Governor Ron DeSantis told reporters Friday that he didn’t support Mills’ bid ahead of the state’s primary elections on Tuesday. Earlier this month, Florida Representatives Anna Paulina Luna and Mike Haridopolos endorsed Ryan Elijah, a former television anchor. While Donald Trump announced his endorsement for Mills in February, the president has remained quiet on the subject ever since.

An August survey found Mills only held a 6-point lead over Elijah, and also revealed that a whopping 41 percent of Republican voters were still “undecided.”

Mills’ embattled bid for reelection may be coming to an end—in what would be a clear sign that President Donald Trump’s grip is loosening on Florida Republicans.

In the past year, the scrutiny has intensified on the numerous allegations against Mills. The Florida lawmaker has been accused of sexual misconduct, harassment, campaign finance violations, financial disclosure violations, accepting inappropriate gifts, and multiple ethics violations. He has faced a months-long ethics probe and is reportedly under investigation by the Department of Justice.

And then there’s his dating history. Asked by Mother Jones about reports that he had dated a 19-year-old while he was a sitting member of Congress, Mills had this to say:

“There’s nothing illegal about two consenting adults dating. The obsession over a man’s dating life is disturbing at best. I’ve been separated from my now ex-wife years prior to our divorce finalizing. Whether in office or as a private citizen, adults are entitled to date in their attempt to find their person. Sometimes you get lucky and find that immediately, but many are not so blessed. Feel free to run your new and slanderous hit piece.”

Still, Mills has resisted calls to resign. On Tuesday, Florida Republicans will make the decision to leave for him.

Trump had no problem ranting about his supposedly great relationship with Kim Jong Un during his photo-op with a teenage lifeguard—but had a major meltdown when CNN’s Kaitlin Holmes asked whether the North Korean leader had requested he scale back joint military exercises with South Korea.

“Quiet, quiet, quiet! You’re very disrespectful in front of this young man. Okay? Don’t you find her disrespectful? Heh. He understands. Quiet!” Trump said.

Trump scolds a reporter: Quiet! You’re very disrespectful in front of this young man. Don’t you find her disrespectful? He understands. Quiet! You’re fake news. BE QUIET! You’re a fake reporter. pic.twitter.com/AevIZXEaGp

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 17, 2026

His tantrum only got worse when the reporter revealed she was with CNN.

“Fake news. You’re fake news. You’re a loud—you’re a loud, boisterous person. You’re fake news. Be quiet. Be quiet. Be quiet!” Trump said. “You’re a fake reporter, and you report fake news.”

Trump’s shameful outburst is just the latest in a well-documented history of lashing out at female reporters. The president has called female reporters “the worst” and “second-rate,” telling them to “be quiet,” that they “know nothing about nothing,” and that he doesn’t like their “attitude.” His vitriol has only intensified during his second term. In November, he told Bloomberg reporter Catherine Lucey “Quiet, Piggy!” Last month, he targeted CNN’s Kaitlan Collins with transphobic jokes.

Separately Monday, the White House attacked Holmes for another question about criticism of the president’s cozy relationship with his aide Natalie Harp, calling the question “disgusting and inhumane” in a post on X. Clearly, it struck a nerve.

“Mr. President, is there enough food on the USS Lincoln?” a reporter asked Trump right after he finished berating a CNN reporter who asked him about North Korea.

“Yeah, it is. That was a CNN fake report. The Lincoln has been out there for a period of time … but over the years we’ve had ‘em out there much longer,” Trump said. “I was at a group meeting, and an admiral came up to see me over the weekend.... He said ‘I’ve been on ships that are out there much longer than that sir, and I know people on the Lincoln, they say it’s beautifully maintained’.… It was fake news reporting from CNN.”

Reporter: Is there enough food on the USS Lincoln?

Trump: Yeah, there is. It was a it was a CNN fake report. pic.twitter.com/l7JaCA8wKW

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 17, 2026

It wasn’t just CNN. Multiple outlets have reported extremely low morale aboard the Lincoln caused by a low supply of dismal-looking food, provisions, and contaminated water—which, combined with the nine months on the water, has caused some of the sailors on the Lincoln to literally jump ship. Family members of sailors and Marines aboard the Lincoln have detailed concerns about their mental health to various publications, including the Military Times, USA Today, and MS NOW.

The Republican response to these reports has been either flat-out denial with no evidence—like Trump—or attacking and emasculating the sailors.

“How weak are you?” Fox News contributor Joey Jones ranted on Sunday. “To sit there and say it was terrible because you had a corndog and a hotdog?… If this is a representation of who our military is now … we’re just Rome sitting here waiting to burn.”

Over half of America opposes the war on Iran. It seems like some of the people fighting it are coming around too.

Attorney General Todd Blanche announced a new regulation Monday that allows convicted felons to apply to restore their access to guns. The Justice Department estimates that 330,000 people will attempt to take advantage of the new rule when applications open next month.

Federal law prohibits anyone from possessing a gun who commits a crime punishable by more than one year, as well as undocumented immigrants, dishonorably discharged military veterans, and people convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors. Overall, about 30 million Americans can’t legally own firearms due to criminal convictions.

“The Second Amendment is not a second-class right, and the federal government should not permanently deprive Americans of a constitutional right without regard to whether they pose a danger to public safety,” Blanche said.

Previously, only those who were pardoned for their crimes regained gun rights. Last year, pardon attorney Liz Oyer was fired from the DOJ after refusing to restore the gun rights of actor Mel Gibson, who was convicted of domestic violence in 2011. Under the new plan, registered sex offenders, violent criminals, and undocumented immigrants will still be barred from owning guns, the DOJ said.

In his second term, Trump has expanded the rights of gun owners and manufacturers, signing executive orders stretching the Second Amendment as far as he can (except for trans people) and reviving attacks on Democrats for “coming for your guns.” This new move from the president will curry favor from gun enthusiasts and organizations like the National Rifle Association, which have long fought regulations that would reduce gun violence and mass shootings. In this case, Trump only cares about making his right-wing base happy.

But over the weekend, the DNC made three decisions that showed how the party committee can be a force for progress and innovation in a party desperate for both. Thank goodness. All is not lost at party headquarters.

The official party, which is made up of 450 members from across the country, adopted a wide array of resolutions over the weekend. One was to formally approve the calendar for the upcoming Democratic presidential nomination. South Carolina’s primary will be held first on January 22, 2028 (a Saturday), then Nevada on Tuesday, February 1, New Hampshire on February 8, New Mexico on February 15, Michigan the following Tuesday, and finally Virginia on the Tuesday after that, February 29. (New Hampshire is very protective of its first-in-the-nation status and might try to be first again.) That’s a great mix. States in every region of the country. Some with large Black populations, others with large Latino populations, some very urban; some quite rural (New Hampshire). Lots of different industries and kinds of workers are in those states.

Some progressives are complaining that starting off in South Carolina gives an unfair advantage to center-left candidates, since establishment Democrats such as Representative James Clyburn have a lot of sway there. Those in the party (left and center-left) who don’t want Kamala Harris to again be the party’s nominee worry heavily Black South Carolina leading the process tips the scales too far in favor of the former vice-president. I think they’re wrong—or at least overstating their case. Close to half of the voters in South Carolina’s primary will be white, and many of the African Americans there are young, progressive, or both. I don’t think Harris (or another center-left Black candidate such as Maryland Governor Wes Moore) is automatically guaranteed to carry South Carolina, which was mostly recently won by Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.

Even if Harris wins South Carolina, that momentum doesn’t ensure her victories in the next several states. South Carolina, Nevada, New Hampshire, and New Mexico are so different that it’s hard to imagine that a single candidate wins all four. If someone does, then that person is a really strong candidate. This combination of states requires a candidate to have a fairly broad support within the party to win lots of states consecutively. That’s how it should be.

This calendar officially ends the days when the party that is supposed to represent America’s diversity had its two most important contests, the ones where most campaign stops were held and the field winnowed, in two of the least-diverse states in the country (Iowa and New Hampshire).

Second, the full DNC rejected a proposal from the party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee that would have banned ranked-choice voting in the presidential primaries. Ranked-choice voting is the system by which people list their preferred candidates in order and the choices of the lowest-ranked candidates are discarded until one person has a majority. It’s what New York City Democrats used in their most recent mayoral primary. Several states vote this way too.

Ranked-choice is a particularly useful system for races with more than two candidates, allowing voters to both choose their favorite and then rank one of the leading candidates if their favorite isn’t among the top. A presidential primary will likely have several candidates, and sometimes hopefuls drop out after people have already voted.

According to DNC rules, a candidate doesn’t win delegates unless they win at least 15 percent of the vote in a state. So currently, if you back someone who finishes at 14 percent or below, that vote is essentially wasted. With ranked-choice, that 14 percent will be redistributed to higher-polling candidates. That won’t make much difference in the total delegate math. But it means that more voters will have gotten to select one of the top candidates.

Third, the DNC adopted a resolution calling for Democratic members of Congress “to craft legislation abolishing ICE.” Conservatives have seized on this resolution, arguing that it shows the Democrats are too liberal. But it’s important to distinguish between abolishing police and abolishing ICE, both stands adopted by some on the left. In terms of electoral politics, while abolishing police polls terribly, close to a majority of Americans favor getting rid of ICE. So this isn’t a huge political risk.

And in terms of policy, getting rid of ICE is a much more realistic goal than cutting back on police. Advocates calling for the abolition of both ICE and local police departments correctly argue that both kinds of law enforcement often ignore civilian authority, brutalize people, and discriminate against people of color. The differences are that police departments also provide a vital service of fighting local crime and report to a diffuse array of mayors and city council members across the country. In contrast, ICE has been turned into essentially a standing army for Trump, preying on liberal cities and activists. And since we have local police departments, the FBI, and numerous other agencies to enforce laws across the country, the United States does not actually need a special apparatus for interior immigration enforcement. I am not suggesting getting rid of all immigration law or personnel. The Customs and Border Patrol, for example, is still useful. But America was fine before ICE was created in 2003 and the heinous actions of the agency during both of Trump’s terms suggest we need to rethink our immigration infrastructure now.

DNC policy resolutions have no practical effect. Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer aren’t likely to demand that all the party’s candidates pledge to abolish ICE—and might even distance themselves from this idea. That’s fine. The party’s voters overwhelmingly support getting rid of ICE. So it’s great that the DNC is representing their perspective and pushing congressional Democrats in that direction.

None of these positive moves have much to do with Martin himself or the party’s lackluster fundraising under his leadership. The party should still take stock of whether Martin is the right leader ahead of a critical presidential election. His messy handling of the autopsy convinces me that Martin should be replaced.

But the DNC is bigger than Martin—and at least this weekend, better.

The British network asked a U.S. federal judge for help in getting documents and testimony from Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and her husband Jared Kushner, the Associated Press reports, citing court documents. Serving the subpoenas has posed a challenge due to all three having Secret Service agents and other security protection, the documents stated. 

Trump filed the $10 billion lawsuit in December, claiming the British network defamed him in a 2024 documentary by editing his speech on January 6, 2021 before the Capitol insurrection. He accused the BBC of “splicing together two entirely separate parts” of his speech to “intentionally misrepresent the meaning” of what he said.

But the lawsuit has had unintended consequences for the president. The network demanded Trump turn over financial documents to demonstrate financial harm from the documentary, to which a judge agreed. The judge also approved subpoenas of his family members and close advisers, including Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon. The BBC has additionally asked for more records related to former special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into January 6. 

Trump balked at handing over any financial documents, filing an emergency motion to pause the judge’s order that was later granted. Now though, the BBC wants to know what information the Trump children have, as they were reportedly present while the president was revising his speech that he would deliver after his supporters had stormed the Capitol. Trump’s lawyers say that “the BBC is simply trying to distract away from their own obvious liability.”

“The BBC intentionally defamed President Donald J. Trump, and now the BBC is seeking to harass him, his family, and supporters by abusing the deposition process,” Trump’s legal team said in a statement. 

Trump probably thought he could scare the BBC into a settlement payday and some favorable coverage. Now, he’s having to fight attempts to discover his internal finances and what his family knows about January 6, 2021.  

Ossoff questioned the president’s relationship with Harp, 34, at an Atlanta rally on Sunday.

“He golfs and trades stocks,” he said. “See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”

Ossoff says that Trump doesn’t want to do his job but wants to “travel with Natalie” pic.twitter.com/aDLMKFeMmR

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 16, 2026

The crowd broke into applause—and the White House took the bait.

Trump himself lashed out after being asked about Ossoff’s comments Monday afternoon.

“You mean Pee-Wee Herman? Pee-Wee Herman lookalike?” Trump replied, pulling out his recent nickname for Ossoff. “I would much rather do other things.”

“Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics,” Steven Cheung, the ever-cantankerous White House communications director, posted on X. “Instead of denigrating hard working people serving their country, Jon should look deep into his soul and ask himself why he’s a miserable person who hates this country. It’s because he’s a radical, extremist Dumocrat.”

“Jon Ossoff is a cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid cosplaying as Barack Obama. Nobody gives a shit what this lightweight loser says,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said on X, launching a homophobic insult at Ossoff.

Trump and Harp’s working relationship has long been the subject of scrutiny, and Ossoff calling her out by name will only intensify it.

Harp was one of the few administration members who snuck away with Trump on a secret flight out of Turkey last month, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio, other Cabinet members, and journalists remained aboard the Air Force One gifted by Qatar—amid concerns it would be the target of a potential Iranian strike.

Harp’s own brother told The Daily Mail that Harp and Trump’s relationship was “very unhealthy,” and in their book Regime Change, The New York Times writers Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported that Harp in 2023 left Trump what amounted to love letters, with one even reading, “You are all that matters to me.”

“Ossoff winking at the rumor that Natalie Harp is more than just Trump’s staffer,” liberal podcaster Tommy Vietor wrote on X. “The question now is whether this will kick up a round of actual reporting by news outlets.”

This story has been updated.

The outrage was on its face ridiculous. Not only would the foot washing stations have been perfectly legal and accessible to all travelers, but there are already two foot-washing stations in DFW Airport. The manufactured controversy was part of a growing wave of dangerous anti-Muslim sentiment being pushed by conservative leaders in Texas, according to a sweeping report The New York Times published Monday.

Dallas-Fort Worth has become a popular destination for Muslim families looking to make their home and find community in the United States. Over the last decade, the population of immigrants from Muslim majority countries grew by an estimated 80,000 people in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area.

Still, Texas’s Muslim population is estimated to be between 300,000 and 500,000 people, accounting for roughly 2 percent of the state’s entire population—and yet for many conservative voters in Texas, Islam has replaced the U.S. border as a major concern.

In Dallas-Fort Worth, this anti-Muslim vitriol hit a new wave in early 2025, after officials announced the construction of the East Plano Islamic Center, or EPIC City, a large housing development and mosque outside of Dallas. Governor Greg Abbott has launched an investigation into the project. In the past year, things have only gotten worse.

In November, Abbott designated the Council of American-Islamic Relations as a “terrorist” organization, just months after the group documented a surge of Islamophobic rhetoric nationally. In May, Abbott ordered the cancellation of a private “Muslims only” party at a water park to celebrate Eid al-Adha, inviting a wave of backlash against the organizers. In June, the Texas State Board of Education voted to make the Bible a permanent part of the K-12 education curriculum.

That same month, at a Texas State Republican Convention, every speaker expressed some form of Islamophobic sentiment. Multiple panels warned of a so-called “invasion.” In a post on social media, Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, warned, “I know I won’t rest until every Muslim is gone.”

Looking forward, Texas Republicans are looking for ways to use state laws to ban or regulate Islamic cultural practices governed by religious rules as soon as next year. Representative Alan Schoolcraft, a Republican candidate from San Antonio, told the Times that Islam is “much more than a religion” and urged Muslims to “try to become a citizen where you’re living. Otherwise there’s going to be conflict.”

But for many Muslims, “assimilating” comes with its own risks. Dr. Farhat Shaikh, a resident of Frisco, north of Dallas, told the Times that assimilating meant being “part of the decision making,” but noted that being actively involved in institutions can get labeled as a “take over.”

Kushner met with Netanyahu along with Board of Peace Director Nickolay Mladenov Monday to discuss implementing the 15-point plan, CNN reports. The president’s son-in-law, who doesn’t hold an official position with the Trump administration, asked that Netanyahu “not create obstacles,” an unnamed Israeli source told the network.

Netanyahu refused to commit to anything, telling Kushner and Mladenov that Hamas had to disarm before Israel begins withdrawing any troops from Gaza. The meeting with Netanyahu came one day Kushner met with Hamas representatives in Egypt on Sunday. Hamas said it agrees to Trump’s peace framework, but will only begin disarmament if Israel follows through on a sequenced withdrawal from Gaza at the same time.

Israel has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians in Gaza in the last three years, including at least 1,260 since a ceasefire was declared last October. But Netanyahu publicly rejected the proposed peace plan earlier this month, calling it “problematic” because of impending Israeli elections in October. The accused war criminal has tied his political fortunes to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, using the war as an excuse to evade corruption charges and rally Israeli voters. Any concessions could undermine his chances of staying in power.

“Low-optics” is the key term there. The new gloves won’t stoke public outrage like traditional weapons and they don’t leave any marks—making them the perfect tool for dodging lawsuits for excessive force.

Speaking in a promotional video for Compliant Technologies published in 2024, Adam Glueck, then-assistant chief of the Cape Girardeau Police Department in southeastern Missouri, explained why his officers had grown so “attached” to the devices.

“In today’s society, you know, everybody’s filming everything, everybody has a cell phone,” Glueck said, adding that the glove “looks better on camera, and it looks better to those witnesses. With a glove, there are no burn marks or scars.”

Bob Couey of the Floyd County Sheriff’s Department recommended the glove for “anybody that’s looking for a utility they can use that is conducive to not leading to lawsuits.”

Video footage of the gloves in action show just how powerful they can be, causing grown men to crumple to the ground in a matter of seconds.

The gloves are considered less lethal—but federal agents will likely feel more empowered to use them against a wider range of people. The manufacturer warns against using their device on elderly people, pregnant women, children, and people with severe disabilities—individuals who have not been spared from the Trump administration’s sweeping crackdown on immigrants.

The Washington Post reported over the weekend that the Navy is conducting an internal review on the viability of moving command towers from the starboard side of the aircraft carriers to the middle, in an attempt to mimic the older warships from World War II that Trump likes. The decision was spurred directly by Trump’s aesthetic preferences, with a Navy official telling The Hill that the president requested the Navy “implement design changes to our future aircraft carriers.” The review is due in “several weeks,” another former official said.

Trump has also ordered the Navy to switch from electromagnetic catapult systems to steam-powered ones, another aesthetic decision that would force the military to spend time and taxpayer funds on making its ships look more antiquated, all so that they can keep sitting around in the Persian Gulf while the Strait of Hormuz remains closed.

“The placement of the island on the Ford class was chosen to support the ship’s design purpose of maximizing aircraft sortie generation—which for an aircraft carrier, directly translates to combat power. A good-faith exploration of future carrier design based on real-world operational requirements is one thing,” Naval maritime strategist Hunter Stires told The Hill. “Expending millions of taxpayer dollars and the time and energy of the Navy’s engineering organizations redesigning the nation’s premier capital ship to indulge the president’s aesthetic whims is not only wasteful and abusive, it exemplifies President Trump’s evident contempt for America’s fighting sailors.”

This news comes as Trump’s upcoming class of 10 new aircraft carriers is estimated to cost $275 billion over the next 30 years.

Jennings, a CNN contributor, went viral last week after posting a heavily edited, intentionally misleading video of what looked like Piker expressing extreme hostility towards Black voters and calling for lynchings. With the full context, it is obvious that Piker was being sarcastic. 

“Black voters have been voting against the socialists, only to be ruled in many cases by privileged white commies,” Jennings claimed, using Black identity as a bludgeon against the Democratic left. “Did you ever notice, by the way, how violent these people are? … Now [Abdul] El-Sayed’s best friend is out there calling for Black voters to be lynched. Beneath all the smiles and dancing videos, there’s nothing but hate and violence in the heart of these Communists.”

Abdul El-Sayed’s best pal and campaign partner says the USA should resume lynchings against black people.

Listen for yourself and understand what the socialists have in store for the black community pic.twitter.com/N3ntbIHefw

— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) August 12, 2026

As Snopes reported, Jennings lied when he claimed that Piker wanted to bringing back lynchings, as “Piker’s remarks on lynchings were sarcastic reactions to a user’s chat comment and opinions expressed by someone else in a separate video.”

Jennings’s video was widely panned, with many calling for Piker to sue. The streamer called Jennings’s video “the worst instance of defamation” he’d seen. On Sunday, Piker confirmed that his team is preparing a defamation lawsuit, saying it seemed “unavoidable,” and that it might include Fox News.

“This kind of defamation is completely unacceptable,” Piker told Status. “It’s exactly how normal people perceive mainstream media to operate, and it’s a real crisis of credibility. I think someone has to push back against it at some point.”

“In Trump 2.0, we now traffic in lies all the time. Just because the Republicans are trafficking in lies with regular frequency doesn’t mean that you can’t uphold some kind of editorial standard,” he continued. “CNN can put whoever they want to on a panel at the end of the day, but it just signals to me, and I think a lot of other people, that some of their panelists are just going to be liars.”

Piker has been a boogeyman for right-wingers like Jennings and centrist liberals for some time, as they choose to focus their slander on him rather than constructing any kind of tangible, positive political message. And Jennings is perhaps the last person anyone should be listening to in regards to Black politics in America.  

The president took to Truth Social Sunday to blame vandals for a large area of dead grass on the National Mall—that happened to be on the same spot where he built a massive stage for his Fourth of July celebrations.

“Look what VANDALS did to the grass connecting the vandalized World War II Monument and the vandalized Reflecting Pool, which will be opened again, and better than ever, shortly,” Trump wrote. “Anybody who thinks the Reflecting Pool wasn’t vandalized should go back to Law School!”

Last week, Trump sounded the alarm again after the World War II Memorial was covered in red and green graffiti and soapy bubbles. U.S. Attorney Jeannine Pirro said felony charges are being brought against Melissa L. Farris, but the charging documents made no mention of the patch of dead grass on the lawn.

Regardless of Trump’s apparent outrage, the president has demonstrated that he couldn’t care less about protecting national landmarks—he’s the one destroying them.

The president who cried vandalism has been behind a lot of the destruction at the National Mall. The Department of Justice concluded that Trump and his hand-picked contractors were responsible for the damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool that left the monument drained and surrounded by chain-link fences. Trump’s federal contractors were also also responsible for cracking the fountain at the German-American Friendship Garden. Not to mention that across the country Trump is actively bulldozing Big Bend National Park in order to build his border wall.

Fox News’s Trey Yingst reported on the network Monday that Trump claimed there is a backchannel with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard officials, but that he is in “no hurry” and, “if Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them.”

It’s not a reassuring statement, especially considering that Iranian Army chief Amir Hatami on Sunday announced bounties for the death or capture of U.S. troops. The sums start at $30,000 and double if a woman completes the mission. Hatami said the plan came after a “large number of requests” to support the war.

“Anyone who kills or captures and hands over invading American military personnel will receive a reward equivalent to $30,000,” Hatami said. “Courageous Iranian women who carry out such an action will receive double the reward.”

Any weapon captured in such an operation would be bought by the Iranian Army for twice its market value and displayed in a museum, according to Iranian state media.

Trump has alternatively threatened to escalate the bombing campaign against Iran while claiming that a peace deal is imminent. Usually, at the last minute, Trump claims he has pulled back from bombing for one reason or another, such as U.S. allies in the region warning against escalation or U.S. military leaders warning of declining missile stockpiles.

On Friday, Trump said that he planned to declare the Strait of Hormuz as U.S. territory, even as Iran continues to throttle maritime traffic through the critical waterway. The area is split between Omani and Iranian territory, and oil and gas from Persian Gulf countries are exported to the world from there. As this war stretches on without Trump sticking to a deal, the global economy continues to suffer, with civilians in Iran and around the Middle East praying that they don’t fall victim to a bomb or airstrike.

Trump sought to overturn a 2023 jury verdict awarding $5 million to Carroll for defamation and alleged sexual abuse. The Supreme Court rejected an earlier appeal from Trump in June, and Trump wanted them to take the rare step of rehearing the case, which the court unceremoniously denied Monday.

Carroll accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a New York City department store in 1996, which Trump denied, attacking her on social media and accusing her of “a complete con job” and a “Hoax and a lie.” She sued him in 2022, and a jury ruled against him, leading to a series of appeals by Trump.

The president eventually paid the cash to Carroll through a fund set up during the appeals process, which grew to $5.8 million after interest. He continues to insist that he didn’t know Carroll and accuses her of making up the story for political and financial reasons, even as he lost another defamation lawsuit to Carroll for $88.3 million, which he also appealing.

Trump is likely to throw a tantrum over the ruling, just as he did when the Supreme Court turned him down in June. He hates having to pay money that he owes, despite the fact that he’s financially better than ever thanks to using the presidency to enrich himself. This time, though, Trump is out of excuses to evade paying Carroll.

This story has been updated.

“Based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea, I am not happy with the fact that the United States has, long ago, agreed to participate in Joint Military Exercises with South Korea. These exercises are not only costly, with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America (as usual!), but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful,” he wrote Sunday evening on Truth Social.

“I have instructed Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to substantially reduce the Joint Military Exercises!” he continued, attributing his decision to South Korea’s position on the Iran war.

“While somewhat unrelated (?), I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, ‘No thanks!’”

It’s unclear how the U.S. plans to reduce the exercises. The annual Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise already proceeded as planned on Monday, the South Korean Defense Ministry confirmed—with 18,000 South Korean forces and 28,500 American ones.

Nonetheless, Trump is spiting South Korea, a longtime ally, for not helping bail him out in Iran while also making a clear overture to the one country it has the most hostile and adversarial relationship with.

“Trump’s description of the D.P.R.K. as ‘unthreatening and respectful’ is alarming to allies, who have watched the regime steadily improve its missile and nuclear capabilities, while also gaining an additional patron in Russia for its support in the war on Ukraine,” Asia Society Policy Institute Deputy Director Emma Chanlett-Avery told The New York Times.

This is just the latest example of the deteriorating U.S.-South Korea relationship under Trump. South Korea has been hit by U.S. tariffs, had hundreds of its citizens (with valid work visas) detained in an immigration raid, and now has lost access to joint military exercizes—all while Trump praises Kim Jong Un and North Korea continues to expand its military capabilities.

“For 70 years, America has held these joint exercises to train AND reassure its Asia-Pacific allies. Furthermore, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is NOT respectful of the USA, now or ever. In the past few months, he has blatantly said NoKo is and always will be a nuclear power, specifically to ward off any hostile action, like America and Israel’s war on Iran,” CNN’s Christiane Amanpour mused Monday on X.

“He already has dozens of nukes, and in June, called for an ‘exponential’ expansion of Pyongyang’s arsenal. They’d already ramped up dramatically since Trump’s failed Hanoi summit with Kim in 2019, which I covered,” she continued. “Since then, Kim has ramped up missile testing, while his soldiers now have real battlefield experience since fighting for Russia against Ukraine. Respectful?”

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Donald Trump just had two very strange outbursts that won’t make Republicans happy. In one, he angrily ridiculed the idea that anyone would be upset about higher costs created by his war. In the other, he brushed off the concerns of military families about the length of overseas deployments. All this comes as Trump is pushing through dramatic new changes to aircraft carriers that are roundly rejected by military experts.

And that prompted a scalding takedown from a Democratic senator who actually knows something about these topics. It occurs to us that all this captures something essential about the fix we’re in. Trump has been faking it all his life, and it’s finally catching up with us. We’re going to work through it all with MS Now’s Steve Benen, who caught a really interesting pattern buried in all this lunacy. Steve, good to have you back on.

Steve Benen: Thanks, Greg. It’s great to be here.

Sargent: So let’s start with what Trump said at a rally just now. Listen to this.

Donald Trump (voiceover): For you to pay a tiny little bit more for your gasoline, just remember, you’re doing it so that a very evil country cannot have a—it’s really the number one state sponsor of terror in the world. We don’t want to have them have a nuclear weapon. So remember that when you have to pay a little bit more. You’re at four dollars. It’s OK. I mean, it’s—I’m not, I’m not—I’ll never apologize. I did the right thing.

Sargent: Steve, that is really something. Note the pure seething contempt for anyone who’s concerned by the added costs created by his war, his unnecessary war. He’s unable to grasp these voter concerns through any frame other than how it reflects on him. I think this is a big deal, big news. What do you think?

Benen: Yeah, I think you’re right. I mean, here we are, twelve weeks out from the midterms. Polls showed that affordability and the cost of living are the number one issue on the minds of the vast majority of voters. And so one would like to think that the head of the Republican Party, the sitting American president, would have the wherewithal to express some empathy and to say, maybe I can try and help you. Maybe I care about the pain that you’re dealing with right now, and I’m going to maybe promise you new policies or a better tomorrow in some way.

But no, he doesn’t do any of those things. Donald Trump instead stands in front of a crowd full of supporters, mocks the very idea that they’re suffering in any way, and denies any responsibility for the fact that he’s to blame for these circumstances that people are suffering through.

And so, you said you think it’s a big deal. I agree with you. I think this is the sort of thing that can resonate with most voters, who see this and will be disgusted by it. And so I would not be the least bit surprised if this is one of those quotes that just lingers in the public mind for the next several weeks.

Sargent: Yes. And this is something that Democrats really have to grab onto. I don’t want to hear anything from any Democratic strategists about how Trump’s negatives are baked in or whatever. Grab this and use it. That’s what I think they should do.

Benen: Well, wait a minute. It’s a gift handed to Democrats on a platter. I mean, here we are, looking at a set of circumstances in which Democrats are saying that they want to focus almost exclusively on kitchen-table issues. They want to avoid social issues altogether, nothing about the culture war. They want to talk about the economy. Well, great.

The head of the Republican Party just said he doesn’t care about higher gas prices. He laughs off affordability as a scam. He doesn’t accept responsibility for the fact that he’s ultimately to blame for the fact that people are suffering through these higher costs, higher cost of living, higher prices. And so, I think you’re quite right. For Democrats who are looking for a strategy for the final 12 weeks, for this home stretch between now and November—well, here it is. Donald Trump just handed it to you.

Sargent: He absolutely did. This is the sort of thing that could really seep into the coverage. So let’s now go to this other Trump outburst. Reporting had indicated that on the USS Lincoln aircraft carrier, living conditions were poor, in part because it had been out at sea for far too long in the Mideast.

Now, the audio of this exchange is not great, but listen carefully and you can hear that a reporter asks Trump to respond to families’ concerns about these long deployments. Trump just brushes it off. Listen.

Reporter (voiceover): Family members of U.S. servicemembers are concerned with the conditions aboard the USS Lincoln…

Donald Trump (voiceover): Well, no, that ship is moving. No, they’re not. That ship is moving right now, or very shortly, and it’s being replaced with another very similar ship.

Reporter (voiceover): Have the deployments gone on too long?

Donald Trump (voiceover): No, not nearly long enough.

Sargent: So there Trump says that the families just aren’t concerned about all this, because he says so. And then he says, you know, the deployment hasn’t gone on long enough, by which I think he means, we’re going to continue this until we win. But again, the seething contempt is the story here.

Steve, I recognize that Trump has rewritten the rules of our politics, but this plus the other thing together paint a picture of a president who feels zero obligation of any kind to take ordinary people’s concerns seriously.

Benen: I think that in both instances he had an opportunity to show empathy, but he’s simply incapable of doing so. It’s just not in his nature. It’s not part of his MO. He can’t bring himself to recognize that this was an opportunity to show some sympathy, to show some empathy, to show that he cares, that he understands the suffering of people who deserve sympathy—and yet he can’t bring himself to do it.

Now, in the case of high gas prices, it’s a much larger group of people, but at the same time, it’s just as important, if not more so, to sympathize with the sailors and marines on the USS Lincoln and the loved ones back home, who are concerned about the fact that they’ve had this modern-day record for the longest possible deployment, and now they’re running out of soap and food.

What is the president’s response to this? It’s to express indifference, to just shrug it off.

Sargent: Trump instantly converts everything into a question of whether he is getting the esteem and the adulation that he knows is due to him.

Benen: If he were to acknowledge the fact that these families exist, that these loved ones who are worried about the sailors and the marines on the USS Lincoln—if he were to acknowledge the fact that their concerns exist, it would reflect poorly on him. It would reflect poorly on his administration, on his poor judgment, on Pete Hegseth’s judgment, for an illegal war that he doesn’t know how to end.

And so if he were to acknowledge their existence, it would reflect poorly on him. And so therefore he has no choice, in his twisted mind and his twisted perspective and worldview, but to say, well, then therefore they don’t exist, because they can’t, in his mind. And it’s just so offensive on its face. A normal human being, much less a normal American president, knows not to behave this way. And yet here we are, seeing him once again demonstrate the fact that his entire worldview is broken.

Sargent: Yes, and it’s in this context that Trump is directing the Navy to completely uproot a system it uses for launching jets from aircraft carriers and replace it with steam catapults. Now, I don’t claim any expertise in this area, OK?

Benen: Neither do I.

Sargent: But a lot of experts are saying it’s a terrible idea that will needlessly cost billions of dollars. And the Navy has been battling the idea for years, because it’s been a longtime obsession of Trump’s. Steve, can you sort of sum up what this is all about?

Benen: Well, sure. About a decade ago, apparently, according to Donald Trump, he spoke to some sailor who said that the current system of launching jet fighters off of aircraft carriers was too complicated. And so apparently, as part of this conversation, this sailor—who may or may not exist, whose name we do not know—said that he preferred the steam catapults.

And ever since then, Donald Trump has said, for whatever reason, that he disagrees with the Navy, disagrees with the experts, disagrees with all the engineers and everyone who could possibly lend him good advice. He disagrees with all of them and says, no, no, we need steam catapults, not electromagnetic catapults.

And so, early on in his first term, he apparently directed the Navy to start pursuing this change. And they blew him off because—and this is the important part—they know what they’re talking about. Unlike the president, who doesn’t, they knew what they were talking about, and so they ignored him.

And yet here we are, second term, and we have an official document posted to the White House website that shows that Donald Trump has actually gone to the Pentagon and said, I am directing you to move forward with plans to swap out the existing system and replace it with steam-based catapults—because, according to the president, this is the smart thing to do, despite the fact that the Navy has told him that it is not.

Sargent: Yes. And so you caught this interesting, broader pattern in which Trump just declares himself to be one of the world’s foremost experts, or even the world’s leading expert, in all sorts of different areas, in whatever comes up at any time. You looked back and found that he said this on construction, on tariffs, on firearms, on health care, on drone technology, even on grass. That one, I didn’t know what to make of. Trump is an expert on grass. What kind of grass? I might be leaving a few out.

Tell us what you found when you looked at this pattern.

Benen: Well, you know, last week, in an offhand comment, Donald Trump said, quote, “I know more about grass than any human being, I think, anywhere in the world,” end quote. Now, if you’re laughing, as you should, because it’s hilarious—I laughed at it too. But in context, this is something that he does all the time. No matter what the subject is, he is the world-renowned authoritative source on every subject.

He not just claims to have familiarity with the subject, or a basic competence—he claims to have limitless expertise, without rival anywhere on the planet, on all of the subjects. Now, on the one hand, of course, we can laugh about that, because it’s absurd. But on the other hand, that arrogance, that misplaced arrogance, leads him to believe that he’s capable of making decisions about things he knows nothing about, because in his mind he is the foremost expert on these subjects.

And so when it comes to things like how best to launch jet planes off of an aircraft carrier, he doesn’t turn to people who know what they’re talking about. He instead says, well, I am the foremost expert on this subject. I talked to a sailor 10 years ago who likes catapults. So therefore, we’re going to go with that steam-based approach.

Sargent: Donald Trump is a devotee of positive thinking. He’s someone who genuinely believes that you can make things true by saying them. This has been true about Trump all his life. And all his life as well, it has also applied to him saying that he knows more than anyone else in the world about any subject.

But I can’t help but feel like, after a lifetime of Trump getting away with this, we might finally be at the point where he’s not going to be able to get away with it much longer. Is that too optimistic, or what?

Benen: Well, I don’t think it’s too optimistic. And the reason I believe that there’s something to this is that right now we see his approval rating sinking. We see his popularity collapsing. And I think that that is a reflection of the fact that the American mainstream has had an opportunity to get a good look at this guy, to get a good sense of where he’s leading the country, looking at the results of his approach to governance over the last year and a half—in fact, over the last five and a half years of his presidency. And they’re rejecting it roundly and soundly. And they’re saying, you know what? I’m sick of it.

There are a lot of people who voted for him who now regret that. There are a lot of people who voted against him, or who are now eager to vote in the midterms. And so I don’t think it’s overly optimistic to think that we’ve really turned a page here. We’ve got congressional Republicans kind of separating themselves from him. We see voters definitely rejecting the White House.

And so I think that combination of factors, plus what we’re seeing in terms of the special election results and primary turnout—all of these factors lead me to think that there is a blue wave taking shape, that there is a movement taking shape to reject what we’re seeing out of the White House. And so I think that optimism that you described, I think, is well grounded.

Sargent: I think a lot of people will listen to you and me talking about this with a little bit of pessimism or skepticism. They’ll say, OK, well, we went through this in Trump 1.0. And in a few years, everybody just forgot about what Trump had done, even though, you know, hundreds of thousands of people needlessly died and the economy was crashed into the shitter. And that’s true, right? But there is reason to think that things are different this time.

For one thing, voters wrongly, I think—but still, they concluded that COVID was kind of an external event that wasn’t Trump’s fault. It was imposed on him, and that that’s what crashed the economy, right? I don’t think that’s right, but I can see how voters concluded it. For another, during Trump’s first term, he actually did listen to people to a degree that he simply does not right now. And I think that’s a critical difference.

We’re seeing in his second term Trumpism unshackled on every front—immigration, tariffs, America First in the world. And I think that that fact, that the three major pillars of Trumpism, of MAGA, of right-wing populism, were really tried in this new kind of way and are failing so miserably, kind of creates an opening for a different level of rejection of Donald Trump and Trumpism. Do you think that’s too optimistic?

Benen: I don’t. And I want to back up for a second, because you were saying that a lot of people who are listening to this are going to think that, well, we’ve been through this, but Trump had kind of worked his way out and he ends up on top anyway. But I’d remind folks, in his first term, his first midterms were a disaster for Republicans. Democrats took back the House. And in a presidential election, Trump lost roundly, by more than five million votes to Joe Biden.

And so I don’t want to make it seem as if somehow Trump has always persevered under these circumstances, because I think we look back in recent history and that hasn’t been the case. But putting that aside, even looking at more contemporary conditions, I think that what we’re seeing now is a wholesale rejection based on a wholesale failure.

I mean, I think that the benchmarks that you just identified are true. I think that right now the fact that Democrats have an advantage on immigration for the first time in many, many years is a reflection of the fact that people see the status quo and they’re not satisfied with it. They are rejecting it, and they’re opening the door to something fundamentally different.

Sargent: Some polls are showing that Democrats have the advantage on the economy for the first time in many years. So immigration and the economy and national security—three areas where Republicans have had traditional advantages, all thrown away by Donald Trump’s incompetence. That’s the story, I think.

Benen: Right. And it’s fueled by fact. This is not just based on perception, it is fueled by fact. I think that ICE and the immigration agenda has been a spectacular failure. We look at the economy, we see the economy losing jobs and with stagnant growth. These are not just based on perceptions. It’s not just based on media narratives. This is about facts. This is about reality. This is about the daily lives that Americans are experiencing, and they’re seeing failure, and they’re sick of it.

Sargent: These are really the three pillars of right-wing populism more broadly, right? Immigration, economy, America First in the world. And so I think, as you said earlier, the American people might be ready to hear something different. I think really they may have their ears open in a way that maybe they haven’t in a very long time. I sure hope so, anyway.

Benen: I think you’re right. And I think that there’s ample public opinion research that shows that this is not just something that we’re kicking around as a possibility. It is something that is absolutely happening right now as we speak.

Sargent: Well, let’s conclude on Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona. He responded to Trump’s craziness about the Navy and the uprooting of the system. Listen to this.

Mark Kelly (voiceover): By the way, Donald Trump knows nothing about this stuff. Not in any world would I ever suggest to the Navy to change the design of some system on a ship at this point. I mean, does the guy know nothing about the way our government is supposed to work and how it’s supposed to be managed? For him to get in these details, especially with his background? I mean, what is his background? He’s a marginally failed real estate developer, right, with multiple bankruptcies. He shouldn’t be weighing in on systems on aircraft carriers. But for some reason, like something like six years ago, somebody said something to him, and he’s been fixated on this issue that, to a president of the United States, should not be an issue.

Sargent: That’s quite a takedown, Steve. I think that Democrats have an opening to really recapture national security in a very broad sense here, by putting people like Mark Kelly out there to just scaldingly ridicule the idea that this guy has any idea what he’s talking about on any of these fronts, especially when we’re in the middle of such an absolute global catastrophe as the one he’s drawn us into. What do you think?

Benen: It reminds me a lot of what the political landscape looked like towards the end of 2008. You know, the economy was in ruins, and Americans were not only upset about the Great Recession, they were also upset about the fact that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had launched two unsuccessful wars in the Middle East, in Iraq and Afghanistan, respectively. And at that point, there was an opportunity for people to say, you know what, I’m sick of this, I want to be ready for a change, not just on the economy, but on foreign policy too.

And I think the fact that Trump is failing so miserably in Iran, and the war continues to drag on—here we are, it’s nearly six months in. Americans were told that this was going to be a quick war, this was going to be an easy war, that this was going to be a casualty-free war, and none of those things have happened. And so now we have people like Mark Kelly, who has a lot of credibility on this, clearly speaking out, but others are speaking out as well.

And this message is getting through. The war is wildly unpopular with the American mainstream, nearly as unpopular as Trump’s economic performance. And that one-two punch is absolutely devastating, not only to the White House and its agenda, but to the Republican Party at large, especially here we are in this critical election period.

Sargent: Just to take your 2008 and George W. Bush comparison one step further—everybody should recall that in 2004, after George W. Bush was reelected, he looked absolutely untouchable. I remember the atmosphere at the time was that because of September 11, and because of all the theatrics that Karl Rove was doing, which at the time looked really formidable—the sense was that he had absolute dominance over our information space, that there was no way they could lose arguments, that Democrats were just scattered and listless and without direction. And then, in two short years, Republicans lost both chambers of Congress. And, then we got 2008 and one of the biggest Democratic victories in, I guess, our lifetimes.

