointed to his head. And Caroline Levitt, the press secretary sitting next to me, she kind of rescued him in that moment and said, “Alzheimer’s.” And he said, “Yeah, yeah, he had an Alzheimer’s thing. Well, well, I don’t have it.”

What are the concerns with Trump’s health that you uncovered?

The story I set out to write about was to figure out whether he is healthy or not, and it kind of ended up being a story about whether the government is healthy or not. There’s kind of an infection that has spread throughout Trump’s inner circle where everybody who talks about him talks about him in the craziest, most North Korean-type, dear-leader way.

Instead of just saying he’s healthy for an almost 80-year-old, that he’s slowing down a little bit, but he’s certainly healthy enough to be president, people talk about him in these terms that are just completely outrageous: superhuman, the healthiest man alive. He told me he was healthier than he was 40 years ago.

The guy doesn’t exercise; he doesn’t eat well. He drinks enough Diet Coke to fill a football stadium. And you just can’t quite trust the people around him. And I felt like the story I published said a lot about Trump’s America, not just Trump’s health.

I want to ask about the bruised hand. Did you get any answers on what that is coming from or the level of severity?

When I got to the Oval Office for my interview, we shook hands. He had a really soft, warm hand, which was surprising, but on the back it was very dry. [He had] a big kind of rhino hide — like bruise on the back. I asked him about it, and what he claims is that he’s on an aspirin regimen, on a much higher dose than even his doctors want him to be on. He says he’s on aspirin because he wants thin blood. And because he takes so much aspirin, he bruises very easily.

The doctors confirmed this is what’s going on. He says, because he bruises easily and because he shakes just a ton of hands, he’s always bruising.

I’m curious about some of the logistics and how open they were to this discussion of his health.

I went into the White House early in my process and I was transparent about what I wanted to write about. I said, look, there’s a big question about the president’s health. Lots of people think they have the answer. I want to clarify the picture, and there’s not a lot of people who really know the answer. There’s Donald Trump; there’s his inner circle; there’s his doctors — and they made a lot of people available.

It was not clear I was going to get to talk to Donald Trump, but before I talked to him, they made time for me to go to the White House and sit down with Marco Rubio. He’s got 40 jobs, and he took time out of his busy day to sit with me in Caroline Levitt’s office and talk to me about how the president was, quote, “too healthy.”

He was telling these stories [that were so embarrassing] that he was debasing himself in a way. “When I ride on Air Force One, I need to take a nap, and so I hide in a blanket. I wrap myself like a mummy covering my head and I do that because I know that at some point on the flight, [Trump’s] going to emerge from the cabin and start prowling the hallways to see who is awake. I want him to think it’s a staffer who fell asleep. I don’t want him to see his secretary of state sleeping on a couch and think, Oh, this guy is weak.”

What did his doctors tell you about his health?

When I showed up to the Oval Office, they were holding pieces of paper that said “Talking Points” on the top of it. So they had things they wanted to get through. They told me that he was as healthy as he says he is. One of them said that they did an EKG of his heart, and he appears to be a 64-year-old or a 65-year-old, according to the AI data that they found. At the end of my interview, Caroline Levitt turns to one of the doctors and says, “oh, you worked for the Obamas, didn’t you?” So I asked the doctor, well, who’s healthier? President Obama? Or President Trump? And Trump is sitting right there staring across the desk at the doctors making direct eye contact. And without any hesitation, the doctor says, “Oh, President Trump.”

Did you experience any skittishness when it came to reporting on Trump?

I think the fact that we went through the Biden era has made reporting on this topic easier in a way. It’s still difficult because you can’t get to the bottom of it, but it made people more willing to talk, maybe?

[The Biden era] made journalists more willing to go for these stories [and] for editors to assign them, because we went through this period of time with Biden where he aged in front of all of our eyes and people were too skittish in some ways to write about it.

Does that comparison feel fair?

I think it’s definitely fair to draw some comparisons if for no other reason than they’re both old. Donald Trump is about to be 80 years old. Just by dint of that fact, it’s a worthwhile story to cover.

