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.
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2:07
Reflections on 100 days of the Trump administration
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.
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41:46
Rep. Jamie Raskin on countering "MAGA chaos"
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.
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31:12
How deportations ignited a clash between the White House and the courts
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.
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35:48
The impact of Trump’s about-face on tariffs
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.
Diane Rehm’s weekly podcast features newsmakers, writers, artists and thinkers on the issues she cares about most: what’s going on in Washington, ideas that inform, and the latest on living well as we live longer.
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