Benen: Exactly. You know, it’s so easy to forget that after 2004, we heard the same things that we were hearing shortly after 2024—that we had entered an era of Republican dominance, that Republicans were going to be leading for the foreseeable future, that they’d cracked the code, they’d rewritten the alignment, everything was going to be different from here on out. That’s what we heard in 2004, when Republicans were running the show. They had the White House, the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court. And as far as we were told, the conventional wisdom from most of the pundits was that Democrats were just lost at sea for the foreseeable future. Two years later, Democrats took back Congress. And then two years after that, they controlled the show. They were in charge.

And so I think that when you heard similar talk in 2024, after Trump won, that he had somehow realigned American politics, I couldn’t help but laugh at the time, thinking, yeah, let’s get back to me in a year and a half. Let’s see what’s going on as we approach the midterms. And here we are. It’s exactly what’s happening. History is repeating itself. They didn’t really earn a mandate in 2004 or in 2024. They overplayed their hand. Americans rejected the poor economy and a failed war in the Middle East. And it’s happening just like it happened then. It’s happening again now.

Sargent: And Trump was supposed to be the guy who was much shrewder than the Bushes and the Roves of the world. Steve Benen, all of that was beautifully said. Thank you so much for coming on. Folks, if you want to check out Steve Benen’s stuff, make sure to check out the MaddowBlog over at MS Now. Steve, great to talk to you.

Benen: See you soon, Greg. Thanks.

But the protesters still weren’t satisfied. They also wanted Ridglan to surrender the animals in its possession to ensure they wouldn’t be killed or sold for use in future experiments. And so, on a bright and chilly April morning, a surprisingly bipartisan group of 1,000 activists traveled to Blue Mounds, Wisconsin, to engage in what they hoped would be a mass “open rescue” of the more than 2,000 beagles that were still held in the facility.

The first, smaller liberation was met with comparatively little resistance. This time, however, the company was prepared. Perimeters were blocked and trenches dug and filled with manure to dissuade trespassers. Private security guards and police patrolled in force, ready to repel demonstrators with tear gas and rubber bullets.

Some of the protesters wore hazmat suits and carried tools intended to help them enter the facility and open cages, but the majority of attendees were dressed in regular clothes and looked like ordinary Americans. Which is what they were, for the most part. Lawyer and organizer Wayne Hsiung had intentionally emphasized a shared concern for animals and a commitment to the principle of nonviolence that attracted people from across the political spectrum. Anti-capitalist vegans stood shoulder to shoulder with dog-loving conservatives. Parents with children and seniors in wheelchairs cheered from the sidelines as more brazen activists tried and failed to breach the barriers.

Not long after the attempted rescue mission began, Gretchen Primack crouched in pain, her eyes burning from pepper spray. A poet and bookseller from New York state’s Hudson Valley, she had traveled roughly 1,000 miles to try to rescue the dogs. But facing pepper spray and rubber bullets, protesters like Primack had been beaten back.

After four tense hours, the crowd retreated. Twenty-seven people had been arrested, and several were hurt; one demonstrator reportedly lost multiple teeth. As Primack rushed a friend who had been hit with rubber bullets to the ER, she wasn’t alone in feeling, she told us, “totally demoralized.”

And then, just as fast as the cops had gassed the protesters, the activists won. Hsiung called it “the greatest turnaround in animal rights history.” Their victory was, in part, thanks to support from right-wingers.

In April, shortly before the smaller scale raid on the facility, the popular conservative podcaster Tomi Lahren interviewed Hsiung and praised the activists for their bravery. The “bipartisan” issue of animal cruelty, she said, is “one of the few areas I think we can all come together on.” After the action, Lara Trump, President Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law and a proud beagle owner, urged Ridglan to make a deal and sell the dogs. Working behind the scenes, reportedly aided by well-connected allies and some deep-pocketed Trump donors, the activists secured the release of 2,000 dogs on undisclosed terms.

Under past administrations, bold direct actions like the one seen in Wisconsin have typically been dealt with harshly; for decades, law enforcement equated animal liberation with domestic terrorism. Yet even as it viciously suppresses First Amendment dissent in other arenas, the Trump regime has seemingly embraced some forms of militant animal activism and opportunistically seized the moment to take credit for the heartwarming Ridglan outcome. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins released a joint video statement boasting about the “major win for animal welfare,” while Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin posted a photo of himself with a beagle and doubled down on the administration’s preexisting commitment to eliminating animal testing in January. The far right clearly sees political value in these animal welfare fights. So why has the left largely ceded the issue to them?

In 2019, Emily Atkin wrote an insightful article for this magazine titled “Why Animal Rights Is the Next Frontier for the Left.” In it, she predicted that “it’s only a matter of time before [the left has] a serious discussion about the ethics and wisdom of consuming billions of animals every year.”

When it was published, we nodded our heads in agreement, hopeful her analysis would prove prescient. What neither we nor Atkin foresaw was the possibility that animal rights might actually be the next frontier for the right. When, the day before the 2024 presidential election, Vivek Ramaswamy posted that “animal cruelty will eventually become a genuine concern for conservatives,” and that it “shouldn’t be a partisan issue,” we scoffed in disbelief. Perhaps we shouldn’t have. Even then, conservatives were up in arms about P’Nut, the pet squirrel turned social media star who had recently been seized and euthanized by New York state authorities, a viral symbol of supposed government overreach and hostility toward pets. “Just go out there and vote for P’nut,” advised Elon Musk.

Today, Ramaswamy’s call is even harder to discount. A movement is gaining momentum on the far right that can’t simply be reduced to opportunistic concern about celebrity squirrels. In addition to launching a “strike force” to crack down on puppy mills and dogfights, the Trump administration is working to rein in animal experimentation. The National Institutes of Health, or NIH, the world’s foremost funder of biomedical research, has dedicated $87 million to the development of animal-free research methods, and the Food and Drug Administration has published a strategic road map to phase out animal testing. Kennedy has met with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, about the possibility of turning NIH-backed primate research centers into animal sanctuaries—a possibility the NIH has reportedly followed up on.

Tomi Lahren, along with fellow influencers Laura Loomer and Mike Cernovich and Republican officials including Florida Representative Anna Paulina Luna, all worked to defeat the Save Our Bacon Act, a misleadingly named bill being pushed by the pork industry that would have preempted state-level welfare protections that provide gestating sows a tiny bit of room to move.

To be clear, the Save Our Bacon Act is a Republican bill, a fact that underscores the fundamental incoherence and hypocrisy of the right’s relationship to animal welfare. Trump’s fossil fuel–guzzling and pro-corporate policies are, of course, disastrous and deadly for humans and nonhumans alike, and the president and his allies are busy deregulating the government agencies capable of monitoring and halting the animal welfare abuses some right-wingers have begun to decry—including, most recently, with a major rollback of the Endangered Species Act. RFK Jr. may sincerely love dogs, but he has also used his bully pulpit to promote red meat consumption and claims to follow the flesh-heavy “carnivore diet.”

Still, you don’t have to squint too hard to see the potential outlines of a phenomenon similar to Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA. Once again, we have a set of broadly popular issues generally seen as belonging to the left, but never centered or taken seriously there, leaving a vacuum to be filled by savvy conservatives.

The polling justifies the enthusiasm, “While the Left and Right don’t align on much these days, over 85 percent of Republicans and Democrats do agree animal testing should be phased out,” reports the conservative Washington Examiner. Eight out of 10 voters also consider preventing farm animal cruelty to be a moral concern, while 72 percent report being more likely to vote for a candidate who supports protecting threatened and endangered species.

Few progressives appear to take seriously the transformation unfolding on the right—one that may well secure victories for some vulnerable animals while also further elevating an anti-government, anti-science, anti-egalitarian agenda. That appears to be the goal of the White Coat Waste Project, an initiative led by Anthony Bellotti, a former Republican operative who cannily connects animal testing to right-wing preoccupations including Covid conspiracies, federal spending cuts, and transgender fearmongering (based on misrepresentations of hormone studies conducted on mice).

Justin Marceau, faculty director of the Animal Law Program at Sturm College of Law and co-founder of the Animal Activist Legal Defense Project, is hopeful about a subset of conservatives expressing what he describes as “genuine care about nonhuman animal well-being.” Meanwhile, he and many of the people he speaks to are also deeply frustrated with many of their ostensible political allies, including a Democratic Party that appears to take animals and their human advocates for granted. “For nonhuman animals who are dying by the billions every year, we’re already in the worst-case scenario,” Marceau explained. “I think Democrats view people who care about animals as a fringe subset of people who care about climate and the environment. They seem to think it’s just not a constituency that they could lose. I think they’re wrong about that.”

Once again, the parallels to MAHA feel inescapable. A few years ago, it was almost impossible to imagine crunchy moms who hate Monsanto becoming a key part of Trump’s electoral coalition. But here we are.

Of course, MAHA quickly revealed its MAGA-laundering fraudulence. Every time its goals have come up against corporate interests in this administration, the corporate interests have won out, often spectacularly so—as when Trump successfully petitioned the Supreme Court to shield glyphosate manufacturers from liability for the health impacts of their pesticides, an almost farcical contravention of MAHA’s ostensible values.

“I don’t see the political right turning on big corporate power when it comes to factory farming,” Marceau acknowledged. “But Democrats have not gone to battle with these big corporate interests either.” And even if the right doesn’t take on the meat industry directly, it “could plausibly deliver victories for animal advocates that were truly unimaginable under Obama or Biden.”

Our conversations with animal rights activists revealed a personal and profound sense of betrayal with regards to the wider left—the ideological and political community, or constellation of communities, separate from the Democratic Party. Consider the fact that the Ridglan protests were covered by mainstream and right-wing news outlets, but barely made it onto the radar of liberal and left media, a massive direct action against a corporate target seemingly unworthy of serious coverage or consideration.

This resistance on the left to even a basic vocalization of compassion for nonhuman animals helps explain why the animal rights movement celebrated some MAGA figures who have begun stepping into the vacuum. “It’s difficult to watch animal rights folks accept this embrace from the right, but at this point I honestly can’t blame them,” explained an activist, who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “If you tell people to fuck off enough times, they’re gonna fuck off. And that’s what the left has been doing to animal rights activists for decades.”

Much of the reluctance to embrace animal rights seems to stem from a broader, zero-sum assumption that these fights distract from or are irrelevant to more traditional leftist issues. This perspective is profoundly divorced from the reality of our industrial system of meat production, the horrors of which are deeply intertwined with the consolidation of corporate power, the exploitation of workers and immigrants, and the destruction of our environment. Far from the prevailing sense of animal rights as a sort of individualistic lifestyle issue, disconnected from a broader critique of capitalism, ending systemic violence against animals actually requires taking on a range of fights that fit in perfectly with the populism that is driving the left’s current political resurgence.

Interestingly, of all the interviews conducted for this piece, it was a conservative activist who best articulated a shorthand for this synthesis. Liam Gray, a former editor for The Daily Caller, is founder of the Wilberforce Institute, a conservative animal rights outfit “focused on ending big government, taxpayer-funded animal cruelty.” Speaking about animal testing companies like Ridglan as well as Big Ag actors like Tyson Foods and Smithfield Foods, Gray said, “The divide on animals right now is feeling less like left versus right and more like people versus special interests. And the more that Democrats don’t respond to that, and side with the special interests, and take for granted that they have the animal people behind them, I think the more it’s going to hurt them.”

Of course, this intersectional approach to animal protection is not guaranteed. MAGA is already attempting to instantiate a very different form of animal politics—what The Atlantic’s Daniel Engber has labeled “Animal Nationalism,” in reference to traditional twentieth-century fascist politics that elevated a subset of animals alongside a subset of supposedly superior human beings.

While conservative groups like Wilberforce are deeply committed to reducing the suffering of all nonhuman animals, for many on the right, it’s clear that some animals are worthy of concern—the cats and dogs in JD Vance’s hateful libel against Haitian immigrants; the bald eagles and whales that have been dishonestly instrumentalized to further right-wing attacks on wind farms—while the vast majority of living beings are imperiled by MAGA’s program of xenophobic cruelty, corporate corruption, and planetary arson. Rather than allow compassion for animals to become another tool in the right’s system of hierarchical politics, the left has the ability—and, indeed, a duty—to elevate a moral framework for animal rights that objects to violence against humans and nonhumans alike on universal grounds.

Fundamentally, any project that aims to decrease needless suffering—which has always been an essential goal of the left—is simply and glaringly incomplete if it does not recognize the vast suffering that humans needlessly inflict on nonhuman animals. Living beings that are capable of joy and pain, affection and sadness, deserve moral recognition. And addressing their immiseration is not at odds with fighting an authoritarian oligarchy that exploits us all. Indeed, not doing so poses serious political risks.

It would be an ethical and tactical blunder to let MAGA uncontestedly lay claim to the compassion that so many feel toward animals. But there is still time to change course. As Marceau put it, “The best-case scenario is that this movement on the right awakens the left to the idea that animal welfare and animal protection ought to matter. To me, that’s the true ideal, because there’s an alignment there that actually makes sense.”

This $1.7 billion project is groundbreaking, as is another one forthcoming in the same state: The world’s largest carbon removal plant will open at the end of the year.

There are caveats in both cases. The surface coal mine and adjacent coal-fired power plant in Bremond, which sits between Dallas and Houston, will continue operating alongside the new solar farm. And many environmental experts are skeptical of carbon removal as a realistic solution to the climate crisis.

But there’s no doubting this much: Texas is a national leader in renewable energy, and has been for decades. It’s first in wind power—by a long shot—and second in solar power generation, behind only California. It generates enough power from solar to power the equivalent of half the homes in the state.

In its enthusiasm for wind power, Texas, which Trump won even more convincingly in 2024 than he did in 2016 and 2020, couldn’t be more at odds with the president. He has had a weird vendetta against wind power ever since the early 2010s, when a wind farm was built near one of his golf courses in Scotland—ruining the view, in his opinion. He claims that all renewable energy is part of the Democrats’ “Green New Scam,” and he’s wildly exaggerated the impact of wind turbines on whales and birds.

Now, in his second term, Trump has ramped up his war on wind power. His Defense Department invented completely bogus national security concerns to justify delaying more than 150 onshore wind farms (a federal judge last week ordered the administration to lift the freeze). The administration, with appalling disregard for our futures and our tax dollars, is also paying companies billions of dollars to abandon wind farm projects, which if built would have, according to a Senate investigation, powered millions of homes and created tens of thousands of jobs (not to mention averted huge quantities of carbon emissions).  

Texas is not following suit. It may be Trump country, but it’s also Green Energy country—a paradox that has a fascinating history.

Texas, being an extremely sunny and windy place, has an ideal natural landscape for renewables. Midland is famous for oil wealth, but in the early twentieth century it was known as “Windmill City,” as nearly every house had a windmill in its yard. But natural resources alone don’t explain everything. People must make decisions and lead, and at the end of the twentieth century one of those people was a Midland native, Republican governor, and future president.

Like his father, George W. Bush was a market-based environmentalist. He didn’t support renewable energy out of concerns over air pollution or global warming, but because he saw how much money there was to be made in the industry. “I didn’t use climate change to get the state of Texas to go forward,” Michael Osborne, who co-founded the Texas Renewable Energy Industries Association, told the Houston Chronicle last year. “I used the green that Republicans relate to.” 

Bush signed a bipartisan bill that broke up the local electricity monopolies and mandated that the state install more renewable energy. Under his successor, the far more conservative Rick Perry, the wind boom really took off. In 2005, Republican legislators set 20-year goals for renewable energy—and blew past them by 2010. Since then, wind energy in Texas has more than quadrupled.

In the Trump era, some Republicans in the state legislature have tried to mess with Texas’s green energy sector. Last year, they attempted to limit the development of renewable projects, but failed. This year, they proposed a quota to protect fossil fuels, as the renewables share of the state’s future electricity generation reaches 70 percent. But in Texas, 60 percent of Republican voters support renewables, and not even the oil and gas industry opposes them; after all, that industry uses renewables to power its own operations—to save money.

This is not to say that Texas is a climate policy paradise. It simply is following the Bush template: monetizing all the state’s abundant natural resources. Texas isn’t forcing the phase-out of coal or other fossil fuels, instead pursuing an “all of the above” energy policy, and they’ve been welcoming to data centers. But this approach has strengthened the argument that all new forms of energy are welcome, with the result that renewables don’t have serious opposition, even in a state that normally loves a culture war.

No serious opposition, that is, except from the Trump administration, which has delayed 54 wind projects in Texas as part of its national freeze. The president’s war on wind has been criticized by conservative Texans, who see his moves as interfering in the free market—and with their values and economic interests. Former GOP state Representative John Davis, a Trump voter who has seven wind turbines on his ranch, told the Chronicle that wind energy was a “conservative idea” and that he was frustrated with Republicans who have abandoned it: “Their own voters are rural Texans, and it’s hurting their own voting base.”

Renewable energy makes practical sense in rural places all over the country, where people are struggling with high energy bills yet have abundant access to sun and wind. If Republicans nationally continue to back Trump’s weird vendetta against wind it could hurt them in Texas but also in other conservative rural states. After all, the state that produces the second most wind energy is Iowa, a famously important state in the presidential election calendar. And solar farms and battery storage on coal mines are not even unique to Texas, as similar projects are underway in Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and Louisiana.

Trump will never come around on wind. His mind is made up. But even red states whose Republican leaders have gone full MAGA can see the economic upside to renewables, and the profit motive is steadily proving more powerful than a dumb culture war. The voters, politicians, and businesspeople of Texas have understood this for many years, and it’s only a matter of time before their ideological brethren across the South and Midwest follow suit.

For decades now, the Republican Party has built its electoral success on myths and lies. Ronald Reagan was the last Republican president who your average person would say left the country better off than he found it. I wouldn’t say that, for a range of ideological reasons, but I’m a liberal. I’m ready to admit, however, that your average person would say that about him.

But that’s a long, long time ago now. You have to be in your fifties at least to have any memory of it. But the last three Republican presidents—Bush, Bush, and Trump—have been disasters. The first Bush oversaw a double-dip recession and a massive savings and loan scandal that looted the treasury. The second Bush started a costly and tragic war based on lies and nearly brought the global economy to its knees. Trump, you know about—corruption, fascism, and staggering incompetence.

That’s four decades of failure. In fact, it goes back much farther. I got an email a couple of weeks ago from my friend Simon Rosenberg, who has for years paid careful attention to the performance of the economy under Democratic and Republican administrations. In this email, he had a chart showing that going all the way back to Franklin D. Roosevelt, monthly job growth has averaged 176,000 under Democratic presidents, and 59,000 under Republican ones. Trump’s average over both terms, because of the job loss during the pandemic, is actually in the red, minus 7,000. In his current term, Trump averages 44,000 a month. Joe Biden, you wonder? He averaged 336,000.

There’s so much more. Returning now to the post-Reagan era: From 1989 to 2026, we’ve had Democratic presidents for 20 years and Republicans for 17.4 years. Care to hazard a guess as to the number of jobs created under Democrats vs. Republicans?

Answer: It’s 49.8 million versus 1.9 million. That isn’t a typo. Fifty million to two, basically. Democratic presidents have also done far better than Republicans on median household incomes, GDP rates, the Dow Jones index, and even deficit reduction. Dramatically so on deficit reduction.

So why do people usually believe the Republicans are better for the economy? Three reasons.

First, the GOP benefits from being the party of big business, which just leads people to assume that they must have a better handle on profits and loss (they certainly do on the latter). People see that nearly every Wall Streeter and corporate honcho is a Republican, and they take their cues from that.

Second, the Republicans and their media propagandists are extremely skilled at reinforcing the above lazy misperceptions. When a Republican is president, they find the one piece of good economic news and flog it endlessly. When it’s a Democrat, they do the opposite, as Fox News and Fox Business did over and over with the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s downward jobs revisions during Biden’s last year in office. Downward revisions are fairly common, but you can bet the Fox outlets aren’t talking about them much these days.

Third and I think most important, the Democrats do an awful job of talking about all this. To begin with, I’m not even sure most of them know just how wide the divergence on the economy is. I remember talking to a group of Democratic House members a few years ago. I started rattling off some of these statistics, and several of them grabbed a pen and a scrap of paper and began scribbling them down. I could tell by the looks on their faces that this was news to them. That’s just indefensible—a total failure of the national party and congressional leadership.

Democrats and their consultants seem to have this belief that they shouldn’t bother attacking the perceived strengths of Republicans. I remember talking with a Biden aide (this was when Biden was still planning on seeking reelection) who said the perception of Trump as a successful businessman was hardwired and unshakeable.

I wouldn’t doubt that every poll and focus group said that. But that doesn’t mean the right line of attack and a pile of cash can’t change that. If you’re old enough to remember 2004, you remember what “Swift-boating” was. In July, the country saw John Kerry as a war hero. Three months and $22.4 million later, half the country thought he was a traitor or a coward or a little of both.

This is a lesson the GOP takes to heart: They went right at his strength, and they changed perceptions of him. When done right, it works. Democrats need to get this. And of course, they were lying about Kerry. And it still worked. But the Democrats just have to tell the truth.

In the current case, Democrats haven’t really done much to drive Trump’s approval down. They haven’t had to. Here, observable reality is doing a lot of the work. But between now and November 2028, it will be up to the Democrats to finish the job.

They have to start telling the country the actual story of the American economy over the last four decades—that every Republican president has left a mess that the Democrat had to try his best to clean up, and that every Democrat has left the country better off economically than he found it, usually far, far better. They should make sure every American knows the numbers 49.8 million and 1.9 million. I’ve only ever heard one prominent Democrat refer to these numbers in a high-profile speech: Bill Clinton, in his speech at the Democratic convention in Charlotte in 2012. It should be mandatory for every speaker at the next convention to mention this.

And by the way, another GOP strength they have to go after directly—this idea that the GOP is the pro-military party. Tell that to the mothers of the sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. Can you imagine if what’s happening on that carrier had happened under President Kamala Harris? First of all, it wouldn’t have, because whatever her good and bad points, she would not have been stupid enough to start this stupid war because Benjamin Netanyahu put stupid ideas in her head. But if somehow it had, Jim Jordan would be screaming about impeachment, and Fox News programming would consist of little else (as things stand, Fox has covered the story somewhat, but at least one anchor recently ripped into those whiny sailors).

Add to that Trump’s utterly baffling announcement last week ordering the Navy to revert to old, steam-powered catapult systems on some carriers. (Where does he come up with some of this stuff?) Experts say these systems are badly outdated, less effective than the electronic systems currently in use, and will cost billions of dollars to install. To give credit where it’s due, I did like what Democratic Senator Mark Kelly had to say on this one: “He’s a marginally failed real estate developer with multiple bankruptcies. He shouldn’t be weighing in on systems, on aircraft carriers.”

So: no, no, and no. A businessman can’t magically fix things in Washington. One day, maybe one will, but not this one. He’s a con man and always has been. The Republican Party is not good for the economy. They screw it up every time. And the Republican Party is not pro-military. The last two Republican presidents have started completely unnecessary wars, gambling with the lives of service members. The next Democratic presidential nominee—moderate, socialist, man, woman, whatever—better say these things bluntly and repeatedly. And every Democrat needs to join them.

In fall 2017, less than a year into President Trump’s first term, I wrote a piece in The Atlantic titled “American Kakistocracy.” As I wrote then, “Kakistocracy is a term that was first used in the 17th century; derived from a Greek word, it means, literally, government by the worst and most unscrupulous people among us. More broadly, it can mean the most inept and cringeworthy kind of government. The term fell into disuse over the past century or more, and most highly informed people had never heard it before (but to kids familiar with the word “kaka” it might resonate).” They should pay attention now.

Bad as the first Trump term was, it was nothing compared to this one. And the key components of the anti-science, anti-government nihilism, combined with willful ignorance about the consequences of their actions, and the interrelationship across policy areas, is about to play out big time starting next year, with health care and policy on the front lines. Three components of horrible policies across disparate areas will interact to engender a catastrophe in an already stressed health ecosystem.

One is the insane anti-vaccination conspiracy theories brought into full focus by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his cohort in the Trump administration, all amplified by Trump himself. The measles outbreak, the emergence of tetanus cases, the attacks on the flu and Covid-19 vaccines, and the evisceration of food safety programs leading to outbreaks of norovirus, cyclospora, e-coli, and listeria, have begun to put more stress on the system, with increased costs, more hospital burdens, and likely more trouble ahead when flu season begins and new Covid strains emerge. Not only that, many undocumented immigrants have been working in meat processing plants—some estimates have been as many as 200,000. The massive deportation policy has left many of those plants with fewer workers to do the same volume of processing, and often a form of self-regulation by the industry for the safety of their products.

Add to that the soon-to-be forced removal and deportation of Haitians, among others losing Temporary Protected Status. Over 100,000 Haitians have been employed in the healthcare sector, many taking care of seniors in nursing homes and via home health care, others working hospitals as orderlies, nurses, or other jobs. It will be a significant blow when those jobs are vacated.

Now comes the biggest problem. When the Republican Congress enacted Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill in July 2025, it included massive cuts in the Medicaid program, totaling around $1 trillion over 10 years—but made sure to postpone them until 2027, conveniently after the midterm elections. The cuts focused on adding onerous work and paperwork requirements, all designed to force recipients off the rolls, and will remove somewhere between 10 and 15 million people from the program, leaving them without any health coverage. That is in addition to the millions losing coverage or facing huge premium increases with the erasure of subsidies for the Affordable Care Act. But the impact will go far beyond those directly losing their health insurance. Medicaid money does not go to Medicaid recipients. It goes to the providers. The loss of a major chunk of the money going out to them will have big reverberations.

The American health care system, unlike in most advanced countries, was jerry-built, a combination of public and private entities, and state and federal involvement. But the public and private are not separate. They are like the organs in the human body—if one declines or fails, it has huge impact on the others. And these cuts are going to reverberate in many catastrophic ways.

Start with hospitals, most of which already face major financial strain, and not just in rural areas. There have been major consolidations as those strains have increased; hospitals have had to be creative, to say the least, in finding the revenue to stay solvent. Independent, community-based hospitals have declined precipitously, and the market has shifted to giant, integrated health systems, with major involvement by both private equity firms and large corporations like health insurers and pharmacy giants buying physician groups and integrating vertically and horizontally. Significant revenue, especially via the emergency rooms, comes from Medicaid.

Cut that revenue, and some hospitals will close, in both urban and rural areas. For those that remain, the burden in the ERs will increase their costs and strain their staffs. The law requires hospitals to provide emergency care to anyone in health crisis coming to their ERs, whether they can pay or not. Poor people and the undocumented will either go to the ER and not be able to pay, or will defer any treatment, including drugs they need, and that will mean more emergencies, more deaths, more burden on the broader system.

The loss in revenue may cause many hospitals to reduce staff, adding to the burden on nurses and doctors who remain. For many, their staffs will already be burdened when the deportations take full effect. And reduced staffs will also put more hospital patients in jeopardy if there are fewer nurses and doctors to watch over them and care for them. Of course, to maintain revenue, hospitals will find ways to charge more for their paying patients, so those cost burdens for them and their insurers will go up as well.

Next, turn to nursing homes. Almost two-thirds of those elderly and disabled people living in nursing homes have their care paid for by Medicaid. They have all reduced their assets to a negligible level to qualify for Medicaid coverage, enabling them to be in these facilities instead of in their children’s homes or in precarious situations living on their own.

Nearly all nursing homes rely heavily on that Medicaid revenue. Lose it, and many elderly and disabled will be out on their ears. Their families will take them in—but there is a double whammy here. The subsidies that exist for home health care, including by family members, are going to be slashed as well, leaving families with their own terrible dilemmas, worsened when trained and trusted Haitians depart.

As for the nursing homes, some will close; others will cut staff and staff pay. The ratio of residents to staff will decline, meaning residents unable to secure help when they need it for such vital tasks as getting medications when they require them, getting help going to the bathroom, getting help in bed to prevent bedsores or worse, having responsive care during a health trauma or emergency. More unqualified staff could mean more abuse of the residents.

There will be more effects seen throughout the country, for everyone who is a part of our intertwined health care system, from those working in it to those using it. No wonder Republicans made sure none of the Medicaid cuts would happen before voters experienced the impact. It turns out that kakistocracy is not just a funny word, but a reality with horrific consequences.

But no one is more choleric over the occasional success of progressive politicians than the dismal corporate dullards at Third Way. After the aforementioned El-Sayed won his Senate primary in Michigan, the centrist organization announced that it was going to “war” with a $15 million campaign against democratic socialist candidates between now and 2028. Both the sense of aggrievement and the paltry amount of money being dispensed makes this extremely sad.

The opening salvo in this supposed “war” is also pretty sad: a wan op-ed by the organization’s top dogs, Jon Cowan and Matt Bennett, in the pages of The Washington Post. The two combine for a few hundred words of grievance, in which they argue that the Democratic Party’s recent woes can be attributed to its extreme politics, which is a very strange thing to say about a party whose recent standard-bearers were Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Cowan and Bennett, in fact, fault Harris for not doing enough to pivot from the leftier positions she espoused on the 2020 stump. This makes me wonder if they were in a coma during the 2024 election, because I distinctly remember Harris both veering wildly toward the center, abandoning previous positions with something approaching a frenzy, and even campaigning with Liz Cheney.

The op-ed is, nevertheless, revealing. Third Way’s politics seem frozen in amber. There’s scant evidence that Cowan and Bennett have spent any time ruminating on the political shifts we’ve undergone since the 2024 election. There’s no mention of the hot-button issues that are fueling the fires of the Democratic electorate, such as the high costs of early childhood, opposition to data centers, the war in Iran, or the GOP’s corruption. The only thing they point to that could be called “recent” is a New York Times poll showing that 62 percent of the Democratic electorate identifies as either somewhat or very liberal, and that most voters want “a fighter for working people who gets things done and is authentic in his or her beliefs.”

That doesn’t describe the kind of candidate that Third Way would support. As Robert Reich wrote this week, “If you bother to look at the funding sources of Third Way ... you’ll find a Star Wars cantina of billionaire megadonors, Fortune 500 CEOs, corporate dark money bundlers, and giant corporations.” Third Way’s donor base is a “Trojan horse” packed to the gills with scoundrels: Wall Street cretins and private equity goons; “members of the GOP-aligned American Legislative Exchange Council,” best known for producing cookie-cutter right-wing legislation that is diametrically at odds with just about every Democratic Party policy priority; and supporters of the Republican Attorneys General Association, “which helps elect Republicans who fight federal environmental and other regulations.” In addition, Reich points out that two of the organization’s former honorary co-chairs are Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Enough said! (Sludge’s David Moore also reported this week that Third Way has received donations from health insurance interests that undoubtedly oppose Medicare for All, which was the centerpiece of El-Sayed’s campaign.)

Third Way’s limitations as a political organization stem from the fact that its leaders have an umbilical connection to Republican money and probably haven’t talked to a human outside of a cable news green room in years. In fact, the last time anyone from the organization sought to learn what life is like for normal Americans, it was chronicled by Molly Ball in The Atlantic, who trailed the researchers the organization dispatched to Wisconsin after Donald Trump’s first election to find the mythical 70 percent of the population that they believed occupied a position of non-partisan purity.

As Ball’s piece described, things didn’t go the way Third Way expected. Instead of finding a centrist majority out there in the hinterlands, it found a population that was extremely partisan—and fairly skeptical of the organization’s donors. But Third Way’s superpower, it turns out, is the ability to perform vertiginous mental hijinks when its priors are challenged. As Ball reported, the study that Third Way published after its tour of flyover country neatly omitted any of the doubts that she watched the researchers wrestle with on the road. “The report surprised me when I read it,” Ball wrote. “Despite the great variety of views the researchers and I had heard on our tour, the report had somehow reached the conclusion that Wisconsinites wanted consensus, moderation, and pragmatism—just like Third Way.”

This is the biggest irony: The successful politicians who so terrify Third Way are actually really good at listening to the concerns of voters and then organizing those voters around campaigns to address those needs. A recent New York Times report on the insurgent left reveals that these candidates aren’t really reinventing the wheel, they’ve just—well, mastered politics: “The campaigns themselves say the secret is in the basics. They have built old-fashioned ground games, harnessing the anger and energy on the left to recruit armies of volunteers, who in turn have greeted the moment’s protest movement with open arms.”

In fact, if there’s one thing that the smattering of successful DSA-aligned candidates have done in recent campaigns, it’s been the thing Third Way refuses to do: show a willingness to abandon preconceived dogma when it doesn’t survive an encounter with reality. As Nathan Newman recently wrote, the local DSA-aligned politicians who are winning elections have learned something that the national DSA is still struggling to accept: “To win local office, you not only have to activate the maximum number of DSA members possible, you need to reach out to a wide range of other progressive individuals and organizations to win election.” There’s something nifty going on here: It turns out that the successful socialists, through their mastery of retail politics, are showing that they’re capable of a little moderation.

Third Way could really stand to learn a thing or two from the politicians it disdains. But that’s not what the Republican funny money backing its every move wants. Instead, you are going to get $15 million worth of Red Scare fulmination. And that rhetoric will be used by the right to disparage every single Democratic candidate—not just the ones who want to enact Medicare for All. Third Way will be arming both the conservative media machine and the slop merchants at CNN and The New York Times with talking points, and using its phony-baloney identity as a liberal organization to color these attacks as coming from the illusory center.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

The Guardian reports that the Adams County Correctional Facility, which is run by the private prison contractor CoreCivic on behalf of ICE, also had a long power outage, leading to a loss of air conditioning for two days this week. This forced detainees to either roast inside cramped cells or spend hours outside in 100-degree temperatures without shade, one detainee told the publication through family members.

The high temperatures also raised tempers, with arguments and physical incidents increasing among the detainees in a facility that is understaffed, causing the publication’s source to fear for his own safety. The gas leak reportedly took place Saturday, and the source, who spoke to The Guardian anonymously, said detainees were evacuated “out into the afternoon heat for hours.”

“They were outside for hours. And when they came back in, it still smelled of gas. And then some of the men were getting headaches and symptoms of inhaled gas. They were never really told where the leak came from, how it was resolved, or was it fully resolved,” the source’s wife said. “Illness has been growing. So there are a lot of people getting sick, and they have begun putting people three to a cell that was designed for two.”

The power outage took place on Monday, and by Tuesday, electricity had only been partially restored for lighting and other operations. Air conditioning would not come on until late in the day Wednesday.

“When these things are happening, either they’re shut out outside without shade and air conditioning, and they’re not given any answers,” the detainee’s U.S. citizen wife told The Guardian. “Or a lot of the time the power was out they just had them locked in their cells, they didn’t get to leave for dinner or breakfast.”

The facility also attempted to prevent detainees from telling anyone outside of the facility about the poor conditions.

“They didn’t give them the tablet devices during that time because they didn’t want them notifying loved ones,” she said. “If they feel anyone’s organizing anything, they’ll send them to solitary.”

CoreCivic downplayed the conditions at Adams County in a statement to The Guardian, saying that the publication received “some bad information.”

“While several detainees thought they may have smelled something related to a natural gas leak, none of our staff members detected anything along these lines,” said CoreCivic’s senior director of public affairs Ryan Gustin. “Out of an abundance of caution, an on-call facility maintenance staff member came in to assess the facility for any possible gas leaks, and none were found.”

Gustin said that the power outage was due to a storm in the area, and that there were no disruptions to the air conditioning systems. He also claimed that no one at any time was refused medical treatment.

The Mississippi facility is one of the largest immigration detention centers in the country, holding more than 2,000 detainees on a 14-acre property as of March. At the time, only nine percent of detainees there had a criminal record. The poor conditions there are not unique, as poor hygiene and illness have been recorded at ICE facilities across the country, such as the Dilley family detention facility in Texas and Delaney Hall in New Jersey, which recently had its third detainee death.

Maisa Lopes Eliaser was mid-flight Wednesday with several other immigrants when agents received a call about her. She told the Associated Press that an ICE agent then asked her if she wanted to continue to Brazil or return to the U.S. Eliaser’s husband, Army Staff Sgt. Alexis Jaramillo, told the AP that they didn’t know who made the call, “but someone made the phone call, and then she came back.”

Other detainees were led off of the plane in Brazil, but Eliaser was allowed to stay on board to return to Louisiana. Agents then told her that thanks to videos and news reports about her case, she was “famous.”

Jaramillo, an aviation operations specialist who has served in the Army for more than 10 years, was forced to take leave from his duties training soldiers to care for his five-year-old stepson after she was detained last month at an immigration appointment. The government previously told the AP that Eliaser had been issued a final order of removal by an immigration judge in April for overstaying a tourist visa.

Now Eliaser has an appointment Monday to reopen her case and green card application, and the couple is worried. Jaramillo, who is a U.S. citizen and married Eliaser in 2024, has been told there won’t be any more issues. But he and his wife “are really, really, really scared about it, but you know, we have to go.”

“I told the person who gave me the appointment, ‘Hey sir, don’t play with me, I’ve been through a lot,’” Jaramillo told the AP.

The Trump administration has disrespected the immigrant family members of U.S. military personnel, with ICE agents raiding a military base to arrest a newlywed soldier’s wife and staking out Marine Corps graduations to detain immigrants. While Democrats in Congress are investigating deportations of military personnel and their families, Eliaser was fortunate enough to be allowed to return to the U.S. Others have not been so lucky.

Investigators with the FDA finally arrived at Taylor Farms’s operation in Mexico to inspect facilities linked to the parasite that can cause explosive bowel movements, four U.S. officials told The Washington Post Friday. 

Donald Prater, the FDA’s acting deputy commissioner for food, said that there was extensive research required before the agency could launch an investigation into the growing conditions.

But food safety experts and some former top FDA officials criticized the agency for waiting so long after publicly linking the company’s shredded lettuce to a national outbreak that has sickened more than 13,000 people and caused two deaths. 

Barbara Kowalcyk, director of George Washington University’s Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition Security, told the Post that in-person work at the facility was necessary for prevention. 

“Ideally, as soon as [the FDA] traced it back to the source, they would be out there working with the facility and specifically working with Taylor Farms to do a root-cause analysis so that we can understand what happened,” Kowalcyk said. “That’s really what’s going to drive prevention going forward.”

On July 17, the FDA notified Taylor Farms that its shredded iceberg lettuce had tested positive for cyclospora. Taylor Farms falsely claimed that the FDA had later walked back its determination, but still promptly recalled all of the shredded iceberg lettuce that was grown and processed in central Mexico out of an “abundance of caution.” A sanitation inspection conducted by Mexican officials between July 18 and July 20 tested negative for cyclospora. The company’s website claims that its own testing of roughly 2,000 samples also tested negative for the parasite. 

Taylor Farms is the country’s largest supplier of fresh produce, and is also pro-Donald Trump. The company sells products to Walmart, Sam’s Club, Kroger, SYSCO, Aldi, Target, and Dollar General.

Before any of this, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reportedly cut back on parasite monitoring. 

“No president has been hated more when it comes to gas prices,” CNN’s Harry Enten said during a Friday segment. “79 percent ... that is the highest disapproval rating for any president on record.”  Former Presidents George Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, who each had their own struggles with gas prices, never eclipsed a 75 percent disapproval rating on the issue. 

Enten: "Even a majority of Republicans -- 52% -- that loyal Republican base who has been through thick and thin with Donald John Trump, even they have turned against the president on gas prices ... these are just atrocious numbers" pic.twitter.com/hc5xJfrA6O

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 14, 2026

“Donald Trump takes the cake as these $4-plus gas prices continue to give us pain at the pump. The American people are taking their anger out on the President of the United States,” Enten said.

The poll’s party line breakdown is even more devastating, as 52 percent of Republicans disapproving may put Trump-backed candidates at risk in their November elections as they have to answer for his decisions—especially in swing states. 96 percent of Democrats disapproved, along with 85 percent of independents. 

These are startling numbers that Trump can’t convincingly blame on decisions Biden made three years ago. Gas prices are high—and will continue to be high—because Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started bombing Iran and Lebanon, and Iran closed the crucial Strait of Hormuz in response. That’s why your gas is $4 for the third time this year—something else that has never happened before.

Trump offered a shockingly callous response while taking a question about the aircraft carrier that’s been deployed since November. 

“Family members of U.S. servicemembers are concerned about conditions onboard the USS Lincoln—” one reporter said. 

“Well no—that ship is moving—no, they’re not,” Trump interjected. “That ship is moving right now, or very shortly, and it’s being replaced with another very similar ship.”

Asked whether he believed that the servicemembers had been deployed for “too long,” Trump had a similarly heartless reply.

“No, no, no. Not nearly long enough,” Trump said.

Reporter: Family members of service members are concerned about conditions on the LIncoln.

Trump: No they’re not.

Reporter: Has the deployment gone on too long?

Trump: No. Not nearly long enough. pic.twitter.com/7TM1LPeOru

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 14, 2026

Family of sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln have detailed the carrier’s multiple issues, including plumbing disasters, disruptions with the delivery of mail, and shortages of food, water, and other supplies. These issues have placed an immense strain on the mental health and wellbeing of sailors on board the ship. It’s gotten so bad that multiple sailors have tried to jump overboard. 

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that the USS George Washington aircraft carrier will soon be deployed to the Persian Gulf from Japan to replace the Abraham Lincoln, part of a previously scheduled rotation plan. But the Lincoln has already been deployed for 250 days and gone a record 200 days without a port call.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth previously claimed that reports about the state of affairs aboard the Lincoln had “misrepresented” the situation. 

Clearly, the president couldn’t care less about U.S. servicemembers or their families. 

You’ve probably noticed that Fox pumps out enormous amounts of propaganda designed to smear the Democratic Party as wildly extreme and irredeemably crazy. Leading Fox personalities routinely depict the party as hostage to globalists, transgender rights activists, and violent socialists. Fox figures regularly savage leading Democratic Party figures as traitors.

Fox also perpetually offers a safe space for Donald Trump’s propagandists to smear the Democratic Party as overrun with Communists and worse. On Fox recently, Stephen Miller dissolved into crazed paroxysms as he seethed that the party’s primary ideology is “hatred for America.”

The game here, of course, is not just to drag down Democratic candidates by association. It’s even more fundamental: It’s about getting voters to stop seeing the midterms as a referendum on Trump—to stop getting crazy ideas in their heads about holding Trump accountable for his world-historically disastrous presidency already.

So how’s that going? Well, perhaps these Fox News personalities should take a peek at the most recent polling from—wait for it—Fox News.

An intriguing pattern is developing in Fox’s polling of the Senate races this summer: Just about all the Democratic candidates are significantly outrunning the favorability of their party. While the party’s standing—which is pretty bad—can’t be shrugged off, Fox’s polls do show that most of these Democrats are not getting dragged down by association with the party.

Meanwhile, all these polls show Trump deeply underwater—including in states he won by double digits.

