Politics | The Atlantic

Why Trump Lost

2026-05-24T10:45:37-04:00

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The first surprising thing about President Trump’s impending defeat in the 2026 Iran war is that he already fought and won a successful war against Iran last year. In June 2025, U.S. and Israeli airstrikes badly damaged the Iranian nuclear program in 12 days of bombardment. Exactly how badly remains controversial. But they didn’t do nothing. If Trump had quit while ahead, he could have banked his gains from last June as a solid if imperfect win.

The second surprising thing about Trump’s impending defeat is that he does not seem to have cared at all about the only evident reason to resume fighting in 2026: the Iranian people’s rebellion against their brutal oppressors. Trump has never given any evidence of caring about Iranian democracy or human rights. He promised the Iranian people “Help is on the way” on January 13, but military operations did not commence until thousands were dead and the rebellion was already effectively crushed. During military operations, Trump made clear that he sought a deal with the existing regime. He made no effort to support or cooperate with Iranian dissidents before, during, or after the uprising.

The third surprising thing about Trump’s impending defeat is that even he himself seems never to have understood why he went back to war against Iran. What exactly did he think he would achieve? He kept saying that he wanted to ensure that Iran never developed a nuclear weapon. He also insisted that he had effectively prevented it from doing so in August. He seemed genuinely to believe that claim. If so, why resume the fighting? If, however, those words were wrong, then why not simply hit the nuclear sites again? Why the need for this bigger war?

Trump started the February 28 war for reasons of personality, not strategy. He is on his way to losing the war for the same reasons of personality.

Trump is arrogant. Think how often Trump mocks his predecessors as “dumb” and praises himself as “smart.” Those predecessors, from Jimmy Carter through Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, all had to ponder military responses to Iranian terrorism and aggression. They all ultimately decided not to wage a major war against Iranian national territory. Among the prime deterrents to action: the Strait of Hormuz problem. Trump apparently decided that a problem that was too hard for everybody else would magically disappear for him, because he is tough and growls in his official photographs.

Trump is reckless. Trump is not a plan-ahead guy. He plunges into desperate adventures without any clear endgame in mind. What really was Trump’s plan on January 6, 2021? After Mike Pence was seized by rioters and forced at gunpoint to recite the magic words Trump wanted him to say, what was supposed to happen then? The 81 million American majority who’d voted against Trump in 2020 would submit? The military, CIA, and FBI would follow blatantly illegal orders? In 2021, Trump provoked violence and hoped it would all somehow work out. He followed the same approach again in 2026.

Trump hates procedure. A lot of the apparatus of the modern presidency exists to force confrontations with unwelcome realities. Cabinet officers are confirmed by the Senate to assure the country that major offices are filled by people of character and competence. The National Security Council is supposed to process challenging data to ensure that the president receives necessary information. But to run the Department of Defense, Trump nominated and the Senate approved Pete Hegseth. Instead of choosing a national security adviser to replace Mike Waltz after Waltz’s resignation on May 1, 2025, Trump tapped Secretary of State Marco Rubio to take on the role. But to double up that particular job dooms the job not to be done at all, especially because Trump has shriveled the NSC’s staff and subjected it to loyalty tests demanded by his most screwball supporters.

Trump is panicky. For all his bluster and boasting, Trump cannot take the heat. Presidents who believe in their decisions ride out bad polls. Trump panics and reverses course. Trump has been signaling since mid-March that he wants an end to the Iran war at almost any price. The Iranians have read those signals. For all the damage the U.S. military inflicted on Iran, the Iranians seem to have gambled that they could outlast Trump. They’ve been proven right.

Trump is gullible. As Trump’s present secretary of state observed back in 2016, Trump is most fundamentally a con artist. But Trump is often a self-defeating con artist who falls victim to his own con. Trump demanded “unconditional surrender” from Iran. Instead, he’s negotiating an exit that concedes most of Iran’s demands and leaves Iran in a more dominant position over Persian Gulf oil traffic than it occupied before the war. But Trump seems genuinely to have convinced himself that he’s won a mighty victory, and he seems truly baffled that others decline to endorse his flim-flam.

Trump can’t lead. Trump’s method of governance is command. He cannot work across party lines, and he cannot speak to any part of the American nation beyond his MAGA base. A war leader, however, must be a national leader. War imposes costly sacrifices. Leaders who take the nation to war must explain those costs and inspire those sacrifices. Trump simply cannot do any of that work, and he has no idea how it could be done.

For three years in his first term, Trump benefited from the strong economy that he inherited. Then the pandemic struck, and his first instinct was to hunt for someone to blame. In this second presidency, his main work has been spectacular self-enrichment, even as the economy has sagged under the weight of his catastrophic trade wars. He made no case for an Iran war to the public and never sought approval by Congress. There are some Iran hawks on the Democratic side, especially in the Senate. Trump never tried to ally with them.

