Happy Monday, C & L readers! And a huge thanks to John Amato for letting me post my show, Politics and Reality Radio, at his venerable site. I'm Joshua Holland, and I'm a contributor to The Nation. I also write for Salon and Raw Story on occasion, and I used work for AlterNet and Moyers and Company.

The show is pretty simple: Each week, we talk to progressive journalists, bloggers, newsmakers and academics, and we take some time digging into the topics at hand rather than trying to boil complex issues down to a series of short sound-bytes. We also try to have some fun with it, because American politics can be depressing as Hell otherwise. And it's 100% commercial free, so if I'm dead wrong about something, you can be sure it's not because my advertisers are putting the screws to me. The show's been a labor of love for the past five years – it was born as The AlterNet Radio Hour.

This week, we're joined by Clare Malone, senior political reporter for FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver's home for wayward nerds. Malone looked at some of the competing theories for what's behind Trump's rise, and then went and talked to some Trump supporters to see how they matched up.

Then we'll talk to my Nation colleague Ali Gharib about the outpouring of rank Islamophobia from the GOP primaries, and how it signals a party that's going off the rails and losing the message. Ali wrote about that for The Guardian this week.

Finally, we'll speak with Akbar Ahmed, a former Pakistani ambassador in the UK who's now a professor at American University's School of International Service. Ahmed has been studying the differences between American Muslims and Europe's Muslim communities, and his insights go a long way toward explaining the domestic terror problem Europe faces today.

Playlist:
Los Fabulosos Cadillacs: "El Matador"
Kacey Musgraves: "Follow Your Arrow"
Melanie Durrant: "Bang Bang"
Atlas Sound: "Walk a Thin Line"

You can also subscribe to the show on Podbean or iTunes (iTunes lags behind and doesn't post new shows until 24 hours after they've been up at Podbean).

Hope you enjoy it.