To wit: Fox’s latest poll in Ohio finds Democrat Sherrod Brown leading GOP Senator Jon Husted by eight points, 53 percent to 45 percent. That’s despite the fact that only 42 percent view the Democratic Party favorably. The rub is that only 44 percent see Brown as too close to the Democratic “establishment,” while 55 percent do not. Turns out a lot of voters who don’t like the party support Brown.

This applies across other races. Fox’s newish poll of Texas finds Democrat James Talarico leading Republican Ken Paxton 51–48, even though the Democratic Party is upside down at 45–54. The new Fox poll of Maine finds Democrat Troy Jackson slightly ahead of GOP Senator Susan Collins 48–46, even though the party is underwater at 44–54. That’s too close for comfort for Jackson, perhaps reflecting his recent entry into the race, but it’s promising.

Meanwhile, earlier this summer, Fox’s poll of North Carolina found former Governor Roy Cooper leading GOPer Michael Whatley 53–44, even though the Democratic Party is polling 43–56. And Fox’s survey of Iowa finds Democrat Josh Turek leading GOP Representative Ashley Hinson 50–46. This poll didn’t test the Democratic Party’s favorability rating, but it did find that only 36 percent of Iowa voters view Turek as “too liberal,” while 60 percent do not.

There’s one exception here: Michigan. Fox’s new survey finds Democrat Abdul El-Sayed trailing GOPer Mike Rogers by 47–51. El-Sayed is outrunning his party (which polls at 43–56), but not by enough. Perhaps it’s that he hasn’t consolidated the base yet (he only wins 75 percent of Black voters), or that his positions are seen as too extreme (54 percent say this), or that he hasn’t reached working people yet (he trails among them by 10 points). But there’s a lot of work to do.

Admittedly, Fox is only one pollster, many other factors will decide these races, and control of the upper chamber is on a knife’s edge. But it’s worth planting a flag on this pattern—Democratic candidates achieving some separation from the party—because it will be a crucial factor. Democratic strategists often say many of these candidates have their own strong identities in their states, and that this will matter more than the party’s overall standing, even in red places. For now, at least, this appears to be holding.

One last thing is worth noting about these polls: Trump’s net favorability ratings are deeply underwater. They’re upside down in Ohio (-14), in Texas (-9), in Iowa (-13), and in North Carolina (-19). In several of these he’s at least 50 points underwater with independents. Trump won all those states—and he won all but the last by double digits.

So here’s a crazy idea: Maybe—just maybe—Trump is a bigger problem for the Republican candidates than the Democratic Party is for the Democratic ones. Note, for instance, that in Maine, 55 percent say Collins votes with Trump too often.

Of course, obscuring such unpleasant realities is one of Fox News’s most critical missions. As Matt Gertz of Media Matters often points out, Fox regularly shields its own viewers from Fox’s own poll findings. Indeed, Trump himself often rages at Fox to fire its pollsters when Fox delivers findings that displease him.

In that sense, Trump and Fox both share a deep understanding about how Trump’s mystique with MAGA really functions: Even mere perceptions that Trump is politically weak or falling short in any way risk fracturing the base.

It’s taken as a truism in American punditry that the supposed impregnability of this base is why Trump has an allegedly unmovable floor. But many of these polls show this base cracking pretty badly as he underperforms with non-college whites and even with rural voters to boot. Fox personalities: If you don’t like hearing all this, well, go take it up with your own network’s pollsters.

One mother told journalist Jim Acosta that her son, a sailor aboard the USS Tripoli, is dealing with low food and hygiene supplies, losing more than 30 pounds in just four months.

Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego rebuked Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth over his dismissal of conditions aboard the Abraham Lincoln, saying Thursday that he was communicating with a military spouse who was forwarding her husband’s text messages.

“Stop lying and fix the problem,” Gallego admonished Hegseth.

The Abraham Lincoln is experiencing multiple issues, including plumbing problems, disruptions with mail delivery, food shortages, and supply shortages, straining the discipline and mental health of sailors on board the ship to the point that some have tried to jump off. One military wife, whose husband jumped overboard, told MS NOW Thursday that her spouse was in the water for about an hour before he was rescued, and she wasn’t told about the incident until four days later.

“I think that it was handled very poorly because they didn’t inform me and they didn’t want me to know, and they’re just trying to cover this up,” the spouse told the network anonymously. She’s waiting for his return to the U.S. after he was medically evacuated from the ship, and said she had difficulty staying in regular contact with him, an aircraft mechanic on his first deployment, because the ship’s internet connection is unstable.

One text message she did receive from him states:

“i think the boat is finally getting to me and i really dont think i can keep up my peace act anymore, you are right about it all not being okay, we were supposed to leave 5th fleet on july 15th but then something had to come up and my last hope of being home soon was gone, im really trying to not feel negative or hopeless but between the wifi and not knowing when i will come home and not knowing what is happening back at home, its really getting me, i dont think i can do another deployment after this and i dont even know if i can finish this deployment.”

The parent of another sailor on the Abraham Lincoln told MeidasTouch that the toilets backed up on the ship just before their son finished his deployment on board. “Overflowing, there was about half a foot of human waste throughout the floor in the restrooms,” the parent said via text.

And another person, whose brother’s fiancée served aboard the USS George H. W. Bush, told MeidasTouch that that carrier was struggling with supply levels.

“They have virtually no food, water, or soap,” the person said.

Joe McBride, a defense attorney who has represented multiple January 6 insurrectionists, has posted multiple fake pictures of Andrew and Tristan Tate—who are currently in Miami awaiting extradition to the United Kingdom—in prison. They wear orange prison jumpsuits and are often residing in comically disgusting conditions. 

“The conditions Andrew and Tristan Tate are being held in are a disgrace. Small filthy cell. Cockroaches. Shower water to drink. No chair. Lights they cannot control. Food that makes Taco Bell look like a Michelin restaurant. Beds too small for men who are 6’3” and 6’5”,” McBride wrote in one post. “Three days outside since the day they were locked up. This is not punishment after conviction. It is illegal punishment that violates their constitutional and human rights.” 

Prosecutors have contested McBride’s description of conditions, writing that “while FDC Miami is not a ⁠Marriott, the Tates’ conditions of confinement are reasonable, constitutional and within BOP’s discretion.”

The conditions Andrew and Tristan Tate are being held in are a disgrace.

Small filthy cell.
Cockroaches.
Shower water to drink.
No chair.
Lights they cannot control.

Food that makes Taco Bell look like a Michelin restaurant.

Beds too small for men who are 6’3” and 6’5”.

Three… pic.twitter.com/gVZC0zwyI6

— Joe McBride (@McBrideLawNYC) July 28, 2026

Another depicts the brothers in those same orange jumpsuits, meditating while sitting in the lotus position.

BREAKING: The Court has granted our motion. Andrew and Tristan Tate's bail hearing is now set for Thursday, August 27th.

We are pleased with the Order of the Court.

The government filed a brief loaded with new accusations, then opposed giving us the time to answer them. The… pic.twitter.com/TlCAO7VF2Q

— Joe McBride (@McBrideLawNYC) August 12, 2026

And perhaps the strangest one shows McBride and the Tate brothers sitting in some dingy room surrounded by Elon Musk, George Washington, Joe Rogan, and  John F. Kennedy, among others. The words “sovereignty,” “masculinity,” “conquer,” “manosphere,” and “power” are on the walls.

“THE MANOSPHERE BUILT WESTERN SOCIETY. MEN ARE THE WARRIORS, THE FATHERS, THE PRIESTS, THE PRESIDENTS, THE GENERALS, THE BUILDERS. EVERY WAR FOUGHT AND EVERY CATHEDRAL RAISED WAS THE WORK OF A MAN,” McBride wrote in all caps last week. “THE RECORD IS NOT IN DISPUTE. TESTOSTERONE IS NECESSARY. LONG LIVE MEN.”

McBride told Mother Jones’s Anna Merlan that the AI-generated images were actually all part of his plan.

“Strategically, a picture is worth 1,000 words,” he said—a claim that could only be taken seriously if those pictures didn’t look extremely stupid and fake. 

McBride is rallying and having Tate supporters do pushups outside of the Miami Detention Center because he’s trying to cast the brothers as these independent free thinkers who are victims of a politically biased U.K. government. In reality, they are glorified internet pimps who have been hit with seven rape charges, three counts of sex trafficking, three counts of assault with bodily harm, and 19 charges for child and extreme pornography—absolutely abhorrent accusations. 

And Andrew Tate wasn’t just some ambiguously right-wing, manosphere poster. He literally ran an online course to “free the modern man from socially induced incarceration” and get followers to recruit women into their “sexual slavery” schemes to obtain their Ph.D.—“Pimping Hoes Degree.” It cost $8,000 per year. 

“You have to fuck them, and they have to love you. It’s essential to the business,” Tate said in one of the courses. “You have to be militant with your fucking pimping.”

“Bang out the machete, boom in her face, then grip her up by the neck,” he said in another clip. “The machete’s on the floor, her panties are all wet, and you go fuck her. That’s how it goes. Slap, slap, grab, choke. Shut up, bitch. Sex.”

The brothers have a pretrial hearing on August 27. 

THE MANOSPHERE BUILT WESTERN SOCIETY.

MEN ARE THE WARRIORS, THE FATHERS, THE PRIESTS, THE PRESIDENTS, THE GENERALS, THE BUILDERS.

EVERY WAR FOUGHT AND EVERY CATHEDRAL RAISED WAS THE WORK OF A MAN.

THE RECORD IS NOT IN DISPUTE.

TESTOSTERONE IS NECESSARY.

LONG LIVE MEN. pic.twitter.com/8R8MPow84W

— Joe McBride (@McBrideLawNYC) August 8, 2026

The Treasury Department announced Friday that it would destroy the government’s registry on shell company ownership, a database law enforcement uses to investigate money laundering and corruption, The Bulwark reported.

In addition to scaling back requirements for shell companies to submit basic information to the federal government, the new rule will also destroy all the data it has already collected.

The Corporate Transparency Act, passed in the final days of Trump’s first administration, legally requires the Treasury Department to maintain this registry. Trump had previously exempted domestic companies and U.S. citizens—99 percent of the entities previously required to report—from data collection under the CTA. The Treasury Department’s latest move has made that decision permanent.

In addition to money launderers, the new rule will protect funding for child pornographers, sex traffickers, and terrorists. It also provides a shield for political contributions for forbidden sources. For example, Saudi Arabia could set up a $45 shell company in Wyoming, and use that to funnel millions into Trump’s super PACs.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is already selling the decision as a favor to small businesses.

“Today’s action is a victory for common sense and American small businesses,” said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in a statement. “President Trump promised to cut red tape, and this final rule delivers. Treasury is eliminating a burdensome reporting requirement for millions of law-abiding business owners without compromising our national security.”

Before the CTA was passed, the United States stood at the center of the world of offshore finance, being the primary location where narco-traffickers, arms dealers, and others chose to wash their illicit money clean. Now, Trump wants to bring all that back.

Trump isn’t alone in delivering a massive gift to grifters, cartels, and kleptocrats. Republicans are in on it, too. In April, Trump’s allies on the House Financial Services committee pushed through a measure that would repeal the requirement that U.S. shells divulge their true owners. In May, Senate Republicans introduced similar legislation, aiming to attach it to the broader defense bill set to be passed later this year. Neither bill has passed a full vote.

Since reentering office, Trump has only made it harder for law enforcement to crack down on certain financial crimes. In addition to eliminating the task forces on kleptocrats, pausing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and gutting the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the president has also pardoned dozens of white collar criminals.

This story has been updated.

Inside Washington

Mary Peltola is putting the “fish” back in kitchen table issues

Alaska Senate candidate Mary Peltola has a campaign slogan you don’t hear in other states: “Fish, Family, and Freedom.” The last two aren’t surprising. But “fish”?

Other Senate candidates this year are focusing on gas prices or health care costs. But to Peltola and many other Alaskans, fish are a crucial and overlooked policy issue touching everything from affordability to labor to the role of money in politics. Ahead of the primary on Tuesday, August 18, she’s been traveling around the state making her case. The top four candidates in the nonpartisan ranked-choice voting primary will advance to the November general election. Peltola is all but guaranteed to advance to the general.

Peltola’s main opponent is Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan, who is seeking a third term. Peltola faces an uphill battle in the red state, which hasn’t voted for a Democrat for president since 1964. But Peltola, who represented the state as its single Congressperson from 2022 to 2025, has outperformed other Alaskan Democrats—in 2024, she lost reelection to the House by fewer than three points, while President Donald Trump won the state by 13 points.

Recent polls show a competitive race. An early August Alaska Survey Research poll showed Peltola with 50.8 percent compared to Sullivan’s 49.2 percent in the final round of ranked-choice. A late June poll from The New York Times and Siena University has Sullivan with a two point lead in the initial round of ranked-choice, with five percent of respondents undecided. Both the Cook Political Report and Sabato’s Crystal Ball classify the race as a toss-up.

Peltola’s fish policy isn’t just about fish, her campaign says, but also the role of corporate spending in politics, Alaska Native sovereignty, and everyday bread-and-butter (fish-and-butter?) issues.

“As someone who grew up salmon fishing on the Kuskokwim River with my father, I know firsthand that fish is more than food—it’s central to Alaskans’ way of life,” Peltola said in a statement. “That’s why I will fight tooth and nail to restore our fisheries to abundance, and that means doing whatever it takes to ban factory trawling and reduce bycatch, deliver relief for Alaska fishermen and communities that are suffering the fallout of fishery collapse, and save our fish. I will stand up to anyone—including the factory trawling lobby and Lower 48 special interests—to fix the rigged system in D.C. and put Alaska first.”

Trawling—using nets pulled through the water to catch fish—is common in Alaska’s fisheries, but can have devastating consequences for the marine ecosystem. In 2026 so far, trawlers have caught nearly 22,000 Chinook salmon by accident in their nets—a side effect known as bycatch. Alaskans are two years into a seven-year fishing moratorium in the Yukon River to protect the fish population. Indigenous subsistence fishers say the ban harms their way of life, while large-scale trawling continues. A majority of likely Alaska voters support a ban on trawling and believe fishing should be limited to rural residents when the salmon population is low, according to a 2025 survey conducted by Data for Progress.

“Alaska is actually well known for having some of the best managed fisheries,” said Liz Nussbaumer, a program officer in the Seafood, Public Health, and Food Systems Project at Johns Hopkins University. Despite that, she said, Peltola’s proposed fisheries policies are welcomed by many, particularly in the deregulatory environment of the Trump administration.

Nussbaumer pointed to Peltola’s plans for fishery disaster funding (which helps keep fisheries stable after a natural or man-made disaster), a fish by-product economy (using fish waste produce for things like pet food and pharmaceuticals), and new monitoring technology to stop bycatch as the most innovative proposals on her platform. “It’s been a blind spot for fisheries and aquatic food systems, where terrestrial [agriculture] typically has had a lot of these protections, but fisheries have not, and especially smaller scale operations, these producers can be living paycheck to paycheck,” Nussbaumer said about disaster funding for fisheries.

Sullivan, meanwhile, has received nearly $280,000 from the trawling industry. One of his largest contributors is Trident Seafoods, which has a history of environmental violations. In 2011, the Department of Justice announced that the company would pay $2.5 million to resolve Clean Water Act violations. In 2018, Trident Seafoods was fined $300,000 for underwater piles of fish by-product near its processing facilities. This June, Sullivan introduced a bill to reduce bycatch, but experts say it was similar to a bill Peltola introduced during her time in the House, which Sullivan did not support.

Peltola’s plan to create a fish by-product economy could help reduce the waste created and dumped by companies like Trident Seafoods. But she also sees this waste as part of a larger story. “Whether it’s bycatch or broken promises from D.C. insiders, Alaskans can’t stand waste, fraud, or abuse,” her website reads. She’s called for 12-year term limits on members of Congress, overturning Citizens United, and banning lawmakers from trading stocks. It’s not directly about salmon. But it’s part of the same story that Peltola is hoping will resonate with voters.

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

Republican House Representative John James, currently competing against Democratic nominee and Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson in the race to replace Governor Gretchen Whitmer, has chosen his running mate, and it’s looking like he opted for an attack dog: State Representative Jay DeBoyer. DeBoyer was one of the Republicans spearheading Michigan House’s lawsuit against Benson last year to force the release of training materials for election officials—information that Benson claimed, if publicized, “would enable someone to interfere with the chain of custody of ballots, tamper with election equipment, or impersonate a clerk on Election Day.” DeBoyer also led an effort to hold her in contempt for failing to comply with a subpoena over this. Additionally, The Detroit Free Press’s Clara Hendrickson reports, “during a fiery exchange in a June 2025 committee hearing, he zeroed in on her violation of the state’s campaign law when she held a launch event for her campaign for governor in the building that houses her department’s offices.”

DeBoyer’s statement accompanying James’s announcement naming him to the lieutenant governor spot, Bridge Michigan reports, said that “Michiganders face a clear choice between socialism and a bold new direction rooted in freedom, opportunity, and prosperity.” Given that Benson is pretty moderate, this “socialism” reference may indicate that DeBoyer will try to use Democrat Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed (who also does not identify as a socialist, but is considerably more progressive than Benson) to argue that all Democrats are radicals.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

A new report from State Futures, a nonprofit focused on state policy in response to “federal authoritarian overreach,” paints a vivid picture of life in the Trump era: So far in 2026, the report finds, lawmakers have introduced 242 bills in 32 states to try to protect residents in response to the administration’s immigration policies. Of these, 53 have passed. Two, notably, have been vetoed—one by Virginia Democratic Governor Abigail Spanberger, who said banning ICE from courthouses, schools, and hospitals “would effectively require security guards and, in some cases, local law enforcement be placed in the untenable position of choosing between violating state law or federal law.” The other veto came from Democratic Governor of Colorado Jared Polis, who said a bill allowing people to sue ICE agents for violating their rights contained overly narrow language.

The Open Markets Institute files an amicus brief in a case currently before the Tenth Circuit, “urging the court to reverse a lower court decision that shielded a no-hire agreement between grocery giants Kroger and Albertsons from antitrust liability.… Open Markets argues that the agreement deprived workers of one of their most important sources of leverage during a strike: the ability to seek employment with a competing unionized employer.”

Data for Progress released a new poll finding that “voters think they are more likely to become homeless than a millionaire or billionaire, and reject the idea that billionaires obtain their wealth through innovation and hard work, instead seeing them as exploitative and a sign of a dysfunctional, anti-working-class economy.” There’s impressive cross-party agreement on that: Not just 67 percent of Democrats, but 65 percent of Republicans say they’re more likely to become homeless than become a billionaire—interestingly, only 54 percent of independents or third-party respondents agree with that. They’re more likely than either Democrats or Republicans to say they “don’t know” or are “more likely to become a billionaire.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Good Week: David Crowley

In a matter of days, Crowley went from trailing Francesca Hong in the polls by 18 points to narrowly beating her in the Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor.

Bad Week: Pollsters

Maybe voters really believed Hong wanted to cancel Thanksgiving. Maybe Crowley dropping out of the race then reentering it, or Mandela Barnes’s sudden exit in late July, scrambled things so badly that no survey stood a chance. But coming hard on the heels of Abdul El-Sayed’s much-closer-than-expected victory in Michigan, Midwest pollsters have been the target of a lot of quips this week.

Political Trivia Question of the Day

Who was the first ever Black Cabinet secretary? That’s a pretty tough one, so partial credit for naming the president who appointed him.

(Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

There aren’t exit polls in primaries, so we don’t know how voters without a college education—the typical proxy for working-class—cast their ballots. But we can still tell a lot from geography: Cities are liberal and on average more educated, rural areas the opposite; some counties are dominated by universities or colleges; and finally, we know the demographics of the bellwether swing counties in every state. So in the Michigan Democratic senatorial primary, Abdul El-Sayed did best in urban and diverse Grand Rapids (Kent County) and where the University of Michigan is (Washtenaw). Haley Stevens won Detroit, where she did a better job of connecting to Black voters, and she tended to win the rural counties. In the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial, David Crowley won Milwaukee and most of the rural counties, while Francesca Hong took the counties with universities and colleges.

Critics of the left like to sneer about this, saying it exposes a hypocrisy at the core of the current left resurgence—namely, that these candidates who claim to speak for the proletariat are doing a pretty lousy job of winning their votes. They’re obviously not wrong, factually. But I think they’re wrong, or mostly wrong, about why.

These critics tend to argue that these results prove that the new populist politics doesn’t appeal to actual working-class people, who are, in the critics’ telling, more moderate in their politics. Therefore the right way to appeal to these people is with sensible, moderate positions. They also often point out with no small amount of schadenfreude that the inability of people like El-Sayed and Hong—this was also true, according to the polls, of Maine’s Graham Platner, the Hotchkiss oysterman—to win working-class voters is proof of what out-of-touch elitists they really are.

Leftists shouldn’t delude themselves: There is some truth to the second point. There’s a long, long history here. In 1848, there were revolutions across Europe as citizens finally became restive enough about all those inbred monarchies to demand change. Initially, students and workers in Vienna, Prague, and other cities marched side by side. Before too long, however, divisions began to emerge. The students wanted things like political rights. The workers just wanted better factory conditions and more bread. Things didn’t end well in most places—like Paris, for example, where Napoleon’s nephew seized power and held it for more than two decades until he started a dumb war and the radical Paris Commune took over.

Today, we see the split in, say, certain aspects of the platform of the national Democratic Socialists of America. A national DSA co-chair has recently done two hugely embarrassing interviews, one with Fox News and the other with The New Yorker’s David Remnick, in which she touted prison abolition and border elimination and so on (and incredibly had no idea at what rate she would tax rich people). These are, to be sure, not ideas working-class people would get behind. They’re purely campus-left positions that aren’t going to get you very far in electoral politics.

The local DSA chapters, in contrast, are far more pragmatic. They emphasize housing and health care and economic things that actually matter in people’s lives. The difference between the more ideological national DSA and the more grounded local chapters was well and knowledgeably laid out by Nathan Newman in
a Substack post in early July.

But even that isn’t really the main reason why progressive candidates have trouble getting working-class votes. The main reason, in my view, is this.

Non-college working-class voters are more skeptical than more educated voters are. I say that not to praise or damn one group or the other. It’s just, I think, the reality. It stems from the fact, more glaringly true in this country with each successive generation, that for the educated class, things like opportunity and advancement and the confidence that one’s children will live better lives are far more real than they are for working-class people. Working-class people’s lives in these last couple of decades have just gotten much harder, inching ever closer to the precipice of job loss, default, indignity. Working-class people live in regular if not constant fear of these things. Educated people, in an economy that leans more and more toward rewarding them, do not.

Therefore, educated voters and non-college voters hear politicians’ promises through very different ears. To educated voters, big promises about government improving people’s lives sound great, or at least plausible. To non-college voters, those promises sound like just more empty talk. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that to non-college voters, the bigger the promise, the phonier it sounds. They hear promises about free health care for all, and they think yeah, right, that’s never gonna happen in this country. Their experience has taught them not to believe, and for the most part, you can’t blame them.

It’s true that it’s not fair that social democrats—and again, most of these candidates are really social democrats, not democratic socialists—should pay the electoral price for this. After all, it wasn’t they who’ve been screwing over the working class for four decades. But they’re stuck with the reality that the screwing has made working-class people extremely suspicious of those promising them big things.

So what’s the solution? Well, the only real solution is to win office in sufficient numbers to deliver on the promises to the point that working people do see genuine improvement in their material conditions. But that’s going to take a lot of time. A decade, maybe more.

In the meantime, I think the best progressive candidates can do is first and obviously, stay away from topics like prison abolition; but second and more importantly, really just explain things to working-class voters in a way that understands and assumes their skepticism. Aspirational rhetoric appeals to educated voters. To non-college voters, it just sounds like more fluff. Tell them, specifically and concretely, why their rent keeps going up, who’s doing it to them, and how you’re going to go after the people doing it. And explain clearly and specifically how your Republican opponent is on the side of the rent-raisers. Dot-connecting of that sort seems to me more likely to win working-class votes than lofty rhetoric and big promises.

Big Bend is a sprawling, 800,000 acre park within Texas’s Rio Grande Valley that’s been frequented by hikers and campers since it opened in 1944. The park is so beautiful and so significant that even the most pro-border wall conservatives are setting aside their views to defend it.

“I believe in border security 100%,” Terrell County Republican Sheriff and former Border Patrol agent Thaddeus Cleveland said to Fox San Antonio. “Believe in even installation of barriers where they’re needed. But I can tell you that specific area ... even just what they’ve done, unnecessary.”

The Trump administration has been bulldozing to place 17 miles of barriers, surveillance, and sensors along the mouth of the Santa Elena Canyon. The plan was initially “a bold line of wall structure along the floodplain of most of the Rio Grande in the high desert region of Far West Texas,” as laid out in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. But that was shelved after local protest.

BREAKING: DHS IS BULLDOZING THE MOUTH OF SANTA ELENA CANYON.

DHS waived every single environmental law, now they’re butchering the most iconic part of Texas’ crown jewel national park. All happening the day after a massive protest right here and on the morning CNN left. This is… pic.twitter.com/GEc5YQEDxK

— Laiken Jordahl (@LaikenJordahl) August 13, 2026

Another thing both Democrats and Republicans agree on is that Big Bend’s mountains already function as a natural deterrent for migrants.

“My constituents believe that the 1,000-foot riverbank cliffs and remote Big Bend terrain offers its own source of deterrence for any illegal migrants crossing into the United States,” Republican Senator John Cornyn wrote in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin last week. “Many residents that live and work around the parks are also concerned that a physical wall, which would be accompanied by lighting systems, access roads, and maintenance corridors, would (1) ruin the beauty, landscape, and wildlife of the park, (2) threaten culturally significant Native American sites, (3) disrupt wildlife migration, (4) limit access to the Rio Grande River, and (5) significantly harm the local economy as tourism is a major economic driver for the region.”

“God already built a wall through Big Bend—it’s called the Chisos Mountains,” Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico added. “We don’t need to give billions of our tax dollars to out of state vendors. We don’t need to desecrate this sacred land. We don’t need this useless, disgraceful, corrupt Big Bend border wall.”

“We have an obligation to secure our border, but Big Bend’s rugged, unforgiving terrain already serves as a natural, God-given barrier that deters illegal crossings. The border crossing data already confirms this,” Texas Representative Drew Darby said. “The federal government has immediate access to smart barrier technologies that increase interdiction rates without bulldozing through Texas’ most scenic and irreplaceable landscapes. DHS can and should use these alternative methods and stop the bulldozing now.”

Republicans still seem to have a (Theodore) Rooseveltian sense of justice when it comes to National Parks and lands, which might cause problems for President Trump as he continues to attack America’s defining landscapes, removing protections from over 86 million acres of public lands to free it up for drilling and wall-building.

The president took to Truth Social Friday morning to rave about an incident at the World War II Memorial, which had been covered in red and green graffiti and soapy bubbles.

“Our beautiful World War II Memorial was just hit by Spray Painting Vandals,” Trump wrote. “THERE CAN BE NO GREATER INSULT TO THOSE AMERICAN HEROES WHO DIED IN WORLD WAR II. First the Reflecting Pool, now this. We are on their trail! Where do these animals come from???”

Beneath the memorial’s arch, red graffiti spelled out the message “Clean hands dirty $,” and the memorial’s fountains were also filled with soapy bubbles.

Shortly after Trump’s post, U.S. Attorney Jeannine Pirro announced that one alleged vandal was already in custody, and included photographs of the suspect.

The Friends of the National World War II Memorial said it was “deeply disturbed by the reported vandalism,” and the Interior Department called the incident an “utter disgrace.”

While the recent vandalism is blatantly disrespectful to the memorial’s honorees and their families, Trump’s outrage is entirely disingenuous.

If anyone started a trend of “vandalism,” it was Trump and his hand-picked federal contractors. Not only were they responsible for the damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, but they left the monument drained and surrounded by chain-link fences. Trump’s federal contractors were also also responsible for cracking the fountain at the German-American Friendship Garden. Where is the president’s outrage about that?

Still, the president has used stories about alleged vandalism to stir up a frenzy of public outrage in order to antagonize his critics and increase surveillance in Washington, D.C. Notably, this high-profile vandalism has taken place more than a year after deploying the National Guard to literally clean up the nation’s capital.

If Trump wants to get personally involved in protecting America’s landmarks, maybe he should turn his attention to the bulldozers at Big Bend National Park—instead, he’s annoyed about graffiti.

The Department of Labor received public comments on the plan to fulfill Trump’s executive order pushing for the financial changes, and close to 12,000 of the comments, all in support, show signs of being fabricated, with several being attributed to people who aren’t alive. These comments don’t include email addresses, the commenter’s city and state, or signatures, Bloomberg reported Thursday. 

Bloomberg attempted to contact some of supporters on the list, many of whom had unique names identifiable through public records, and found people who said they never made the comments attributed to them, or were dead. One comment made in May and attributed to Danna Oderman was clearly fake, her son Heath Oderman told Bloomberg, not only because she died in December, but because “the language is nothing she would ever have used while on this Earth.”

Another May submission shows Lyngrid Rawlings supporting the president’s plan, but the educator and U.S. Foreign Service officer died in 2024, her daughter Lauren told the publication.

“It’s deeply disrespectful and dishonoring,” Lauren said. “Her life was about service, and to have her name misused in this way is the antithesis of everything she lived for.”

Living people also had comments falsely attributed to them, including Karl Gilberson, a retired Massachusetts professor, who said to Bloomberg that “those don’t reflect my sentiments, at all.” 

All of these comments followed just five templates and were submitted from April 29 to May 5. The names differed, but line breaks, length, and punctuation were all identical, according to Bloomberg’s findings. They also happen to make up the vast majority of supportive comments. In contrast, almost all 30,000 comments opposing the measure were spread out across the nine-week comment period and included differing language, email addresses, and signatures, as well as cities and states. 

The plan was submitted as a draft rule to the Employee Benefits Security Administration on March 31, and has support from the private equity industry as well as other private sector industries. It seems that some entity or person who really wants American retirement accounts diversified into the private sector decided to manufacture support. The Trump administration considers the measure a top priority, with acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling telling senators in July that “this is how President Trump is going to make America wealthy again.”

But they don’t seem that concerned about fake comments. The Department of Labor’s “focus when reviewing a comment is on the substance of the comment and not on the identity of the commenter or the number of commenters making the same point,” a spokesperson told Bloomberg.

Trump signed a memorandum Thursday directing the U.S. Navy to start installing old-fashioned steam catapults on its aircraft carriers, instead of electromagnetic launchers, U.S. officials told The Wall Street Journal.

The memo directs the Navy to redesign the Doris Miller, the newest Gerald R. Ford class aircraft carrier, and all remaining ships. The first three ships, the Ford, John F. Kennedy, and Enterprise, will keep their electromagnetic system.

Trump has been ranting about “goddamn steam” catapults since 2017, suggesting that the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System doesn’t work, while providing no evidence to support that claim. In January 2024, Trump baselessly claimed that magnets stop working when placed in water, and therefore were a stupid thing to put on a boat. In October 2025, he said he just loved the sight of “that beautiful steam pouring off the deck.”

As recently as last month, Trump called the electromagnetic launchers “not nearly as good, too complex.”

In reality, the Navy says that the electromagnetic launchers have allowed their Ford class carriers to launch and recover aircraft at a higher rate than previous classes of ships. Additionally, the maintenance on steam catapults is considered labor intensive and costly, compared to newer models.

Trump’s long-standing grudge against electromagnetic launchers seems to stem from his frustration about the production of the USS Gerald R. Ford, which cost roughly $13 billion to make and experienced delays and cost overruns. There’s no reason to think its launchers don’t work, however.

In a statement, the White House said that steam catapults were more “resilient and robust,” and that the move would reactivate parts of the maritime industrial base that are “easier to scale.”

Trump has long pushed for this senseless redesign, but top Navy officials and industry leaders have resisted the move to tear out such a complex system integral to the design of the Ford class. Bryan Clark, a naval expert with the Hudson Institute, told the Journal that replacing the electromagnetic launchers with steam catapults would likely cost billions of dollars.

Trump is not an expert in military asset design—but that hasn’t stopped him from inserting himself in its development.

Secretary of Energy Chris Wright spoke to the network’s Bret Baier Thursday evening and didn’t have a good answer when Baier asked him about the strait.

“Mr. Secretary, you can concede, can’t you, that the U.S. doesn’t have total control over the Strait of Hormuz?” Baier asked.

“Look, Iran is attempting to hold the world economy hostage and to terrorize their neighbors. They built up a giant arsenal. So are they causing difficulties in the region? Absolutely. But they have a losing strategy. At the end, that will lead to the collapse of this regime in Iran as their economy gets strangled,” Wright responded. “But are they causing some difficulties for their neighbors and the world economy? Absolutely. But their ability to cause difficulties are declining. Our ability to escort and bring products out of that region is growing. They have sort of one card and it’s shrinking in size.”

“That does not sound like total control,” Baier said.

Baier: Mr. Secretary, you can concede, can't you, that the U.S. doesn't have total control over the strait of hormuz?

Wright: Are they causing some difficulties for their neighbors and the world economy? Absolutely. But their ability to cause difficulties are declining.

Baier:… pic.twitter.com/iGBClwkNZx

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 13, 2026

At one point in the interview, Baier played a clip from November in which Wright claimed energy prices would plummet. He then showed the secretary that energy costs are much higher now. Wright ignored Baier’s comparison, claiming that costs were down.

Bret Baier plays Wright a clip of himself from November 2025 saying there will be a downward trend in energy prices. Baier then shows Wright the current figures detailing the rise in energy prices. Wright responds by saying things are going in the right direction. 😬 pic.twitter.com/SILt2IwrGv

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 13, 2026

If Fox News is skeptical and willing to call out a Trump administration official, that suggests that the continued Iran war and its negative effects on the global economy is too big to ignore for conservatives. For months, gas prices have stayed high, and talks between Iran and the U.S. have yo-yoed between a peace deal and Donald Trump threatening to escalate the war, before pulling back at the last minute and raising concerns that he is manipulating markets.

If no deal is reached by November, the midterms will not go well for Trump and Republicans, and Democrats could retake Congress. They’d have the ability to end the conflict with a war powers resolution and investigate Trump’s market manipulation, as well as his mishandling of the battle with Iran.

After we recorded, new Fox polls found Dems up eight in Ohio and down four in Michigan.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

This week, Fox News released a poll showing Democrat Troy Jackson up two points over Susan Collins in Maine. Even more strikingly, Trump is more than 20 points underwater in the state. So we went back and looked at the summer’s Fox polls, and it turns out they’re some of the very worst for Trump of all. He’s deeply underwater in many states he won. This comes as two new forecasts have Dems narrowly favored to win the Senate.

And it also comes as new reporting suggests Trump and his advisors don’t understand how they got to this point. So do Dems really have a shot at the Senate? To parse this question, we’re talking to Democratic strategist Caitlin Legacki, who’s worked on a lot of Senate races. Caitlin, thanks for coming on.

Caitlin Legacki: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: So if you go back through four recent Fox polls of Senate races, here are the top lines. In Maine, Troy Jackson edges Senator Susan Collins by 48 to 46. In Texas, Democrat James Talarico is up on Ken Paxton by 51 to 48. In North Carolina, Roy Cooper is sizably ahead of Republican Michael Whatley by 53 to 44. And in Iowa, Josh Turek is up over Ashley Hinson by 50 to 46.

Caitlin, all of those, with the possible exception of North Carolina, are very close. And I will say, I doubt Roy Cooper’s that far ahead in North Carolina. In your experience, how good a position is this for Democrats given the timing, and what do you make of those numbers?

Legacki: Our friends at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee could not, I think, be in a better position than they are right now. This is an extremely difficult map for Democrats. So to be leading, even if only within the margin of error, in all of these states, it’s an incredible sign that the Senate is within reach.

But I think, to your point, there’s a lot of things that have to go right between now and November for that to happen. And I think that while everyone is doing all of the right things, we certainly cannot take it for granted.

Sargent: Well, I’ll say, I really think that all these Senate races are on a knife’s edge, with the possible exception of North Carolina and Georgia, which is one we didn’t talk about the numbers on. But the main event in these Fox polls is Trump’s dismal favorability ratings. Let’s go through them.

In Maine, it’s 39 to 60. That’s 21 points underwater. In Texas, it’s 45 to 54, nine points underwater in Texas. In North Carolina, it’s 40 to 59, 19 points underwater in North Carolina. And in Iowa, it’s 42 to 55, which is 13 points underwater. Trump won three of those states, two by double digits. I don’t know what to make of numbers like this. What do you make of them?

Legacki: A lot of folks said that they voted against Democrats in 2024 because they were dissatisfied with the Biden administration’s approach to inflation and reducing costs. And Trump campaigned on promises to bring costs down on day one. And I think when you look back at the last two years, almost every single thing he’s done has actually increased costs—whether it’s unnecessary tariffs on allies like Canada, or, you know, needlessly bombing Iran and shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, which has caused some of the highest gas prices we’ve seen in decades. Every single thing he’s done has been like a heat-seeking missile to increase prices on American families. And I think that that’s a huge factor in the dissatisfaction you’re seeing with his job performance.

Sargent: How big do you think Iran is in this? My basic sense is that Iran is playing a huge role in Trump’s low approval ratings. It really symbolizes so many things about the failures of this presidency, and it’s yet another example of a direct link between his own pathological craziness and his policies and high costs on Americans. Do you think Iran is central to the equation here?

Legacki: A hundred percent, I do. I mean one of the most glaring, I think, signifiers of cost and inflation that American families have is the price of gas at the pump. And so every single day, when people are commuting to work and having to fill up their car, they’re seeing five dollars a gallon, six dollars a gallon in some places. And that’s—first of all, it’s frustrating on its own, but it’s doubly so when everyone knows that this was a war of choice.

And so I think part of the reason you’re seeing Democrats doing well and Republicans doing so poorly in a lot of these historically conservative states is because there’s just so much frustration with the way that he’s popping off, as it were, and doing these things needlessly, and refusing to change direction or change course. It just, it drives people crazy.

Sargent: I think also the war is a big reason that the Senate is at risk for Republicans, because voters implicitly understand that Congress has just basically turned a blind eye and essentially given Trump this blank check for this insane adventure he’s on. The war is hitting people with higher costs, it’s creating the impression that Trump is completely lost and rudderless as a leader.

And The Atlantic reports that Trump has “furiously” told aides that Iran is acting in bad faith in these negotiations. Yet, according to The Atlantic, his aides are privately showing him all this data that supposedly shows that if he just bides his time, Iran’s economy will ultimately cause them to surrender: Sir, sir, absolutely, you’re doing the right thing by doing nothing!

So they’re basically telling him right now that doing nothing is a very smart plan, really shrewd on his part. And you can kind of see that manifesting itself in Trump constantly saying things like, “I’ve got nothing but time.” And it’s like, behind the scenes, Republican Senate strategists must be tearing their hair out.

Legacki: I think this speaks, at a macro level, to the dangers of having a president who surrounds himself with yes-men. During the first Trump administration, at least, there were people around him that were willing to get fired from their jobs in order to try to tell him the truth. In the second administration, it’s all sycophants. And what that means is, like, we know he’s being given bad data.

We know people are using that to push their personal political agendas. And the people that are suffering most are American families, and then the families that are being bombed in Iran and elsewhere, simply because, you know, we kind of have a sucker for a president right now.

But the other problem that Republicans in the Senate are dealing with is, you know, the main argument for Susan Collins to get reelected is that she has been a Republican check on Trump. But in all of these instances, you see kind of like this scenario where Republican senators stand up to Trump, they delay something, but then ultimately they fold.

Sargent: Yeah, well, let’s talk about independents for a second, because I think for independents, the failure of Republican senators to stand up to Trump is really critical. In Maine, in the Fox polling, Trump’s favorable rating with independents is 23 to 73. In Texas, it’s 18 to 78. I’m not kidding, those are the numbers. In North Carolina, 24 to 74. In Iowa, 24 to 67.

Again, that’s with independents, in states that Trump mostly won. I just don’t know what to make of that. He’s around fifty points underwater with independents in three of those, a bit less in the fourth. Those numbers just seem too terrible for Trump to be real. What do you think?

Legacki: Yeah, I think that to some degree they are real. But where I agree with you is that they’re not necessarily going to be Democratic voters. And I think that a lot of those independents are just fed up with both parties right now. And so the impetus on Democratic candidates is to stand up to Trump and show how they’re going to be able to be a check and a balance on him.

But then also to show voters how they’re going to do things differently, and how they’re going to stand up to the Democratic leadership in a way that, I think restores some common sense to D.C. And you know, I think that the biggest mistake Democrats can make right now is to conflate the dissatisfaction with Trump as a mandate for Democrats or for Democratic policies, without us actually, like, getting into office and showing that that trust is earned.

Sargent: I think there’s maybe a realistic way to understand these numbers, in keeping with what you’re saying, which is: Trump is in absolutely terrible shape with the electorate, and with the middle of the electorate as well. Like, these numbers with independents are just absolutely awful. But that doesn’t necessarily mean Democrats win them in the numbers that they ultimately need.

And so maybe the way to think about this is, if there’s a way for Democrats to win the Senate this time, it’s in those numbers. In other words, there really is a very real opportunity here to win the Senate in numbers like those. It’s just a matter of converting just enough independents into Democratic voters to make it happen. What do you think of all that?

Legacki: I think that’s exactly right. And I think this goes to the heart of a debate that has been waging within the Democratic Party for the last few presidential elections, where there is a fundamental question of: is it more important to excite and turn out our base, or is it more important to moderate a little bit in an effort to win over those independent voters? And obviously, you know, it’s a balancing act, because we need our base voters to turn out, right? But we also need to win enough of those independents in order to get over the finish line.

And so I think, you know, part of the reason that folks were freaking out about Francesca Hong, and were less enthusiastic about Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, is just that, you know, if we run too far to the left, we run the risk of losing seats that are otherwise winnable. And so I think we have to be very mindful that nothing is a given here. And all of these races, as strong as Democrats’ position is right now—all of these races are extremely losable for us, as much as they are winnable.

Sargent: They are. They are on a knife’s edge, I think, as I said earlier. Let’s talk about the overall map for a sec. I think if Abdul El-Sayed hadn’t won in Michigan, we might feel even a little bit better right now. I think Abdul can get there. I really do. It seems like he wants to win, and it seems like he’s taking the steps necessary to moderate and mend fences in the party and so forth. And it’s going to be a very good year for Democrats. That’s probably enough to get him there.

Democrats need to flip four seats, though, and a lot of those races are very close. We had another poll just out of Texas that had Talarico down one, unfortunately. And so the Fox numbers are encouraging, but they aren’t the whole story. What’s your sense of the whole map? Where do you see the strong spots, and where do you see the weak spots?