One reason I think that Trump is able to “get away” with some things that could be signs of aging is that they could also just be signs of Donald Trump being Donald Trump. He has been a chaotic figure for a long time. He’s got this rambling way of talking. He says unhinged, outrageous stuff. He did that 15 years ago. He does that now. Are there differences in the way that he communicates between now and then? Sure, of course. But it’s not as stark as if and when Biden starts to show signs of deteriorating. Because Biden was such a serious guy who kind of spoke in your traditional politician way, as soon as there was slippage, you could notice it a lot easier.

I want to ask about something that does seem similar: The president and their aides basically kept telling you not to believe your own eyes. In this instance, you have Trump dozing off in meetings and aides saying, oh, that was just his thinking pose.

One thing that did not make it into the story — I’ll talk about it with you for the first time. This is a little exclusive.

I did talk to some people from Biden’s White House for this story. They didn’t want to put their name out there, obviously, but one person was telling me that watching this happen did kind of feel similar to them. I have a quote [about Biden’s health issues] in front of me here I can read, which is: “I think there’s a world where we denied it so much that there was a delta between what people were seeing and hearing, and that led to distrust. I think that denial of the thing people are seeing — you just can’t get away with that anymore. I think they’re making the same kind of mistake in backing themselves into the same kind of corner that we were in.”

Part of Trump’s broader success and appeal is that he can get his followers to believe his own version of reality. Do you think this strategy on this issue of his health is actually working for him?

I think it’s like a lot of issues for Trump these days: He’s got a base of support that’s going to believe everything, and then there’s this group between his supporters and his detractors who are going to be less convinced by this.

Donald Trump does seem to be losing his ability to control his story. His poll numbers are not what he wants them to be. The midterms are trending in the wrong direction. The immigration story is not even going the way he wants to go, and that was kind of a top issue for him.

The way that he tries to control the narrative, so to speak, of his health is sort of akin to how he’s trying to control everything, and I just feel like he’s sort of losing some of that control. This happens to presidents; this is why they become lame ducks. It’s just happening a little earlier for Trump than is traditional for a president. He’s been referred to as a lame duck by pundits already, and that doesn’t normally happen until the third year of a presidency.

You may not like what comes after Charlie Kirk

2026-01-30T12:11:23-05:00

Attendees wear Trump hats during Turning Point's annual AmericaFest conference in Phoenix, Arizona on December 21, 2025. This year's conference commemorates the late right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, who was fatally shot on a Utah college campus in September, sparking an outpouring of grief among conservatives and prompting President Donald Trump to threaten a crackdown on the "radical left." (Photo by Olivier Touron / AFP via Getty Images) | AFP via Getty Images

Charlie Kirk started Turning Point USA to reach college-aged kids he believed were being indoctrinated by liberal universities. His efforts were thoroughly embraced by conservative luminaries, all the way up to President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.

But since Kirk was assassinated in September, TPUSA’s popularity has exploded on college campuses with membership increasing by the thousands in some places; and Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, has nominally taken over the organization in her late husband’s stead.

But as New York magazine’s Simon van Zuylen-Wood told Noel King for the latest episode of Today, Explained, there are other right-wing superstars who are jockeying for position in the organization, and many young conservatives are embracing a worldview that is darker and more conspiratorial than Kirk ever was.

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After Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah, in September, the question was: What would happen to Turning Point USA?

The question was not only what is going to happen to TPUSA, his campus and electoral apparatus, but also what was going to happen to youth conservatism?

I went to the [Kirk] memorial [at the NFL stadium in Arizona] and started talking to college kids, and it became evident that the place to go investigate the post-Charlie Kirk moment was the campus.

The answer in mid-September looked really different from the answer in mid-December. If I had written my story three weeks after Charlie Kirk was killed, I would’ve thought that there was a sort of nationwide religious revival taking place.

Charlie Kirk, whatever people thought of his right-wing politics, was playing a role that only became more evident to me after he was gone. He was serving as a sort of stopgap against even more malign forces that were creeping up on the young right.