Trump’s vision of the presidency is authoritarian and kleptocratic: Issue orders, grab money, luxuriate in flattery, erect monuments to oneself. That’s no way to lead a nation through the hazards and difficulties of war. Now the war is ending on disadvantageous terms for the United States. Trump’s old methods will be turned to a new task: trying to deceive the American people and the world into believing that the war he lost was really a big win, the biggest ever, so big you cannot believe it. He’s likely to discover that, indeed, nobody does believe it.

Out of the Gerrymandering Darkness, a New Hope for Reform

2026-05-23T06:00:00-04:00

Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick and Tom Suozzi occupy a lonely space in Congress. Their respective parties—Fitzpatrick is a Republican from Pennsylvania, Suozzi a Democrat from New York—are waging a nationwide gerrymandering fight that neither wants any part in. With the seat-for-seat battle expanding to new states seemingly by the day, Fitzpatrick and Suozzi are calling for a truce—if only anyone would listen.

“There’s got to be people that come to the table and agree that it’s in the best interest of our nation to not do this, that it’s a race to the bottom,” Fitzpatrick told me.

National leaders in both parties, however, are in no mood for peace. President Trump has directed Republicans to seize every opportunity to draw House seats in their favor, in hope that the GOP can create a buffer big enough to overcome the president’s sagging poll numbers in the midterm elections this fall. The Supreme Court’s decision to weaken the Voting Rights Act last month freed Republicans to redistrict even more aggressively across the Deep South, building on the party’s gains in Texas and a handful of other states last fall.

Democrats, who hit back in California but lost a court fight in Virginia, have vowed their own escalation in blue states next year. “We’re going to win in November,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries vowed to reporters last week, before adopting a bit of fantasy-flick hyperbole: “And then we’re going to crush their souls as it relates to the extremism that they are trying to unleash on the American people.”

The gerrymandering frenzy will likely extend for at least two more years, which in turn will only exacerbate the polarization and partisanship that has gripped Congress and steadily diminished its standing. “We’ve just made this so bad for our country,” Suozzi told me. “We have got to address this problem, or we’re going to fall further into this spiral, this death spiral.”

Fitzpatrick and Suozzi are co-chairs of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, a group that in an ideal world might comprise the entirety of Congress—after all, what else is a legislative body for?—but in these dysfunctional times make up a few dozen lawmakers along the center political axis of both parties. With the House so closely divided over the past decade, the caucus has occasionally exerted influence over policy—when it’s been able to avoid its own issues. I spoke with Fitzpatrick and Suozzi in a joint phone interview earlier this week, during which they told me that the caucus had resolved to make a concerted push against gerrymandering.

Both Fitzpatrick and Suozzi have some incentive to make this stand, as do many of their problem-solving colleagues. Fitzpatrick represents one of just three GOP-held districts that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, whereas Trump narrowly carried Suozzi’s Long Island constituency. Their purple seats are the kind that both parties target in redistricting, and the two hope that demonstrating their distaste for partisan warfare can help them win crossover voters in November.

[Read: The House of Representatives is turning into the Electoral College]

The Problem Solvers Caucus met inside the Capitol last week to discuss what to do about the redistricting “death spiral,” at a gathering that took place a short walk away from where House Democrats were beginning to plot their next round of revenge on gerrymandering Republicans. The challenge for the Problem Solvers is that they are constrained both by an internal struggle for consensus and by their relatively narrow view of Congress’ power to regulate a practice that’s nearly as old as the republic.

Fitzpatrick joined every other Republican in opposing a Democratic bill in 2022 that would have, among many other things, banned partisan gerrymandering nationwide and forced states to use independent redistricting commissions to draw House maps. Although he supports independent commissions, he told me that Congress couldn’t require their use. Instead, he said, Congress would have to use its funding power to encourage political reforms such as nonpartisan redistricting and open primaries—another popular idea to combat polarization. But the caucus has yet to endorse even that proposal. “We haven’t come to a decision as to what we’re going to advocate for yet,” Suozzi told me when I asked what the caucus planned to do about gerrymandering. “We’ve come to a decision that it’s a problem.”

Outside Congress, election reformers are even glummer about the gerrymandering race, but they have far grander ideas about how to fix the nation’s politics. A few of them think—or at least hope—that Americans will grow so infuriated by the whole mess that a new opportunity for change will emerge.

In early 2020, the political scientist Lee Drutman published a book in which he decried the “doom loop” created by the nation’s two major parties. Seven years later, he says that the system is now even “doomier and loopier.” He told me that he is not sure how much worse Congress can get. “Things are pretty ugly and pretty nasty and pretty bitter,” Drutman said, “but I guess you should never underestimate how low the floor can go.”

[Read: The fight-club rule on gerrymandering]

Drutman advocates for a system known as proportional representation, in which each House district elects not just one but multiple members determined by the percentage of the vote each party receives. Congress would include representatives from several parties, as opposed to its current configuration of Republicans, Democrats, and a small number of independents who align with one caucus or the other. The idea might seem like a pipe dream, but it has been drawing more discussion in the past few years (including in this magazine). Last week Harris, who is considering another White House bid, mentioned multimember districts during an interview in which she called for the party to hold a “no-bad-ideas brainstorm” to “strengthen democracy” and respond to the gutting of the Voting Rights Act.

The Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by five other conservatives, set off a fresh rush by Republican-dominated states to gerrymander in advance of the midterm elections, and threatened to decimate the ranks of Black representatives from the South in Congress. Tennessee eliminated its lone majority-minority district barely a week later, and GOP leaders in both Louisiana and Alabama announced new elections so that they could redraw districts currently held by Black Democrats. (Louisiana suspended a primary election that was already under way to do so.) South Carolina Republicans are now debating whether to carve up the district long held by Representative James Clyburn; in Georgia, Governor Brian Kemp called a special session of the legislature so that the GOP majority—which Democrats hope to displace in November—could redistrict for the 2028 election while the party still holds power in the state.

Drutman said that the Callais ruling could end up being the “hinge point” in the debate over systemic political reform. It was a moment in which “the rules changed,” he said. Aside from proportional representation, Drutman mentioned other ideas that have gained currency in recent years, particularly on the left. They include increasing the size of the House from its current 435 members and expanding the nine-member Supreme Court, along with campaign-finance and ethics reforms.

Democrats considered some of those changes when they last held power in Congress, and Harris mentioned Supreme Court expansion as part of her proposed brainstorm. (She also cited the possibility of statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.) As the party seeks to reclaim both the White House and durable congressional majorities over the next few years, it must debate whether to prioritize reforms that will enhance its power or those intended to decrease partisanship in the system as a whole.

The voters who stand to lose the most in the power struggle between Republicans and Democrats are those who don’t register with either party—and who represent the fastest-growing share of the national electorate. In a Gallup poll released earlier this year, 45 percent of respondents identified themselves as independents, the highest percentage Gallup has ever recorded. As the two parties shrink in stature, they are trying to consolidate their power, in part by drawing districts stacked in their favor and also by closing primary elections to independent voters and opposing efforts to open them up. In a gerrymandered district where only voters registered with a party can participate in the primaries, candidates aim to appeal to a small slice of the electorate that tends to be much more partisan than the population as a whole, deepening the divide across the country.

To many reformers, changing primary rules to expand access for independent voters is a more effective way of combatting polarization than farther-reaching proposals such as proportional representation and increasing the size of the House. The parties’ “push to maximize partisan advantage in ways that silence voters will lead to a populist backlash, and I think in that backlash is our opportunity,” Nick Troiano, the executive director of Unite America, a group that opposes closed-party primaries, told me.

Unite America invested heavily in statewide ballot initiatives to replicate Alaska’s unique voting system, in which four candidates advance from a nonpartisan primary to a general election run on ranked-choice voting. The campaigns lost nearly everywhere they were on the ballot in 2024, but Troiano thinks that had they been before voters this year, in the midst of this redistricting brawl, they might have fared better. “I don’t think that strategy was a failure. I think the timing was off,” he said.

The trouble for any election reform in this hyperpartisan moment is that as soon as one party—or even a prominent party leader, such as Harris—takes a liking to a proposal, the other party becomes more skeptical of the idea. (Ranked-choice voting, which for a while enjoyed bipartisan appeal, fell victim to this dynamic after its adoption in Maine coincided with Democratic victories.)

Open primaries face resistance among leaders of both parties because the model explicitly challenges their dominance. In California, top Democrats have never loved the state’s voter-approved nonpartisan primary, and the risk that the party might get shut out of the runoff election in the governor’s race this November has prompted a new effort to scrap it. Democratic leaders in Colorado and Nevada opposed primary-reform ballot campaigns. Louisiana Republicans ditched the state’s so-called jungle primary in 2024.

But at least a few Republicans are entertaining the idea of open primaries as a partial remedy to polarization and the legislative paralysis it can cause. Fitzpatrick has said that if Pennsylvania had an open primary, he’d run for Congress as an independent rather than as a Republican. A closed primary, he told me, effectively disenfranchises more than one-third of voters. “As a matter of justice, it’s wrong,” Fitzpatrick said. “And it has a corrosive effect on the House floor. You can tell the people who live in closed-primary states. They conduct themselves very differently.” (Fitzpatrick ran unopposed in his primary on Tuesday, but his occasional breaks with Trump have attracted the president’s attention. “He likes voting against Trump,” the president told Fox News’s Jacqui Heinrich, who is engaged to Fitzpatrick. “You know what happens with that? It doesn’t work out well.”)

[Listen: America has always had a gerrymandering problem. This is new.]

Garret Graves, a Republican from Louisiana who served in the House for a decade until last year before an earlier round of redistricting split up his district, shared a similar perspective on closed primaries. “There were hundreds of times where I had members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, who said to me, in summary, I know this vote is the right thing to do, but I can’t do it, because I’ll get primaried,” Graves told me. Closed primaries, he said, “distort democracy. They distort free markets.”