Legacki: Yeah, so I think you’re exactly right about Michigan. I think Michigan is still very winnable. It’s just going to cost Democrats more money in terms of outside spending and investment to get there. The strongest spots that I see here are North Carolina and Georgia. I think the bright spots are really Iowa, Texas, and Alaska.

I’d also just mention, as it relates to Maine, both Alaska and Maine have ranked-choice voting. So I think that that adds a wrinkle that makes me a little bit more bullish on Democrats picking up that Alaska seat than otherwise I would be. And then, you know, somehow in all of this, Sherrod Brown in Ohio gets forgotten a lot. And I think, as red as Ohio has gotten in recent years, he’s running a really strong campaign. It’s very local. It’s focused a lot on issues related to data centers. And I think that he’s kind of the sleeper to get us over the finish line.

Sargent: Let’s just assume for now that Georgia is almost certainly going to stay in the Democratic camp. And let’s just also assume that North Carolina Democrats are going to win there. It really does look like Roy Cooper’s going to win. Michael Whatley’s challenge just doesn’t appear strong enough, and Roy Cooper’s well liked in the state and so forth. So that means Democrats have to flip three out of Ohio, Maine, Texas, and Alaska.

There was a time when I would have felt better about Maine than I do now. I think Troy Jackson really doesn’t appear to me to be a strong candidate yet. Maybe he can kind of grow into it, I hope, as you say, that he sort of codes for voters as a generic Dem. I don’t know if that’ll happen, but I really hope so. If you had to pick right now, which three out of Ohio, Maine, Texas, and Alaska would you say Democrats are going to win, if they are?

Legacki: Alaska, Ohio, and Maine. And I actually have a very different take than you do on Maine.

Sargent: OK.

Legacki: Which is that—and part of the reason that I was more in favor of Janet Mills than I was of Graham Platner—is that the worst-case scenario for Susan Collins running this campaign is that it is a referendum on her and whether or not she has been an appropriate check on Donald Trump.

The Graham Platner campaign obviously came with a lot of baggage that would have allowed her to make, I think, the story more about him. And it would have allowed her to make this election more of a choice. I think—having been in this position myself, working for Claire McCaskill in 2012—the worst possible person for Susan Collins to run against is a generic Democrat, right?

And so even if he’s not the world’s strongest campaigner, I think that if he and, like, Democratic outside groups are able to make the Maine election a referendum on Susan Collins and Donald Trump, there’s a very good chance we win there.

Sargent: All right, so you’re thinking Texas is probably the one that’s less likely to flip out of those four.

Legacki: Yeah. And it’s not meant to be any sort of knock on Talarico. He’s running a great campaign, he’s doing everything he needs to. It’s just that Texas is such a big state, it is so expensive to run there. I think it is just inherently the hardest of the three states to win in.

Sargent: Yeah, I think that’s right. And Ohio is going to be really tough, though, let’s face it. I mean, this is a state that Trump won by a very sizable margin in 2024. And I think Alaska is something everybody’s sleeping on in a way. But it does seem possible. It does seem like Sherrod Brown is running a strong enough campaign, and the numbers are bad enough for Trump in red states, that make a pickup in Ohio actually possible.

So you can see a path through the races that you just identified, and it basically goes something like this: Sherrod Brown runs a strong campaign all the way through, and Trump’s terrible numbers just make it possible to eke it out. Troy Jackson runs a generically Democratic campaign in Maine, and they manage to turn it into a referendum on Susan Collins and Donald Trump. And Alaska happens without anybody looking, right?

Legacki: Honestly, it might. And the thing about Ohio that I think people are sleeping on a little bit is that you’ve got both a governor’s race and a Senate race this year. And on the governor side, they’ve got Amy Acton versus Vivek Ramaswamy. Acton is also running a great campaign. Ramaswamy is also running a terrible campaign.

And so I think increasingly it’s hard to see any scenarios in which Republican voters in Ohio are excited about turning out and Democratic voters are unenthusiastic. And so I think those factors lend themselves to kind of a perfect storm in Ohio, of Democrats eking one out there.

Sargent: Well, we have two new forecasts that pretty much bear out what we’re saying in this conversation. The Fifty Plus One forecast has Dems very narrowly favored to retake the Senate, at 55 percent probability. Nate Silver’s new forecast has it at 57 percent. I will tell you, I look at those numbers, Caitlin, and I say to myself, well, OK, I am right to think that everything’s on a knife’s edge here. Like, at first you look at the numbers and you say, OK, well, we’re favored. But, you know, those are incredibly, incredibly close odds, and everything could just flip like that.

Legacki: Yeah, it’s a coin flip. And I think the thing that nobody is really talking about or focused on is the fact that Republican Party committees and outside groups have about twice as much money as Democrats. And you know, Democrats are raising a ton of money, the campaigns are outraising their Republican opponents. But when you’re looking at a disparity of about six hundred and fifty million to three seventy-five, or whatever Democrats have, that’s a big difference. And I think that that is something that right now is the one thing that Democrats aren’t crushing. And that could be the difference-maker.

Sargent: It absolutely could. You can see in the fundraising appeals from some of these candidates that they really see that as well.

Well, Caitlin, let’s close on the comic relief here. It has to do with Iran, and I think this really underscores the degree to which Trump’s terrible numbers and Republicans’ difficult spot is rooted in the Iran war, as well as a few other related things. Michele Tafoya, the Republican candidate for Senate, had this to say about prices and the Iran war. Listen.

Michele Tafoya (voiceover): I think right now, at least, just kind of keeping a stiff upper lip. Maybe you take one less trip to Starbucks, and so that gas goes a little further until this thing is over and these gas prices come back down again. Let’s just try to be patriots about this

Sargent: Well, Caitlin, there you have it. I think what that actually shows is that these Republican candidates all have one other big liability, which is they’re not allowed to seek any distance from Trump. They have to defend everything he does as absolutely perfect, to the point where they actually have to say, “Screw you,” to the voters, in order to sustain their hagiography for Trump.

Legacki: I haven’t seen “suck it up” as a winning message before, but you never know.

Sargent: You never know. Caitlin Legacki, it was really awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Legacki: Thanks for having me.

Alice Black (Emmy Rossum), the young agent listening to Nora’s story, was formerly a Brooklyn homicide detective in an abusive relationship with Marshall (Jake Lacy), a colleague in the precinct and her childhood sweetheart. On one occasion, he beat her so badly she ended up in the hospital. She told her commanding officer, and rumors spread, but the department did not reprimand or discipline Marshall; instead Alice was shunned as disloyal, as a liar. Doubly traumatized by the abuse and by the department’s rejection of her, Alice has started a new life as a fed, aspiring to become an agent for the sex crimes unit.

When she and Marshall cross paths on a case—they’re working a PD-FBI collaboration on a string of murders—he is apologetic, cowed, even meek in his interactions with her. He invites her to come see his sick mother. He seems, to all outward appearances, like a good guy. She agrees, but the sentimental scene quickly turns sour. His mother berates Alice for lying to try to ruin her son’s career, and Alice storms to the door. “She just wants to know that I’m gonna be okay,” Marshall pleads in the soft, chastened tones we’ve come to expect from him, “and she wants you to know that I’ve changed.” Alice, enraged, replies, “You changed things? What’d you change? You got a new coat? What? You got new pants? New haircut?”

And then Marshall really does change. “Please stop for a second,” he whisper-shouts. His hands raise to the sides of his head, his fingers tensed, grabbing air. “Stop making jokes!” Things unravel from there, Marshall’s pretense of friendly détente vanishes, he chases her, she pulls a gun on him. He tried to play it cool, but in that moment, Alice saw, and we saw, the truth. He wanted to hit her. Furious, one of the best new shows of the year, is about what it’s like to be one of the women who make men like Marshall so angry. And what kind of rage lies in them.

Furious, created by Elizabeth Meriwether, is about the systems through which men abuse women and girls, as well as the systems through which they get away with it. Sometimes those systems are occult bureaucracies and complicated conspiracies, but often, we see, there’s really no system at all but the patriarchy. The villainous men of this show—domestic abusers, biased bosses, sex traffickers, dirty lawyers—get away with their crimes by being bold enough to commit them in the first place, and they rely on the reflexive fear or complacency or even sympathy of their witnesses to protect them. It’s a world in which it’s perfectly natural for a man’s desires and impulses to put him afoul of the law, but unnatural for a woman to try to hold him accountable.

At the center of the show, though, are three women who are ready to try. There’s Alice, abused, brilliant, but struggling through both her PTSD and the stigma she still carries, even at a new agency, to be taken seriously. There’s Nora, her reluctant mentor, whose career has been held back by workplace sexism, workplace racism, and the aforementioned systems that prevent her from ever really truly getting to the bad guys. “You think you’re ever gonna catch anyone who matters,” she asks Alice, by way of welcoming her to the profession.

Alice and Nora find each other in pursuit of a third wronged woman. In the show’s opening scenes, we see a man—an heir to the wealthy Easton family—obviously drugged and hurt, desperately crawling through his hallway. He is quickly subdued by a diminutive, even cheery, young woman with violent bangs and a sequined shoulder bag. As he lays in agony on his staircase, she injects him with what we eventually learn is a fatal dose of fentanyl. But she snuggles up beside him as he breathes his last. Gazing into his eyes, her brow furrows. “I don’t really like listening to you,” she confides to him, and then his eyes glaze over.

As Alice quickly surmises, Easton’s murder is not an isolated event. He is, instead, the second in what will soon be a line of men, all killed in the same way by the same woman. That emergent serial killer is Catherine Grace (Lola Petticrew). She was trafficked as a child, raped and abused by countless men, and now, she’s methodically wiping out her abusers, specifically the ones she thinks are connected to the death of her childhood friend. We spend as much time onscreen with her as we do our law enforcement leads, and one of the show’s most obvious, but most subtly performed tricks, is getting us to understand the three of them as allies, despite their cat-and-mouse antagonism. Neither Alice nor Nora represents or even ever fully wields the power of their institutions; Catherine is never the real villain.

Furious is the third show Elizabeth Meriwether has created in the past four years, following 2022’s The Dropout and 2025’s Dying for Sex. All three series, to start, are ten times funnier than they have any right to be. For as ghastly as Furious can be, it’s filled with actors who have intuitive comic timing, and characters who make each other laugh. When Alice admits to Nora that she hooks up with men and asks them to get violent with her, Nora says, “You think I’ve never asked someone to smack me around a little in the throes of a passionate embrace? You think I’ve never let someone take a few whacks at this piñata?” Both of them laugh. The fifth episode of the show—alternating between Alice’s tense undercover operation and Danny’s slapstick interrogation of Catherine’s friend and possible fiancé Alden—is equal parts Silence of the Lambs and The Pink Panther. When Danny tells Alden that he suspects Catherine may have murdered his mother, Alden replies, “Nobody’s perfect.”

Furious also shares with The Dropout and Dying for Sex a common focus on the unruly, even contradictory feelings of underestimated women. And, in that, it is committed to a patient and unwavering focus on the texture of their experience. Nora sings Meat Loaf at karaoke; Catherine preps for murder by bedazzling pictures of her victims and dancing around in her room to Rihanna’s “We Found Love.” The shows are not just about what happens to these women, but what it feels like, how it happens to them as particular, eccentric individuals. Each series is an improvised dance between these women in extremis and the faceless institutions—Silicon Valley, the health care industry, the justice system—to which they are either invisible or a nuisance.

None of that would matter, though, if Meriwether didn’t have the genius for casting that she has. Amanda Seyfried, Michelle Williams, and Jenny Slate have all delivered career-best performances under her care. In Furious, there is, likewise, an embarrassment of riches: prestige TV veteran Emmy Rossum, stage actor and award-winning audiobook narrator Quincy Tyler Bernstine, and ferocious up-and-coming Irish actor Lola Petticrew. Each performance is so tenderly crafted and full of life—not one of these actors takes the available route of stoic gloom, the path of any number of raincoat-bedecked traumatized detectives and murderers before them. Abuse, violence, inequity have made these women strange, unpredictable, unable to play along and conform to the world around them. And that makes them spellbinding to watch onscreen—three weird sisters.

Furious is about the inescapability of bad guys and the labor the women—and decent men—around them have to perform in order to counterbalance or even appease them. It’s not enough that they’re there, it’s that they need things from the people they are most likely to abuse or exploit. A recurring theme of the series is men asking our three heroines things that make them uncomfortable. Nora’s supervisor asks her to drop a case to protect a powerful friend; Marshall asks Alice to call the lieutenant and tell him that the abuse allegations are lies; Marshall asks Alice to get back together; as she’s seducing one of her targets, he asks Catherine to sign an NDA. Even the “good” guys can’t help it: Both Alice and Catherine receive lovelorn proposals from their male friends (Scoot McNairy and Steve Way, respectively) at, or near, their lowest moments. Malevolent, dismissive, oblivious.

The obvious comparison for Furious is Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Killing Eve, another series about a fucked-up female friendship plot between a cop and a murderer. But Furious is not a violent romance between two women on opposite sides of the law. The comparison that feels more apt is The Wire. Both shows are interested in the ways all parties concerned are caught up in the hypocrisy of a law enforcement bureaucracy that can’t—or perhaps is not even designed to—enforce the law. Both live inside that structural disappointment. Alice and Nora work quickly and competently to solve their case but are stymied by buffoonishness and corruption at every turn; Catherine knows that becoming a serial killer is the only way for her to extract justice for herself or her friend. Good intentions are the decadent luxury of the few agents who aren’t primarily concerned with covering their own asses—it’s easy to see why Alice and Nora might find kinship with Catherine, another woman whose intentions and interiority don’t matter in even the slightest bit to those with power over them. It is, to say the least, infuriating.

It’s a story that today’s Democrats would love to rerun, and which Republicans fear to repeat. On the surface, the conditions seem similar: President Donald Trump’s approval ratings are nearly 20 points underwater; the national average for the price of gas is more than $4 per gallon; and the war in Iran is little liked by the public.

But it’s unlikely that Democrats will see the kind of blue wave they experienced two decades ago, even with favorable conditions. In 2006, Democrats netted six new Senate seats and gained 31 seats in the House of Representatives. It’s hard to imagine such a sweeping victory this November, in part because there are fewer competitive swing seats than there have been in elections past.

In the House, this is partially due to partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts. Republicans are particularly skilled in this arena: According to the Cook Political Report, there was a 70 percent drop in swing seats in states with GOP redistricting control between 1997 and 2023. These fights have only become more rabid, with a slate of states undertaking mid-decade redistricting efforts in response to urgings from Trump—a practice recently empowered by the Supreme Court’s decision diluting the power of racial minority voters.

“Redistricting was a factor in our elections 20 years ago, but the parties have gotten better at drawing the lines, and have reduced the number of seats that are reasonably within reach for for each party,” said Nathan Gonzales, the editor and publisher of Inside Elections, a nonpartisan election analysis site.

But there is also an increasingly large gulf between the two parties on the ideological spectrum, and blue-state Republicans and red-state Democrats are less likely to be elected on a federal level. Members of Congress are voting in line further to the left or the right than they have been in previous years. And even though fewer voters are identifying themselves as either Democrats or Republicans, they are also less willing to consider a candidate from the party they ideologically oppose.

“Today the parties want to build very different worlds, and in 2006 they wanted to build worlds that were different, but not as different as they are today,” said Lynn Vavreck, a political science and communications professor at UCLA. “In 2006, if you were a voter who didn’t have a strong party allegiance, you were better able to entertain a vote for one side or the other side.”

In 2026, however, a Democratic-leaning voter casting a ballot for a Republican candidate would signal support for Trump’s most controversial policies, such as the surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in blue cities. Conversely, a more conservative voter who might have been able to swallow their dislike of Democrats in 2006 to express their displeasure with the war in Iraq might be less likely to do so today.

“The parties are far apart and it’s harder for voters to swing, and that might limit the losses, and that’s really the reason that nobody is really predicting a 31 seat swing in 2026,” said Vavreck.

In 2006, Democrats’ dramatic victories were in part the result of a “snowball effect” in seemingly unrelated issues with Republicans turned into political poison, including a series of scandals that plagued GOP members of Congress—resulting in the resignation of four members of Congress leading up to the 2006 elections, and the reelection losses of another three. Similarly, accusations of sexual harassment and assault have upended some House races this year, and domestic violence allegations against Representative Max Miller have put his seat in play for Democrats. (Serious accusations against prominent politicians this year are not limited to Republicans: California gubernatorial candidate Eric Swalwell and Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner both ended their campaigns after being accused of rape.)

Even if some Democratic candidates have flaws that on the surface make them weaker candidates, it’s possible that the frustration with the president and Republicans will bubble over at the ballot box, as it did in 2006.

“There were Republicans in 2006 who were excited about the opposition research that they had on Democratic candidates, but voters weren’t willing to listen,” said Gonzales. “Those attack messages were falling flat because voters were determined that change was more important.”

Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont who served as chair of the Democratic National Party during 2006 elections, believes that Trump will be an even greater drag on the Republican Party in 2026 than President George W. Bush was 20 years ago. Trump’s election in 2024 was a sign of how voters wanted change “in the worst way,” argued Dean, but now he believes many have buyer’s remorse.

“I think it’s not so much that people want to change to the Democrats. It’s just that they’re very unhappy with the status quo. It’s gotten worse, not better, since Trump has been president,” said Dean.

Even without Trump’s relative unpopularity, Republicans would be facing unfavorable political conditions this year. The president’s party typically does poorly in the first midterm elections after he enters office. Of the nine Senate elections that are considered to be competitive this year, three are held by Democrats, and the remaining six by Republicans. Democrats have a solid chance of flipping Senate seats in North Carolina, Alaska, Maine, Ohio, Iowa, and Texas. Many analysts give Democrats even better odds of gaining control of the House.

It’s an open question whether these headwinds will benefit Democrats on the state level. In 2006, the blue wave didn’t just apply to the chambers of Congress, but to statehouses as well. Before the midterm elections, there were 22 Democratic governors and 28 Republicans; afterwards, those numbers were reversed. Democrats also won 300 state legislative seats across the country that year.

But where voters wanted to send a message on their displeasure with American involvement in Iraq in 2006, the frustration with the war in Iran is more connected to cost-of-living issues. Preelection polling in 2006 found that the Iraq war was the top issue for voters, whereas recent polling has shown that the state of the economy is the priority for voters ahead of this November’s election. There are warning signs for Republicans today about Trump’s handling of the economy. According to a Politico poll, 41 percent of Trump voters who do not identify with the MAGA movement believe the rising cost of living is Trump’s biggest failure.

Republicans have often tried to capitalize on the “culture war” issues of a given era, and in this cycle, they are working to tie Democrats to socialism, particularly given the success of progressive candidates such as Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. Whether those attacks stick could determine the behavior of voters in the very few remaining swing states.

“If voters are focused on the economy, inflation, cost of living, then Democrats are going to do very well. But if voters are focused on the Democratic Socialists of America and socialism, and whether they like socialism or not, then Republicans are going to do well and maybe hold on to both the House and the Senate,” said Gonzales.

As in earlier iterations, the latest round of demands to repudiate all things (smeared as) “woke” is best understood as a desire to delegitimize opposition, brought about by a real challenge: the left building power. This time, that challenge arises from a few meaningful electoral victories by democratic socialists and their allies, which, going into the midterms and the next presidential election, have activated those who see their job in politics as protecting the Democratic Party from itself.  Rather than enter headfirst into a legitimate political struggle with the candidates to their left, rather than have a fight over substantive differences, some Democrats have instead decided to pin their problems on the rhetorical—hence the turn on “woke.” What started as shitposting—“Woke 1.0” etc.—is being used as a tool with which to discipline the left. It is depressing to see elected officials who have benefited from this leftward shift, including Ocasio-Cortez, indulge that nonsense.

Those wielding this tool, engaging in what we are condemned to nonsensically call “anti-wokeism,” are using “woke” mostly as a way of casting anyone challenging their power as being outside reasonable debate, as illegitimate. Dismissing “woke” is a way of dismissing those people, without wading into the dirty work of explaining in public that you consider them your lessers, as beneath consideration. In that regard, this is not so much a backlash as a revival. The origins of “woke” as a descriptor and where it came from help make that plain.

When Blues legend Huddie Ledbetter, also known as Lead Belly, was recorded performing his extensive repertoire in 1938, he closed one song with an advisory to Black people going south: “Stay woke, keep your eyes open.” The song, “Scottsboro Boys,” was inspired by the unjust criminal punishment of a group of Black teenagers and young men, who were falsely accused of raping two young white women and were sentenced to death—a case still unfolding when Ledbetter gave that advisory. White Alabamans at the time considered the case a sign of their advancement: After all, they held trials, not lynchings. Scottsboro is synonymous with the ways white supremacy structures and reinforces the criminal legal system in the United States. Ledbetter himself had faced and survived prison, in part through his music. All this is what prompted Ledbetter’s warning, 90 years before the same forces were, as in Scottsboro, exposed for the world to see after police stole the lives of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. 

I do not expect anyone to remember that history, especially when the anti-woke turn relies on deliberately misrepresenting very recent history, one that its proponents lived and worked through. But if Woke 1.0 is whatever we say it is, it may as well be Scottsboro and Lead Belly’s song.

The anti-woke are pointing at something real, but the crisis is inside their own heads. They keep revisiting allegedly crazyyyy things people said in 2020—but not what actually happened in 2020. Nor are they are interested in whether negative consequences, if any, occurred as a result of this pandemic of people stating their beliefs.

My colleague Perry Bacon has astutely corrected the record: “There is no such thing as Woke 1.0, and it would be almost impossible to define such a time, era, or set of positions.” Those stirred by current events to recite a litany of “woke” sins tend to turn to the same few examples as evidence of how the left went “too far,” but the demand to abolish the police is always on the list.

It’s true: That demand was made. So where did those abolished officers wind up? They’re still out there, still killing Black people, and now making way for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to abduct immigrants. Fine, fine, cops weren’t abolished—but they were defunded, right? Well, where, exactly? A number of cities pledged to cut police funding; most of them ultimately increased police budgets. A 2025 study of nearly 300 major U.S. cities found that in Republican-dominated cities, police funding significantly increased after the protests in 2020. Police were not fully defunded anywhere—or, at least not anywhere outside the anti-woke imagination. 

So what did happen? A dam broke, and the routine police murder of Black people mobilized some white people, and that multiracial mobilization was scary to other white people. There was a groundswell of popular support for abolitionist projects, inspiring new connections between abolition and other social movements. For a moment, the summer of 2020 made people consider whether policing could ever keep us safe. The ongoing anti-woke revival is, in truth, an effort to make sure none of that ever happens again.

Each time the anti-woke crowd revive themselves, it is not because anything was stolen from them, but because they feel as if someone has challenged their presumed ownership. This is, as ever, an expression of white power, in particular an expression of its fears that it is losing its historical dominance. That is what happened in 2020. It is not complicated, even as it takes on other forms. It is MAGA crowds holding mass-produced signs reading “mass deportations now.” It is endless iterations of the same conspiracy theories about nonwhite usurpers and invaders stealing elections. It is Southern white prosecutors in Scottsboro.

“Woke” remains a live target across the political spectrum because white dominance is too. It is sad to see the same refrain play out in 2026, when, far from having succeeded to “excess,” the movement was denied most of what it demanded, by Republicans and Democrats alike, who now insist that the movement did win. Why would they want to rewrite events to grant their opposition a win? Well, why bother saying you stand for something, when you might be told you have to stand for something else later? It is safer to campaign in opposition to what was never achieved; then you need only win in the mind. It is safer to fight a phantom. As the movement reminded us in 2020, there is no shortage of ghosts.

Cutting taxes on the rich is a uniquely unpopular idea. Since 1939, Gallup has been asking, “Do you think our government should or should not redistribute wealth by heavy taxes on the rich”? In 1939, 54 percent said “should not” and only 35 percent said “should,” even though the Great Depression was raging and the New Deal was well along. Since 1939, though, the should nots have been falling and the shoulds have been rising. Today, a 52 percent majority say the government should redistribute wealth by taxing the rich heavily, and a 47 percent minority say it should not. (The current vogue for democratic socialism isn’t happening in a vacuum.)

If you put the question in a manner more appetizing to moderates—do the rich pay their fair share?—61 percent say no, according to an April Pew Research Center poll. Fully 81 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaners also say no, along with a not-inconsiderable 41 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaners.

Given these realities, the White House, if it endorses a tax cut, will try to sell it as a middle-class tax cut. The Democrats have tax-cut proposals of their own that target lower-income people. I’ve explained previously that I prefer the alternative approach of cutting payroll taxes at the low end and eliminating the Social Security tax ceiling at the high end. But earlier this month my New Republic colleague Monica Potts made a convincing case that the Democrats’ tax-cut gambit has run its course. So maybe the priority ought to be protecting what revenues we have left and reducing the deficit wherever possible so the bond market doesn’t rage out of control. No tax cut will help with that.

On Tuesday, National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett and Larry Kudlow, who held that post during Trump’s first term, discussed on Fox Business the two tax proposals Trump is contemplating. One is to index the capital gains tax, and the other is to exempt from capital gains tax home sales below $2 million. (Currently the exemption goes up to $500,000.) The first of these is a more obvious giveaway to the rich. The second mimics the Obama administration’s strategy of shielding the haute bourgeoisie when it hikes taxes on the rich. Biden tried a version of this and failed, producing no major tax increase on the rich, because his Democratic congressional majority was too timid to impose one. In Trump’s version, the context for cutting taxes for the haute bourgeoisie is a tax cut for richer folks, too.

The dialog between Kudlow and Hassett conveyed that particular air of unreality characteristic of Fox World. (It was on Kudlow’s Fox Business show, which is called Kudlow.) Kudlow began by noting that the Congressional Budget Office had just projected this year’s budget deficit to be $2.1 trillion, up from February’s estimate of $1.9 trillion. “The budget deficit for the first ten months of the year is $1.8 trillion,” Kudlow said. “I’m not sure I understand why.”

Kudlow was baffled because he actually believes, contrary to 45 years’ evidence, the GOP’s propaganda that tax cuts pay for themselves. They do not. The tax cuts in last year’s budget reconciliation bill, for instance, slashed federal revenue by an estimated $570 billion. In addition, the Supreme Court made Trump give back about $166 billion in tariff revenue, of which Trump’s already rebated about $100 billion. According to The Wall Street Journal’s Theo Francis and Celia Bernhardt, these rebates have been so big that they’re juicing the stock market.

Anybody who follows the business news should know all this.

Kudlow asked Hassett to explain this mystery of a persistently high deficit. Hassett explained the bit about tariff rebates. He also complained that the CBO isn’t factoring in the Trump administration’s reduction of the civil service workforce by 300,000. The real figure is 155,000, according to an April report by the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service. If we assume, very generously, that Trump’s unloaded another 45,000 civil servants since April, then Hassett’s estimate is still off by one-third. The budget-hawk nonprofit Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says that a 10 percent reduction in federal employment will save $350 billion over 10 years. The Partnership for Public Service says that Trump cut 12 percent. Let’s once again be generous and call the federal workforce cut 15 percent. That’s $525 billion over 10 years, or $53 billion per year—peanuts compared to the cost of Trump’s tax cut, which Hassett didn’t mention, or the cost of Trump’s tariff rebates, which he did.

In Fox World, as opposed to the real world, it is not thought illogical to follow a lamentation about government insolvency with a plea for tax cuts. Kudlow cited a McLaughlin & Associates poll that said 62 percent of voters approved of indexing the capital gains tax to inflation. The idea, which Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, has pushed in Congress, possesses obvious appeal; why should you pay taxes on inflation? Income taxes are already indexed to avoid “bracket creep,” which is when inflation pushes you into a higher marginal-tax bracket. Why not index capital gains taxes, too?

Because capital gains are already taxed at a lower rate than labor income. The top capital gains rate is 20 percent. The top labor-income rate (which is also too low) is 37 percent. Get back to me when you’ve eliminated that differential—and when you’ve also eliminated the “angel of death” loophole that lets assets escape capital gains tax when passed on to heirs—and we can talk. But if we ever do index capital gains like we do income-tax brackets, we’ll have to figure out some way to capture lost revenue—because remember that $2.1 trillion deficit? You don’t want to make it $3 trillion. According to the Yale Budget Lab, indexing capital gains would cost $170 billion over 10 years if it applied only to assets purchased after 2025, and almost $1 trillion if it applied to all assets.

Then there’s the distributional impact. People making less than about $100,000 would receive virtually no benefit, according to the Yale model (and would likely pay more income tax to cover the lost revenue). People making more than about $3 million, on the other hand, would save $350,000 in taxes. If McLaughlin & Associates had bothered to furnish voters with that information, its poll results would have been quite different.

Kudlow also said participants in the McLaughlin & Associates poll “probably want a break on the capital gains tax for the sale of a home, maybe up to $2 million.” The poll did indeed show that 52 percent of voters wanted to increase the capital gains exemption on home sales from the current $500,000 to $1 million. But the poll made no mention of exempting home sales all the way up to $2 million, which would affect a small minority of all home sales. Bloomberg’s O’Donnell and Reilly pointed out that according to the National Association of Realtors, only the richest 15 percent of homeowners—a group already wealthier than the general population—would benefit from bumping the exemption up to $2 million. The other 85 percent avoid capital gains tax already through the very generous $500,000 exemption.

Hassett expressed interest in these two policy proposals but didn’t commit Trump to them. Kudlow, however, said he’d spoken to Trump already. “He liked the idea of the indexing, he liked the idea of a bigger exemption,” Kudlow said.

If Trump endorses these tax proposals, he’ll say they’re an affordability play and argue that lowering capital gains tax will encourage more people to sell their houses, thereby lowering prices. But Democrats should answer that these are just two more Trump giveaways to the wealthy, most especially the indexing of capital gains. There are many ways to reduce the cost of housing: zoning for higher density where appropriate; investing in infrastructure; eliminating tariffs on lumber, steel, and aluminum to lower construction costs; subsidizing low-income housing; and so on. Throwing money at millionaires and billionaires is the most regressive way conceivable to lower housing costs, and there’s no great reason to believe it would even work.

Judge Cooper still has to review the board’s plan for the center’s closure, which they have until next week to provide.

The board also voted to put Trump’s name back on the center, circumventing the law stating “no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas” by putting “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump,” somewhere on the building.

“This morning’s decision to close the center and the surprise agenda item to put Donald Trump’s name back on the building was more of the same,” said Democratic Ohio Representative Joyce Beatty, who successfully sued the center in May. “This latest development is a transparent effort to circumvent the court’s ruling, and flies in the face of the statutes that Congress passed. I will continue to fight for this treasured national monument.”

This is just one of the many useless aesthetic overhauls that President Trump has taken on during his vastly unpopular second tenure—from the Reflecting Pool, to the East Wing of the White House, to the new ballroom. His takeover of the Kennedy Center, attacking it for being too “woke,” did real damage to the institution, as ticket sales plummeted and the center’s cultural legitimacy suffered.

“My word: Just think about how low his self esteem is that he needs this so badly? Most human beings would have felt the shame of all this,” journalist Chuck Todd wrote on X. “I know this isn’t a new take. But it doesn’t make it any less sad or pathetic.”

The New York Times reports that the Department of Homeland Security opened probes into labor unions, a climate change organization, socialist groups, and other organizations to find out if they had aided protesters, whom the government called “violent opportunists and agitators,” against the administration’s crackdown in Minnesota.

According to government documents, these investigations were invasive, gathering information on individuals and groups who have never been suspected of committing crimes. For example, over three years of financial records were subpoenaed from the Sunrise Movement, a climate activism group, and the Communications Workers of America, the labor union that represents the staff at The New Republic.

The government also sought three years’ worth of wire transfers from the Service Employees International Union, the U.S.’s biggest health care union, saying they were inquiring about “domestic terrorist financing.” Those time periods predate the 2025 launch of the government’s “Operation Metro Surge” in Minnesota.

In addition, government agents began extensively spying on protesters and organizers at libraries, parks, churches, and online meetings, recording license plate numbers as well as names and proceedings. They also infiltrated Signal group chats, attempting to learn about protests and their targets’ political opinions.

All of this suggests some kind of ulterior motive on the part of the Trump administration. The DHS investigations seem to imply that the government was trying to find or manufacture criminal activity based on dissenting political speech. Federal prosecutors even went so far as to show a grand jury a PowerPoint slide alleging a conspiracy to obstruct immigration agents by 18 groups, including the AFL-CIO, the country’s largest labor federation.

While none of the groups targeted by the inquiry have faced criminal charges, the government in June charged 15 people with interfering with immigration agents. The government claims the defendants are part of the left-wing antifascist movement, or antifa. Instead of going after the crimes committed by its own agents, the Trump regime wants to charge the people who protest those crimes.

“You received $10,000 from Congressman Miller’s PAC this election cycle. Your campaign spokesman told Politico you have no plans to return the money. Now Miller, of course, has been accused of abusing his ex-wife and his daughter—allegations he denies,” Bash asked Lawler on CNN Thursday afternoon. “Why have you decided not to return the $10,000?”

“Well, first of all, there’s been a lot of allegations leveled. I know Max very well. I’ve talked to him personally over the last two years about this very difficult family situation—it’s tragic. I don’t think anybody disagrees about that,” Lawler said. “But this is something that should play out in family court. I think the fact that some in the media and my Democratic colleagues have tried to turn it into a spectacle and,
you know, use this situation for political points is wrong.”

He then turned focus away from Bash’s question and onto his upcoming midterm opponent Cait Conley, who took money from former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer in 2017. Spitzer resigned in 2008 after he was caught in a prostitution ring.

“Okay, so I’m asking you specifically about Max Miller ... you said you’ve talked to him a lot privately,” Bash pushed. “It sounds like you’re saying that you’re not returning the donations because you get into that because you believe him?”

Miller has been accused of holding a gun to his wife’s head, scalding her with boiling water, breaking his two-year-old daughter’s collarbone, and using drugs. Miller has denied all of it, referring to the boiling water specifically as a “playful incident.”

When asked about the allegations, Lawler was defensive. “Look, this is a private family matter that unfortunately has spilled out into the public. It should be adjudicated in family court. Max has been accused, Max has also made accusations against his ex-wife. It is tragic,” he said, refusing—like nearly every Republican in Congress—to seriously condemn the allegations against Miller and call for his resignation.

“Obviously, I don’t condone any level of abuse, but ultimately there’s been nothing that has been corroborated here, which is part of the reason why Max is continuing to run for reelection.”

The most full-throated GOP rebuke of Miller came from his father-in-law, Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno. “He is a danger to my daughter, and I hold my breath every minute he has custody of my granddaughter,” Moreno wrote on X. “If there are any basic standards of character required to hold elected office, Max Miller fails them.”

Virtually every Republican except Emily Moreno’s father has deferred to the House Ethics Committee, refusing to call on Miller’s resignation, even as Senator Moreno calls him someone who needs “serious psychological help.”

“This is the typical Washington media game where it’s always: An allegation comes up, you must return the money,” Lawler said. “It’s the typical game. Everybody plays, and it doesn’t actually do anything to further the situation. If there’s evidence that Max did something, then obviously there should be a thorough investigation of that. But thus far, there’s been nothing to verify any of the claims that have been leveled. I think it is a tragic family situation. We all know people who have gone through nasty divorces.”

Lawler didn’t say whether he thought this was simply a “nasty divorce” or what precisely was “tragic” about the family situation. Then again, he didn’t have to.

“We make sure every ship, every crew, every captain has everything we can provide them at every single moment,” Hegseth said to reporters while on a visit to Panama. “Some deployments are longer than others and I have more respect and gratitude for those sailors than anybody. What they do in those high seas in those austere conditions with fewer port calls—it’s incredible.”

Multiple outlets, including the Military Times and Stars and Stripes, have reported low morale and mental health concerns among sailors as the Abraham Lincoln’s deployment stretches well beyond its initial end date in May. The aircraft carrier is reportedly experiencing water contamination, plumbing problems, disruptions in mail delivery, and food shortages, with pictures of meager, tasteless-looking meals going viral.

The situation has led to safety issues, exhaustion, and burnout among servicemembers, and multiple sailors have reportedly tried to jump overboard or otherwise harm themselves. Hegseth didn’t mention those reports Thursday, despite family members of crewmembers stationed aboard the ship explicitly raising them during heated town hall meetings last week with military leaders, including acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao. One spouse reportedly told officials at a meeting that her husband had messaged her earlier that day saying “he hopes he doesn’t wake up tomorrow.”

Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal wrote a letter to Hegseth Wednesday demanding answers about conditions on the Abraham Lincoln and to visit the ship.

“The Lincoln’s extended deployment raises broader questions about the Navy’s ability to sustainably generate carrier forces while preserving servicemember well-being, maintenance schedules, fleet readiness, and the capacity to respond to future contingencies,” Blumenthal wrote.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that the USS George Washington aircraft carrier will soon be deployed to the Persian Gulf from Japan to replace the Abraham Lincoln, which has been deployed for 250 days and hasn’t had a port call for a record 200 days. The change, which U.S. officials told the Journal is part of a previously scheduled rotation plan, will come as a long-awaited relief to the beleaguered sailors on the Lincoln.

Three U.S. officials told The Washington Post Thursday that the U.S. military had lost at least 45 Reaper drones. Each low-flying surveillance and attack drone costs between $30 million and $50 million to produce, depending on what type of sensor each machine carries, placing the potential total cost of the missing or destroyed Reapers at up to $1.3 billion.  

A fourth U.S. official told the Post that not all of the Reapers were shot down—some of them crashed after the operators’ connection to the drone failed. 

At the beginning of the war, there were approximately 185 Reapers in the U.S. military fleet, including 165 in the Air Force and 20 in the Marine Corps. Marines spokesperson Lt. Col. Joshua Benson said that none of the Marines’ Reaper drones had been lost. 

In May, Air Force Lt. Gen. David Tabor told the Senate that the number of remaining drones had fallen to roughly 135, noting he was “concerned” about the losses. 

Reaper drones join the growing list of weapons that the U.S. is shedding faster than it can replace. A report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies published in May estimated it will take until at least 2030 to restore the U.S. missile stockpile to pre-war levels, leaving a multi-year “window of vulnerability” for the United States in potential future conflicts. Since that study was published, the United States has only continued to execute military strikes, and Trump’s war against Iran has racked up a total estimated bill of more than $100 billion.

It’s been more than five months since Trump launched his military onslaught against Iran, and multiple reports have raised concerns that the United States is running out of weapons. Trump administration officials have denied the reports, even after they reportedly sent the president into a rage. 

Despite insisting that the U.S. weapons stockpile is far from depleted, the Trump administration has launched a desperate campaign to boost weapons manufacturing. 

Last week, Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg gave industry leaders three weeks to submit their plans to “drive significantly faster, more aggressive delivery schedules and/or increased production for critical capabilities.”

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said that the department was actively focused on boosting munitions acquisitions to provide “the weapons our warfighters need at the pace the threat demands,” but he claimed the effort predated Trump’s seemingly endless war. 

Now, his ex-wife Emily Moreno—daughter of GOP Senator Bernie Moreno—is suing him for exposing their daughter to online pedophiles earlier this month.

“Defendant Congressman Max Miller, and Miller’s lawyer, Defendant Aaron Minc of Defendant Minc LLC, recklessly published and disclosed to the world a nude image of the child depicting her genitalia,” Moreno’s lawyer, Subodh Chandra, wrote. “Faced with a mostly self-inflicted dumpster fire of public attention to his reputation for abusive behavior, Miller so desperately wanted to salvage his political job, that he recklessly and intentionally provided [his attorney Aaron Minc] a trove of documents and photos, indifferent about what they contained or how they were used.”

Miller’s own lawyer was accused of initially lying about “the seriousness of their offense,” before he admitted to releasing the pictures himself.

“Unfortunately, I missed the last three pages of a 40+ page document with sensitive content. It was completely unintentional and a mistake.... To be clear, this was completely my fault. I am solely responsible for what happened. I was the only person responsible for assembling, creating, reviewing, adding, deleting, redacting, or making any changes to the information and files that were in this folder,” Minc wrote days after the incident.

“Any parent—and any lawyer—knows the grave danger of posting nude photos of a toddler on the public web for pedophiles and bad actors to download,” Moreno’s lawyer continued. “They victimized an innocent child to score political points, and we intend to hold them fully accountable under federal and state law.”

This is just one of many, many fires for Miller. His father-in-law Senator Bernie Moreno has been virtually the only Republican to call for his resignation, saying he needed “serious psychological help.”

“He is a danger to my daughter, and I hold my breath every minute he has custody of my granddaughter,” Moreno wrote on X. “If there are any basic standards of character required to hold elected office, Max Miller fails them.” Miller also received a restraining order from his ex-girlfriend and former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham.

Miller has done his daughter—whose collarbone he’s already been accused of breaking—an incredible disservice, regardless of the outcome of this lawsuit. Even still, the entirety of GOP leadership from Trump to House Speaker Mike Johnson has stood steadfastly behind Miller as a House Ethics Committee investigation commences.

Staffers and legislators are using AI chatbots to write speeches and news releases, manage mail from constituents, draft questions for congressional hearings, and even draft amendments, The Washington Post reports. The Senate and House have cleared staffers to use ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, and Google’s Gemini, with the House also approving Claude. Last year, the House bought 6,000 Copilot licenses, encouraging staffers to use them.

Senators and representatives regularly use the services themselves. Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville asks ChatGPT questions about issues such as Medicare and Medicaid while driving across his home state of Alabama.

“It’s kind of like you can sit there and talk to an expert,” Tuberville told the Post. “You don’t know whether or not they’re 100 percent correct. But they put you on the right path.”

Republican Representative Mike Flood asked a chatbot where private equity was buying single-family homes while working on a bipartisan housing bill last year. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, who supports stricter regulations on tech companies, has used ChatGPT to look up demographic information.

Congressional staffers aren’t clear about if there are limits on using the bots. One staffer uses Copilot to draft bill amendments, while another fed all of his phone contacts and text messages going back years into Claude and told it to build a database of reporters, including what he pitched them, what they accepted, and what went badly. Claude also runs the communications budget of that congressional office, overseeing taxpayer-funded mailers and all ads sent to constituents.

That staffer isn’t sure what congressional rules allow for AI use.

“You’re still not supposed to put constituent data into AI,” he told the Post. “There are weird things around where the rules are. I don’t know all of them.”

In reality, Congress’s own rules are that AI can’t be used to make deepfakes, make personnel decisions, handle sensitive information such as constituent information, or finalize legislation. AI can be used to help draft a bill, but humans have the final review of it. And chatbots can be used to draft a response to a constituent, but aren’t allowed to be told who the constituent is.

Most of the staffers who spoke to the Post said they didn’t know these rules, and enforcing them is left to staffers self-policing or reporting their colleagues. This has already caused problems, such as when Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna proposed an amendment to a defense bill earlier this summer.