And without Charlie Kirk there, they started to become much more prominent. They see the murder of Charlie Kirk as evidence of left-wing intolerance, but they also no longer have Kirk as this kind of role model who is actually keeping these darker forces at bay.

You talked to a lot of young people as you were reporting this piece. Who stood out to you?

The main character of my piece is the president of the TPUSA chapter at Ole Miss, Lesley Lachman.

She’s 20 years old. She’s from Westchester County, New York. She represents a kind of micro-trend, which is kids from the Northeast who want to go to college at these big “All-American” schools in the South.

She represents what appeared to be kind of the boom where not only does the campus organization grow, but her social status grows. She’s a queen bee, everybody knows who she is.

What’s the conservative ecosystem on campuses look like now?

There are a bunch of different groups, [with] TPUSA being the sort of top dog right now; but there’s Young Americans for Liberty, Young Americans for Freedom, and there’s the classic College Republicans groups, which are themselves divided into groups.

The radicalization of Gen Z is the through line of my piece, and what happens is that a young woman like Lesley Lachman, she’s got impeccable conservative bonafides, but actually there are many, many students even to her right, who feel like Trump is too moderate, [and that] JD Vance is suspect.

Charlie Kirk was barely acceptable as a “moderate,” but they loved him anyway because of what he stood for.

What does it mean for Trump and for MAGA that Charlie Kirk is gone and now there are lots of kids to the right, even the far right of Charlie Kirk?

It’s extremely troubling that two main figures in my piece that are just dominating the feeds of these students are Candace Owens — who’s a conspiracy theorist [who] has rocketed-up the Spotify podcast charts by spreading really out-there theories about his death — and Nick Fuentes, who’s an outright antisemite.

But as an electoral consequence, it’s actually arguably more troubling to MAGA’s chances. If you are doing pure identitarian, hate-driven politics in the Fuentes vein, you probably instantly just doomed the multiracial coalition that brought Trump to office in November 2024.

One of the things that was striking about your piece was the presence of so many young women.

I think the TPUSA’s appeal to young women is actually not quite about Erika Kirk, although Erika Kirk now being the figurehead is going to accelerate the female-dominated nature of TPUSA.

A lot of these young Republican groups, especially the ones that are sort of interested in Nick Fuentes, are extremely male, to the point where I was hanging out with these kids and they were basically kind of complaining like, “Why can’t we get any girls to come to our meetings?”

There’s also a handful of issues that TPUSA really hones in on that is activating for conservative women in Kirk Country, as I call it.

TPUSA has an influencer called Alex Clark who hosts a podcast and she’s a big Make America Healthy Again influencer. MAHA is extremely popular right now with young conservative women.

There’s also the issue of the two Rileys, Lakin and Riley and Riley Gaines.

Lakin Riley was a nursing student who was killed by a Venezuelan migrant in 2024 near the University of Georgia campus, a Venezuelan who entered illegally during the Biden administration.

And then there’s Riley Gaines, who is a swimmer who was at the University of Kentucky who competed against the trans athlete, Leah Thomas, who swam at University of Pennsylvania.

Trans sports issues and illegal immigration are issues that TPUSA focused on a lot. They feel like liberals have sold women like them out.

And Lesley, who’s TPUSA president at Ole Miss, she was already kind of going to meetings last fall, last spring 2024 when Riley Gaines came and spoke. That’s when she threw herself into TPUSA and then became the president.

If you’re a Kirk acolyte, do you follow the “martyr,” the person who has passed on, or do you follow the person who’s still available, still on YouTube, still on Twitter? Where do you think they’re headed?

Based on everything I saw, they are headed where their feed is headed, and it cannot be overemphasized how dominant Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes are in their feeds.

In a culture that rewards conspiracism, the appetite on the American right, the young American right, for conspiracy is just bottomless. Absent clips of Charlie Kirk on his podcast every day or on the campus, his greatest enemy, Nick Fuentes, is there.

By the end of December, the discourse around Nick Fuentes and his influence was inescapable. And I asked Leslie, well, how does he factor into your life?