Yet Graves was looking not to his former colleagues in the House but to the public and even the courts for a solution. He suggested that a lawsuit challenging closed primaries as unfairly disenfranchising voters could succeed. “I would really welcome something like that,” Graves said. As for Congress, he seemed to think that the chances it would act on closed primaries were as small as the likelihood that the parties would lay down their arms on gerrymandering anytime soon. “I have zero hope,” Graves said.

What Is Hunter Biden Doing?

2026-05-22T17:34:00-04:00

It was something of a political hall of mirrors: Hunter Biden arriving at Candace Owens’s house, sitting in a book-filled room decorated with a crucifix and orchids in the shape of a heart, holding a coffee cup labeled conspiracy theorist, and answering a range of questions from a podcast host who has called him “an alleged sex predator” and “A DEGENERATE THAT SHOULD BE IN PRISON” who comes from a “SCUM family.” The first question: “The cocaine that was found at the White House, was it yours?”

To say this was an unusual pairing is an understatement. To claim it was Frost/Nixon is an overstatement. But it said something about modern-day politics—and the weirdness of online culture—that the son of a former Democratic president and a right-wing podcaster were sitting there together, conversing for nearly two hours, finding common ground on being misunderstood, on being targeted by a powerful president, and on questioning the circumstances of Charlie Kirk’s death and whether the assassination attempts against Donald Trump were staged.

Owens apologized for treating Biden like “a caricature” and joining the “political machine” that attacked him during one of the lowest moments of his life (“I’m really sorry that I contributed to that. Like, I just feel really shitty”). He lavished her with praise (“You’re probably the most effective communicator I’ve ever heard behind the microphone”). She encouraged him to spend time in confession (“Don’t worry,” he responded, “I’ve been to confession”), and he giddily proposed that they go see Pope Leo XIV together: “For real, let’s go to the Vatican.” Biden offered book recommendations (“Have you ever read The Devil’s Chessboard?”), and Owens complimented his intelligence (“Not to be rude, but I thought you were dumb”).

Much of the conversation focused on Biden’s recovery story, human details of which Owens seemed largely unaware. “I just didn’t even consider: He’s a crackhead. That’s actually a very relatable thing,” she said at one point. (Never mind that in December 2024 she devoted a segment to President Biden pardoning his son, in which she mentioned “crack” more than two dozen times over about 20 minutes.) To anyone who has read Hunter Biden’s 2021 memoir, followed his federal court cases, or heard him in previous interviews, there were a lot of familiar themes: The guy who has long had addiction issues, and been in and out of rehab through much of his adult life. The guy who spiraled further after his brother died. The guy who watched as compromising photos, his private text messages, and more than a decade of emails became public fodder and complicated his dad’s campaign and presidency. “It forced me into a choice,” he said. “And the choice was: Do I get out of bed and live, or do I die? And it became that much of a dichotomy. And I chose to live, and it wasn’t easy.”

Biden has spent years living under Republican attacks. Owens herself led many of them alongside other fixtures of the hard right. Former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene once, during a congressional hearing, held up graphic images of Biden engaged in sex acts. Yet earlier this week, Greene wrote on social media, “I am so interested in this interview. This is what real journalism looks like along with where the political underground of America is moving.” Both Owens and Greene have been repeatedly criticized for making anti-Semitic comments, downplaying the Holocaust, and playing into anti-Jewish tropes.

The most revealing moment came toward the end, as Biden recounted the attacks he faced. “They tore off all my clothes, tarred and feathered me, and put me in the center of town, and said, ‘Look at him.’ And I survived,” he said. Owens locked eyes with him and apologized several times. “Genuinely, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I did partake in just the inhumanity of just Look at this guy at the worst moment of his life, with prostitutes. He’s on crack, he’s on drugs, and we should make fun of him.” Biden began tearing up, wiping his eyes. “For you to say that to me, I truly mean it, just from a purely selfish point of view, means the world. And I truly didn’t come here for that.”

But why was he there? Why did he recently reactivate his account on X? And what’s next for the man many Republicans have loved to hate and many Democrats have hoped would disappear?

I have gotten to know Hunter Biden quite well over the past few years. I spent months in 2021 combing through a copy of his hard drive—the product of an infamous laptop that he allegedly dropped off at a computer-repair shop and never retrieved—and learned way more about him than I cared to. The research produced a number of stories about his business pursuits, about his relationship with Tucker Carlson, and about how he benefited from his family name.

I also wrote about Biden’s attempts to become an artist, along with the ethical concerns his ambitions raised in the White House and the congressional investigations that followed. That all can seem quite quaint now. For some time, Biden has been privately angry about the Trump family and their business pursuits that involve far more money and foreign countries, pose far more conflicts of interest—and get far less scrutiny. That anger burst out in the interview with Owens.