One of her staffers included a summary of the proposed change with the amendment, and the first line began with “increasing example specific factors. Identical to H.R. 100 (118th Congress).11:25 AM????Claude responded:”, which was clearly lifted from a chatbot. Until rules and enforcement are tightened, incidents like this, and worse, will continue, and the public might not ever know.

Donald Trump accused Harvard in March of violating civil rights laws by allowing a “hostile educational environment” for Jewish and Israeli students over the course of “several years.” Harvard denied the allegations and moved to dismiss the lawsuit.

In a new filing, U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns found that most of the incidents the Trump administration had cited all took place between 2023 and 2024, and the remaining three took place in March 2025—a full year before the complaint was filed.

“Without diminishing any concern arising from these occurrences, the court finds them, singly and collectively, to be too isolated and episodic to support a plausible inference that any institutionalized noncompliance with Title VI persists at Harvard to this day,” Stearns wrote.

The lawsuit was “devoid of any factual allegations plausibly establishing that any events that might be construed as evidence of noncompliance occurred after June 30, 2025,” he added.

The original lawsuit alleged that students were stopped from entering campus buildings by “antisemitic demonstrators” in 2023 and 2024, and that some Jewish students felt pressured into wearing baseball caps to hide their yarmulkes.

The federal government claimed this was evidence that Harvard had violated civil rights laws, and demanded the return of “billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies awarded to a discriminatory institution.” But clearly, the administration has failed to prove in court that the university has done anything wrong.

This is the latest blow to the president in his ongoing battle with the Ivy League school. Since the start of his second term, Trump has denounced Harvard as an example of an institution infecting American youth with liberal ideas and has attempted to freeze its federal funding.

In June 2025, Trump officials tried to prohibit Harvard from admitting international students before a judge stopped the plan. In September 2025, Harvard won a lawsuit against the administration after the latter froze billions in federal funds from the school. In that case, a federal judge said the administration had “used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”

This lawsuit was the second time the Trump administration has sued Harvard this year. In February, the Justice Department sued the school for allegedly not handing over its admissions records.

Inside Washington

The challenge Peggy Flanagan will face in Minnesota

If Democrats want any shot at taking back the Senate, they need to win the seat in Minnesota being vacated by retiring Democrat Tina Smith. Normally, this wouldn’t be a tough task: The party hasn’t had to worry about a Minnesota Senate seat in nearly 20 years. But a unique set of political crises in the state and a pro-choice Republican candidate could change that.

The progressive Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan won the Democratic primary on Tuesday night, edging out centrist Representative Angie Craig. Flanagan, endorsed by the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, will now face Republican Michele Tafoya, a former sports broadcaster who beat out a crowded field. In her victory speech, Flanagan started tying Tafoya to President Donald Trump’s unpopular agenda, which will likely be one of her main messages during the race. “Donald Trump has cost our state far too much already. And we are not about to give Donald Trump another loyal soldier like Michele Tafoya to take his orders and do his bidding,” Flanagan said. The DFL issued a statement emphasizing a high-profile Tafoya gaffe from March, when the Republican said that Americans need to “be patriots” about gas price spikes due to the Iran war—and that if they find their budgets stretched, they should “take one less trip to Starbucks.”

But despite that inauspicious start, Tafoya this week showed why she is likely the best shot Minnesota Republicans have had to take a Senate seat in decades. As outlets called the race in her favor, Tafoya sketched out a moderate campaign focused on the fraud scandal that has plagued Governor Tim Walz’s administration: “This isn’t about red versus blue. It’s common sense versus crazy. We will not reelect politicians who let criminals steal billions and treat accountability as optional. We deserve better, and it’s time we demand better,” Tafoya said in a statement after her win.

“Republicans are very happy to run against [Flanagan] because they think she owns the fraud issue,” said Steven Schier, a professor of political science at Carleton College. Fraud in state social safety net programs has been a major issue in Minnesota since 2020, and Trump’s administration has elevated reports of fraud to denigrate Somali-Americans and paint the state’s Democratic leadership as inept and corrupt. The main instance of fraud involved a nonprofit called Feeding Our Future, which stole $250 million worth of federal nutrition funds during the pandemic. There are a number of other social safety net fraud cases working their way through the courts. While the leader at the center of the Feeding Our Future case, Aimee Bock, is white, the Trump administration has highlighted the Somali-American backgrounds of others charged, often calling the Minnesota fraud allegations “Somali fraud” and using the story to boost anti-immigrant and anti-Somali sentiment.

By emphasizing Flanagan’s role as Walz’s lieutenant governor while these scandals transpired, Tafoya could appeal to frustrated suburban voters and independents. “There are two groups in the state that determine the direction of state elections: the group of political independents and the suburbs,” Schier said. “We know from anecdotal evidence that suburbanites are very upset with their money disappearing through fraud.”

Tafoya is also well positioned to win over suburban and independent voters because of her views on abortion. Tafoya has described herself as “pro-choice” multiple times, though she sought to align herself more with pro-life conservatives during the primary election. This pro-choice statement could end up being extremely helpful among suburban women voters.

“College educated suburban women are perhaps arguably the most important voting bloc there is in Minnesota,” said David Schultz, a professor of political science at Hamline University. He pointed to a town called Edina, a suburb of Minneapolis in Hennepin County. Around 20 years ago, Edina was solidly red, but has since become blue. “Tafoya needs to win in places like Edina,” Schultz said. The centrist women in those kinds of suburbs are deeply concerned by “family security issues,” he explained: school safety and quality, cost of living, and healthcare. “If [Tafoya] can talk partly about that and come across as at least a moderately pro-choice candidate,” he added, “that helps her a lot.”

The suburban ring counties around Hennepin and Ramsey will be crucial to watch, said Schier. Those counties—Washington, Dakota, Scott, Carver, Wright, Sherburn, and Anoka—have tended to be solidly Democratic, but could flip to Tafoya.

The last Republican to win a Senate seat in Minnesota was Norm Coleman, who served from 2003 to 2009 and was narrowly defeated by Al Franken in 2008. Coleman’s path to victory was unique. He served as mayor of St. Paul for eight years, which helped him pick up urban voters that would ordinarily lean Democratic. Experts also pointed to Arne Carlson as a useful example of a statewide Republican victory in Minnesota. Carlson served as governor from 1991 to 1999 and was both pro-choice and pro-LGBTQ rights. In 1994, the Republican Party denied him an endorsement over his pro-choice views, but he still won the primary and general elections in landslides.

While Tafoya seeks out suburban women, Flanagan will need to distance herself from the fraud scandal. One way she will do that will be shifting attention from state governance to federal issues, like Trump’s unpopularity and the ICE incursion into Minnesota earlier this year, dubbed Operation Metro Surge.

She’ll also lean on what state Democratic leaders and experts say was a successful primary. Schultz pointed to her success outside of the Twin Cities, where Flanagan outperformed Craig in areas where Democratic voters tend closer to the center. “She emerges out of this a stronger candidate than I think most people were thinking,” Schultz said. Flanagan also has a turnout advantage: The Democratic primary turnout was double that of the Republican turnout on Tuesday.

Polling so far puts Flanagan ahead. She was up seven points against Tafoya in a late May Impact Research poll. A June survey of 800 likely voters had a generic Democratic candidate up eight points against a generic Republican, with nine percent undecided. The Cook Political Report rates the race as “Likely Democratic.” Despite that, the race is still competitive, and could strain national Democratic resources in a cycle where the Senate map is tough for Democrats. “Even if Tafoya can’t win, the fact that the Democrats now have to defend a seat and worry about it—one that they normally don’t have to worry about—is a problem for them,” Shultz said.

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

Democrat Nate Willems, running for Iowa attorney general, is putting a populist spin on the traditional tough-on-crime talk for A.G. candidates. If elected, he announced this week, he’ll create a new enforcement unit to recoup cash from wage theft, which he said in an interview to the Iowa Capital Dispatch amounts to “ten times the amount of all other types of theft in the state of Iowa combined.” The unit will offer workers a “direct line” for reporting violations, and have a special focus on “chronic offenders.”

Buried beneath Wisconsin primary and consumer price index headlines on Wednesday, The New York Times published a disturbing report about Ecuadorean fishermen being attacked and killed in drone strikes, with their lawyer saying the drones were “deployed from a vessel manned by ‘gringos’ with American-flag patches.” Despite the Trump administration boasting of similar strikes on boats in the past, both the Pentagon and U.S. Coast Guard have disclaimed these attacks. The Times also points to flight data showing “that a maritime patrol plane—based out of a military base in El Salvador—flew in the direction of all three boats in the days before they were attacked. The pilots onboard spoke English with American accents, according to air traffic control communication recordings.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

In a brief for the Roosevelt Institute, Michael Madowitz outlines policies that could “reduce price volatility and maintain global stability” in the face of supply chain shocks like the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz. “Advanced economies need not import inflation when crises occur due to geopolitical conflict,” he writes. “We are once again seeing a real-time example of the case for strategic reserves, buffer stocks, and spare production capacity for even abundant commodities.”

The Center for American Progress publishes a new report by Michael Sozan and Ben Olinsky on Trump’s efforts to meddle in upcoming elections. They detail 15 specific tactics, including “installing election deniers in key government positions,” “gutting key agencies and essential election security programs,” “sharply curtailing voting by mail,” preparing to “purge” voters by “weaponizing federal databases and demanding personal voter information,” and more.

The Center for Biological Diversity celebrated California’s announcement of a rapid phaseout of the pesticide paraquat earlier this week. Vermont became the first state to ban paraquat in May. “California and other states are taking aggressive steps to protect people from this dangerous poison, but the EPA continues to spin a web of red tape to obscure paraquat’s well-documented harms,” said Nathan Donley, the organization’s environmental health science director. You can read TNR’s coverage of paraquat research, as well as state efforts to shield pesticide firms from cancer lawsuits, here and here.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Here’s Why That’s B.S.

Does anyone really think ICE can be trusted with those gloves?

Watch TNR’s Edie Olmsted unpack the hype around the agency’s new “humane” shock gloves, which Edie notes aren’t supposed to be used on “pregnant women, children, the elderly, or people with severe disabilities—in other words, people that ICE has demonstrated no qualms about detaining.”

Political Trivia Question of the Day

With David Crowley now officially nominated to seek the Wisconsin governor’s mansion: How many Black governors have there been in U.S. history, and can you name three? (Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

the first day of summer

the last day of my mother.

I loved being 28.

That was 56 years ago,

not as long ago

as the Inca civilization

or the death of Chaucer,

but now let us look at the future.

If I end up living

as long as my mother did,

the year will be 2037

a year in science fiction.

But why is the pasta water

taking so long to boil?

Last month, the White House touted a mid-year report from the Council on Criminal Justice as evidence of Trump’s public safety policies working to reduce crime. But a closer look at the report found that it doesn’t actually support the administration’s claims, NOTUS reported Thursday. 

In a press release published on July 29, the White House claimed that the four cities that saw the steepest drop in homicides in the first six months of the year were Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Memphis, and New Orleans—four cities where Trump deployed National Guard troops and federal agency officials “after Democrat leaders failed to act.”

But those cities didn’t see the steepest drops in homicides—and some of them weren’t even included in the original CCJ report. 

In reality, the cities that saw the biggest drops were Lincoln, Nebraska; Rochester, New York; and Little Rock, Arkansas. Washington saw the sixth steepest decline, and Los Angeles saw the seventeenth. Meanwhile, Memphis and New Orleans weren’t even mentioned in the CCJ report. 

The White House cited a separate article to support its claim about Memphis and New Orleans, but the author of that piece told NOTUS that the White House’s statement was “incorrect.”

Following a request for comment from NOTUS, the White House published yet another press release Tuesday featuring completely different statistics. This time, the Trump administration claimed that Washington and Memphis had seen the ninth and tenth largest drops in homicide, according to Axios’s analysis of a survey from the Major Cities Chiefs Association.

Neither report suggested that the downward trend in national homicide rates—which began in 2022—has anything to do with Trump’s policies. 

The Trump administration has continually fudged the numbers on the president’s public safety record in order to manufacture consent for a host of transgressions, from the National Guard troops that still occupy the streets of D.C. to Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids that continue to tear apart families and trample on human rights. But the real crime numbers don’t support his federal takeover of American cities. For example, homicide rates in Minneapolis, which was flooded by ICE agents this past winter as a part of Operation Metro Surge, were higher in the first half of 2026 than they were in 2019, according to the CCJ report.  

Experts have suggested that several factors could be responsible for the change, but many pointed to significant investments in community violence intervention following the Covid-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, the current administration has cut more than half of federal funding for gun violence prevention from the Department of Justice. 

The New York Times reports that the 10 used jets, which were purchased through a no-bid contract with a northern Virginia business with ties to former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, have barely been used. Seven of the planes, older Boeing 737s, aren’t being used because DHS doesn’t have the staff to operate them, the Times reports, citing an internal government document.

Three of the plans are luxury business jets, and DHS has sought to lease or loan two of them to other agencies, including one of them to the FBI for use by Director Kash Patel, the agency said in a letter to Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee.

The firm that got the contract for the planes is Daedalus Aviation Corporation, whose chairman donated to a political action committee headed by Noem. But DHS may not have needed the planes in the first place, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement has a history of using planes chartered from private companies for deportation flights, as well as military and Coast Guard jets.

Former acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement John Sandweg, who served under the Obama administration, told the Times that “if you asked me to write a list of the things ICE needed to increase the number of deportations, buying its own fleet of airplanes would absolutely not make the top ten.”

When the Times contacted DHS for comment, a spokesperson blamed Noem, who President Donald Trump fired in March.

“The contract for Daedalus was made and approved by department leadership before Secretary Mullin was sworn in,” DHS said in a statement, adding that the department “reserves the right to adjust course in an environment with evolving requirements and demands.”

A spokesperson for Noem disagreed, telling the Times that the jet purchase was finalized under her successor Markwayne Mullin. The contract size reportedly went up by $303 million on the day Mullin was sworn in.

Regardless of who is responsible, the jets are wasting taxpayer dollars sitting on a tarmac. Democratic Senators Chris Murphy and Patty Murray, who sit on the Senate Appropriations Committee, say that DHS officials told them that most of the planes would not be used for deportations after all.

“The American people deserve a full accounting of this gross misuse of their tax dollars,” Murray and Murphy wrote in a letter to the department.

Paramount already owns CBS News, a relationship that has resulted in the ascension of The Free Press’s Bari Weiss and the crippling of 60 Minutes. Now, the $81 billion deal to buy CNN parent company Warner Bros. Discovery—which would give Paramount Skydance a near monopoly on mainstream media—has been paused after 12 states filed an antitrust lawsuit to be heard in March of next year.

Larry Ellison reportedly met directly with Trump last November, and earlier this year was hit with allegations of “credible concern that Paramount leadership has offered, solicited, or effectuated a corrupt exchange: more favorable coverage of the Trump administration and its allies in exchange for favorable treatment by Trump administration antitrust and media regulators.” Trump has been critical of CNN for the greater part of a decade.

Everything the Ellisons have done so far at CBS News, from uplifting Bari Weiss to pushing the network in a more pro-Israel direction—has been to gain Trump’s blessing for this massive deal. It’s no wonder people are concerned—and unconvinced—about some independent editorial board actually doing anything to stop that from continuing. And while some referenced conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch creating a similar committee when he purchased Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones in 2007, others have noted that that too was simply all for show.

CNN White House correspondent Alayna Treene reported Wednesday that Trump had repeatedly called Leavitt while she was on maternity leave to have her second child. The president was apparently desperate to know when she would leave her children and return to her podium, Treene said, citing anonymous sources.

Treene also said that Leavitt’s decision took the administration by surprise, and Trump even asked her to stay.

Another source close to Leavitt told Daily Mail that she had been strongly considering whether to step down during her maternity leave—while she was fielding frequent calls from the president.

Leavitt left for maternity leave on April 27, three days later than she initially planned to leave. The press secretary gave birth to her daughter on May 1, and returned to work just nine weeks later on July 1. Federal employees are typically entitled to 12 weeks of paid parental leave.

Two sources told the Mail that Leavitt’s decision, announced Wednesday, had been months in the making. “She was just trying to figure out how to politely step down with [Trump’s] blessing,” one of the sources said.

Another source told the Mail that Leavitt realized she needed to leave after returning from maternity leave. “First week back she realized she wasn’t feeling it anymore,” the source said.

Yet another source told Mail that Leavitt had been experiencing severe “burnout” from her job.

“It was a very stressful job to do with her children. She never got any sleep, and she didn’t want her performance to slip either, so she decided to stay as long as she could and do the job well,” the source said. “The president did everything he could to keep her.”

Leavitt said Wednesday that she was leaving to spend more time with her family. “The truth is since returning to the White House after the birth of my daughter, I have felt in my heart that I cannot be the best mom my two young children deserve while devoting the constant time, energy, and attention required of the White House Press Secretary,” she wrote on X.

Trump initially announced Leavitt’s departure Wednesday, saying she was leaving in order to “spend more time with her beautiful young children and family, a decision I totally understand and respect!”

But it doesn’t seem likely that the president has “respect” for Leavitt’s decision—after all, he couldn’t even give her three months off with her newborn baby.

In a lengthy statement on X Wednesday, Leavitt confirmed that she would be leaving the White House at the end of the month and included two photos of her with President Donald Trump.

Soon after, the internet started claiming that one of the photographs appeared to have been edited with AI. The Daily Beast reported that Leavitt had been “busted” for using AI to alter her image. The publication even produced a graphic showing all the ways she’d touched up her appearance, “slimmed” her waist, “enhanced” her chest, and “volumized” her hair.

But for once, Leavitt was telling the truth. The contested photograph was taken by Anna Moneymaker outside of the White House on July 15, 2025. It can be found on Getty Images in all of its original glory.

So, Leavitt’s photograph isn’t a lie—but you know what is? Everything else she said during her time as fascism’s mouthpiece.

For example: Leavitt parroted a fake story about Trump blocking $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza. She played along with claims that a deadly aircraft collision which killed 67 people had been caused by “DEI.” She called the Epstein files a “Democratic hoax.” She played defense for Trump’s mysterious bruises. She claimed that the Democratic Party’s main constituency was “Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.” And much, much more.

So long, Leavitt. It’s been real. Not literally, obviously, but you know what I mean.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday evening that the CIA was skeptical of reports of a threat, which were relayed by Israeli intelligence and led to Trump hiding in a catering truck to be moved to an alternate military aircraft, which then flew him out of Turkey. An unnamed official told the Post that the reports were deemed “Israeli-derived, not U.S.-generated, and viewed as low confidence.” 

Trump was originally going to fly out of Turkey aboard his new Air Force One, a Boeing 747 plane gifted to him by Qatar. But amid apparent concerns that the plane wasn’t fitted with sufficient security measures, Trump first switched to a second, older Air Force One jet before secretly leaving that plane aboard the catering truck, which took him to a military plane that flew him out with select aides. 

Despite the CIA’s doubts about the nature of the threat, the White House decided not to take any chances, leaving the media and key staff, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, aboard the older Air Force One plane. Meanwhile, Trump was on the military jet unbeknownst to the public and even some senior administration officials. 

One former official told the Post that some U.S. intelligence officials think Israel shared the plot against Trump with them not to inform the president, but to try and influence his decisions over U.S. policy and the war in Iran.  

It “fit a broader pattern of Israeli intelligence reporting that some officials see as designed as much to shape presidential decision-making as to inform it,” that former official told the publication, adding that Rubio was briefed on the intelligence behind the threat but decided to stay on the older Air Force One plane anyway, even though that plane was ostensibly in more danger.  

“I am very curious about the extent to which the Israeli-provided intelligence was not only credible but independently verifiable,” Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen told the Post. “I have no doubt that Iran would like to see the president gone, but this all seems a little fantastical.”

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

By now you’ve heard that when Donald Trump left the NATO summit in Turkey last month, the Secret Service transferred him off of Air Force One and onto an alternative plane, flying him out clandestinely to avoid an Iranian threat. Many of Trump’s Cabinet members were left on the decoy plane. Now new leaks from inside the administration are making this whole affair look considerably darker.

It appears several of Trump’s most loyal aides were transferred to the secret plane with him, even as reporters were not informed about any of this and were left on the decoy plane as well. All this neatly symbolizes Trump’s abusive and authoritarian relationship with the media. So to dig into all of it, we’re talking to Margaret Sullivan. She regularly calls on the press to treat Trump as the abnormal threat he truly is, on her excellent Substack, American Crisis. Margaret, nice to have you on.

Margaret Sullivan: Thank you, Greg. Good to see you and hear you.

Sargent: You too. So we learned from The Washington Post that Trump was secretly removed from Air Force One onto a catering truck without the knowledge of the press corps, and possibly many of his Cabinet officials who were left on the plane. The Times’s reporting on this is quite scathing. It notes that, quote, “If Iranians were trying to shoot down the presidential plane,” then the subterfuge that protected the president “may have made targets” of those who flew aboard the jet.

Margaret, can you explain why that’s so highly irregular and objectionable?

Sullivan: Yes, it’s highly unusual. It’s actually shocking that Donald Trump would, you know, arrange for himself to be flown in safety while leaving many members of the press on the plane who didn’t realize the threat, and didn’t realize that the president was removed to yet another plane.

He has treated the press in a very unusual and very bad way for years now, and unfortunately, many members of the mainstream media, they don’t seem to care, or they don’t know what to do about it, but they keep covering him in this very normalizing way. Like, “Well, he’s the president, so therefore we have to believe everything he says,” or, you know, treat it with a great deal of deference. And, you know, this, I think, is a very vivid example of what he thinks of them.

Sargent: So now, based on more leaks, news outlets are reporting that others who accompanied Trump on the catering truck and onto the separate plane included White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino, Walt Nauta, another top aide, and Natalie Harp, Trump’s executive assistant, who kind of functions like a security blanket to the president. I don’t know, Margaret, that seems pretty questionable.

Obviously, there are reasons Trump would want his closest aides around him, but this occurred even as all these other people were left on the decoy plane.

Sullivan: So his actions were to protect and keep around him the people you just mentioned. And one of them is, is Pete Hegseth. And, you know, not to protect and not to keep in mind or think about the welfare, apparently, of the press and some of his Cabinet members, including the secretary of state. So I think it is very telling, and it certainly speaks to the relationship with the press in a bad way.

Sargent: It really does. And so something similar happened with President Bill Clinton, at least similar in the sense that there was a decoy operation. But in that case, the press was briefed beforehand.

It was explained to the White House Correspondents’ Association, and they were told what sort of safety procedures were being put in place for journalists. It’s just plainly obvious that the Trump group didn’t think about the journalists at all in this case, right?

Sullivan: Yeah. I mean, maybe they thought, maybe they had some dire thoughts about it, like, “Well, if something happens, oh well.” But we don’t have to go quite that dark here. I think what we can see is that there wasn’t an effort to inform, there wasn’t an effort to protect, and also what ends up happening is that the press then is misleading the public about what exactly took place. And with no correction afterwards. It had to be turned up weeks later by The Washington Post.

Sargent: It’s so strange. So Margaret, what do you make of the White House Correspondents’ Association’s role in this whole thing? They were not informed. In the case of the Clinton decoy operation, the White House Correspondents’ Association was informed at the time, and now the White House Correspondents’ Association is reacting kind of meekly to what’s happened here. What do you make of that?

Sullivan: So, as I understand it, what’s happened is that the new president, if that’s the title, of the White House Correspondents’ Association, who happens to be a Fox News correspondent got together with White House officials and apparently, I think with perhaps a written statement as well as spoken words, said, Gee, you know, we really didn’t appreciate that too much, and it’s a problem, and please, you know, let’s not do that again. But was there a huge outcry? Was there a sense of, “My God, you can’t do this. It’s an absolute outrage? No.

And this is the same White House Correspondents’ Association that just had, you know, a big gala dinner at which President Trump trashed the press. They knew that would happen, and they did it anyway, and I can pretty much assure you that even after this, it will happen again next year. There’ll be a gala event. He’ll be invited. He’ll come. He’ll say some horrible things about the fake news media. And it’s a ridiculous relationship that should not be. They really should be standing up to him. They really should be doing a lot more in solidarity and for the public. I mean, that’s the part that bothers me—is this is about access. It’s not for the public interest.

Sargent: That’s really interesting. I’d like to pick up a little bit on that. You wrote a good piece about the White House Correspondents’ Dinner with Trump. He just relentlessly abused reporters, personally abused them, and he lied about the media having Trump Derangement Syndrome, or at least Trump’s lackeys did that. I think on some fundamental level, the White House Correspondents’ Association just doesn’t want to say that Trump is different, that he’s different from other presidents in the most fundamental way, in the sense that he really just has zero respect for the media’s institutional role in a democracy.

And previous presidents, you know, they did all kinds of disgusting things, like under Bush the propaganda was terrible, under Clinton there was a lot of manipulation, et cetera, et cetera. But I think on some level they recognized that the press has an important institutional role in liberal democracy. This group does not recognize that at all, and that’s something the White House Correspondents’ Association doesn’t think it can say. What do you think of all that?

Sullivan: I think two things. One is that they’re very afraid of losing access to the White House. I mean, it’s their job not to, you know, sort of dig up dirt about the White House, or, like, really sort of get under the surface. It’s mostly their job to, you know, for example, be in the briefing room and ask a question, and then the evening news with David Muir, or whoever it may be will take that as a soundbite and show, Look, we’re, we’re doing our jobs here. So much of it is optics.

So some of it is losing access, not being able to, you know, do that, and some of it is just this strange normalization that has gone on for years now, in which the reporters seem to be saying to themselves, Well, he’s the president, and no one can argue with the fact that what the president does creates news. So we’re going to simply treat it as news. And if we need to do a little fact-checking or pushback, we’ll do that, but nothing that’s very radical. Whereas he’s radical, and so I think something much more powerful needs to be done in reaction to that. But don’t hold your breath.

Sargent: Yeah, and I think there’s a bigger calculation as well on the part of the news media, and maybe you could shed a little light on this. They really think that the election of Trump represented some sort of seismic cultural event that repudiated them. I think that’s how they think about it on some level, a lot of reporters. He called them fake news for years. They just kind of let it roll off their backs, and then Trump was reelected, so maybe the American people agree that we’re fake news, right?

Like, I think that may be the way a lot of these reporters conceive of it, and they think to themselves, We can’t really point out that Trump is different, because that puts us on the wrong side of this kind of shifting cultural phenomenon. What do you think of that? You think that’s possible?

Sullivan: I do think that when Trump was elected in 2016, there was a kind of internal reckoning. Was it the right reckoning? I’m not so sure about that. I think the right reckoning would’ve been to say, Gee, maybe we paid a little too much attention to Hillary Clinton’s email problems, and, you know, maybe we did a few things that were out of line. But no, the reckoning was, We need to get out of D.C. and New York and California and get into the heartland. OK, that’s reasonable. The Washington Post put together an America desk, you know.

That’s all fine, but it, it isn’t the only thing. I wish that the press corps would have in their minds, and I wish their bosses would insist on, their actual role in a democracy, which is to be the eyes and ears of the public, and to, to represent the public. And I just don’t see that. So much is about ratings and optics and access, all the wrong things—profits, shareholders. What does my boss...what merger is my boss trying to do right now? That’s not what the First Amendment was supposed to accomplish.

Sargent: Certainly not. I want to flag a quote from Joe Lockhart, press secretary to Bill Clinton, about the difference between the Clinton decoy example and the current one. Lockhart said this, quote: “They just didn’t seem to give a second thought to anybody but the president and the few people who were with him. We went out of our way to make sure the maximum number of people, especially civilians, were protected and not human shields. They didn’t even think about it, and to me, that’s the big difference,” close quote.

Margaret, there’s an irony to this whole thing I want to flag. The press actually was absolutely terrible to Bill Clinton, if you recall how Bill and Hillary were covered. By contrast, now Trump pretends he’s mistreated by the press, right? But there’s no comparison whatsoever between the way the press treated Bill Clinton and the way they treat Trump. They treated Clinton much, much worse and much more unfairly. Yet Trump world doesn’t respect the media’s institutional role. It’s just everything is upside down.

Sullivan: That’s right. And, you know, the role of the media and the role of the press, and their sort of power to hold public officials, especially the president, accountable, has radically changed since the Clinton years. And, you know, that’s for many reasons that could be a book. But one of them is the decline of local news. One of them is that Trump is—we may criticize him harshly for certain things, but he’s very good at sort of blasting this misinformation out there, and then when he’s called on it, blaming the press.

We’re in a different world now, and that’s a part of the, you know, contrast between what happened in the Clinton years and what’s happened now. Also, so many of the things that Trump does would be impeachable offenses, but we’re so overwhelmed by all of it that I think that it’s, as somebody wrote this past week very well—Craig Unger—”Nothing moves the needle.” And this is another thing that I’m afraid will not move the needle.

Sargent: Yeah, it might not. I guess we’ll see what happens in the midterms. I think things are sort of on the right track there. Let me ask you this, though, Margaret. Is there another thing going on here with the press and Trump that maybe we should pin down, which is that the press sort of feels like it’s on its back foot in a big sense, right? Not just vis-à-vis the culture with Trump’s victory, but also because of all the changes in the media landscape, which are actually really delivering the media some pretty severe blows.

TikTok, the way the internet works now, right, the role of independent media, which is really kind of flourishing in a certain way and poaching people away from the MSM, and of course, like what you’re talking about, the local press disappearing. I wonder if the press feels institutionally really under threat and defensive in a very big sense, and that too makes them somewhat unwilling to really say that Trump is different. What do you think of that?

Sullivan: Well, I mean, there’s a lot of pushback against the mainstream press right now, from the public, from public officials. Yes, but we have a job to do, and we ought to do it and not be worried about whether what foot we’re on, or whether we’re sensitive and got hurt or let somebody call us a name or something. We have a constitutionally protected job to do, and that should be front and center for us.

Sargent: Just to wrap this up, it seems to me like there’s sort of two stories at once. In certain respects, I want to give the media some credit here. You alluded to The Washington Post’s great scoop on all this. In some respects, the press is reporting as aggressively on Donald Trump as I’ve seen the press report on any president in my lifetime. There really is a lot of great work being done.

But on the other side of the equation, you’ve got, like, the conventions of political reporting aren’t really shifting to meet the moment in some sense. The headlines don’t really reflect the seriousness of what the reporters themselves are turning up. This is something you’ve talked about, like the conventions of political reporting. How do we get the press to take a little more seriously this difficulty—that the conventions of political reporting really aren’t up to the moment and need rethinking?

Sullivan: Well, it comes from leadership. I really think that the leadership, the top editors, the top people at the really big news organizations, need to send that message out to the troops that we’re going to bear down on this in a different way, including through the headlines.

I mean, very often—and this is I think part of what you’re saying—very often there is a very strong story, and it has a very wimpy headline on it, and often people don’t get past the headline. You know, they’re skimming. They see a news alert, they see a tweet or a Bluesky, you know, whatever it may be. They’re not going to read into the 11th or 12th paragraph. So we see a headline that says, “Critics say,” something, and it seems just like more infighting, when in fact the story could be very strong.

So I think that needs to be taken seriously. But self-reflection is not something I’ve noticed as a really high value or ability of, you know, big journalism.

Sargent: So do you think this latest thing has the capacity to change things a little? I mean, you could not ask for a clearer look at just the amount of pure contempt that Trump and his people have for the media than this one. Will that change anything?

Sullivan: I would love to think so, Greg, but I just don’t. There have been so many things that have come along that seem like the thing that will change stuff. I think the only thing that will change anything is the overall accumulation of, you know, the public saying, there’s just too much now. It’s just, it’s gone too far. And the midterms are going to be extremely important, because Trump is unrestrained. And so if the checks and balances start to work, I think that changes everything.

Sargent: Yeah, I think that’s a really important point. I just want to close on it. If Democrats can take one or both houses of Congress, they’re going to have more of a role in setting the agenda of what the press is talking about. And Trump’s going to look weaker, and if there’s one thing that reporters can really sniff out, it’s when someone’s weak or losing. They like that story, right, Margaret?

Sullivan: They certainly liked it with the end of Biden’s presidency.

Sargent: Well, we’ll see if they apply it here. I don’t know. Well, folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to check out Margaret Sullivan’s excellent Substack, American Crisis. Please subscribe to that. Margaret, thanks so much for coming on. Great to talk to you.

Sullivan: Thanks, Greg. Good to be on with you.

“Those are old newspaper articles?” the guy next to me asked. He might have been in his thirties. He had a loose hipster haircut and expensive sneakers. “Very cool.”

I told him I was reading news stories speculating about the possibility of a female president. The furthest back I’d traced the dream was to suffragist Tennie Claflin, who, a newspaper reported, predicted that “a mixed Presidential ticket” would “sweep the country” in the 1908 election.

“Oh, wow,” the guy marveled. “That’s … a long time ago.”

We talked for a couple of minutes about the recent past, and Hillary Clinton’s and Kamala Harris’s near misses. “How long do you think it will take?” I asked him.

He thought a bit. “For sure in the next 50 years,” he said. Then he saw my face. “Maybe 20?” He amended: “Soon.”

The country’s next chance to turn “soon” into now is 2028, and without a doubt it is the Democrats’ opportunity, should they choose to embrace it. Karen Finney, a longtime Democratic political consultant, told me her colleagues on the other side of the aisle had no real prospects of a female nominee—not the way the party is now. The Democrats’ field, meanwhile, is unformed. Three women swirl in the mix: Gretchen Whitmer, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Harris, who has put out the strongest signals of the three. (We might add a fourth, Amy Klobuchar, who is running for governor of Minnesota this year; if she wins, that’s a fine perch from which to seek the presidency.) Because we have no firm sense of which specific women might be up for consideration, now is exactly the time to consider the Democrats’ current attitude toward nominating any woman at all—and what it means if they don’t.

Most of the party faithful I spoke to seemed to go only so far as to obliquely acknowledge the existence of skittishness around nominating a woman: Usually, I gathered some version of “I’m hearing it, too.” In January, New York magazine asked, “Will Democrats Dare Nominate a Woman for President in 2028?” MS NOW wondered whether, for Democrats, a female candidate at the top of the ticket would be “radioactive.” The most public declamation of the reality Democrats must contend with came from Michelle Obama, who has twice explained her refusal to entertain her own entry into the race as a function of knowing she’d lose: “You all are lying. You’re not ready for a woman. You are not.” Indeed, we’ve run A/B tests on the subject, and the results have been heartbreaking: two eminently qualified women against a buffoonish serial sex pest; one qualified but rather boring man against the same tyrant. You can point to a thousand different variables at play, but there was one inarguable constant. The women lost; the man won.

There are obvious reasons for leaders to avoid publicly quashing the hope that a woman might once again top the ticket. One is their obligation to their constituents. For years, Democratic voters have told pollsters that they would like to see a female president elected in their lifetime: 89 percent of them, according to a YouGov poll in October 2025. But partisans are not immune to arguments about electability, and certainly electability—generally pitched as a concern about ideology and not gender—played an enormous role in Joe Biden’s taking the nomination in 2020, when he ran against a record number of female candidates.

For those who are anxious about winning in 2028, it makes gut-level sense to minimize the various specific reasons Harris—and before her, Clinton—lost, and fixate on their gender as a liability. After all, the stakes are so high. Run a woman and fail, and more than the presidency could be lost—democracy, women’s rights, everyone’s rights. “Soon” could become “never.” This is a genuine concern.

And yet it’s also true that if the Democrats nominate a man, the choice would not be neutral. You can insist that any particular female candidate is not the one for you; certainly, I have found myself supporting a man when a woman was in the field. But women have been running for president since before we won the vote, and our chance to lead the country has always been just around the corner. Every time it’s a man at the top of the ticket—even in the days before women could “credibly” run—the choice of candidate has sent a message to voters about who is worthy of consideration and whose voices deserve to be heard. The Harris and Clinton losses were devastating, no doubt. But in 2028, being robbed of even the chance to make a woman president would hurt, too.

The history of people telling women they will not become president is rage-bait. “Never” is always “never.” But a march through the history of “soon” leaves a mark on the heart. Over one hundred years of “someday” makes each next chance feel even further away, not closer. Certainly, women are not the only group that hasn’t had their turn in the Oval Office; our grief is not unique—or rather each intersectionality can claim its own particular shade of mourning. What all women can share is the familiar sense of a promise just a little too far away to be kept.

Tennie Claflin’s prediction that a mixed ticket would “sweep the country” in the 1908 election came after defiant campaigns by her sister Victoria Woodhull in 1872 and Belva Ann Lockwood in 1884 and 1888. That highest, hardest glass ceiling has more cracks than most people know. The hope that it will give is older yet. “I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors,” Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John, in March 1776. “Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.” (“I cannot but laugh,” John wrote back.)

It was after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920 that talk of “soon” took the shape it has today, a respectable guessing game to fill up feature wells when the right news hook comes along: Women have come so far. The presidency is next.

Less than three months after suffrage, newspapers ran a syndicated column evaluating the chances of possible female candidates for president. Women had led a grassroots movement that wrought a change to the Constitution—two movements, if you count how many women had been key to pushing the prohibition amendment through. The White House was the logical next step.

The column’s analysis was as sober and considered as any panel discussion today, perhaps more so. The article quoted Martha Corman, who theorized the front-runner to be suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt, “a stateswoman of broad and generous vision, a student of international affairs” who commanded “an organization the like of which no man running for president ever had to support him.” Or perhaps it would be the more radical Alice Paul, head of the National Woman’s Party, who might release the same “hunger strikers and prison martyrs” who won the right to vote “on persons who are blocking the way to some other goal of progress the pickets hope to reach.” (Donald Trump is the only candidate in modern times who has seen supporters’ prison martyrdom work in his favor.)

From here, the trail of “soon” winds its way through the American conversation, intersecting with actual campaigns but more often taking place in the space between them. A specific campaign squeezes the question into the shape of a specific person. The mainstream media has been entertaining the idea of electing a woman for more than 100 years; the actual women running have had more trouble finding consideration.

By 1934, the argument that a woman could become president reached the exact same point we remain at today, which is to say that women had by then been elected to every other office. As an Associated Press story that year observed, “The presidency and vice-presidency is the only high government executive office this country has not already accorded women.”

In 1945, a columnist opined that somewhere in the country “is a girl … who may succeed in being elected President of the United States”—after all, that year saw a record number of women serving in Congress: 11.

In 1949, a Gallup poll on willingness to vote for a woman saw the respondents split, 48 percent for and 48 percent against. A poll write-up summarized the state of affairs: “A ‘Madam President’ is as inevitable for the United States as the return of short skirts.” That same year, Harry S. Truman told the delegates of Girls Nation that by the time “all of us old people will be out of the way … you might have this terrible job which I have.”

In 1959, John F. Kennedy wrote that it would happen “during this generation.”

Meanwhile, more and more women tested this theory in the major parties, including Republican Margaret Chase Smith in 1964 and Democrats Shirley Chisholm and Patsy Mink in 1972. Smaller parties with longer odds took the biggest chances—most of the women who have run for president in the United States have led third-party tickets, and almost half have been women of color.

In 1976, Betty Ford thought it might happen by 1996.

In 1980, Jimmy Carter said it would happen by the time his daughter Amy came of age (and maybe she’d have the job).

In 1984, the same year the Democrat Geraldine Ferraro stepped into place as a vice presidential candidate and lost, Ronald Reagan assured a group of female Republican leaders that they’d see a woman in the office “one of these days,” and four years later added that a woman president was “inevitable.”

In 1990, Ferraro herself said she thought that “we have a real shot at having a woman president in this next decade” because the sexist nature of her coverage—“How I did my hair, where I bought my clothes. Dumb things”—would be put away. “Because I was the first woman, people were caught up in a lot of other things besides my brain,” she told McCall’s. “People got it out of their system in 1984.”

In 1991, 65-year-old Barbara Bush said she planned “to be around” for it. (She died in 2018.)

In 1992, Democrats’ “Year of the Woman” saw more women than ever run for office and more women win. Patricia Aburdene, the co-author of Megatrends for Women, confidently asserted that “male-dominated institutions, from religious fundamentalism to the Senate Judiciary Committee to the Supreme Court, will be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st Century.”

In 1993, in a television interview, Bill Clinton—as his wife stood straight-faced beside him—guessed that it would be “not long,” adding, “probably within my lifetime.”

In February 1999, pollster Larry Sabato, self-proclaimed possessor of a political “crystal ball,” said, “It’s going to happen sooner than anyone expects,” and predicted that if there were four male candidates in the 2000 presidential election, one would be a minority. “People are going to be stunned at how quickly the white male power structure falls.”

In 2006, Laura Bush guessed it was imminent: “I think it will happen probably in the next few terms.”

In 2010, George H.W. Bush saw it on the horizon: “I don’t know who, or when, but I would say fairly soon.”

In 2016—you remember.

In 2017, Hillary Clinton softly echoed her husband’s timeline: “Will we ever have a female president? We will. I hope I’m around to vote for her.”

Then 2024. You remember.

Bill Clinton, two weeks after Harris’s loss in 2024: “Pretty soon.”

Nancy Pelosi, 2025: “Within this next generation.”

Barack Obama, 2026: “Sometime soon,” he told People magazine in June. “In my lifetime.”

Ask a political scientist about women’s representation in American politics and one of the first things you’ll hear is, “When women run, they win.” This is true as far as it goes, which is to say: They win until they get to the presidency. That women succeed in downballot races has, in fact, been true since the 1990s. A 1997 study of more than 60,000 candidates stated unequivocally that “a candidate’s sex does not affect his or her chances of winning an election…. Winning elections has nothing to do with the sex of the candidate,” and no major studies since have found otherwise. A 2016 study of congressional races from 1982 through 2012 found “no evidence of a gender penalty” in “general election vote share [or] probability of victory.” In 2021, a meta-analysis of 67 papers looking at candidate choice concluded that being a woman actually increased support from voters by just under 2 percent, and found “only a modest difference in the effect of gender for white and black candidates.”

Women have run for office in larger and larger numbers, and their proportions have continued to increase—but their representation has moved only incrementally over time, far out of step with their participation as voters (women’s turnout is consistently higher than men’s), as community volunteers (women are 30 percent more likely to volunteer than men), and as political donors (women give less money overall, but tend to make up half of overall unique donors). Women hold about a third of state and federal offices across the United States: 27 percent of senators, 28 percent of the House, and 33.6 percent of state legislators. At the executive level, 25.4 percent of U.S. mayors are women, and 28 percent of governors. Then there’s the presidency, standing still at 0 percent overall. There’s just something different about it.