And she told me that, when she was sad, when she was feeling lonely, ordinarily she would’ve scrolled over and seen what Charlie Kirk was up to. [But since Kirk’s death,] she couldn’t help herself; she’d sometimes just watch Nick instead.

The return of cocaine

2026-01-02T12:04:44-05:00

A customs officer displays a cocaine bag seized at Brussels Airport in 2025. | Nicolas Tucat/AFP via Getty Images

The Trump administration has been telling Americans that fentanyl is so widespread, it’s a “weapon of mass destruction.“ But according to the Washington Post’s Mexico City bureau chief Samantha Schmidt, fentanyl isn’t the drug the administration should be paying attention to — it’s cocaine.

Globally, supply and demand for the drug are surging, according to Schmidt. And that’s happening amid a changed cocaine landscape, one that’s evolved from the kingpin-run trade of the ’80s. The drug might conjure images of Pablo Escobar and Al Pacino’s Scarface, but today’s reality is less the big bad coke boss and more like a proliferation of smaller outfits trafficking in cocaine.

As Schmidt told Today, Explained cohost Jonquilyn Hill, “It is a much more globalized business than before, and it works in an entirely new way that makes it much more difficult to combat.”

How big is the global cocaine trade right now?

Year after year it is breaking records. The land in Colombia that is used to cultivate cocaine is about more than five times the size than during the Pablo Escobar years. Today it is so much bigger, and we see both demand and supply surging in many parts of the world.

Seizures in Europe [are] growing to levels that now rival the United States as a main destination point. Pablo Escobar was killed in 1993, so up until that point, that was when the United States was really focused on cocaine and trying to tackle the cocaine trade and the cartels moving it.

But that was a very different era. Now it is globalized. We are talking about a proliferation of smaller, much more nimble, very strategic drug trafficking organizations across South America.

What’s driving that growth?

We are seeing demand soaring in countries that previously were not considered main markets. Europe now is a top destination alongside the United States.

Some of it is also supply-side. We are seeing within Colombia just the amount of land with cocaine, and the productivity of that land, is so much higher than before. And when you talk to experts, some of that is explained by the way that they’ve created these cocaine enclaves where they not only have much more productive land, they grow a lot more of the crop (the base plant is called coca). It’s way more productive, and they’ve managed to concentrate these enclaves near the borders and near the coasts so they can quickly move it out.

And before, we had one or two main armed groups that controlled the trade in Colombia. Now because of the peace negotiations in 2016 and the collapse of those peace negotiations and the aftermath of that, it’s also sort of opened up the country to criminal networks from around the world.

We’re talking about how the trade has expanded via cultivation methods and diversified markets and logistics. It feels like we’re talking about any other kind of business.

Absolutely. Much of this is happening on legal container ships. Sometimes you do see these crazy stories about these submarines ending up in Australia, and these go-fast boats in the Caribbean, but a lot of times it’s legal container ships that are leaving through legal ports.

A lot of what has also allowed this explosion in the cocaine trade is corruption. It’s buying off people in the ports, in the police, in the courts. So it’s going to be a lot harder to get rid of this when it has infiltrated every level of the state.

How is law enforcement dealing with this new era of the cocaine trade?

So the answer to that depends on whether you’re talking about last year or this year under the Trump administration.

Last year I think the focus was on trying to dismantle the criminal structures from the top. Fast-forward to this year, and in the current moment we’re in, the Trump administration has taken a vastly different approach. They have had this massive buildup of the military in particular, the Navy in the Caribbean, and in many parts of the waters in Latin America, and have been bombing drug boats at sea that they allege are drug traffickers moving drugs to the United States.

The Trump administration is saying that this is a threat, that these are “narco terrorists” flooding the United States with drugs, and they talk about it in a way that implies that fentanyl is moving on these boats when we know that it is predominantly cocaine.

We don’t really hear the Trump administration talking about cocaine and the specifics of that trade as much as we hear them talk about the fentanyl crisis. So we’re kind of conflating two things here.