[Read: MAGA’s next top influencer]

“I had two shows and probably sold a total of 20 paintings,” he said. “And you had a problem—not you; well, you too—had a problem with me being this emblem of corruption?” Owens agreed, and said she would forever distance herself from the Trump family and now sees their business pursuits on a far different scale of corruption. “I wish I could go back to the days where I thought, like, Hunter Biden’s art was the most corrupt deal that was done in politics,” she responded.

Owens largely steered clear of the topic of Joe Biden, explaining that it would be “completely demonic” to try to get Hunter to say anything bad about his dad. Not that he would. He views himself as something of a defender of the Biden legacy at a time when so many Democrats have ridiculed the former president for deciding to run for reelection. But Owens did try to get him to address the subject of Kamala Harris, who replaced his dad on the ticket. Biden demurred, saying that he didn’t know her well and that she was always nice to him. “I’m not dodging the question,” Biden said, “but I don’t want to shit on the vice president.”

The free-ranging interview also provided a window into what I’ve long seen as Biden’s willingness to entertain ideas that can seem far-fetched, his deep skepticism of certain parts of the federal government, and a worry over the vindictiveness of the current administration.

Although his father granted a sweeping pardon to him for crimes committed in the past, Biden expressed worry about being framed or targeted by Trump in the future. Before getting on flights, he said that he has a witness watch him pack his bags, afraid that someone might plant drugs. Given his track record, he said, no one would believe that he’s clean and sober.

At one point, Biden asked to keep one of Owens’s trademark coffee mugs (the ones with Conspiracy theorist on them), and they both suggested that the assassination attempts against Trump and the murder of Kirk, a close friend to Owens, could have been staged. They have every right, the pair agreed, to question whether they were. “It’s almost as if they’re just saying, like, eff you,” Biden said of those who dismiss their questions.

[Read: Finally, a Democrat who could shine on Joe Rogan’s show]

“It’s so disrespectful that we’re not even getting good psyops anymore,” Owens responded. “Like, we’re supposed to believe he’s survived four—what are we at, four assassination attempts? The first president that’s ever survived four assassination attempts? They lie to us about things.”

The two also think something else has changed. “There is a meanness. A willingness to adopt very, very un-American tactics against our opponents because it’s become a zero-sum game,” Biden said. “It’s not just, I disagree with you. It’s, You need to be punished. You need to be punished for what you believe.”

As to Owens’s first question about the cocaine found at the White House in July 2023—which, at the time, spawned its own conspiracy theories—Biden said it most certainly wasn’t his. He’s been sober, he said, since June 1, 2019. “I’m an easy target. And understandably so. I’ve been, I think, probably the most famous addict—and famous person, because of the grace of God, in recovery.”

Ken Paxton Is Actually Doing This

2026-05-22T10:59:51-04:00

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

President Trump took 11 weeks to choose between Senator John Cornyn and State Attorney General Ken Paxton in the Texas Senate primary runoff—so long that most people figured he’d never actually decide. Which is why, when Trump finally endorsed Paxton on Tuesday, the news hit a crowd of Republican retirees at a Tex-Mex restaurant like manna from the MAGA heavens.

Paxton was due that day for a meet-and-greet at Matt’s Rancho Martinez in Allen, but he was running late. Suddenly, the sound system, which had been vibrating gently with a selection of the Country Top 40, began blasting “Y.M.C.A.” People read Trump’s Truth Social post aloud from their phones and waved their arms in time with the president’s unofficial anthem. A man near me with slicked-back hair shouted into his phone, “We did it!” And by the time the next song came on—Thunderstruck! Ahh-ahh!—waiters were circulating with trays of free margaritas. “I have chills!” one elderly woman told me happily. Another lifted her plastic cup to the sky and shouted over the din, “What a time to be alive!”

It really is. Donald Trump is a historically unpopular politician. Gas prices, high inflation, and the war with Iran have all systems flashing fire-engine red for Republicans in November. Yet here was the president, throwing his political weight behind Paxton—a man who has been indicted, impeached, and allegedly unfaithful to his wife. In Washington, D.C., Senate Republicans were apoplectic at the president’s casual betrayal of one of their own. But here at the Rancho, an endorsement from Trump was welcomed like a hug from Oprah or the title of “Sole Survivor,” an American prize of inestimable value. These Texas Republicans love their attorney general the way that they love Trump: wholeheartedly, with no questions asked.

By choosing Paxton, the president is rewarding his—and his base’s—unwavering devotion. He is likely also guaranteeing Paxton a primary victory over Cornyn. And in so doing, Trump may have cemented a set of very difficult circumstances for his party. If Paxton wins on Tuesday, Democrats will probably be better positioned to win statewide in Texas than they’ve been in the past 40 years.

In the beginning, there was a pen. A $1,000 Montblanc, to be specific, the writing instrument of choice for celebrities, heads of state, and other kinds of people who recognize the cultural cachet of a customizable gold nib. Paxton apparently knows a good pen when he sees one, and in 2013, then–State Senator Paxton did see one—next to a metal detector at the Collin County Courthouse, where a fellow attorney had accidentally left it behind. Paxton picked it up and pocketed it. Later, after a call from an officer, Paxton returned the pen to its rightful owner; it had been a misunderstanding, a simple mistake, a Paxton spokesperson said. But that didn’t stop the ads. “This is Attorney General Ken Paxton, rummaging through the metal-detector trays and stealing that $1,000 pen,” the narrator says in one from 2018.