The discrepancy between “when women run, they win” and the lack of diversity in political leadership was largely framed as a “pipeline problem” through the 1990s, and activists sought to address the issue with amped-up recruitment and candidate workshops. A 2005 study by researchers Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox reframed the debate. Surveying the rise of women in professions that typically generate candidates (including education, law, and business), they documented what they called an “ambition gap.” Lawless and Fox indicated that women didn’t show the same interest in running for office as men, but to describe it as simply a problem of “ambition” disguises a more troubling disconnect. Women were interested in politics at the same rates as men, but they didn’t see themselves as potential candidates. They were also less likely to see themselves as qualified and less likely to have taken steps to run. Lawless and Fox found these gaps to be consistent across demographics. Their book on the subject became a cornerstone of the field, and its title is a bit of a rallying cry: It Takes a Candidate.

The two researchers remained on the case throughout the decades, returning to the original sample in 2008 to find the gap unchanged and the implied solution the same as well: It Still Takes a Candidate came out in 2012. Their 2014 research on young people’s interest in politics found the ambition gap in college students to be just as significant, despite, again, interest in politics being basically equal among genders.

In 2023, these intrepid researchers sallied once more into the surveys, with a paper whose exhaustion bleeds through every line: “It Takes More Than a Candidate: The Invincible Gender Gap in Political Ambition.” The paper is a bleak tour of how little has changed in 20 years, and how women’s prospects have, in some ways, gotten worse. The gap between men who had “ever considered running for office” and women who had ever considered it increased from 16 points in 2001 and 2011 to 18 in 2021. In 2001, there was a 12-point difference between men and women who self-identified as “very qualified” to run for office. In 2011, it was 13, and in 2021, 14. The gap between men and women being approached about running for office has remained constant as well. To be clear, there have been gains in women’s representation—each cycle seems to bring a new record. What Lawless and Fox and other researchers emphasize, however, is that those gains aren’t nearly enough.

Lawless and Fox offer a hypothesis to explain the stasis despite 20 years of enormous change in so many other respects. They call it “the representation paradox.” More women are seeking office than ever before, which means even more women are put through the meat grinder of increasingly more toxic elections. (If you want a vivid example of just how personal and wretched campaigning for women in the modern age has become, search “CANDIDATE NAME + PORN” and notice how the results differ for women and men.) Specifically, when it comes to women taking on the most visible race in the country, if not the world, they may run, but they mostly lose—and these campaigns are particularly nasty.

There’s no doubt that something has made Americans, especially women, who have witnessed these candidacies more discouraged about their role in the political process than they once were. A survey in 2015 by YouGov showed that 67 percent of Americans believed the country to be ready for a female president. Ahead of the 2024 election, 57 percent said the country was ready. YouGov’s October 2025 poll showed support for that belief dropping to just 48 percent. A similarly timed survey by the American University School of Public Affairs found an even more precipitous decline: Just 38 percent of respondents agreed that the “men of America are ready to elect more women to political office” in general. Only 20 percent of women under 50 thought this was the case—consistent with 2018 Pew polling that shows women have led the shift in pessimism about America’s readiness. In 2014, 41 percent said that voters had a problem electing women to high office, and in 2018, 57 percent did, while men’s assessment stayed essentially the same (at 31 and then 32 percent).

These numbers fly in the face of Gallup’s poll, which generally shows upwards of 90 percent of all Americans saying that they, personally, are ready to vote for a female president, a number that has remained more or less constant for years. Others have found less stellar results, but all sorts of polling show Americans portraying themselves as willing to vote for some hypothetical woman, while their guesses as to other people’s willingness to do that are less rosy.

There’s an argument that asking about what your neighbors think and not what you would do is a sneaky way around social desirability bias—the tendency people have to answer questions in ways they think are more socially acceptable. Contra Michelle Obama, I think it’s a little more complicated than the country simply lying about its readiness. People are correctly surveying the environment as it is rather than trying to figure out what others might “really” believe. If the world seems sexist and racist on its face, why might you think some people feel differently, deep inside?

This type of misjudgment of others is called “pluralistic ignorance.” According to one review of the literature, this sociological phenomenon explains “the lag between a society’s perception of itself and actual changes in people’s private beliefs and values” in all sorts of areas, particularly race and gender. A landmark study in 1931 showed that white fraternity members consistently said that they themselves were willing to admit racial minorities but just as consistently voted against doing so—because they believed their fraternity brothers were against it. Other studies have shown that men understate other men’s support of parental leave relative to their own and that men and women underestimate men’s concerns about gender bias in STEM contexts. Without intervention, ignorance of this type perpetuates the problem.

This is the loop of “soon.” As long as women perceive that the path to the presidency is all misery and no glory, as long as they believe they are running uphill only to hit a brick wall, there is going to be a lid on the number of women willing to run.

In fact, according to Lawless and Fox, women under 40 aren’t just pessimistic about women’s chances in politics, they are most likely to see the political environment as particularly hostile to women. Over a third agree strongly that “women face more scrutiny and challenges when they run for office than men do,” compared to over a quarter of women over 60. They are also somewhat more likely to doubt that they have thick enough skin to endure a campaign: 66 percent compared to 61 percent. This is the next generation of potential female candidates, and they don’t want the job. Or to put a finer point on it: They don’t want to go through the painful experience of running only to fail in the end. Once again, the truism of “When women run, they win” cannot break through what’s on the news and in their social media feed: Lawless and Fox found that only 23 percent of women think women are just as likely as men to win their races.

As Lawless and Fox observe, “to the degree that the candidacies of Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, or Kamala Harris serve as a civic education project about women who run for office, they appear to reinforce, or perhaps exacerbate, women’s doubts. Thus, for many well-qualified women, dismissing the idea of running for office is a rational response.” This is an incomplete hypothesis. The problem is not so much that these candidates, Clinton and Harris in particular, faced disparagement and ridicule and even more subtle forms of bias. The problem is that they faced those hurdles and it was for naught.

Even worse: Look who they lost to.

I was a reluctant Hillary Clinton supporter. I was not especially taken with her 2008 campaign. I supported Bernie Sanders in 2016. But on Election Day of that year, I felt the surge of hope that many did. My mother died in 2012, and I found myself thinking of her as I walked to my office, how tickled she’d be. My immediate grief that night was as much for the happiness I thought her victory would have meant for my mom as it was for the general state of the country.

Thousands—hundreds of thousands—of women shared that grief. It mobilized the Women’s March on Washington and the hundreds of satellite marches around it. On election night in 2024, that same pang pieced many of the same hearts. We got the message: You are not wanted here.

The desire for a female candidate isn’t universal among women, or at least it doesn’t always trump women’s other desires and concerns. Harris won the lowest support among women of any recent Democratic nominee. White women without college degrees voted against the female presidential candidates in significant numbers in the general election when they got the chance; women in the Republican primary in 2024 were cool toward Nikki Haley. But is unconcern about women’s representation proof that you’re immune to the message that women aren’t suited for the job? No. In fact, it means you’ve internalized the message more completely. Women made up around 45 percent of Democratic congressional nominees in 2024 and 16 percent of Republican hopefuls, despite persistent and progressively more alarmed calls for candidate recruitment. They make up just 15 percent of Republicans serving. Representative Elise Stefanik called the situation a “crisis” in 2018, and while it’s no longer a crisis, Republican women’s representation lags far behind that of Democrats. You could argue that’s because Stefanik’s crusade is dwarfed by the GOP’s larger project. But what’s happening in their party is just a more dramatic version of what we’re all living through.

When I asked Betsy Hodges, the former mayor of Minneapolis, what she thought of the Democrats nominating a woman in 2028, she interjected: “If there’s an election in 2028.” Whether or not the nominee is female, she pointed out, doesn’t matter if elections aren’t fair and free. But if it does seem like the election will proceed, she said, a male candidate would at least mean “less noise in the process, fewer think pieces about whatever.”

“I don’t know,” she went on. “I’m kind of agnostic on the idea of whether or not a woman can win.” At the moment, she said, people are making decisions about the nomination and the presidency based on the devastating disappointments of the Trump Era. “The chances of people fully healing from the trauma of the last 10 years by November of 2028—the chances are pretty slim.”

Hodges isn’t wrong to be cynical. Her agnosticism about running a woman—the wish for less noise, the acknowledgment that people will be making decisions under stress—fits the pattern Lawless and Fox describe. “I think a lot of women, having been disappointed twice now … are reverting back to their disappointment as well,” Hodges told me. This is the discouragement loop, working as designed.

The loop can be interrupted. In 2020, researchers surveying potential Democratic primary voters found that presenting “when women run, they win” data caused a measurable shift in intentions to vote for a woman. Suggestively, showing primary voters polls about America’s “readiness” to vote for a woman did little to shift behavior. As the study notes, neutralizing electability concerns “may require more than merely correcting perceptions of others’ attitudes; it may require shifting perceptions of others’ likely behavior.” Perhaps not enough primary voters got the memo; most assuredly, what primary voters actually did in 2020 is the more meaningful statement on likely behavior than what you’d read in a survey.

Optimistic observers might argue that a woman who survives a truly bruising primary might fare better than Clinton or Harris in the general election. After all, however unique their paths to the nomination, both were tarred with the same undermining allegation: They didn’t really earn it. Harris, obviously, suffered because of Biden’s selfish decision to run for reelection. His delayed exit from the race made Harris’s coronation a matter about which the party had little choice. In 2016, the field was basically cleared for Clinton; then, once she was challenged by Sanders, the Democratic National Committee under Debbie Wasserman Schultz clearly put a finger or two on the scale for her. And all this came trailing decades of accusations that she was only in the public eye at all because of Bill anyway.

Those analyses may be accurate. It’s also true that allegations of not having earned something are especially damaging to women candidates, who come into positions of power having to defend their right to be there. Biden certainly benefited from the Democratic establishment’s backing of him. He was unquestionably the candidate who had waited his “turn,” and he didn’t suffer from the same sorts of whispers. That these narratives cling to Clinton and Harris as explanations for their losses doesn’t suggest that all the next female nominee has to do is win a “normal” nomination—rather, it suggests just how durable the narrative of deservingness is. I want to believe that all it would take to shed this suspicion is a decisive-enough win, but everything I’ve ever seen tells me that the bar for “deserving” is always set in retrospect, and women never fully surpass it. This isn’t an argument against voting for a woman in the primary; it’s just a warning against the inevitable.

Sending another woman into the maw of 2028 is a risk. A brutal enough campaign and another loss for the Democrats could continue to suppress women’s interest in running—if (as Hodges worried) there’s ever another election again, that is. Democratic primary voters are not wrong to believe that democracy is on the ballot. A Republican win could endanger women beyond their mere presence on the ticket or their absence from the Oval Office, not to mention what might befall other vulnerable groups. The whole architecture of the country is wobbling—do you want to gamble that sexism (conscious or not) won’t move a couple of ten thousand votes somewhere in the Upper Midwest?

But waiting to give a woman a chance to win is a risk, too. It creates the circumstances for another generation of women to mostly absent themselves from the process.

This is the cost of “soon.”

Should a woman not get the Democratic nomination, the best-case scenario—barring a surprise such as a dynastic intervention putting Ivanka on the throne, say—would move the prospect of a female nominee or even president to 2032.

So, eight more years, or even just four.

Things are getting better, and it feels churlish to argue with that. Yes, there are more and more women in Congress, on the bench, and in city hall. But breathless headlines and raised-arm celebrations can hide the pace of change. Balancing hope, which is necessary, against reality, which is just as essential, is a trick for anyone without power. If I’ve come down hard on the side of reality, it because I’m so sick of “soon.”

In my tour of “soon” I also found truth-tellers, women who sized up the country’s intransigence and spelled out the double standards. In 1934, Eleanor Roosevelt, often spoken of as a presidential candidate herself, slyly drew out the double standard: “We certainly will not have a woman president until some woman worthy of being president appears on the horizon. In the meantime, men both worthy and unworthy will probably fill that office.” And Gloria Steinem in 1983, calling the shot: “Most categories of men will precede any category of women.… We are likely to have a Jewish male president, a black male president, Hispanic male president before we elect any women.” Even Shirley Chisholm reflected in 1972, “Black male politicians are no different from white male politicians. This ‘woman thing’ is so deep. I’ve found it out in this campaign if I never knew it before.”

These women weren’t being pessimistic. They were being honest. Their honesty didn’t change the outcome then, and honesty alone won’t change it now. Only action can.

You are not sexist for wanting the candidate to be a man or supporting a man. At the same time, you get to decide if a hundred years of “soon” might now add up to something. To wait longer is to reinforce the exact system that’s brought us here. A hundred years of “soon” is not a promise. It’s a pattern.

                                              “n. the specific feeling of the sun’s heat on a cold day.”

Venice was too hot,
we both agreed that first evening,
so we pointed the car
toward the cooler Alps,
which we had read about in a book.

I was driving a green
ragtop Sunbeam Alpine,
shirts off, just nineteen,
and we were cooled up there
then warmed by the Alpine sunbeams.

In October 2017, during the first year of Trump’s first term, The Guardian columnist Marina Hyde tweeted, “Absolutely convinced Melania is being played by a Melania impersonator.”

At bottom was the evergreen mystery of how anyone could stand to be married to Donald Trump. This “Melania” beside Trump in photos, acting wifely through gritted veneers, must be a decoy. “Theory: She left him weeks ago,” Hyde proposed.

But Melania did not leave him. Like a MAGA last-gasper in denial about Trump’s infinite betrayals, Melania stayed. Trump cheated on her—but she stayed. He ignored her birthday, forgot her name, and razed her side of the White House—but she stayed. Yes, she swats away his touch, sleeps alone, and seems to despise him. But, like so many blind Trump supporters, she’s apparently determined to give over her one life on Earth to this dance of death.

Melania’s brand combines high vanity and low self-respect. It doesn’t win her fans. Indeed, her unfavorability rating makes all other modern first ladies look like national treasures. In the summers of their own husbands’ second terms, Hillary Clinton had +25 favorability, Laura Bush had +46, and Michelle Obama had +42.

As of July, Melania Trump was at -13. That’s below circle-the-drain levels. “Melania Trump is breaking records in the way that you don’t want to break records—historically awful,” Harry Enten said on CNN when she first hit -12. He also echoed her callous “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” jacket, the one she wore to visit children in detention centers in 2018.

“The American people really don’t care for her.”

Probably Melania was never going to win Miss Congeniality. She’s reclusive, for one. This year, she’s appeared only 38 times in public, including in one photo that shows her briefly deplaning Air Force One. When she does go out these days, it’s behind a mask of cosmetics, a curtain of hair, and clothing in funereal hues.

Her most striking appearance came in April, when she gave a panicked address before the White House press corps. She spoke cryptically and acidly of “lies” circulating about her and Jeffrey Epstein.

This speech, of course, pointed sleuths straight to the cause of her distress: rumors about whether teen-modeling kingpin Paolo Zampoli (now an employee of U.S. taxpayers as the “U.S. Special Representative for Global Partnerships”) or the unspeakable Jeffrey Epstein introduced the Trumps in 1998. Her features looked controlled, static, even synthetic. The common touch is missing for Melania. But the human touch is missing too.

For MAGA devotees, a Slovenian-born former model in dominatrix stilettos doesn’t exactly scream America First. To find another foreign-born First Lady, you have to go back to Louisa Adams, wife of John Quincy Adams, who was born in London in 1775. She was admittedly extremely popular; but unlike Melania, she had an American father.

Then there is the 80 percent of us who are non-MAGA Americans. For us, it remains an article of faith that anyone with a beating heart must find Trump too repellent to tolerate. That’s why theories that Melania’s a simulacrum have never quite died.

Back in 2017, days after Marina Hyde’s tweet, comedian Andrea Wagner Barton posted a photo on Facebook to prove a Melania impersonator was in the mix. It was a blurry photo of Melania looking uncanny. Digital Zapruder sleuths were off to the races comparing noses. Google searches for “Melania Trump double” and “Fake Melania” skyrocketed.

These days, Trump, with his own marked likability issues, still considers Melania an asset. On Sunday, he posted a stylized press picture of him and his wife to Truth Social, next to a snap of Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee in the Michigan Senate race, and his wife, Dr. Sarah Jukaku. “Two VERY DIFFERENT America’s,” Trump’s caption read.

El-Sayed shot back on CNN: “Sarah and I actually like each other... I don’t know about the First Lady and the president, but from what I’ve heard, it’s a bit of a rocky road.”

What do Americans even need from first ladies? It’s a deeply conservative role, and Melania, though 57, doesn’t exactly conjure home and hearth. But first ladies are at least expected to engage in public advocacy for non-partisan causes. At this Melania has also failed. “Be Best” was a daftly named nothingburger.

On the other hand, she has shown some passion for self-promotion. Her flop documentary “Melania,” which was directed by accused sexual abuser and Epstein cohort Brett Ratner, was financed by Amazon in what looked like a bribe to her husband.

Undaunted, Melania has a limited reality series on Amazon coming out in the fall. It will give a restive nation another behind-the-scenes look at Melania’s stupor and suppressed irritability, this time in the first weeks of Trump’s current term. The preview for the series opens with Melania sighing “here we go again” and features disembodied stilettos sinking into carpets in what could double as content for OnlyFans.

In the meantime, tinfoil tall tales about Melania’s off-ness keep evolving. Now people speculate that Melania is artificial intelligence. In May, she published an audiobook that was voiced by AI. “A NEW ERA IN PUBLISHING,” she wrote on X.

Also in the spring, Melania in white strode a red carpet with a robot in white named Figure 03, a humanoid programmed to do dishes and laundry. Like a slightly drugged but obedient homemaker, Figure 03, which has no eyes or mouth, has precise, slow-motion, melancholic movements and a soft girlish voice. For an audience who has never warmed to the First Lady, the jokes made themselves.

“One is a soulless, foreign-made device, sold by one shady businessman to another,” wrote a YouTube commenter. “The other is a robot.”

What had happened? Some of that is still up for debate, and some trials are pending, but a few important facts are generally accepted. On the night of July 4, 2025, around a dozen people converged on the immigrant detention camp known as Prairieland. They had planned a noise demonstration, gathering near enough so that those inside could hear them as they chanted supportive slogans through bullhorns, waved flashlights, and set off fireworks. One person vandalized a few cars in the parking lot. Some security cameras were damaged. The camp’s officers told the demonstrators to leave, and most of them did. A local police officer arrived and saw, at a distance, someone wearing a neon green neck gaiter and carrying a rifle. The officer drew his weapon. The person in green fired, striking and wounding the officer. More law enforcement swarmed the scene and arrested everyone they could find.

In the ensuing days, law enforcement sought anyone they thought was involved. There were raids, more arrests, and a hunt for Benjamin Song, who fired the rifle. On July 8, federal prosecutors announced the first round of arrests and charged 10 people with attempted murder of a federal officer. A few months later, after the president declared war on what he called “antifa,” federal prosecutors began describing those arrested as an “antifa cell.” Then they charged them with “providing material support to terrorists.” In the end, some 22 people were swept up in this case, facing a range of federal and state charges. This June and July, 15 people were sentenced by federal judges to prison sentences spanning 30, 50, and 100 years.

Beyond the shooting, beyond the demonstration, the political activities prosecutors pointed at to justify charging these activists were utterly ordinary. The government deemed the protests defendants organized, the zines they made, and their shared interests in antifascism and anarchism the incriminating features of a (nonexistent) antifa terror cell. Importantly, some of the people who were first to come to the defendants’ aid were engaged in those political acts, too. They shared those political interests. This meant that from the beginning, supporters faced the reality that their actions could also be characterized as criminal. They knew that the Trump administration was not interested in merely prosecuting individual acts of violence or even vandalism, but rather in casting a group of people as a threat to the nation.

The boundaries of that group extended beyond the July 4 noise demonstration. Prosecutors got indictments for people who weren’t even there: someone who moderated a group chat on Discord, someone who gave a defendant a Faraday bag (meant to block a phone signal) that she had crafted herself, and someone who moved a box of zines from a home he’d shared with a defendant (who was also his wife). If the government was already going this far to target activists in its crackdown on dissent, was there any kind of organizing that could be considered safe?

“It’s obvious to me that the prosecution optimized for the headline,” said Lydia Koza, whose wife, Autumn Hill, was sentenced to 50 years. “They optimized for the shock and awe.” We spoke just after the anniversaries of the noise demonstration and the raid on her home with Hill. For months after the arrests, Koza explained, the defendants remained in detention, unindicted, some in “administrative segregation”—solitary confinement—“while the Justice Department scrambled to try and put together a theory of the case that served their ends.”

What the case was supposedly about—the purpose and nature of a noise demonstration—was something that could be easily mischaracterized, a fact the government’s case arguably benefited from. Noise demonstrations, recalled Autumn Hill in a recent rare interview she gave from prison, are “a pretty typical form of protest”: “Fireworks and megaphones and bells and whistles and all that are extremely common.” While a noise demo is one form of protest, it can also be an expression of care and connection. “My goal,” Hill said, “was to let the people inside, the detainees, know, ‘Hey, we’re here, we know that you are there, you haven’t been forgotten, and we understand that what is happening to you is unjust.’” In that sense, a noise demo has more in common with sending a letter to a person in prison than it does with a march or a rally. It’s not merely a symbolic action; it’s a way of showing those incarcerated that people on the outside are looking out for them and paying attention to what happens to them. Showing up and connecting with others is the point.

The day after the noise demonstration, on July 5, Autumn Hill was arrested in a raid on the Dallas home she shared with Koza. “They tried to present this house as being like a commune, or a compound,” Koza told me. In the government’s telling, the house was linked to what prosecutors called “the attack.” At a pretrial hearing, FBI Special Agent Joseph Clark Wiethorn, testifying for the government, was asked what the house meant to “the group.” “It’s been referred to as different things,” Wiethorn replied. “I’ve heard the term as a commune for multiple individuals.” As he put it, “This place was used for holding meetings, for organizing.” Then he called the house “a staging location” that had been “used for pre-attack planning.” It was if by being the scene of an organizing meeting, the house they shared was something sinister in disguise. “You know, we’re living together for fundamentally economic reasons, because this economy is brutal, and because sharing a house is literally the only way to get by,” Koza explained. “This is not as weird as the prosecution wants to make this sound.”

Meanwhile, the “planning” the government offered as evidence of conspiracy appeared to involve discussions of the necessary and complex logistics of organizing a demonstration in the midst of ICE raids. People at anti-ICE protests were facing violence from police as well as political repression through wildly reaching criminal charges brought by federal prosecutors (many of which, across the country, have since been thrown out, from the cases involving D.C. Sandwich Guy and labor leaders to the Broadview 6). This escalation in criminal charges was a pattern already becoming clear in mid-2025, and it was directed from the top.

About two weeks before the Prairieland arrests, the Justice Department had issued a directive to all U.S. attorneys to step up cases against anti-ICE demonstrators. Federal prosecutors, a memo from Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh stated, should prioritize investigations to do with alleged “rioting, looting, arson, destruction of property, assaults on officers (federal, state, and local), and obstruction of federal immigration enforcement efforts,” and should publicize their efforts. “Push out press releases whenever you file charges in these matters,” Singh instructed.

That July, after the arrests, as federal prosecutors rolled out their case against the Prairieland defendants to the media and the defendants sat in jail, their supporters were at work just trying to find each other. These efforts were the beginnings of what became the DFW Support Committee, a group started, Bruno explained, “to connect everyone who’s part of this wider and pretty small radical community in the [Dallas-Fort Worth] metroplex area.” It wasn’t easy, he said, because people had typically tried to remain “as anonymous and disconnected from each other as possible.” The size of their community, compared to the local opposition, along with the opposition’s increasing access to mainstream political power, had already led people to isolate themselves and take precautions, even before the more punitive climate took hold. The political repression driving the case could give them more reasons to disconnect from one another. It was difficult to verify the names and dates of birth for the defendants, information that was necessary in order to locate them in jail and communicate with them there. Some people may have deleted the Signal app off their phone, Bruno said, or changed their usernames. It could take weeks or months before participants connected names they knew on a screen to faces they knew from an organizing meeting.

Those kinds of meetings, tying this somewhat diffuse community together, were also made suspect in the government’s case. Ines Soto, Elizabeth Soto, and Savanna Battan—Bruno’s friends—were the driving force behind the Emma Goldman Book Club, which Bruno had been attending as far back as 2016, “not when it started, but damn near close,” he told me. “Emma Goldman Book Club. It sounds very innocuous,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Shawn Smith. “It’s camouflage for what it is.” Prosecutors put anarchist books and zines that might be read in the club—or at least, their covers—in press materials.

Alexandra Edwards first went to the book club in 2023, she told me, when she was new to the DFW activist scene. “Ines made room for me,” she wrote in a recent essay on the case. Edwards, a writer and academic who teaches about anarchism and researches fascist movements and networks, was at the time working to support the Stop Cop City defendants, who had been organizing against a planned $90 million police megafacility in Atlanta. The Georgia attorney general charged more than 60 people with racketeering for their involvement, and more than a dozen with domestic terrorism. (These defendants were characterized by prosecutors as “militant anarchists.”) “I wanted to host a letter-writing night for the Cop City defendants—people then reading their mail in jail,” Edwards wrote, and when she brought this idea to the book club, “Ines folded it into the evening.” Three years later, Ines Soto was among those jailed for participating in the noise demo, and the book club was demonized in the government’s case.

The government was convinced, or at least wanted the jury to be convinced, that the book club was a front for plotting insurrection. “Emma Goldman is a known anarchist. And in these book clubs, this is a place for people to come together and share and spread this type of literature, this anarchist material,” testified FBI Special Agent Joseph Clark Wiethorn at one pretrial hearing. “And where they read, they set up what’s called tabling events. And it’s a place for these people to come together to discuss these ideas.” In other words, it was an ordinary book club, with one distinguishing characteristic: the nature of the ideas under discussion. “All right,” replied Assistant U.S. Attorney Smith. “And these are really kind of violent, overthrow-the-government-type things?” The FBI agent answered simply, “Correct.”

The noise demo itself, meant to express solidarity with people locked away in an immigrant camp, has resulted in a bitter symmetry. The demonstrators who organized to show support for detainees are now imprisoned, and others are now organizing and demonstrating to support them.

On days when the trial was in session, members of the support committee staffed a table at the courthouse; people shared zines and pamphlets about the case. Bruno told me that he gave essays about the case to anarchists in Greece and South Korea. The types of networks that had been made to sound suspicious in the government’s arguments were put to use raising money for lawyers and supporting defendants’ family members. It is the kind of network that could grow, as Bruno and others have put it, the mass movement that it would take to free the Prairieland defendants—broad and strong enough to put the necessary pressure on a future president to pardon and release them.

Early on, Bruno said, the government’s aggressive roundups and violent raids had unfortunately been “pretty successful in scattering everyone.” It took concerted effort to get them back together, he explained, “and understand that these are battles that have to be fought in community, have to be fought collectively, instead of trying to hide.” The risks they face remain very real. But for Bruno, there’s a deeper lesson here, one for the future: “Repression is harder when we’re all together—when we all stick together, when we are all in community with each other—than when we’re separate.”

Once back in office, though, Trump was more like a deadbeat dad. Yes, in February he issued an executive order to increase access to IVF while lowering its cost, which in his eyes made him the “fertilization president.” But it was mostly hot air. Trump did strike a deal in October with a subsidiary of German pharmaceutical company Merck KGaA to slash prices for IVF drugs in exchange for tariff relief, but IVF advocates said the estimated $2,200 savings wouldn’t do much to help couples afford a treatment that costs as much as $25,000 for a single round. The promised free coverage for IVF never came to pass, and in many ways the IVF landscape has gotten notably worse thanks to Republicans in Washington and in state houses across the country. And that’s a big opportunity for the Democrats in a critical election year.

In April 2025, budget cuts killed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Assisted Reproductive Technology Surveillance team, a panel that tracked how well IVF works in the United States. Then in December, and again a few weeks ago, Republicans in Congress killed a provision to expand the military’s coverage of IVF, despite having voted for such coverage in the past. Trump, who is notorious for letting Capitol Hill lawmakers know when they have displeased him, said nothing. Meanwhile, there’s a nascent movement in red states to regulate IVF and providers, leading to fears that anti-IVF forces will slowly chip away at access to fertility technology much as anti-abortion groups eroded access to abortion in the years leading up to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling.

This is a dramatic shift from 2024, when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that embryos created through IVF are considered “unborn children,” leading local clinics to pause treatment out of fear of criminal prosecution and civil liabilities. The nationwide backlash pressured the Alabama legislature to move quickly to assure the legality of IVF, and Republicans across the country scrambled to assure voters that they supported the procedure.

“Already in 2024, the Democratic plan was to make reproductive policy issues as big a deal as they could,” said Sean Tipton, chief advocacy and policy officer for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. “President Trump, being the extremely talented politician that he is, saw that and decided that being against IVF was going to be really bad. So he was going to be for it. I think if he had not done that, I don’t think we would have heard any pro-IVF things out of most Republicans.

“So Republicans had to thread that needle,” Tipton added. “What they have chosen to do is campaign as if they’re pro-IVF and govern as if they’re not.”

Danielle Melfi, CEO of the national infertility association RESOLVE, said there’s a “big gap ... between promises and reality.” “Every politician was really forced to go on the record to say, hey, we support IVF, we support people being able to have families if they’ve experienced infertility,” she said. “But where the difference is coming up is, how do we make real-world access available to people?”

Trump seemed sincere about supporting IVF, and has been vocal about wanting more native-born babies in America. As recently as May, in an Oval Office event, he announced a proposed rule that would allow employers to offer IVF coverage as a stand-alone benefit, much like vision or dental care. Still, that rule wouldn’t require employers to cover fertility treatments. “No president has done more to help Americans struggling to start families than President Trump, whose administration has created a new fertility benefit option and slashed the cost of fertility drugs,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement to The New Republic. “The Administration will continue to explore additional policies to build on these historic successes.”

IVF was a politically polarizing issue even before the 1978 birth of Briton Louise Brown, dubbed the first “test tube baby” by the media. Some believed that IVF, which includes freezing and sometimes destroying unused embryos, was tantamount to abortion. Others “didn’t like IVF because it would enable people who were single, unmarried, and people who were in same-sex relationships to all have children, too—and also, enable people to prioritize a career and education,” said Mary Ziegler, a professor at UC Davis School of Law who is at work on a book on the history of IVF. “All of these things were not something conservatives approved of.”

IVF is enormously popular now, with a 2024 Pew Research poll showing that seven in ten Americans think it’s a good thing; eight percent think it’s a bad thing, and 22 percent don’t know. But determined opposition remains from religious and social conservatives. That’s apparent not just in Congress, where GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson, an evangelical Christian, has quietly scuttled efforts to expand access to IVF, but in the reaction to last weekend’s announcement by Democratic Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez that she is freezing her eggs.

Prominent blogger Matt Walsh called the decision “totally backwards and ridiculous,” writing, “She’ll turn 37 in a couple months. If she got pregnant now, it would technically be a geriatric pregnancy. Instead she’s freezing her eggs. This desire to start having children late in life is completely baffling to me.” Mollie Hemingway, the editor in chief of The Federalist, wrote, “Ladies, get married to a good man as young as you’re able and have your babies and do it naturally. This is a very sad public performance/display of unnecessarily unwise decision making.” (“Naturally” is right-wing code for getting pregnant through sex and not using birth control, condoms, or other forms of contraception.)

The White House, however, sees this is a losing issue. “We most certainly want to encourage more women and families to have children, period,” a senior White House official told Axios. “That’s a diplomatic way of saying, ‘Yes, the Matt Walsh messaging is not helpful.’” Another Trump adviser told the outlet, noting the upcoming midterm elections, “This isn’t really a winner for Republicans.”

Democrats haven’t made IVF a front-burner issue in the midterms, as they did in the 2024 general election, after the Alabama court ruling. But it’s starting to pick up: In announcing the reintroduction of the Right to IVF Act in July, Senator Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat who had both of her children via IVF, slammed Trump for dropping the fertility ball.* “Almost two years after promising free IVF for all Americans if he were elected, Donald Trump has still failed to deliver,” she said. And Ocasio-Cortez, making her egg-freezing announcement, noted that she was doing so in part because of the “political environment where this administration is denying reproductive care to women across the country, from abortion rights to the ability to carry out a healthy pregnancy.”

With Congress at a standstill on the issue, action is moving to the states. And there, IVF advocates say, is the real threat. RESOLVE monitored 181 bills across 39 states this year and found that 41 threatened IVF access.

Proposals range from mandatory tracking of embryos (as South Dakota considered and rejected this year) to Targeted Restrictions of IVF Providers, known as “TRIP” laws, which would impose reporting and other regulations on clinics, as Tennessee considered and rejected last year. That measure also would have prohibited genetic testing and imposed an embryo creation limit of four times the number of children the patient hopes to have. (Since not all embryos are viable, providers try for as many as they can create—typically eight for women under 35, and four to five for patients 35-40.)

Embryonic “personhood” laws and bills (considered but not passed this year in South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Minnesota) are a constant threat to IVF, advocates say, citing the Alabama Supreme Court ruling. In Louisiana, embryos are considered “juridical persons” under the law, and it is illegal to intentionally destroy a viable embryo. People who have embryos created have to keep them frozen in the Bayou State or ship them elsewhere.

Such tactics, reproductive rights advocates say, are similar to the strategy used to weaken abortion rights, state by state, when an outright ban was out of reach. “We see a lot of parallels between the efforts to restrict or ban abortion and what we’re seeing now in the states to restrict IVF,” said Karla Torres, senior human rights counsel for the Center for Reproductive Rights. “Conservatives or anti-abortion advocates who are now targeting IVF know they cannot outright ban it. What they are looking for [are ways] to restrict access to it or undermine the standard of care for IVF.”

Ziegler agrees. “It’s parallel to the playbook that took down Roe,” she said.

Arkansas, meanwhile, last year became the first state to enact the RESTORE Act, which requires insurance companies to cover what is called Restorative Reproductive Medicine, or RRM. The controversial approach—which critics deride as “blame and shame”—aims to identify and treat physical issues and lifestyle choices that allegedly interfere with fertility. The problem, IVF proponents say, is that precious time can be wasted finding the “root cause” of infertility—and then it may be too late for IVF.

Emma Waters, senior policy analyst in the Center for Technology and the Human Person at The Heritage Foundation, rejects the notion that RRM is not as effective. “To treat infertility, one must treat the underlying causes. IVF, in and of itself, doesn’t do that,” said Waters, the co-author of the Heritage paper that has become a template for state legislation pushing RRM.

Torres said she expects other states to follow suit in promoting the “restorative” care at the expense of IVF. In Texas, the state GOP recently approved a party platform opposing IVF and promoting “natural procreative technology,” an element of RRM, as an alternative to IVF. (While Texas law requires insurers to offer IVF coverage, employers don’t have to sign up for it. Further, with a few exceptions, the couple must have been infertile for five years, and only the husband’s sperm can be used.)

Another new battleground in the IVF wars is surrogacy, Torres said. Florida recently enacted a law banning gestational surrogacy contracts if any of the parties is a citizen or resident of a State Department-designated “foreign country of concern.” While the law appears aimed at birthright citizenship, it has the effect of limiting IVF, Torres said.

The movement in red states to limit IVF is picking up steam, Tipton said. And since state legislatures tend to move more quickly than Congress, they could change IVF access quickly. “Legislation is like sperm,” Tipton said. “There’s a lot of it. Most of it’s not going to amount to anything. But if you’re not taking appropriate precautions, there’s going to be hell to pay.”

* This article previously misstated Tammy Duckworth’s state.

“Our wonderful White House Press Secretary, and one of my most trusted aides, Karoline Leavitt, will be departing her role at the end of the month so she can spend more time with her beautiful young children and family, a decision I totally understand and respect!” Trump wrote Wednesday afternoon on Truth Social. “Karoline has been a real leader in the White House, and has done a phenomenal job fighting for Justice, Liberty, and Freedom, since 2018, including our Historic Re-Election Campaign of 2024. Karoline has been one of the best White House Press Secretaries in the History of the Office. Thank you, Karoline, for a job well done!” 

Leavitt first joined the Trump administration in 2020 as part of the White House Office of Presidential Correspondence, and was eventually named assistant White House press secretary. She ran an unsuccessful campaign for Congress in New Hampshire before making her way back to the Trump campaign, and was named press secretary in 2024, the youngest one ever at 28 years old. It is unclear who will replace her. 

Leavitt leaves a legacy of devoted bigotry behind her. She lied about Trump blocking $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza. She blamed a deadly collision between a military helicopter and an American Airlines flight that killed 67 people on DEI instead of massive cuts Trump made.  She called the Epstein files a “Democratic hoax,” and she called Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran national and Maryland father wrongly deported by the Trump administration, a “foreign terrorist” and “MS-13 gang member” who was “engaged in human trafficking.” That was a lie too. 

The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York Wednesday, calling Trump’s plan “extraordinary, corrupt and unconstitutional.” 

Truth Social is part of Trump’s company, Trump Media & Technology, which announced the plan last month. Under a new product, known as Trump API, it seeks to get Wall Street companies to pay between $60,000 and $100,000 per month for preferred access to Trump’s posts so their traders can have an advantage on market reactions to them. 

Trump API would provide 24/7 access, along with Trump’s archived posts going back to 2022, including ones that were deleted or altered. Trump Media’s interim CEO Kevin McGurn says that the company intends “to create a lot of friction for those folks that aren’t coming to us directly.”   

This seems a lot like insider trading, which is a federal crime prosecuted by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the lawsuit directly takes aim at the ethical issues behind selling access to market-moving information from the president of the United States. 

“This scheme is profoundly corrupt. The President stands to gain financially by giving ‘market-moving’ government information to those who are willing and able to pay his personal company,” the plaintiffs write. “There is no legitimate interest, let alone a significant one, in permitting President Trump to profit from selling government information.” 

According to the lawsuit, Trump Media disclosed on Monday that it already has more than 10 subscribers to the service, including financial news outlets and high-frequency trading firms. The president stands to personally profit from those companies having access to privileged information generated by his position. 

With any other politician, this would be a massive ethical violation possibly coming with legal penalties, but for Trump, it’s only the latest in a series of schemes that have allowed him to profit off of his presidency. For now, this lawsuit is the only attempt to end his insider trading venture. 

Blanche claimed that the fund was dead, while at the same time insinuating that the administration would look for other ways to offer payouts to insurrectionists and allies during his introductory press conference on Wednesday.

“The president has never gone as far as you have to say that the Anti-Weaponization fund is dead. Now that you’ve been confirmed narrowly, arguably because of that Anti-Weaponization fund ... is it dead, and is it ever gonna come back?” a reporter asked.

Blanche offered a verbose, noncommittal answer.

Blanche: The president feels very strongly, as do I, that there were people who were victims of a DOJ that was absolutely weaponized. He feels very strongly he would want to make them whole, as do I. But it will not be through the anti weaponization fund. pic.twitter.com/1DMWSMP9Uo

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 12, 2026

“I quibble with that, because the president said in the Cabinet meeting that it’s dead. He’s also said that he likes it. But he has also said it’s dead,” Blanche said. “As for me ... I have testified under oath that it’s dead. I have testified in front of the House when I wasn’t under oath where I said it was dead. I have answered questions after my hearing where I said that it was dead. I rescinded the order that set up the weaponization fund, which means that it does not exist ... I’m not sure how I can further say that the Anti-Weaponization Fund does not exist.”

“We also have said ... that if Congress would like to make it a law, that we would support that,” Blanche continued, changing tack. “The president feels very strongly, as do I, that there were people who were victims of a Department Of Justice that was absolutely weaponized, and he feels very strongly he would want to make them whole, as do I. But it will not be through the Anti-Weaponization Fund.”

Within Blanche’s answer is a strong desire to gift reparations to Trump’s aggrieved supporters and friends through whatever means accessible to them—an alarming answer given that it was one of the issues his confirmation apparently hinged on.

ESPN reported Wednesday that Josh Kushner, the brother of President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and ex-Disney CEO Bob Iger have reportedly reached a deal with business executive Mark Walter to buy the NBA team just a year after Walter purchased it for $10 billion. 

The timing is suspicious, as Walter is facing a loan fraud investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan, over $16 billion in private credit deals concerning insurance companies he owns. Walter also happened to visit the White House in June to be honored with the Los Angeles Dodgers, which he owns, for winning the World Series. 

Did Trump cut a deal and get his son-in-law’s brother involved to help Walter out with some impending financial trouble? Josh Kushner is said to politically disagree with his brother and Trump. But he still would have been the main investor in the abandoned plan by FIFA President Gianni Infantino, who has cozied up to Trump, to sell stakes in the World Cup. Kushner would have to sell his minority stake in the Miami Heat to complete the Lakers deal.

Walter faces a serious threat to his business empire with the federal probes, according to The Wall Street Journal. Trump’s second term has been marked by visible corruption involving business executives and wealthy foreign leaders close to the president, and that appears to be extending to professional sports.  

A special grand jury is a judicial body made up of 23 American citizens that exists to conduct large, sometimes yearlong investigations usually centered on government corruption or organized crime. They can also issue a report regarding the potential “preponderance of evidence” upon the conclusion of their investigation, something a regular jury can’t do. Anyone named in their investigation may later testify in front of them.

Pirro’s move is unprecedented, as a federal special grand jury has never been called in a jurisdiction as small as D.C. And while she has yet to speak on what the body will actually focus on, one doesn’t need to look far to identify why she might be taking aggressive measures like this right now.

Pirro couldn’t get the “DC Sandwich Guy” after charging him with assault for throwing a sandwich at a federal agent during Trump’s takeover. She failed to indict the six congressional Democrats—led by Senator Mark Kelly—who made a video urging federal law enforcement and members of the military not to obey illegal orders in February. And most recently she’s failed to get any kind of prosecutorial motion on the Reflecting Pool drama, getting into screaming matches with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum of all people while Trump publicly rebukes her. The former Fox News host has had her back against the wall for some time now. While this move still might not put any actual bite into her bark, it might be just loud enough for Trump not to fire her.

Case in point: David Crowley’s upset victory over democratic socialist Francisca Hong in Tuesday’s Wisconsin gubernatorial primary. Crowley, the candidate of the Democratic “establishment,” defeated Hong by half a point. Yet this extraordinarily narrow win could have hidden, surprising implications that benefit the party more broadly, perhaps impacting Democrats’ ability to combat MAGA-GOP tactics in the 2028 presidential race and in the longer-term House redistricting wars.

Let’s connect the dots. Most obviously, a Crowley win in the primary probably makes it more likely that a Democrat will take over the Wisconsin governorship next year from incumbent Democrat Tony Evers. Republicans spent millions to boost Hong for exactly that reason. But that’s not all: With Crowley at the top of the ticket, Democratic strategists believe, wins in many down-ballot state legislative races in Wisconsin are now more likely.

