What’s Going On in the United States???

02/27/25 • 57 min

New Thinking for a New World - a Tallberg Foundation Podcast

Aziz Huq and Scott Miller discuss the unprecedented pace and impact of Trump’s first five weeks in office

Donald Trump has been president for five weeks now. In light of the blizzard of executive orders, funding and hiring cuts, endless nominations and appointments, and above all the nonstop controversial policy declarations on every imaginable topic (and some of which literally are unimaginable), it seems like months or even years.
It's already clear that President Trump intends to change, not only how Washington and the United States work, but how the whole world works.
No president has ever started with this much activity, for better and for worse. The American custom is to wait to the hundred-day mark to assess the launch of a new presidency. But all this frenetic and even radical activity justifies an earlier stocktaking.
To do that, the Tällberg Foundation recently convened a webinar. Alan Stoga, Tällberg’s chairman, engaged in an extended conversation with Aziz Huq, professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago, and Scott Miller, a leading strategist for businesses, politicians, and governments in the U.S. and globally.
Do you think Donald Trump is good for the United States, your country, or the world? Please tell us what you think here

Aziz Huq and Scott Miller discuss the unprecedented pace and impact of Trump’s first five weeks in office

Previous Episode

The Brave New World Is Here: Are We Ready?

Andreas Schleicher, OECD Education and Skills Director, shares insights from the Survey of Adult Skills, revealing its good, bad, and ugly.

We live in an increasingly complex technology-driven world. How we learn, how we create, how we make and grow things, how we interact with each other is being transformed by new technologies that themselves are rapidly evolving. In a perfect world, this technological transformation would lift all boats, make people smarter, healthier, more prosperous, maybe even wiser and more human.
This, obviously, is not that perfect world—in part because the unpleasant fact is that too many people in too many places lack the skills to cope with even the day-to-day realities of modern life.
That is the stark conclusion of a massive study of adult skills in 31 major countries across Europe, the Americas, and East Asia recently published by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Simply put: adult literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving skills are declining or stagnating almost everywhere. That’s the exact opposite of what our societies need.
No wonder so many people in so many places seem dissatisfied—seem to fear the future, not embrace it—and no wonder democracy seems to be in trouble.
Andreas Schleicher, Director for Education and Skills at the OECD, oversaw the organization's Survey of Adult Skills. In this conversation with host Alan Stoga, he explains the good, the bad, and the ugly of what his team of researchers discovered.
Do you have the skills you need to use technology, or are you being used by it? Please tell us what you think here.

Next Episode

Best New Thinking: Tyranny’s Most Dangerous Foe

2024 Prize winner María Teresa Ronderos advocates for honest, smart journalism to fight misinformation and uphold democracy in the digital age.

Winston Churchill is alleged to have written that "A free press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize; it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny.” Thus, it should be no surprise that at a time when clear majorities of people in most democracies don’t trust their governments or their politicians, they also don’t trust their media or the journalists that produce it. Literally, you can’t have one without the other—and today most of us have too little of both.
María Teresa Ronderos is trying to change that.
She is an accomplished Colombian investigative journalist, co-founder of the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP), and a recently announced winner of the 2024 Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize.
Ronderos believes that the only way to defeat the misinformation and disinformation that corrode our democracies is with honest, deeply sourced, smart journalism. She also believes that if social media is too often the bête noire of both democracy and journalism, information technology properly used is the best antidote. Overall, she believes that good journalism is not only still possible, but is more essential than ever.
Do you agree?

This episode was originally published on December 5, 2024.