Texas hadn’t seen anything yet.

Over the next decade, Paxton would build a rap sheet of legal and ethical entanglements so long and complex that it is difficult to quickly sum up. I’ll try: In 2015, his first year as attorney general, Paxton was charged with defrauding investors in a tech company. (The charges were dismissed after Paxton agreed to do community service and take an ethics class.) In 2020, some of Paxton’s aides reported their boss to the FBI, accusing him of using his office to benefit a particular donor; Paxton later fired those staffers, who sued, alleging retaliation. (The FBI investigated Paxton, but the Justice Department ultimately declined to prosecute. A judge did find that the attorney general had violated the state Whistleblower Act, and Texas paid the aides $6.6 million.) In late 2020, Paxton became a star player in Trump’s “Stop the Steal” attempt to overturn the results of the presidential election, by suing to invalidate the results in four states that Joe Biden won.

By 2023, Paxton was the subject of a full-blown impeachment investigation based in part on the above allegations. Ultimately, the Texas House, including the majority of Republicans, voted to impeach him. Paxton was eventually acquitted by the Senate, with Trump’s help. But during the Senate trial, sordid details about his personal life spilled out, including witness testimony that Paxton had cheated on his wife, State Senator Angela Paxton. Later, in 2025, Angela announced that she was divorcing Paxton on “biblical grounds,” which is the Baptist way of saying that Ken was at it again. (Paxton has denied allegations of an affair.)

Despite all of this, Paxton continues to win. He’s been reelected twice since 2014, serving 11 years as attorney general. Cornyn has run attack ads, but the rushing river of Paxton controversies is tough to channel. Earlier this year, the Cornyn campaign released a six-minute ad unpacking all of Paxton’s corruption allegations that no voter could reasonably be expected to sit through. Later, the campaign tried a different approach, publishing an AI-generated spot centered on Paxton’s alleged infidelity that was both hard to follow and painfully campy.

Ask any Paxton supporter what they make of these accusations, and they will usually reply with some version of “Fake news!” or “He who is without sin can cast the first stone.” Many of them simply seem exasperated. “Who cares?” a man named Eric told me in Allen. “We’ve got bigger fish to fry!” The truth is that grassroots conservatives in Texas stand by Paxton because he has consistently stuck by them. By the time Trump entered the White House, Paxton had already positioned himself as an enemy of the establishment, a warrior against the deep state. As attorney general, he sued the Obama administration more than a dozen times, with mixed success; later, he filed more than 100 lawsuits against the Biden administration. (Both of these facts are applause lines in Paxton’s stump speech.)

As attorney general, Paxton sues like he breathes. This month, he won a $10 million settlement from the Texas Children’s Hospital that required it to stop gender-transition surgeries for minors. He also ordered Texas public schools to show proof that they were displaying copies of the Ten Commandments in classrooms, which, considering the quantity and credibility of all the allegations against him, is a bit like the fox giving the henhouse a lesson on etiquette.

Paxton’s superpower is that he is highly adaptable to the changing dynamics of his party and, like the president, appears to be completely lacking in shame. He has always simply “ignored electability as a concern,” Brandon Rottinghaus, a political-science professor at the University of Houston, told me. “He has no brakes.”

Voters I interviewed proudly made the same comparison. People thought Trump couldn’t win in 2016, a man named Doug Snyder told me after writing a $1,000 check for Paxton in Dallas. “Guess what? We’ve got the hats. And we’ve been to Mar-a-Lago,” he said.

Politics needs more leaders like Paxton and Trump, Diane Truitt told me at the same event—alpha males, she elaborated, like Bambi’s dad “coming out of the forest with those huge antlers.”

Which brings us, as always, back to Trump. Senate Republicans had urged the president to endorse Cornyn, who has been in the Senate for 23 years, and whose white-haired politesse evokes a bygone congressional era. Last week, in an apparently desperate effort to secure Trump’s affections, Cornyn tried to rename a highway after him. But Trump was not to be swayed. “John Cornyn is a good man, and I worked well with him, but he was not supportive of me when times were tough,” the president wrote on Truth Social.

Paxton’s supporters can rattle off Cornyn’s sins without even pausing to think: He was slow to endorse Trump in 2016, and wasn’t enthusiastic enough about Trump’s efforts to build the border wall. Worse, he voted with Democrats to pass a gun-control package after the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde. He is, in short, a RINO, or Republican in Name Only. Paxton’s advertising campaign against Cornyn has been ugly. This month, the attorney general put out an ad arguing that the incumbent senator supports “Muslim mass immigration” and featuring Cornyn saying “Inshallah.” (“Ken Paxton has never said anything in Arabic,” a spokesperson for Paxton told me.)