On that front, the stakes are very high. Another top Democratic goal this year is flipping control of the Wisconsin state legislature, which is notoriously far more right wing than the state itself. To do so, they’re targeting 14 GOP-controlled legislative seats—10 in the State Assembly and four in the State Senate. Winning those seats would have been harder with Hong as the gubernatorial candidate, Democratic strategists say.

“Crowley’s path to victory runs through suburban Wisconsin and through holding down Republican margins in rural communities,” Joe Zepecki, a veteran Democratic strategist in the state, told me. “That overlaps with exactly where Democrats need to win state legislative seats to get the trifecta next year.”

By contrast, Zepecki said, Hong’s path would have run through boosting youth turnout in Wisconsin’s urban centers and around college campuses. “That does not map on to where the competitive legislative races are,” Zepecki noted.

A Democratic trifecta in Wisconsin will be hard to pull off with Republicans enjoying a three-seat edge in the State Senate and nine-seat edge in the Assembly. But with Trump’s approval in the state stuck at around 40 percent, a very good year is certainly plausible. The large number of GOP state legislators who retired this cycle shows that Republicans very much agree.

And a trifecta suddenly makes possible big progressive legislative changes, Zepecki pointed out, like ending the state’s right-to-work status, restoring collective bargaining for public employees, a minimum wage hike, legalizing cannabis, and more. These have had “zero chance of passing since 2011,” Zepecki said, referring to when Republican Scott Walker was elected governor and lurched the state in a reactionary direction. “That’s a long time.”

Now note that the GOP gubernatorial nominee, Representative Tom Tiffany, is an election denier who voted against certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 electors. There’s no telling what he’d do to sabotage the electoral count in the 2028 presidential election. Same with a GOP-controlled legislature. If Democrats can win the governorship—and even better, both legislative chambers—it would cut off that option, too.

Want more? Recall that Wisconsin’s congressional seats remain hideously gerrymandered due to the last decade of GOP redistricting: Right now, Republicans control six House seats and Democrats control two. That’s ludicrous in a state where Evers was elected governor in 2022 and in 2018 by very slim margins, not to mention where Donald Trump won in 2024 by less than a point after losing to Biden in 2020 by—you guessed it—less than a point.

That extreme gerrymander gives Democrats a big opening—if they can flip the state legislature. Republicans have unleashed the gerrymandering hounds nationally—the party has long gerrymandered, but Trump and MAGA supercharged it this year by demanding mid-decade chicanery across the country—and most Democrats grasp that they now must do the same.

But in this cycle they were hamstrung by structural obstacles. More redistricting opportunities will soon open up, and a big one could be in Wisconsin: As a recent Fair Fight Action analysis found, Democrats could potentially squeeze three additional House seats out of the state.

It’s not clear when this might be doable: The state constitution probably precludes a redistricting next year (though a Democratic trifecta could try). But if Democrats can assemble and keep this trifecta through 2031, then they can redraw the House maps to gain those three seats into the next decade. As Fair Fight Action’s Max Flugrath put it: “Flipping the Wisconsin legislature is critical to countering the GOP’s war on fair representation.”

There’s still more! The gubernatorial outcome could also impact the hugely contested House race in Wisconsin’s third congressional district, which could figure in a new Democratic majority. The party’s preferred candidate, Rebecca Cooke, just won her primary there. A source familiar with internal Democratic polling tells me Crowley’s victory makes it more likely that Cooke can compete against hard-core MAGA GOP Representative Derrick Van Orden with male independents, a key demographic in the district.

“That wasn’t going to happen with Hong at the top of the ticket,” the source said.

Admittedly, these sorts of calculations—the slicing and dicing of the electorate, the notion that long-term policy and redistricting advances live or die on such infinitesimal shifts—are not a particularly inspiring way to think about politics.

Yet this is how our system is constructed. The reversal of the GOP rigging of democracy in Wisconsin has been incredibly painstaking. It depended on hard-won victories like recapturing the State Supreme Court in 2025 in the face of $20 million in spending by Elon Musk. It has relied on arduous, unglamorous organizing, and on grinding victories akin to tiny movements in trench warfare.

As Wikler has put it, unrigging the GOP capture of democracy in Wisconsin taught him something about how power ebbs and flows—how seemingly isolated victories enable other gains elsewhere down the road. “I compare it to an electrical grid where if you short out one substation, the lights flicker in the next neighborhood,” Wikler recently told Ezra Klein. “American political power is like that.”

Over time, in short, every little victory here and there adds up to something much bigger than the sum of its parts. In Wisconsin, the long-term unrigging of the GOP hammerlock on democracy still hangs in the balance—but it’s certainly more plausible now than it was only 24 hours ago.

The Military Times reported Tuesday night that in multiple instances, some of the 5,000 military personnel on the ship have tried to jump off before being stopped by other crew members. Family members of those stationed on the ship are concerned about the mental health, exhaustion, and safety issues affecting their loved ones.

“He’s scared,” Annabelle Loma told the Times about her husband, who reportedly tried to jump overboard. “He thinks he’ll get a dishonorable discharge, and just because he was burnt out, his 13-year career is ruined, just like that. That’s not fair, that’s not right. That’s not what he should be worrying about right now.”

In recent town hall meetings with military leaders, including acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao, things have gotten heated, with family members expressing fear and worry over mental health and the risk of self-harm for the ship’s personnel. One spouse reportedly told officials at a meeting Thursday that her husband had messaged her earlier that day saying “he hopes he doesn’t wake up tomorrow.”

One woman at a town hall in San Diego told Cao it was difficult to feel proud of her relative because she believed the military was “killing innocent civilians,” and her relative had expressed guilt about what he was doing, which drew applause from the audience.

Stars and Stripes spoke to several sailors and their family members, who describe declining morale and exhaustion on the Abraham Lincoln, which was only supposed to deploy to the Middle East until May this year. The ship left port in San Diego in November for a deployment to the Pacific Ocean, but was diverted to the Gulf because of Donald Trump’s Iran war. Combat operations have been extended with no return date.

The ship has experienced food shortages, with pictures of meager and tasteless-looking meals going viral. Supplies are also running short, and the ship is plagued with water contamination, plumbing problems, and disruptions in mail delivery. All of this is wearing on the discipline and mental health of those aboard as Trump’s pointless war with Iran drags on without end.

Trump, for his part, seems either unaware of how dire things are among servicemembers or simply doesn’t care. He touted the U.S. naval blockade on the Strait of Hormuz Wednesday and bragged about how successful it is.

Republican candidates Amir Hassan of Michigan, Andy Ogles of Tennessee, Mike Lindell of Minnesota, and Darline Graham of South Carolina were all endorsed by Trump ahead of their primaries. Hassan, Lindell, and Ogles each lost their race, while Graham is nowhere close to the fifty percent she needs to avoid a runoff.

In Michigan, Hassan—possibly doomed by his own base’s bigotry—lost handily to Thomas Smith by over 10,000 votes, even as Smith dropped out of the race last month and ceased all campaigning. Tennessee incumbent Representative Ogles was defeated by Charlie Hatcher after suffering through scandal and redistricting. And Lindell—known mostly as the MyPillow Guy—lost to Minnesota House Speaker Lisa DeMuth by about 11 percentage points and more than 45,000 votes. He refused to concede at the time, in true Trump fashion. And Graham, who was essentially anointed after her brother’s death, is now struggling against Ralph Northam.

These are primary races—in theory the most concentrated MAGA voting bloc in which any candidate endorsed by Trump should expect to have an upper hand (maybe except Hassan). A bigot like Ogles and a crank like Lindell should feel more than welcome in a primary on paper. Instead they—and Trump—have been rejected by Republican voters. This is yet another awful warning sign for the GOP as midterms approach in November.

The Department of Homeland Security published a public notice Monday announcing that Immigration and Customs Enforcement would spend between $10 million and $20 million to buy gloves that emit painful electric shocks.

The devices, called G.L.O.V.E, or Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, are manufactured by Compliant Technologies in Kentucky and advertised as a “humane, low-optics, de-escalation solution for many situations facing our men and women in uniform.”

The manufacturer warns against using its device on elderly people, pregnant women, children, and people with severe disabilities—individuals who have not been spared from the Trump administration’s sweeping crackdown on immigrants.

The company also warns that the devices are not meant to be used against people merely exhibiting “verbal defiance or belligerence.” But federal immigration agents aren’t exactly known for making that distinction—with deadly consequences. Agents have continually threatened or attacked individuals who criticize or monitor their immigration enforcement activities.

A senior DHS official told NBC News Wednesday that all ICE agents would begin wearing the electric gloves by the end of September.

Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, deputy project director on policing at the American Civil Liberties Union, told the Associated Press that federal immigration agents had not demonstrated their capacity to restrain themselves.

“ICE spent the last year showing this country they are too quick to use force. Now they will be able to deploy electric shocks with the slight push of a button that maybe nobody else can see them do,” she said. “Introducing gloves that can so easily be used to deliver terrible pain in encounters is a recipe for harm to the public.”

Across the country, ICE agents have practiced excessive force, warrantless searches or arrests, racial profiling, and wrongful detentions. This notice follows the eleventh fatal shooting by federal immigration enforcement during President Donald Trump’s second term.

Multiple outlets have reported that the Trump administration discovered an Iranian assassination threat against the president last last month while flying out of Turkey. They chose to keep the information secret, having Trump board Air Force One on camera while he, Harp, and Scavino later hid in a catering truck that covertly transferred them to another plane. Rubio was reportedly the only person aboard the original Air Force One who was aware of the possibility that everyone on it could be killed by an Iranian strike at any point.

“It’s really just up to Secret Service. I just follow what they like to do ... They wanted me to go on a different flight, a different plane, equal safety,” Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews Tuesday night. “I do what they say. The plane that I was on was at greater risk ... Because that would be the plane that I think that they would be more likely to go for.”

There are so many questions here. An assassination threat credible enough to make Trump hide in a catering truck only further delegitimizes the administration’s constant rhetoric about how crippled the Iranian government is. Why wouldn’t they just wait it out instead of sending Rubio and some of the highest ranking Cabinet members on a possible suicide mission? And why wouldn’t Trump take everyone on the secret flight instead of just Scavino, Nauta, and Harp—his closest assistants? Trump even said once of Harp that she was the “only one who loved him as much as his wife and kids.” Nauta, moreover, was a codefendant along with Trump in a federal case that alleged that the pair had improperly stored classified materials at Mar-a-Lago.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that the Trump administration pulled money from other government agencies and private donors, and then steered that cash into an account that usually holds a few million dollars for routine White House maintenance, known as “White House Repair and Restoration.” 

But since Trump took office last year, the administration has funneled $875 million to that account. That money consists of transfers from the U.S. Secret Service and the White House Military Office of about $500 million, with $305 billion from private donations. Another $70 million was also directed to the account, according to documents reviewed by the Post, but the source isn’t identified.  

In all, Trump plans to spend at least $900 million on “modernization projects” on White House grounds, including a helipad, improvements to Lafayette Square, a new visitor screening center, and the White House ballroom that was ruled illegal in federal court last week, with Trump planning to appeal. 

Trump’s ballroom was estimated to cost $600 million (up from $200 million when he first announced the project). Taxpayers will pay for about half of that latest figure, contradicting the president’s promise that the vast majority of it would be paid for by private donations. 

All of this is unprecedented, as in previous administrations, requests for White House renovations were submitted as requests to Congress and then put through the appropriations process before agencies sought approvals and hired contractors. But Trump seems more preoccupied with construction and redevelopment projects in his second term as president than he is with the daily business of leading the country. He regularly falls asleep during important meetings and ceremonies, but musters up excitement to check on his various pet projects. 

Inside Washington

Could Jon Husted be Sherrod Brown’s ideal opponent?

We’re taking a look outside of Washington during Congress’s recess, highlighting some of the top battleground House and Senate races. Today, we’re focused on Ohio, where former Senator Sherrod Brown is fighting to represent the state once again in the U.S. Senate.

Brown, who served three Senate terms before losing to Republican Bernie Moreno in 2024, is running against Jon Husted, whom the governor appointed to fill the state’s other Senate seat—the one JD Vance vacated when he was elected vice president that year. Since taking the seat last year, Husted has consistently voted for President Donald Trump’s agenda, repeatedly voting against resolutions that sought to curb the war in Iran.

Husted previously served as Ohio’s lieutenant governor and, before that, Ohio’s secretary of state. Despite this history, “not that many people know who he is in Ohio, to be honest,” said David Cohen, professor of political science at the University of Akron. “Jon Husted is a bit of a mystery to a lot of people.” What they do know about him tends to be negative, Cohen added, citing his “lockstep” votes for Trump’s agenda, contributions from Epstein associate and billionaire Les Wexner (the Husted campaign has pledged to donate them), and his testimony in a corruption case involving the utility company FirstEnergy. Husted testified in March for the defense in the FirstEnergy case, which Cohen called “Ohio’s biggest political scandal in history.” The central allegation of the ongoing case is that FirstEnergy funneled some $60 million to various state GOP politicians to pass a bill favorable to its interests. Husted has not been accused of wrongdoing in the case. His testimony involved a dinner between the then–governor elect and FirstEnergy executives. Before the scandal was public, Husted’s 2017 campaign for governor received support in the form of dark money contributions from FirstEnergy.

Brown’s campaign has emphasized Husted’s role in the FirstEnergy trial, his past campaign contributions from Wexner, and his support for building data centers in Ohio. “It’s a no-lose issue for Democrats,” Cohen explained. “Data centers are universally hated by people on the left and on the right and in the middle.”

Husted’s adherence to Trump’s agenda could be the biggest gift of all for Brown’s campaign. The war in Iran and subsequent cost of living increases are deeply unpopular among voters, and could be enough of a motivator for Democrats to turn out for Brown and independents to push him over the edge. The unpopularity of Trump and his agenda has created “an opportunity that we haven’t seen really for 20 years since 2006, when the Bush administration was struggling so badly in the wake of Katrina and other things,” Cohen said. “I think it’s possible not only [for] Sherrod Brown, but you may see a clean sweep of the statewide Democratic candidates this year.”

Husted and other Ohio Republicans also risk being damaged by the scandal around Representative Max Miller, who is accused of abusing his daughter and ex-wife (who is the daughter of Ohio’s senior senator, Moreno). Miller, who represents Ohio’s 7th congressional district, has persisted with his reelection campaign, despite the allegations. Voters’ distaste for Miller could boost his Democratic challenger Brian Poindexter, as well as Brown, particularly if some Republican voters simply stay home. Husted avoided commenting on Miller’s candidacy until late last week, when he called on Miller to step aside.

But despite the favorable environment, Brown still faces a tight race. Ohio has become redder over the past decade. Trump won the state in all three of his presidential elections. Republicans control all statewide offices, both chambers of the state’s legislature, and the majority of the state’s House delegation. The Cook Political Report rates the race as a toss-up, and polls from June are split, with one showing Husted up three points, another showing Brown up three points, and a third with Brown up four points.

Brown lost to Moreno in 2024 by just 3.6 percentage points. In that race, Brown lost eight counties that he won in 2018: Ashtabula, Erie, Lake, Mahoning, Ottawa, Portage, Trumbull, and Wood. All eyes will be on those northern counties this November. In 2024, Brown was plagued by negative ads that attacked him for his support for transgender people. He also struggled to maintain distance from Kamala Harris, who was running at the top of the ticket. Ultimately, Brown received 120,000 more votes than Harris did in 2024, outperforming her by over seven percentage points.

Experts expect Brown to handily win the state’s blue urban areas. But he’ll need to shrink Husted’s margins in the red suburban and rural parts of the state, too. Suburban areas, home to about half of the state’s population, tend to have lots of independent voters, who Cohen says “are just kind of ripe for capture by Sherrod Brown and by Democrats in general” in 2026. The task isn’t necessarily to win these counties outright, but rather to siphon enough votes away from Husted in these crucial districts to carry the state as a whole.

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

Wisconsin’s Francesca Hong may have gotten most of the Democratic gubernatorial headlines this week, but in the Southwest, two other party hopefuls are making unusual pitches to the public as well. In Texas, a central component of gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa’s message, writes the Houston Chronicle’s Jeremy Wallace, is that she’s the only thing standing between America and a near-permanent GOP majority in Congress via gerrymandering and new census counts. (Wallace breaks down the numbers.) In Arizona on Tuesday, Governor Katie Hobbs announced the running mate pick that she’s been teasing for over a week, naming former Republican Mesa Mayor John Giles to her ticket. Giles, an independent now, split with his party in 2021 over a nondiscrimination ordinance intended to protect LGBTQ+ residents and endorsed Kamala Harris for president in 2024. He is also, the Arizona Capitol Times notes, “a member of the typically conservative Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a religious affiliation he shares with Hobbs’ opponent, Congressman Andy Biggs.”

Is a new, underwater front opening in the data center wars? Maine Public profiles a new proposal to build a “submerged” data center in Passamaquoddy Bay. The idea was famously tested in Microsoft’s Project Natick off the coast of Scotland in a pilot program that hasn’t been active in years; Maine Public notes that “earlier this year, another submerged data center was reportedly deployed in China.” Residents of Eastport, Maine, who worry about damage to the local economy, particularly if the data center heat drives out the lobsters, are having none of it. “Speakers from across the political spectrum lambasted the idea” at a recent gathering, Maine Public reports. One of the more memorable quotes, from Eastport City Manager Brian Schuth: “I have said it’s the equivalent of an idea scrawled on a bar napkin.” Of note: Both chambers of Maine’s state legislature passed a temporary moratorium on data centers larger than 20 megawatts this past spring—a measure spearheaded by state Democrats—only for Democratic Governor Janet Mills to veto. The measure would not have affected Passamaquoddy Bay, though, as the application by developer DeepGreen Western Passage would not meet this threshold.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

Resources for the Future publishes a new working paper from Yanjun “Penny” Liao, Hannah Druckenmiller, and Margaret A. Walls on the urgent topic of how weather extremes are affecting the federal crop insurance program, or FCIP. Unsurprisingly, they write, “farmers respond to adverse weather and yield shocks by increasing insurance participation: a 10 percent yield decline increases insured acreage by approximately 4.9 percent for corn and 3.4 percent for soybeans.” That means that “climate-driven enrollment growth alone is estimated to raise program costs by 4–9 percent for corn and soybeans by midcentury.” On the bright side, they also find that “FCIP enrollment substantially mitigates the adverse effects of extreme heat on rural labor markets and generates positive spillovers to nontradable sectors, such as retail, hospitality, and health care.”

Illinois’s new law allowing Uber drivers to unionize, David Madland writes at the Center for American Progress, joins similar policies in Massachusetts, California, and Minnesota in showing the strengths of so-called sectoral bargaining for a “difficult-to-organize, ‘fissured’ industry with a dispersed workforce, such as rideshare.” This isn’t a fringe issue, Madland notes in a new article: “Around 1 million workers would gain union coverage if the approximately 70,000 rideshare drivers in Massachusetts, 800,000 in California, and 100,000 in Illinois can reach collective bargaining agreements with rideshare companies. That would mark a major shift for workers and unions, reversing approximately 20 years of gradual decline in private sector bargaining coverage.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Book of the Week: What Happened to Liberal Democracy? by Daron Acemoglu

THE GIST: Acemoglu, a Nobel Prize–winning economist and NYT bestselling author of Why Nations Fail, argues that liberal democracy’s existential crisis stems from structural problems more than cultural ones—and that saving it requires a turn to what he terms “working-class liberalism.”

PRAISE: Thomas Piketty says the book offers a blueprint “for rebuilding Roosevelt-like ‘working-class liberalism,’” while Joel Mokyr, last year’s Nobel laureate in economics, says it’s “essential reading for anyone concerned about politics, power and populism in the twenty-first century.”

CRUISING THE INDEX: What Happened to Liberal Democracy? isn’t just a work of political philosophy—though there are plenty of references to Rousseau and Rawls in its pages. In a sweeping chapter on automation and the rise of the postindustrial society, Acemoglu argues that the U.S. tax code has long incentivized corporations to shed jobs via outsourcing. And he writes incisively about the role of technology and the increasingly insidious role played by artificial intelligence and social media in everyday life.

TNR’S QUICK CRITICAL ASSESSMENT: As the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election draw nearer, the question of how to rebuild from the wreckage of the second Trump administration has only grown more urgent. While Acemoglu takes a global view of liberalism, he offers insight into the questions U.S. Democrats are asking right now—about what went wrong and where we can go from here.

—Alex Shephard

Political Trivia Question of the Day

As the South Carolina GOP Senate primary heads to a runoff: The Palmetto State last elected a Democrat to the Senate back in 1998. Who was that Democrat? (Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

While speaking to reporters on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews Tuesday night, the president faced a tough question about his plane-swapping farce.

“Why was it too dangerous for you to fly on Air Force One, but not too dangerous for the press?” one reporter asked.

“Well, I don’t know. I think actually, the plane that I flew on was at greater risk. I think it was at greater risk because that would be the plane that they would be more likely to go for,” Trump said.

Trump: They wanted me to go on a different flight.

Q: Why was it too dangerous to fly on Air Force one?

Trump: I don’t know. I think the plane I flew on was at greater risk because that would be the plane they would be more likely to go for.

Q: Were you worried about shoulder… pic.twitter.com/xM7TMd2zFk

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 12, 2026

Trump’s explanation is nonsense.

When Trump departed the NATO summit in Turkey last month, the press reported that the president would fly with them aboard the original Air Force One.

Meanwhile, the president secretly changed planes in order to evade a credible assassination threat from Iran. Members of the press and some staff members remained on the plane, none the wiser—and evidently vulnerable to attack. Given the reportedly tiny circle of people who knew about the plan, it’s highly unlikely that Iran knew, either.

Several top administration officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller were also left aboard the decoy plane.

The primaries in New York and Colorado, where three House incumbents were unseated and other more establishment and center-left candidates were defeated, suggested that Democratic voters were moving both ideologically leftward and away from heeding the guidance of party leaders. In those states and others, candidates backed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and the Democratic Socialists of America were winning and beating opponents supported by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and others from the party’s center-left wing.

But shifting to the Midwest introduced two other elements to these contests: more conservative electorates and electability considerations. While I don’t have data to prove this, I would assume that the average Democrat in Michigan or Wisconsin is less progressive than in the New York districts where DSA-backed candidates won. And in the Michigan and Wisconsin primaries, prominent figures in those states, most notably governors Gretchen Whitmer and Tony Evers, emphatically endorsed Hong and El-Sayed’s opponents, arguing that they were more likely to win the general election. Democratic voters are likely to be particularly receptive to these arguments in Michigan and Wisconsin, both of which are must-win presidential states and flipped from Donald Trump to Joe Biden back to Trump over the last decade.

Hong’s defeat was almost a mirror image of El-Sayed’s victory a week earlier. Pre-primary polls, as with El-Sayed, suggested Hong had a comfortable double-digit lead. But instead, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley and Hong ended up effectively tied, as Representative Haley Stevens and El-Sayed were last week. (El-Sayed won by about 1 percent; Crowley by even less.) Like El-Sayed, Hong won in areas near the state’s colleges but trailed her more centrist opponent in small counties and the state’s heavily Black urban county (Wayne County in Michigan, Milwaukee County in Wisconsin). While it’s too early to have such full analysis of the results in Wisconsin, I assume that Hong, like El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, and other progressives, defeated her more centrist opponent among younger and college-educated voters but trailed with African Americans, non-college voters, and those over age 50.

We don’t know if the polls were wrong, Crowley gained ground, or Hong lost it in the final days of the campaign. But two factors probably shaped the stunning outcome a lot: Evers’s rejection of Hong and strong backing of Crowley; and Hong’s own comments reinforcing doubts about her, most notably when she at first refused to fully backtrack from her 2020 tweet calling for ending the celebration of Thanksgiving. It was notable that prominent progressives such as Warren, Ocasio-Cortez, and Sanders, who had campaigned aggressively for El-Sayed, refused to endorse Hong in the final days of the campaign. I suspect they, like center-left Democrats, were skeptical she could win the general election and didn’t want her defeat to tar the broader progressive movement.

There was some good news for progressives on Tuesday in the Midwest. Peggy Flanagan, the lieutenant governor of Minnesota who was backed by Warren and other prominent progressives, easily defeated Representative Angie Craig in a Senate primary. Craig, like Representative Stevens of Michigan, was the darling of the center-left both in her state and nationally. Tim Walz’s wife Gwen endorsed Craig, as did Pete Buttigieg.

Craig, who represents a swing district, leaned into electability, as fellow center-left candidates Crowley and Stevens did. But I suspect voters in Minnesota cared less about that issue than in Wisconsin or Michigan. After all, while Minnesota isn’t super blue, Democrats nearly always win presidential and Senate races there these days. Fairly liberal figures (Paul Wellstone, Al Franken, outgoing Senator Tina Smith) have won in Minnesota in recent years.

So if Flaganan wins in November, she’ll likely be a champion for progressive causes. But she won’t be the champion for progressive electability that many on the left desperately want, because she won’t have carried a swing state.

Tuesday’s outcome, though, may be good for both wings of the party. Progressives get to test their electoral theories with the better candidate (El-Sayed instead of Hong). Centrists don’t have to root for a leftist that they dislike in a second key swing state. The battle for the soul of the Democratic Party will continue into the 2028 presidential primary. And that’s where it should be decided anyway.

Despite President Donald Trump’s endorsement, Lindell lost to Minnesota House Speaker Lisa DeMuth by about 11 percentage points and more than 45,000 votes. On Tuesday night, when a reporter asked him on his livestream LindellTV if he’d concede the race after the Associated Press called it for DeMuth, Lindell said, “Why would I listen to the AP?”

“There’s 265,000 votes left to count. I’m down by 18,000 now,” Lindell ranted. “I’m not going to give up this race until the votes are counted. That’s nonsense.”

Manic Mike Lindell is ranting and raving that he won’t concede. pic.twitter.com/A67RewLDa3

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 12, 2026

Lindell is a leading 2020 election conspiracist and consistently casts doubt on election results, so it’s expected that he would dispute his own loss. Trump tried to give him an eleventh hour boost on Tuesday, posting on Truth Social about how “Mike Lindell deserves a BIG WIN IN MINNESOTA today.

“Nobody has worked harder, and given up so much, in fighting for free and fair Elections. Go out, NOW, and VOTE for Mike Lindell for Governor. He will not let you down. Thank you! President DJT,” Trump wrote.

Democratic Representative Ted Lieu mocked Lindell and his election conspiracies on X after the news of his loss, posting, “Many people say Venezuela rigged the election against Mike Lindell because they don’t like his pillows. Never seen anything like it.”

Now Minnesota is guaranteed to have its first ever female governor come January, as Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar handily won the Democratic gubernatorial primary. Meanwhile, Lindell will have to go back to his struggling pillow business, which he stepped away from to run for office.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

In an interview with a MAGA media personality, Donald Trump lets slip that he’s considering declaring a national emergency to take over the midterms. This is partly bluster, but we should take it seriously. It comes as Republicans privately fear Trump’s rage is boiling over their failure to pass voter suppression legislation. He’s clearly looking for new ways to steal the election this fall.

So what can Trump actually do if he does try to go full dictator and seize control of the midterms? How far can he get? What impact might it have even if he fails? What can we do to prepare? We’re talking about all of it with election law expert Rick Hasen, who’s one of the best out there at explaining this stuff. Rick, good to have you on.

Rick Hasen: Great to be with you.

Sargent: So just to set the table here, the Senate went into recess without passing Trump’s SAVE Act, which could disenfranchise millions if it did pass. Politico reports that Republicans are now bracing for Trump’s, quote-unquote, “wrath.”

They expect Trump to explode again with more demands for the SAVE Act, and they fear that’ll turn off MAGA base voters they need to turn out in the midterms. Rick, what do you make of all that?

Hasen: Well, yeah, it’s been really one of the president’s priorities for months. He’s obsessed with election fraud. Whether he believes it or not, he talks about it constantly. And what the SAVE America Act, as it’s now called in its most recent iteration, would do, among other things, is require everybody to potentially re-register to vote, providing original copies of their birth certificates, maybe their marriage licenses, their naturalization certificates. It would be a hugely disenfranchising law if it passed.

But it’s stuck. There are not even 50 Republicans who support it. So there are Republicans like Lisa Murkowski and Mitch McConnell, both of whom have reasons to oppose it. So forget about blowing up the filibuster, which is what Trump wants the Senate to do. There’s just not even enough support on the Republican side to get this thing passed with a majority vote.

Sargent: Right, this thing isn’t happening, and that’s the context for this. Trump was talking to Wayne Allyn Root, a MAGA personality. Root suggests that Trump declare a national emergency to take over our elections. Then Root says the Supreme Court has precluded Congress from overriding such declarations. And listen closely to the end, where Trump says, “stranger things have happened. I’ll leave it at that.” Check this out.

Wayne Allyn Root (voiceover): You have the right to declare a national security emergency for elections. And the Supreme Court ruled in 1983, under Reagan, that INS versus Chadha—that if you declare a national security emergency as the president of the United States, they can’t challenge it. It can only be overturned by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress. So if you do this in the next month, we will get photo ID, proof of citizenship, and a limit to mail-in ballots, and you don’t—

Donald Trump (voiceover): Stranger things have happened, I’ll leave it at that.

Root (voiceover): All right, we’ll leave it at that.

Sargent: So you heard that, right? Trump says clearly, “stranger things have happened, I’ll leave it at that,” Rick. So let’s just break this up into pieces. Before we get into the details about what this would entail, Trump is letting it dangle out there that he’s really considering this, right?

Hasen: Yeah, I mean, he’s just constantly saying things. You may remember months ago he talked about nationalizing the elections and taking over elections in 15 states. So he’s constantly making claims that maybe he’s going to do something related to the midterms.

And his new attorney general, Todd Blanche, won’t preclude the idea of sending ICE agents to the polls. Now, I don’t think that’s going to happen, but they’re dangling all kinds of stuff out.

Sargent: Right, and he is clearly letting it be known that he’s considering declaring a national emergency over our elections, yes?

Hasen: He is. It might be for internal MAGA consumption too, but he’s certainly not excluding that possibility.

Sargent: Right, so let’s go through this. When presidents declare national emergencies, it unlocks powers that Congress has already created in other statutes, which presidents can then wield by virtue of having declared the emergency. In general terms, Rick, what sort of powers do these tend to be?

Hasen: So Trump has declared a national emergency at the border. He did it in his first term and he did it now. And that might free up some money. That might allow him to take congressional appropriations that were otherwise going to be used for some purposes and use them for other purposes. So there are—by, I think it was a count by Just Security, the great website—50 different powers that could be invoked.

None of them have anything to do with elections. But there, yes, definitely presidents can and do invoke the term “national emergency,” and it does give them additional powers to do certain things. And Congress has given that power. And it’s true that Congress couldn’t take that power away, unless the president agreed, or unless two-thirds of both houses of Congress passed some legislation to do that.

Sargent: Well, the rub here is that declaring a national emergency wouldn’t unlock any presidential powers over elections specifically, right? Even though it would unlock a bunch of other powers, just nothing over elections specifically. Can you walk us through that piece of this? Why doesn’t it do that?

Hasen: So there are two reasons why declaring a national emergency doesn’t make Donald Trump the election czar in this country. The first is, there’s no federal statute—of all those 50 statutes that deal with national emergencies, none prescribe any powers to the president over elections. The other reason is even more fundamental.

The Constitution, the United States Constitution, does not give the president power over elections. We have a decentralized election system. Most of our election rules come from states, from state legislatures passing statutes.

There’s a part of the Constitution—it’s in Article I, Section 4—it says that Congress can override state rules on elections. That’s when Congress, for example, requires motor voter—people can register to vote at motor vehicle departments. But Congress has to do that with legislation. The president has no role to play. All that the president can do is take care to assure that the laws that Congress passes are being faithfully executed.

Sargent: Exactly. So before we get to the bigger picture here, Wayne Allyn Root made this claim about the Supreme Court ruling that Congress can’t override declarations of national emergencies. Can you explain just briefly what he thought he was saying there?

Hasen: So the bottom line here is that Root thinks that if Trump declares a national emergency and tries to take over elections, Congress can’t stop him, because they need both houses of Congress on a two-thirds vote to stop him. The problem with that logic is simply that declaring a national emergency never gave Trump the power over elections in the first place. So there’s nothing for Congress to overrule.

Sargent: Yes, that is exactly what he thought he was saying, and you really laid bare, I think, how preposterous it is. The crux of this, though, is that we shouldn’t shrug about it.

You wrote on your Election Law Blog, which is excellent—everyone should check it out—that Trump has other motives for letting it dangle out there that he might declare a national emergency, even if the idea is bogus. What are those other motives? Can you walk us through that?

Hasen: Yeah, sure. So one thing that I think he’s trying to do is to please his MAGA base. They’ve been pushing for a long time to have Trump declare this national emergency. In fact, there was some group that sent him a draft executive order that was going to do just that and totally take over elections. That document was leaked to The Washington Post. Trump never did anything about it. So he’s trying to please the MAGA base, keep them thinking that he’s going to do something.

Second thing is that if the Democrats actually win control of both houses, or even one house of Congress, in November, they’re going to make Trump’s last two years very unpleasant. And so he is trying to delegitimize in advance those Democratic victories. I tried—I told you we should have fixed the elections, Democrats cheated, what they’re doing is illegitimate. So to try to prebunk that.

And the last thing I think that it does is, he’s trying to scare people. He’s trying to scare people into thinking he has more power than he has. That itself makes him powerful, because people are deterred by him. And maybe it deters people from showing up to vote in elections. Hey, are there going to be ICE agents at the polling place? Is my ballot not going to count? Why bother voting?

And I think that’s extremely dangerous. So these are all things—I agree, we should not be complacent at all, even if Trump doesn’t have the power to actually do some of the stuff he’s threatened.

Sargent: Yeah, and I think that you very neatly get at what the role of ICE is in all this. ICE is very terrifying, for good reason, to a lot of people in the United States of America now.

So whenever Trump says maybe ICE will be at the polling places, then they’re hoping that people will just not want to run into masked, heavily armed thugs in the process of exercising their right to vote. And I think that’s really what this is about—it’s to frighten us all into believing that we don’t have an electoral system anymore, that they’ve won, basically. What do you think of that?

Hasen: Yeah, I think Trump has managed to do a double whammy, right? On the one hand, he’s convincing his supporters that the elections are rigged and that they can’t be trusted. And then when Republicans try and take actions to secure the election system, like trying to pass the SAVE Act, well, then Democrats think he’s trying to rig the elections.

And so everybody’s confidence in the elections goes down. And it’s like, why mail back my ballot if the post office isn’t going to deliver it? Why show up at the polling place if there’s going to be armed security there? All of these things are, I think, scare tactics. And we shouldn’t give Trump the power—we shouldn’t give Trump room in our heads to panic over whether or not we’re going to have free and fair elections.

Sargent: I think there’s another element to this I want to get at as well. There’s a tendency of the press and a lot of liberals to look at this kind of thing and say, it’s bluster, it’s Trump using his magical distraction powers, etc.

But I think it should be hugely controversial that he would even say he’s considering these things, because he’s revealing a very profound contempt for our democracy, and really a profound contempt for you and me, Rick, as voters. Contempt for millions and millions of voters across the country. And I think we should say loudly how vile it is for him to do that. What do you think?

Hasen: Well, you may remember that back in 2016 and in 2020, he said he wouldn’t accept the results of the election unless he won. I mean, this is just banana republic stuff. It’s terrible stuff. And I should say, there are things that Donald Trump might try to do to try to manipulate the election outcomes that I’m very worried about. Not ICE agents at the polls, but trying to interfere with the certification of election results or the tabulation of ballots.

Trump’s got a lot of levers. These are not legal levers, mostly. They’re things that would be illegal. But one of the things I’m really worried about is: what if he tries to have his Department of Justice seize ballots in a live election? That would be terrible. So we have to be on guard. This is not a moment of complacency, even if it’s true that the courts would say Trump has no power to nationalize our elections.

Sargent: And just to go back to your earlier point about sowing doubts in the legitimacy of elections—that has the ability to function later as a pretext for him doing those things that he could do, such as seize ballot boxes, right?

Hasen: Absolutely. And so I think, you know, at every opportunity we have to point out that Trump doesn’t have this power, and point out how illegitimate it is for him to try to exercise it. One of the levers that Trump is trying to use right now is, he’s trying to order the United States Postal Service not to deliver mail-in ballots from states that don’t comply with a set of rules that he’s ordered the Postal Service to put out. He’s also ordered the Department of Homeland Security to come up with lists of citizens that states are going to have to compare to their own list, or face criminal liability potentially.

Whether he’s going to be able to do any of this is currently before the United States Supreme Court, in an emergency motion where Trump is trying to be able to do this before the elections. Now, I don’t think he’s going to be able to succeed, in part because it’s too late. Our election administrators are already getting ready to run our elections.

But it shows you he’s using every tool, whether that’s executive orders, whether that is his bully pulpit, whether that is his various departments of his government that are trying to get voting rolls. All of this is of a piece that is really trying to exert whatever power he can over how elections are run, despite the fact the Constitution gives him no power in this area.

Sargent: So Rick, what can we do right now to prepare? What would you suggest to rank-and-file voters out there who are very worried about what’s about to happen, but really adamantly want to do their part to whatever degree they can right now to prevent this madman from pulling off anything like that?

Hasen: Well, I mean, one thing to do is to make sure you’re registered to vote, and to actually vote. And you know, it’s—checking your registration, with all of these Trump pressures on voter registration, I’m worried about states dropping people from the voting rolls who are eligible to vote. So make sure you can vote. That’s like the number one thing.

But also, I think, you know, support those organizations that are fighting Trump on issues like whether he has any power over elections. There’s been a lot of litigation already, and it’s going to continue probably through the election. And because our elections are so decentralized, there’s lots of opportunity for people to get involved, as either poll workers or as observers, either for a party or with good-government groups. There’s election protection work to do. There’s a lot of things to do.

And if Trump actually tries to do something to interfere with elections, that’s the time that the public is going to need to be ready to go to the streets if they need to. I really don’t think that’s going to be necessary, because I think there’s going to be enough pushback before that. But our democracy’s not going to protect itself.

Sargent: It does appear as if civil society is fully engaged here, and I’ve got to say, I see democratic resilience in all that. Folks, if you want more of Rick Hasen, make sure to check out his blog, Election Law Blog. It’s chock-full of stuff like this. Rick, always good to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Hasen: Thanks for the opportunity.

The agency has described these arrests as targeting people who have overstayed their visas, without clarification or even acknowledgement of the fact that they may have separately been allowed and instructed by the government to remain in the country.

Even reasonably well-informed observers might think that there’s a simple distinction between “status” and “not status.” This type of binary language permeates political conversations around immigration, but if you’ve either read my work or the work of other explanatory immigration journalists, you know these matters aren’t quite so simple. The immigration bureaucracy is rife with administrative semi-statuses, temporary protections, and other carve-outs: “authorized stay,” presence under color of law, and so on.

“I think the public doesn’t understand that immigration is kind of very gray and very paradoxical, because you could still be amenable to detention and being placed in removal even though you’re authorized to stay here. That’s the paradox,” said Cyrus Mehta, a longtime New York-based immigration attorney and professor at Brooklyn Law School. That tension had not necessarily come to the fore because the government had, for the most part, left people with pending or administrative status alone; now driven by the Trump administration’s imperative to juice arrest and detention numbers, it’s targeting anyone it can get its hands on. “I don’t know whether they have any parameters,” added Mehta, noting that ICE has not enunciated any concrete policy.

Most of the reported cases of airport arrests seem to involve people that were waiting for official adjudications on their applications for status, and who were not in active removal proceedings. This is not an uncommon posture to be in. Let’s say, for example, that you are a foreign national who entered the country lawfully on a visa—maybe a B-type tourist visa or an F-1 student visa—and subsequently got married to a U.S. citizen. You petition to adjust your status to permanent residence through this marriage, at which point you are instructed to remain in the country while this application is evaluated; leaving the country will be considered an abandonment of your application.

So you wait for the year or more that it could take for this process to be complete, during which the visa you initially used to enter the country expires, because, again, you have been explicitly instructed not to leave. This presence is considered authorized stay—that is to say, you don’t have a specific status at this moment in time, but the government is aware of the situation and has signed off on your continued presence in the country. This is not really an anomaly or an extraordinary circumstance, it is the way the system is designed to work and has long worked. Yet the administration now seems to have decided that this is functionally the same as having no status at all.

There are many versions of this circumstance. There are people who might be in affirmative asylum processes who have overstayed tourist visas. There might be those who had a status which the government subsequently attempted to terminate who are exercising their right to contest that termination. There are people who might have conditional green cards and are petitioning to remove those conditions (a situation that arises out of certain marriages), during which time the green card expires. What all these people have in common is that they are following the law—and they are in the country lawfully. Could they still be detained upon attempting to travel by domestic flight? Who’s to say?

Not ICE, which hasn’t put out any sort of guidance or information about who is or isn’t subject to the airport arrests (questions sent to the agency received no response). This is by design; uncertainty is not incidental but central to the administration’s narrative-building efforts, which are arguably more potent in shaping behavior than the practicalities of its enforcement operation. People who may or may not be subject to arrest will tend to avoid participation in regular life, especially as they see high-profile examples of others detained and thrown into removal proceedings.

This was the case for Michael (a pseudonym to protect his privacy), who entered the country on a tourist visa before applying to adjust his status to permanent resident as a result of his marriage to a U.S. citizen. While waiting for Citizenship and Immigration Services to issue a decision, the tourist visa ran out, though Michael did ultimately receive an approval about a month and a half later. He and his spouse already had plans to fly domestically to attend a wedding, but decided to reconsider those plans until he at least had his physical green card in hand.

Mehta said agents would have no cause to arrest someone who was already a permanent resident (though agents have targeted specific green card holders like Mahmoud Khalil on explicitly political grounds). Yet it makes sense for lay people attempting to navigate this environment of fear and precariousness to want to overcorrect. In any case, Michael’s desire to have documents in hand highlights another issue with these airport arrests, which is that the systems that ICE and Customs and Border Protection are drawing on to make these detention decisions are very often wrong or outdated. A person might be able to subsequently prove that they did have status, but only after they’ve missed their flight and spent some time in detention.

Even for the people who would undoubtedly be targeted, we can comfortably say the relative risk is low; there are millions of domestic air travelers every day, and even assuming that the publicly reported detentions are a significant undercount, we’re still talking about a small fraction of domestic travelers with uncertain status who’ve been arrested in the past few weeks. Yet every would-be traveler who’s between statuses, including those with explicit permission from the government, or even those with specific status, might now find themselves having to think twice before flying even within the country. That’s precisely the plan.