Next week’s primary will be close, but Trump’s endorsement will probably give Paxton the edge. Whichever man wins will go up against James Talarico, a baby-faced state lawmaker and Presbyterian seminarian whose campaign has centered on faith and economic populism. Talarico is, in some ways, eminently attackable: He has said, for example, that “God is nonbinary” and argued that opposition to abortion isn’t rooted in scripture. Paxton is already workshopping nicknames for him, including “Six-Gender Jimmy” and “Low-T Talarico.”

But many Texas political observers and strategists believe that Cornyn would be better-positioned than Paxton to beat Talarico in November, given Cornyn’s ability to fundraise and his palatability among general-election voters. Especially in a year when the political environment seems so favorable to Democrats, running someone as controversial as Paxton, they argue, would be risky. The Cook Political Report has already said that if the attorney general wins next week, “Texas would move into a fully competitive race.”

This is, of course, the outcome that many Republicans dread most: that Paxton will be unable to win over the moderate Republican and independent voters he’ll need to succeed in November—and that Texas will make Talarico the first Democratic senator it’s elected since 1988. If Paxton is the nominee, “we’re in deep kimchi, which is Korean for ‘shit,’” Jerry Patterson, a Republican, former Texas land commissioner, and Cornyn supporter, told me. (Patterson is evidently not a fermented-vegetable fan.) “We’ve excited a new group of voters,” he added, referring to Trump and Paxton supporters, “and now we’re paying the price for it.”

At least for now, the voters Patterson is talking about seem to exist in an alternate reality—a place where Donald Trump’s endorsement can only be a good thing, where MAGA reigns and margaritas abound. “I don’t know where they’re getting those numbers from,” a woman named Mary told me in Allen, when I asked about the president’s dwindling national popularity. At the Rancho, voters don’t see Ken Paxton as an electoral liability any more than they believe that Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square. For them, November is looking particularly bright.

Two Futures for the American Left

2026-05-22T07:00:00-04:00

In a spat between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Marjorie Taylor Greene, which side would American leftists take? Until recently, this might have sounded like a ludicrous question. By any measure, AOC is one of America’s most left-wing politicians. Greene is a self-described Christian nationalist who once belonged to the right-wing Freedom Caucus.

But two weeks ago, AOC described Greene as “a proven bigot and anti-Semite” who shouldn’t be trusted, and many American leftists flocked to Greene’s corner, condemning AOC for her comments. They included the activist Cenk Uygur, the journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Grim, the Palestinian writers Susan Abulhawa and Mohammed el-Kurd, and the Democratic strategist Peter Daou, to name a few.

The newfound love for Greene on the left is explained primarily by one factor: Israel. MTG has changed sides on the issue. In the past she evinced strong support for “our ally Israel,” criticized AOC on the grounds that the representative “hates Israel,” and complained about “Israel-hating radicals.” Now Greene has broken with Donald Trump and come to condemn the “genocide in Gaza.”

Greene hasn’t become more tolerant: She greeted the election of Zohran Mamdani, New York’s first Muslim mayor, last year with an X post that showed the Statue of Liberty in a burka. And she hasn’t abandoned conspiracism: Just last week, with regard to COVID-19, she claimed that the pharmaceutical company Moderna had helped “manipulate the virus (bioweapon), make the vaccine (poison), and then make the profits.”

[Yair Rosenberg: Four simple questions for Marjorie Taylor Greene]

But Israel tops all concerns for some leftists, so Greene’s reversal on the issue is enough to win their support, and AOC’s refusal to embrace her is seen as a counterproductive purity test. Uygur, for instance, claimed that AOC had done “exactly what Israeli supporters want—split the anti-war movement and critics of Israel’s genocide.”

The AOC-MTG dustup is not really about how big a tent the American left should erect, however. It’s not even about whether left-wingers should occasionally collaborate with those on the right. Rather, it presents a choice between two irreconcilable futures for the leftist movement itself.

One of these two visions involves building on America’s liberal tradition while attempting to push it toward democratic socialism. This approach has a long history in the United States. In the late 1930s, the Communist Party gave vociferous support to Franklin D. Roosevelt even while recruiting thousands of people to its own ranks. The Port Huron Statement of 1962—the defining document of the American New Left—called for the movement to “include liberals and socialists, the former for their relevance, the latter for their sense of thoroughgoing reforms in the system.”

Institutionally and electorally, this version of the left relies on a grand coalition of trade unions and civil-rights groups advancing the rights of women and Black Americans—in other words, the historic constituency of the post-1970s Democratic Party. It would work to gain back the working-class votes that the party has lost in recent years.

Such a path is essentially that of Bernie Sanders, who has managed to both oppose the two-party system and make himself a core part of the Democratic Party, occupying top positions and helping shape its platform. AOC has made similar choices: She’s stayed on good terms with the Democratic leadership, even while being enormously popular within the country’s largest leftist organization, the Democratic Socialists of America.