“The goal of this administration is to just create fear, panic, confusion, and there is this general hostility towards noncitizens, and even if you’re a citizen, there’s still hostility,” said Mehta.

Vocational pride plays a large role in the conclusion to Whitehead’s Harlem Trilogy. After two decades of crooked escapades, many nearly fatal, Carney has a chip on his shoulder. He had “grazed upon the feasts of middle-class comforts, and had lately acquired a paunch.” His accomplishments in furniture sales don’t capture his overall arc though. Carney’s a successful regional dealer of both couches and contraband, and neither career could exist without the other. But he can’t put “Fencing Since ’59’” on his rebuilt 125th Street storefront, an omission that is slowly eating at him. Hence his rather funny response to being mistaken for a janitor while held at gunpoint. In Cool Machine, he seeks a unified theory of himself, executing schemes for the loot and the laurels as 1980s New York City rumbles around him.

This existential current adds a new dimension to the historical trilogy’s themes. Under the guise of breezy pulp, Whitehead has written a sprawling systems epic attuned to the racialized churn of New York City commerce and real estate. Each novel has focused on a decade in the lives of Carney and New York City, beginning with Harlem Shuffle, which spans 1959 to 1964, and Crook Manifesto, which stretches from 1971 to 1976. The first book took the Civil Rights Movement as a backdrop for a grubbier form of striving, Carney and crew working odd angles as the city stunted Black mobility. The second used the political, financial, and drug crises of 1970s New York to dramatize the difficulty of getting by. Carney and Pepper, his wily bruiser, navigated shifting criminal and cultural landscapes, their hardened views in tension with the metamorphic city. In both novels, Whitehead presented “jobs”—that classic euphemism for criminal schemes—as sweaty, taxing affairs. His crooks endure grimy workspaces, long hours, annoying bosses, and ambient violence, their fortunes attainable only through labor and pluck.

That focus continues in Cool Machine, set between 1981 and 1986. But Whitehead spotlights careers rather than jobs, tracing the long tails of his characters’ grifts, and the city’s. While maintaining the streetwise sensibility of the series’ earlier installments, he revisits key metaphors, analogies, and incidents, layering Cool Machine with both the material history of New York and the personal revelations of his characters. The book is haunted and pondering, the narrative constantly posing questions about community and working life from the perches of middle and old age.

What value does a lifetime of striving, both crooked and straight, produce? Do the skills criminals master prepare them for retirement? Are they even fit to retire given their bloodied hands and strained relationships with regular folk? Their city is subterranean, dark, and lawless, and in it the seismic forces of capitalism, racism, and public corruption are unmitigated. How does such a place become a home?

Carney isn’t the real target of the trap he walks into. The men who lured him, two gruff Bostonians named Buzz and Orson, seek Uncle Rich, a famous Harlem thief who double-crossed them and made out with a sapphire that Carney ended up fencing. Carney had no clue he’d met the legendary bandit, but the jewel connects him to the feud with Buzz, and he needs to work quickly to extricate himself. Buzz, liver-spotted and round of belly, strikes him as violently unforgiving. Carney likens him to a plumber “who comes back when you aren’t home to strangle your parakeet if you stiff him on the bill.”

Carney ends up getting more involved in the beef, stumbling into a kind of criminal internship. Despite the heat from Buzz, Uncle Rich, who’s nearing the end of his career, brings the furniture dealer in on his final jobs. The Harlemite is one of Whitehead’s most memorable inventions. He’s subverted tropes throughout the trilogy, and Uncle Rich epitomizes that enduring sense of play. The final score is often a Hail Mary play in heist stories, concocted by the desperate and almost guaranteed to incur heavy losses.

Uncle Rich, a kooky trickster in his sixties who once faked his death, plans to pull two final jobs. He’s got none of the fatalism of the standard noir criminal mastermind though, and is often jovial. He’s a worldly aesthete and a working man who appreciates a good hot dog, both manager and coworker, hands-on despite his age and expertise—the Godfather as cool unc. In Carney, he recognizes a kindred spirit: “You don’t ask about the stones, or the man who beat your friend. You want to know the lore. It’s nice to see,” he says when Carney fills him in on Buzz’s pursuit.

He gives Carney the lore and a raison d’etre as they outmaneuver Buzz in preparation for the big scores, one of which involves nabbing a Jesse Owens Olympic medal. Under the tutelage of Uncle Rich and his crew, the furniture salesman slowly sees himself and the city anew. He admits that money isn’t his true motive, nor is stability for himself and his family, which he risks every time he churns a stolen good.

Standing on a train platform, Carney ponders a racy ad for Triumph cigarettes, a poster for Escape From New York, and a mural riffing on The Spirit of ’76 that he’d wanted for his store before it was firebombed:

Instead of a straight re-creation of the famous painting, his three musician-soldiers strode out of the ghetto. Worn down, beaten down, but playing on, past the ruined lots and burned-out tenements, fife and drums mixing with the screams and musket fire of battle. The arson job had put the kibosh on that idea, but Carney liked to turn it over in his head occasionally, wondering how many of the Harlemites who turned the corner of 125th Street recognized their own striving in that scene. Escape from New York? There was nowhere to go. Better make the best of it.

Carney’s previously been keen to compartmentalize these tangled urges: “More crooked in one direction and more legit in the other—careful you don’t split yourself in half Carney,” Whitehead wrote in Harlem Shuffle. But this triptych of advertising, pop culture, and homespun patriotism offers a vision of reconciliation, Carney’s divided selves in harmony. As Buzz bears down on Uncle Rich’s crew, Carney, typically the guy who gets involved after the job goes down, gets his first taste of the frontlines and loves it. His diligence doesn’t go unnoticed either. Uncle Rich silently praises Carney as they execute their plan, acknowledging his craft and focus: “Yes, the fence was working out fine. A cool machine.”

Like its predecessors, Cool Machine is divided into three novellas that each take place in a different year. The structure makes the books episodic, with one scheme and its particular players driving each section, but also can stunt the momentum as the story repeatedly resets. That’s still somewhat the case in Cool Machine, which follows Pepper in its middle novella, but the framework is more rewarding this time, as Whitehead actively threads together the stories. If crime is a canvas for Uncle Rich and Carney, a means for self-expression and actualization, for Pepper it is toil, and following him after the high of the first novella offers a sobering contrast.

A World War II veteran who ran with Carney’s late father Big Mike, Pepper is Whitehead’s wry and subtly moving take on the hardboiled hood. First introduced in Harlem Shuffle, he resides cozily in the underworld, and Whitehead often uses that immersion for comedy. Pepper, constitutionally intimidating and alert, always sticks out. He calls normal people “civilians,” and in one exchange, in which a character asks if he’s a mass murderer, he replies, “What’s mass?”

In Cool Machine, Pepper, previously a source of bottomless might, is introduced as severely overworked. “He had gutted, garroted, grappled with his enemies, and been brutalized, bludgeoned, and manhandled in turn,” Whitehead writes. “Shot and stabbed, half strangled and wholly concussed. Beaten with bats, chains, and a hardware store’s worth of ad hoc weapons; thrown out of cars, thrown out of many types of moving vehicles, tossed into pits, ditches, and ruts; and one time even subjected to a modern update of an ancient Aztec torture ritual (this was in Delaware).” The irony is as grim as it is humorous: Work has been steady for Pepper, but so has pain. He’s got no paunch for all his efforts, just aches.

His biggest ailment is an undiagnosed stomach issue, which stalks him as he gets embroiled in a shady art deal on the Lower East Side. He’s hired by a friend of Carney’s wife Elizabeth as a bodyguard, but when the guy is robbed, the role quickly expands into private eye, interrogator, and funnily, art appraiser.

The New York of 1983 is foreign to the veteran goon, the streets strewn with graffiti and refuse, the youth decked out in freaky hairdos and clothes, the music unsettling. The demographic breakdown at his favorite bar skews “maybe seventy-thirty yuppie-crook” and it no longer serves his favorite beer. But Pepper finds his way through the alien city, teaming up with LJ, the mohawked and combat-booted assistant to an art collector, to track down a man, a suitcase full of money, and a Fang mask.

That classic chase-the-Macguffin setup is a con. The novella turns out to be the most experimental in the trilogy, full of psychedelic textures and jagged juxtapositions of text and narrative. Pepper has been expanding his vocabulary via a “Word-a-Day” calendar, and the terms pop into his head as he rummages around the Lower East Side with LJ. Whitehead writes the words in all caps, and they’re typeset outside of paragraphs, making them eye-catching as graffiti. Meanwhile, sardonic “headlines” from a SAMO-like street artist named Daily Newz are plastered across Manhattan, and also get typeset outside of the paragraphs. As do words from assorted signs, wheatpastes, and eventually a film. The result is a kind of psychogeography of Pepper and downtown New York, man, culture, and matter smearing together, clashing.

As the plot ramps up, coming to involve a sadistic hired gun from out of town, a figure from Pepper and Carney’s past, and worsening stomach pains, the old crook considers bailing. “He wasn’t the thief he used to be,” Whitehead writes plainly. But in a pivotal scene that wryly takes place on a toilet where Pepper seeks refuge from his punishing cramps, the words on the streets and in his head swirl into a revelation that leads him to the mask. His New York is threatened, cruel, dilapidated. But for downtown weirdos and uptown killers alike, opportunity still lurks.

In 2021, before the release of the first book, Whitehead pitched the trilogy as a reprieve from The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys. “After the darkness of the last two books, the levity, Carney’s humble charm, is fulfilling a psychological need for me,” he told The New York Times. “I could explore the world in a different way, that’s not tied to these terrible systems of capitalism and institutional racism.” This has been true in a way. The narrative voice of the Harlem Trilogy novel is slicker and wackier than those Pulitzer-winning books, more deadpan and acerbic. But Whitehead has not truly changed his tune.

The third novella of Cool Machine, set in 1986, centers on several institutions: family, the mob, City Hall. Robert, son of Carney’s cousin Freddie, who died in Harlem Shuffle, has gone missing. He was the last person to see his dead employer, a lawyer plugged into the city’s political machine, and the cops and the Cosa Nostra start sniffing around. Carney catches déjà vu: Freddie was also once in the crosshairs of cops and gangsters, and he didn’t make it out. Even worse, Carney played a role in Freddie’s fall despite them being close as brothers. He considers Robert his nephew, and finding the young man his duty.

That mission sends Carney on his own psychogeographic odyssey through the city. As he hunts for Robert, he dreams thrice of past apartments and has conversations with Freddie’s ghost, à la A Christmas Carol. He visits a chicken place that burned down in Crook Manifesto and has been reopened by the late owner’s less accomplished niece. It smells of “leftover oil.” He meets Pepper at their old crook bar, which has now been completely yuppified. “The kitchen,” Whitehead writes, “formerly reserved for after-hours beatings of snitches and double-crossers, was back in operation and serving burgers, buffalo wings, and stuffed potato skins.”

The change is jarring, but not unwelcome: Pepper’s girlfriend Blossom compliments the improved environment, as does Pepper, who no longer drinks. “Inflammatory,” he responds when Carney offers a beer. Pepper doesn’t even live in the city anymore; following a much-needed stomach surgery, he’s decamped to despicable Delaware, and comes to town only to help Carney find his nephew. Without becoming an apologist for gentrification, Whitehead admits its fringe benefits, among them a sharpened eye and the capacity to form new connections to old spaces.

Even the mobster antagonist, a retired killer nicknamed the Rabbit because of how quickly he fled the scene of his first hit, finds himself struck by the altered city. His nephew Junior is the killer of Robert’s employer, and because the hit was not authorized, the Rabbit should give him up per mob rules. But as “an old man who’d do anything for his nephew,” he decides to help Junior find Robert, who witnessed the murder. He largely resents ’80s New York. The bulletproof glass at restaurants makes shaking down Black people “like a fucking dessert cart, you want to grab one but you can’t,” he scoffs. Tompkins Square Park, where he once cooled off after breaking a man’s jaw, is a “real shithole now.”

In these competing impressions of and journeys through the city, Whitehead resists a single narrative of New York. It is a cauldron of miseries and a homeland, a hunting ground and a cool machine, a place where even killers and crooks can retire, can commiserate lives lost and enriched. This multiplicity is a pet theme for Whitehead, who once wrote an essay collection on the city, and has set other novels in it. But the Harlem Trilogy has paired the rhapsody with the grit in ways he’s only hinted at before, the romance always followed by a slug to the chin.

In the final act, having located Robert and realized how much institutional might is aimed at the young man, Carney pitches the mob: He’ll give up all his ill-gotten cash in exchange for Robert’s freedom. He gets the idea after recalling a question from Uncle Rich—“What do you value?”—and his answer is family, a layered concept for Carney. He was once ashamed of crime being the family business, reluctant to let his crooked and straight lives overlap, and desperate to unravel them whenever they did. But the pitch draws on both backgrounds. It’s his own final job, the culmination of his furniture store being launched with blood money he found in Big Mike’s truck and Carney truly loving sectionals and coffee tables. It’s a harebrained scheme only he, father, uncle, and veteran salesman and fence could make.

That bespoke sense of finesse is the heart of the Harlem Trilogy. Whitehead doesn’t depict the trait as only cool or guile. He presents it as craft: skill and experience put into action, knowledge applied by hook or by crook. Carney refuses to be called a janitor because he’s dirtied his hands another way. In that last parley, the consummate professional finally gets his flowers.

By “insurance,” Hacker mostly meant social insurance provided by the government, sometimes in concert with private insurance companies. Hacker warned that private insurance was never going to pick up the slack. “Although markets work splendidly in most areas of commerce,” he wrote, “insurance markets often fail when we need them most.” Hacker didn’t give the private insurance industry much additional thought, except for health insurance, then inextricably tangled up with government through Medicare and Medicaid (and, after the book’s publication, with Obamacare).

But lately we’ve been seeing insurance markets fail outside the realm of social insurance, suggesting The Great Risk Shift had more applicability than perhaps the author knew. The most conspicuous instance is homeowner’s insurance. In addition to the growing unaffordability of housing, Americans are being priced out of protection for their property against fires, floods, and other acts of God. A survey by the online lending website Lending Tree found that between 2020 and 2025, home insurance rates rose 46 percent nationally. That was nearly double the rate of inflation. 

Climate change clearly plays a significant role here. Insurance rates must be approved by state regulators, so rates vary from state to state. In five states, inflation exceeded homeowner’s insurance increases—West Virginia, Vermont, Maine, Alaska, and New York. What do these states have in common? According to Lending Tree, “none of the states … are in areas typically prone to hurricanes, wildfires and other major, costly weather-related disasters.”

But climate can’t be the only reason, because Colorado, which had the biggest rate increase, ranks relatively low on climate-change risk, whereas New York and Maine rank relatively high, and Florida, where climate-change risk is the highest in the country, lies in the middle range for rate increases. In a May survey by the Pew Research Center, 65 percent of homeowners cited as a major reason for property-insurance rate hikes “insurance companies wanting to make more money.” Only 46 percent cited climate change. 

Insurance companies will always want to make more money—it would be perverse for them not to—so what this poll finding suggests to me is that in states where homeowner’s insurance rates are rising fastest, state regulators aren’t moving aggressively enough to impose limits. If climate change were the only thing driving up insurance rates I doubt we’d see a June 2026 Public Citizen survey indicating that in 2025 the property and casualty insurance industry had its most profitable underwriting year in two decades. Profits were $68.7 billion. That’s more than twice the $25.3 billion insurers earned in profits the year before. 

“Property and casualty insurance” encompasses not only homeowner’s insurance but also auto insurance. So it shouldn’t surprise us that auto insurers are abusing consumers, too. “If You Get in a Car Crash,” read a Wall Street Journal headline August 9, “The Risk Is Growing Your Insurance Won’t Pay.” The story, by Jean Eaglesham and Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky, reported, shockingly, that auto insurers failed to pay out on fully 45 percent of all the auto liability and medical claims that they resolved last year. This is up from about one in three a decade ago, and amounts to a “near flip-of-a-coin chance of being left empty-handed on liability and medical claims.” 

Logically, climate change would have little if any demonstrable effect on the rate of auto accidents. And anyway, the number of auto accidents dropped over the past decade from 6.82 million annually to 6.18 million. Public health policies to contain the Covid epidemic, which reduced the number of workers commuting to an office, led to a very significant drop in fender-benders—5.25 million in 2020, 6.1 million in 2021, and not much higher since. Which looks to me like an argument for remote work (other aspects of which I heartily dislike). 

Auto insurers blame dwindling payouts on an increase in fraud, “driven in part,” the Journal reports, “by fake claims enhanced with AI tools.” That appears to be a real problem, albeit one better documented in the United Kingdom than in the United States. Artificial Intelligence makes it really easy to fake photographs of automobile damage. But AI fakery can’t be too much of a driver yet this side of the pond, because the rate at which auto-damage claims  get turned down (as opposed to medical claims from auto accidents) hasn’t increased over the past decade. It was around 25 percent a decade ago, and it’s around 25 percent today. 

The reason auto-insurance payouts fell to 45 percent is that insurers are denying en masse medical claims from auto accidents. Medical claims are much harder to fake, because the victim must furnish medical documentation that can be checked. Since insurers can’t blame AI in this instance, they blame lawyers. “People are going to litigation as a first step, instead of a last resort,” Sean Kevelighan, chief executive of an industry group called the Insurance Information Institute, told the Journal. 

Litigation is indeed increasing, answers the other side in this dispute, but “that’s because more claims are being denied—not the other way around,” John Morgan, founder of the Orlando-based Morgan & Morgan, told the Journal. That makes more intuitive sense. Why go to the trouble of suing an insurer before you find out whether some claims adjuster wants to emulate the Edward G. Robinson character in Double Indemnity and deny your payout? A State Farm spokesperson suggested to the Journal that the higher rate of non-payments reflects increases in deductibles, but that would just be a different method to shift risk to the customer.

What mostly seems to be happening is that auto-insurance payouts were kept down last year to sell more policies. As with homeowner’s insurance, increases in auto insurance premiums typically exceed inflation, but last year they were well below it, according to S&P Global Intelligence numbers reported by the Journal in January. This looks like an attempt to curb the growing rate of drivers who defy legal requirements to buy auto insurance because it’s too expensive. According to the Insurance Research Council, the uninsured rate rose from 12.4 percent to 15.4 percent between 2017 and 2023.

The Journal story found one example in which the reason the insurance company declined to pay out was (to apply technical industry jargon) absolute chickenshit:

Christopher Benton hit another car, what he called a “little bumper accident,” in 2023. The Adelanto, Calif., lab technician assumed his $5,000 liability-coverage insurance claim would sail through. But Allstate-owned National General refused to pay a cent. The reason? His 15-year-old son.

The teenager wasn’t in the family’s 2012 Chevrolet Silverado at the time of the fender-bender. He didn’t even have a driver’s license. But National General said his absence from the policy application breached its requirement to disclose all household members ages 14 or over.

Remember, from your childhood, that annoying kid on the playground who loved to say, “You didn’t say ‘Simon Says’”? That kid grew up to be a claims adjuster for an automobile insurer.

Ultimately, the problem is that insurance doesn’t get regulated at the national level. Leaving its regulation to 50 different states is inefficient. Also, state governments are much easier than the federal government for insurers to bully or bribe into submission. America figured that out for most industries during the Progressive Era and the New Deal, but somehow insurers remained out of the administrative state’s grip. Why?

That story begins in 1868, when insurance regulation was just coming into being. The Supreme Court, in Paul v. Virginia, ruled that the selling of insurance policies did not constitute commerce, and therefore was not interstate commerce, so Congress could not direct the executive branch to regulate insurance under the Commerce Clause. That left regulation to the states. In 1944, though, the Supreme Court reversed itself and ruled in United States v. South-Eastern Underwriters Association that actually, yes, the selling of insurance is commerce (well, duh; they don’t exactly give those policies away), and that the Sherman Antitrust Act can therefore be deployed against them. 

Insurance companies and state insurance regulators quickly swarmed to Capitol Hill and persuaded Senators Pat McCarren, Democrat of Nevada, and Homer Ferguson, Republican of Michigan, to pass a law, the McCarren-Ferguson Act, that overturned United States v. South-Eastern Underwriters Association, reestablishing that only states could regulate insurers. In the 1980s, Rep. John Dingell, the very powerful Democratic chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, tried to pass a law imposing federal regulation on insurers, but by then the Reagan Revolution was underway. Dingell got nowhere.

A word about Pat McCarren. Despite being a Democrat, the man was an anti-New-Dealer, a Red baiter, a fanboy of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, an antisemite, and a pushover for the business lobby. In addition to shooing federal regulators away from insurers, McCarren bequeathed the 1950 Internal Security Act, commonly known as the McCarren Act or the McCarren-Walter Act, which required Communist organizations to register with the federal government. It also created a Subversive Activities Control Board and made it much easier to deport perceived troublemakers who hadn’t broken the law. The first two of these provisions were later repealed. The third remains on the books, and President Donald Trump is using it in his terror campaign against immigrants who dare to engage in political protest. 

McCarren was the prototype for Senator Pat Geary in The Godfather Part II. Senator Geary is the guy who insults Michael Corleone at the start of the film. (“I don’t like to see you come out to this clean country, in oily hair, dressed up in those silk suits, and try to pass yourselves off as decent Americans”). Near the end of the film, Geary comes to very much regret his extreme bigotry against and rudeness toward a proud Italian-American. I don’t know what McCarren’s personal views were toward Italians, but his McCarren-Walter Act also limited immigration from southern Europe, including Italy. For years, the Las Vegas airport was named after McCarren, which was like calling it Senator Geary Airport. But in 2021 Clark County came to its senses and renamed the airport after the late Senator Harry Reid, who was a fine man.

I mention all this to establish that Pat McCarren wasn’t anybody whose opinion should command much respect these days, on pretty much any subject. Let’s repeal the McCarren-Ferguson Act, start regulating insurers at the national level, and reverse this latest manifestation of Jacob Hacker’s Great Risk Shift.

The Post found what experts had long suspected—that the numbers Trump so often touted—an 88 to 92 percent decrease in crime and an 18 percent decrease in homicides—were due to a downward trend in crime that appeared long before the National Guard did. Not only that, but the study notes an increase in assaults with a dangerous weapon.

Tom Homan: "DC is much safer now. Memphis, much safer. All the cities where President Trump has deployed federal agents and the National Guard to help local authorities, it's all good. My wish is places like Chicago will reach out..." pic.twitter.com/QjTF9HyWI8

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) August 11, 2026

Local leadership doesn’t share Homan’s sentiment.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has reportedly gained as much as $2.9 million from his fossil fuel interests since being tapped to join the high court.

Alito’s reported assets—excluding his home and other personal property—grew from $1.1 million in 2005 to between $3.4 million and $8.4 million in 2024, according to federal financial disclosures. During that period, his oil and gas holdings have made him between $390,000 and $2.9 million, according to an analysis by Court Accountability, The Guardian reported Tuesday.*

And as the Supreme Court prepares to hear a fossil fuels-related case, that brings Alito’s ability to be impartial into question, Court Accountability co-founder Lisa Graves warned.

“You might have real appreciation for how that industry has helped make it possible for you to perhaps buy a second home on the water, or live a [certain] lifestyle,” said Graves, who put together the analysis.

Alito, who is the only Supreme Court justice with holdings in energy companies, has refused to step back from the upcoming petition brought by fossil fuel giants Suncor and ExxonMobil. He previously recused himself from a petition from the same companies in 2023,. The new case will determine whether municipal and state governments can seek damages for decades of Big Oil deception regarding the climate harms these companies knew their fossil fuel products would cause—a make or break decision for Alito’s second stream of income.

Most of Alito’s financial gains came from property in Grady County, Oklahoma, in which his wife, Martha Ann, holds a mineral interest. Alito has reported the value of the plot between $100,000 and $250,000, but Graves noted that one of Alito’s family members had sold an adjacent plot for $800,000, suggesting that the jurist could be underreporting the land’s value.

In 2022, Alito’s wife agreed to lease the plot of land to Citizen Energy, a private oil and gas company. No reporting or public documents indicate that a well has been drilled on this property, but a lease agreement shows that the owners would have received three-sixteenths of the profit from any extracted oil.

“It raises concerns because you have a sitting justice who is hoping to get richer based on oil exploration of this land,” said Graves.

Citizen Energy was later purchased by Validus Energy, in which Elliott Investment Management holds a major stake. Alito previously landed in hot water after he failed to disclose a free plane ride he took from Elliott Investment Management’s founder. The firm also owns more than 52 million shares of Suncor, which are worth more than $3.2 billion, according to Court Accountability.

Alito has major investments in Vanguard High Dividend Yield ETF, a high dividend yield fund in which Exxon is the third-largest holding. In 2004, Alito inherited between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of stock in Exxon—which he has since sold.

“My view is that you shouldn’t be able to sell a stock just so you can sit on a case, even though that company’s profits have benefited you,” said Graves.

In May, a coalition of watchdog groups—including environmental, civil liberties, and good government organizations—sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee calling for an investigation into whether Alito’s refusal to recuse in this case violates federal law.

The court is expected to hear oral arguments on October 5.

* This article originally misstated the amount Alito has made from his oil and gas holdings.

On Tuesday, NewsNation’s Ryan Noble asked what Graham would say to people who think that.

“I don’t see it that way, I’m not being handed this seat. I realize that I have to earn voters, so I’m working hard to do that. Like I said, I want to spend the next two weeks getting out to as many places as I can. You know, Lindsey was amazing, I will never fill his shoes. No one can ever fill his shoes, and I don’t just expect it to be handed to me,” Graham said.

Darlene Graham: "I'm not being handed this seat" pic.twitter.com/17pYTeBOI9

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 11, 2026

The interview came on the same day that South Carolina is holding a special primary election to replace Lindsey Graham as the Republican candidate. His sister was expected to fill a caretaker role instead of running for a full term. Last month, MAGA personalities raged at her decision to run, calling her “idiotic” and one of the “worst congressional creatures.”

President Donald Trump has decided to back Graham, but conservatives say she doesn’t have the credentials or a history of being involved in right-wing causes. Her only political donation on record happens to be to a South Carolina state senator that helped kill an abortion ban, and she neither voted in the 2024 presidential primary nor the 2016 general election.

For once, Trump’s endorsement hasn’t led to the state’s Republicans coalescing behind Graham. None of the candidates in the special election are expected to get 50 percent of the vote, according to The Washington Post, making a runoff election likely. Turnout is also expected to be low, drawing only the most politically engaged voters, and that doesn’t bode well for Graham.

The president unloaded this cartoonishly bigoted insult in a Tuesday morning post criticizing NYC’s “Pied-a-Terre Tax”—a fee on second properties valued at $1 million or more. He called it a “dangerous political ‘experiment’” and falsely claimed that the policy would drive people out of the city “by the tens of thousands,” which has not occurred at all so far. Then he got to the congestion pricing.

“It’s hard, as President of the United States of America, to sit back and watch it happen, especially to a place I once loved. Financial, and then Social, RUIN, is a 100% certainty - And then the Radical Left Jihadists charge Congestion Pricing on top of everything else,” Trump wrote. “This doesn’t work in America, and must be stopped, NOW!”

He went on to proclaim that his administration would explore whether “the Federal Government has any legal right to avert this disaster, before it is too late, for the millions of people who cherish New York and want to see it thrive, as opposed to becoming a filthy, crime ridden, decrepit place of mockery and scorn.”

Trump’s post came just a day after a Staten Island judge temporarily paused the tax law. The pause was blocked that same day.

CASA, Inc. and Barbara (the pseudonym of an anonymous pregnant immigrant) each filed motions in federal court against the Trump administration Tuesday, seeking to halt Trump’s August 6 executive orders targeting “birth tourism” and limiting the Forteenth Amendment’s application.

CASA was supported by the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project and the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection. Barbara is supported by groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP, Democracy Defenders, and Asian Law Caucus, who argue that the Supreme Court’s June ruling against Trump’s previous attack on birthright citizenship prevented any “revisions” regarding legal exceptions.

“If the President issues 100 orders seeking to create new exceptions to the sacred guarantee of the Citizenship Clause, all 100 will be equally illegal,” Barbara’s lawsuit states. “And nothing requires this Court to countenance the continued assault on this foundational constitutional principle or issue an endless string of EO-specific injunctions.”

The new order restricting the Fourteenth Amendment tells government agencies not to “issue documents recognizing United States citizenship” to diplomats in the U.S., the children of alleged members of “terrorist organizations,” people who are completing a “commercial transaction” to ensure a child is born on U.S. soil, and certain people born in U.S. territories.

The executive orders were already long shots to survive legal challenges, considering that they’re using many of the same legal arguments that the Supreme Court struck down in June.

In a statement Tuesday, Aarti Kohli, executive director of the Asian Law Caucus, said the White House “is just throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.”

“Immigrant communities know that our rights are on the line, especially when the government uses us as scapegoats,” Kohli said. “The Trump administration already lost once, and it will lose again.”

White House officials have directed the Department of Justice to consider launching another lawsuit against former U.S. Olympian David Hearn, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

The request comes after U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro moved to drop the cases against Hearn and three other alleged vandals, after her office discovered evidence that the pool’s loose lining was caused by a “rushed and flawed installation process.”

Even after Pirro walked the president through her trove of exculpatory evidence, Trump has continued to rave about supposedly damning witness testimony and video footage. But the DOJ has been clear: It can’t prove a thing.

A federal judge dropped the charges against Hearn, but said he would wait to decide whether the case was dismissed “without prejudice,” which would mean the Trump administration couldn’t prosecute Hearn for the same crime going forward.

This week, Representative Jamie Raskin—the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee—will formally demand that the Justice and Interior Departments turn over a wealth of documents related to the charging decisions made in this case.

“They talk about munitions—and we’re fine with munitions, we’re fine. But the reason it would be lower—and we’re building them like crazy—but the reason it’s low is [Joe Biden] gave three hundred billion dollars worth to Ukraine,” Trump said on the Real America’s Voice network Tuesday morning.

“They never mention that. They never like to mention that. Now I’d like to give to Ukraine also, but they have to pay—meaning the European Union ... I give it to the European Union—they have money, and they pay top dollar, they pay full dollar.” 

Trump blames Biden and Ukraine for the munitions shortage caused by his war of choice against Iran pic.twitter.com/oivuK7rHLl

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 11, 2026

The U.S. is currently short on long-range missiles and interceptors because the Trump administration has been shooting them at Iran for the past six months, not because Biden gave some Tomahawks to Ukraine in 2024. Trump has been insisting that he inherited a depleted munitions stock while also insisting that we do not have a munitions shortage. 

This back and forth continues all while the Center for Strategic and International Studies stated that “the United States has enough missiles to continue fighting this war under any plausible scenario.” 

It’s laughable that a country which spends as much on the military as the U.S. does would be short on weapons after six months of war with Iran, and it’s even more laughable that Trump thinks blaming Biden for problems we’re watching him cause will fly in 2026.  

Newsmax’s Wayne Allen Root interviewed Trump just after midnight Tuesday morning, and said that Trump had the right to declare a national security emergency next month, forcing through photo identification, proof of citizenship, limits on mail-in ballots, and other heavy voting restrictions. Trump seemed to like that suggestion, but didn’t want to tip his hand.

“Let me just say stranger things have happened, okay? I’ll leave it at that,” Trump said.

Root: You have the right to declare a national security emergency for elections. If you do this in the next month, we will get photo ID, proof of citizenship, and a limit to mail-in ballots…

Trump: Let me just say stranger things have happened. I'll leave it at that. pic.twitter.com/89h4OnJkHz

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 11, 2026

Trump is afraid of massive Republican losses in November’s midterms, and has been unsuccessfully pushing his allies in Congress to pass the draconian SAVE Act. With that appearing more unlikely each day, Democrats and other Trump critics are raising concerns that he may take drastic action, such as declaring a national emergency and maybe deploying legions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to the polls.

In fact, Democrats have been trying for close to a year to get documents from the Department of Homeland Security regarding its policies and memos on sending ICE agents to polls. Agents were seen at polling places in Texas during its May primaries and in California in June, but when Democrats used the Freedom of Information Act to investigate, they were sent useless press clippings.

If Trump tries to invoke national security to take over federal elections, it would shatter precedent and could set off lawsuits and protests across the country. His repeated, disproven claims about voter fraud and rigged elections suggest that he’ll make the same excuses in November. The question is how to ensure a fair and accurate result that can stand up to his attacks.

In a memo published Monday evening, just hours after Blanche’s swearing-in ceremony, the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel argued that the president could claim executive privilege over communication between him and his “private advisers,” provided that the communications were confidential and related to his presidential “decisionmaking.”

The memo also seemed to expand executive privilege to apply to communications between the president’s “direct advisers” and civilians.

If the Democrats take back the House of Representatives in the upcoming midterm elections, this memo could have major implications for any investigation into the president and other top administration officials. Clearly, the Trump administration is preparing to stonewall Congress.

Blanche’s latest move reflects poorly on all of the Republicans who voted to confirm him—but especially Senators Bill Cassidy, John Cornyn, and Tom Tillis, who bought into the attorney general’s promises to limit the scope of a different immunity for the president. Blanche has demonstrated that he isn’t the least bit interested in holding the president accountable for anything—let alone preserving transparency in government. But we already knew that, didn’t we?

In a statement Tuesday morning, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the memo revealed that Trump was “petrified of the questions a Democratic Congress will demand answers to.”

“FIFA would be making a terrible mistake if, for any reason, they even considered replacing President Gianni Infantino. He is fantastic, having just presided over the most successful World Cup, by four times, ever presented,” Trump wrote Monday night on Truth Social. “If he is gone, it will never be as successful or profitable again! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Much of the soccer world sees Infantino’s tenure much differently. After a secret plan concocted by Infantino to sell a substantial stake of the World Cup to private investors leaked, the soccer confederations that lead Europe, Asia, and North and Central America and the Carribean turned on the FIFA chief. UEFA, which governs European football, is currently boycotting all FIFA competitions until Infantino leaves office; earlier this week, the three confederations accused Infantino of a “fundamental breach of trust” and “deception” in an open letter and announced that they would hold their own competitions if he remained in power.

“Leadership in football is not a possession. It is not about holding—or demanding— power to be held. It is a duty of service to the football family that entrusts it,” the letter reads. “When trust is broken through deception, when an individual places himself above the collective that entrusted him with authority, that duty has been abandoned.”

Even still, Trump’s support for Infantino makes sense. The two have been closely linked since Trump returned to the White House; last December, Infantino awarded Trump the FIFA Peace Prize—a pitiful sham of an award that was given solely to curry favor with Trump while he continued to mope about not winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Now Trump is returning the favor, sort of. An unhinged post on social media, after all, is probably his equivalent of a made-up prize.

Inside Washington

The big question in Iowa’s Senate race

Is Iowa still a swing state? That’s what Democrats are testing in the increasingly red state’s races for governor, U.S. Senate, and four House seats this fall. Josh Turek, the Democratic nominee for a vital U.S. Senate seat, is hoping to prove that a Democrat can still win in Iowa. But he faces an uphill battle.

Turek, a Paralympic gold medalist basketball player who has served in the state legislature since 2023, is facing Ashley Hinson, a former TV journalist and current member of the House of Representatives, a role she’s held since 2021. The two are vying to replace retiring GOP Senator Joni Ernst. 

Both Turek and Hinson list affordability and agricultural policy high up on their policy platforms. Turek wants to raise the minimum wage, set term limits for members of Congress and Supreme Court justices, and address cancer-causing water pollution—a serious problem in Iowa that has been linked to agricultural runoff. Hinson’s platform includes limiting regulations for family farms, moving federal agencies out of D.C. and into the states, and cutting government waste. Both candidates want to see Congress pass a farm bill, and Turek says he wants it to include anti-monopoly provisions and a “right to repair.”

In the last decade, Iowa’s status as a swing state has become increasingly debatable. The state has elected Republican governors since 2010, and both Senate seats have been held by Republicans since 2015, when Ernst was elected to serve alongside long-serving Senator Chuck Grassley.

President Donald Trump won the state in 2016 by over 9 percent, a massive 15-point rightward swing from the 2012 election. He then won Iowa by 8 percent in 2020, and by over 13 points in 2024.

Turek hopes his “prairie populist” vibe, which has won him elections before, will help him flip the Senate seat. In the state legislature, he represents the 20th district, which includes his hometown of Council Bluffs. He won the seat by just six votes in 2022 and 561 votes in 2024—even though Trump won the broader Pottawattamie County, which includes the 20th district, by 17 percent in 2020 and 20 percent in 2024. 

“When I went door to door, crawling up stairs and dragging my wheelchair behind me, the first question people always asked was ‘how in the world did you get up here?’ I would tell them ‘I crawled up here, because that’s how important your vote is to me. I think more than anything, people want their representatives to be willing to listen and fight for them, not for the billionaires and the large corporations,” Turek said in a written statement to The New Republic.

Turek will need independent voters this November. According to a new Emerson College Polling/Nexstar Media survey, independent voters break for Turek by an 11-point margin. But he still trails Hinson in the poll, with support from 45 percent of respondents to her 48 percent. Six percent of respondents remained undecided.

Some political analysts think Turek’s ability to appeal to independents and conservatives still won’t be enough. “If a Republican is disaffected this year, they’re a heck of a lot more likely to not show up or to skip over various offices on the ballot than they are to vote for a Democrat,” said Charlie Cook, founder of the Cook Political Report, in a speech at Des Moines’s Drake University in late July. “We’ll have to wait and see whether the Iowa Senate flips, but I’d give it probably a one in four chance.”

The Cook Political Report rates the Senate race as “leans Republican,” and Cook himself said that he believes Iowa hasn’t been a swing state “for a long time.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

The Ohio Capital Journal has published a trio of pieces reviewing candidates’ data center positions in three key races: gubernatorial (Democrat Amy Acton versus Republican Vivek Ramaswamy), Senate (Sherrod Brown versus Jon Husted), and the 9th congressional district (Marcy Kaptur versus Derek Merrin). Ohio passed tax breaks for data centers in 2017, and now ranks sixth in the nation for current and planned data centers. All three races are believed to be a dead heat, although there’s very little public polling on the 9th. While data center backlash transcends partisan divides, the pieces show that, across the board, Democratic candidates in Ohio seem to be adopting a more aggressive regulatory position. 

One of the water utilities recently targeted in suspected Iranian cyberattacks on the U.S. water supply, The Washington Post notes, was in western Arkansas—one of three states that sued the Environmental Protection Agency under Joe Biden to prevent it from instituting a requirement to harden water systems against cyberattacks. “Had the EPA rule been in place, some experts say, the Arkansas utility or others like it might have been spared,” write Ellen Nakashima and Amy B. Wang

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

The Open Markets Institute’s Center for Media and Digital Governance director, Courtney Radsch, condemns last week’s Federal Communications Commission vote to scrap a rule that limited TV media consolidation. “This decision effectively places FCC Chair Brendan Carr in open defiance of Congress, and it gives us yet again another reason to call for removing him from his post,” said Radsch in a statement.

Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert calls last week’s Senate confirmation of Todd Blanche as attorney general a “stain on the record of Senators who voted to confirm him.”

After yet another company announced a settlement agreement with Trump’s Interior Department last week to abandon its offshore wind leases, the Natural Resources Defense Council notes that this brings the tally of such settlements up to “nearly $4 billion in U.S. taxpayer funds.” In a statement published on the organization’s website, NRDC policy analyst Pasha Feinberg said that “American consumers are paying twice, once with their tax dollars and the second time with higher utility bills.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Four Questions For: Crystal FitzSimons, president of the Food Research & Action Center

Interview by Monica Potts

Q: Who are you, and what are you working on right now?

A: I am the president of the Food Research & Action Center, where I’ve spent 27 years working to end poverty-related hunger in America. Before stepping into this role, I spent many years leading our child nutrition work. Right now, we are focused on restoring, protecting, and strengthening the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program after Congress made unprecedented cuts to the program in July 2025. Since then, five million people have lost access to SNAP.

Q: What is the most difficult thing about your line of work?

A: Helping policymakers feel the urgency of ending hunger can be one of the hardest parts of this work. Children only get one childhood, and there are no do-overs. Growing up in a food-insecure household, as one in five children do, can have a lasting impact on how they grow, learn, and thrive. Hunger is solvable. It just requires political will.

Q: What was your biggest success in the last year or two?

A: We have made significant progress on Healthy School Meals for All. More schools are offering school breakfast and lunch to all their students at no cost, regardless of household income. That’s a win for kids who have the nutrition they need to thrive in school, families who can count on school meals to help ease pressure on their household budgets, and schools who have students who are well nourished and ready to learn. 

Q: What keeps you going in these stressful times?

A: What motivates me is knowing that hunger isn’t inevitable; it’s a policy choice. We know what works. We have the tools to solve it. And that is what we focus on every day at FRAC. I also draw strength from the commitment and passion of my colleagues, who bring that same sense of purpose to the work.

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

A Democratic Wisconsin senator from the 1960s and ’70s was the creator of Earth Day. Who was he? (Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.) 

Trump nominated Dennis Kirk, an author of the conservative manifesto and former adviser to Tulsi Gabbard, as the Department of the Interior’s inspector general. Kirk, who worked in the Office of Personnel Management in Trump’s first term, would oversee any probes into alleged malfeasance or corruption within the Cabinet department.

Kirk created a training video for Project 2025 and wrote an essay warning against “progressive ideology” in the federal workforce. As inspector general, he’d be in charge of ethics investigations in the Interior Department, as well as closer looks at Trump’s pet building projects in Washington, D.C., including the $16 million renovation of the Reflecting Pool.

The move immediately drew backlash from Democrats. Representative Jared Huffman, the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, called Kirk a “fake and fraudulent watchdog” in a statement last week.

“[The inspector general’s office] is weighing serious ethics investigations into senior officials in this administration. It’s no surprise the White House suddenly wants its own man inside the one place that Trump’s cronies still have reason to fear,” Huffman said.

The Reflecting Pool project is a disaster, with a peeling and tattered “American flag blue” paint job ruined by hydrogen peroxide that was added to kill algae. Trump pushed an unfounded vandalism allegation and had the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro try to prosecute people who simply got close to or touched the pool and its peeling paint. Those charges all fell through.

David Hearn, an ex-Olympian who faced spurious vandalism charges that were later dropped, is exploring legal options against the federal government, and Democrats are looking to investigate the project and botched prosecutions by seeking documents from the Interior and Justice Departments. That effort could run into Kirk, a conservative operative and Trump loyalist.

A previous Interior Department inspector general, Mark Lee Greenblatt, doesn’t have confidence in Kirk’s ability to carry out the job, saying to The Hill last week that “the chilling effect on whistleblowers is real.”

“Who would jeopardize their careers by submitting a complaint about an administration official to an I.G. who is avowedly aligned with the administration?” Greenblatt said.