The alternative to this vision for the left is very different. It envisages a future anchored in populist anti-elitism rather than in defined values or political traditions. It would unite those angry at “the system,” including by opposing the post-1945 world order and liberalism itself, in search of an alliance of the far left and the far right. Hence Greenwald, once on the left, now makes common cause with his right-wing counterparts, such as Alex Jones and Candace Owens. A popular pro-Palestinian account on X endorsed both a leftist Democratic-primary candidate in Michigan and Dan Bilzerian, a Holocaust denier who is running for Congress in Florida. As an emotional wedge issue, Israel is ideal for this trans-spectrum populism. Those on the left embrace hostility toward Israel as an anti-imperialist cause, while those on the right advocate an American nationalism suspicious of entanglements abroad, such as the steadfast U.S. support for Israel.

Some of the responses to AOC’s remarks about MTG made clear that her critics weren’t just suggesting that she tactically align with Greene, but that they preferred Greene’s politics to AOC’s, especially on Israel. Daou, for instance, averred that Greene had “far more intellectual honesty” and “far more courage on the defining moral issue of our time,” namely, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Abulhawa, too, asserted that for her, “as a leftie,” Greene had “more credibility and honor” on that issue. In fact, AOC has one of the most pro-Palestinian records in Congress. But the populist wing of the left distrusts her commitment largely because of her association with the Democratic Party establishment. Greene, since her rift with Trump, can be cast as an outsider.

The writer Sohrab Ahmari, who combines Catholic conservative social values with populist economic views, recently wrote about AOC’s criticism of Greene in the British magazine UnHerd. He called on AOC to view society as divided into two camps—underdogs versus those in power—and to mobilize the former against the latter.

But this kind of populism does not have a track record of success for the left. Perhaps the most significant force to have tried it is the Spanish party Podemos, founded in 2014, which attempted to ignite a left-right groundswell against an ill-defined establishment that it called “the caste.” But this message didn’t resonate with Spanish voters. No grand populist coalition came to be; instead, Podemos wound up allying with the Socialist and Communist Parties, and it currently backs Spain’s Socialist-led government.

[David Frum: The new blood libel]

Populism has, at the same time, proved stunningly successful on the right. And as far-right populist parties consolidate power in one country after another, many on the global left find themselves drawn to join them in a shared anti-liberalism. Last year, Perry Anderson, the grand old theorist of the British New Left, offered an account of populism that strongly suggested that its purveyors on the right and left could pursue a common agenda.

But a far left that put aside its significant differences with the far right to unite over a joint opposition to “the system” and obsession with Israel would no longer be recognizable. It would be forced to abandon or heavily de-emphasize defining values, such as gender equality, anti-racism, and the need for action on climate change, without necessarily finding common ground with the right on its economic agenda.

This is thus a struggle over the American left’s identity. The 2010s, following the 2008 global financial crisis, gave rise to anti-establishment forces across the world. In the U.S., these included both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. The former’s success eventually transformed the Republican Party and brought about the Trump presidency. The left, in turn, has done much to transform the Democratic Party: Despite losing two primaries in 2016 and 2020, Sanders, once a lonely voice on the fringe, has become a major force, and some polls show AOC leading among potential Democratic candidates for president in 2028. A DSA member is now mayor of America’s largest city.

But the American left must choose. It can help transform the Democratic Party into a broad liberal-socialist coalition that encompasses the politics of Sanders and AOC. Or it can try to compete for the right’s populist voters by dissolving its political and historical identity into an unrecognizable mash of anti-elite anger. In the process, it will become ever more like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Homeland Security’s Plan to Squeeze International Flights

2026-05-21T13:33:00-04:00

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In early April, shortly after Markwayne Mullin took over the Department of Homeland Security, he floated an idea on Fox News that wasn’t taken seriously; it sounded, in fact, like a proposal from someone very new on the job: Mullin threatened to cut federal screening of international passengers and cargo at airports in cities with “sanctuary” policies, which limit cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Such a move would trigger flight cancellations to airports in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other major cities and force airlines to reroute to other destinations. Mullin’s proposal seemed more like a wild swing than a real plan.

The new secretary is pushing forward anyway. Last Wednesday, Mullin convened a small group of airline and travel-industry executives at DHS headquarters in Washington and told them he may reduce Customs and Border Protection staffing at major airports that serve sanctuary jurisdictions. Mullin told the executives the locations could include Portland International Airport, in Oregon; New York City–area airports such as John F. Kennedy International Airport and Newark Liberty International Airport; and Washington Dulles International Airport, according to two people with knowledge of the discussion who were not authorized to speak publicly. Mullin did not indicate when DHS would begin the pullback, but it would likely occur sometime after the United States finishes hosting the World Cup in July, the two people told me.

Travel executives are alarmed, and have told DHS that international travelers and cargo cannot be easily routed elsewhere, these people said. The disruption would cause chaos in major U.S. airports and inflict significant economic damage beyond the cities Mullin is seeking to pressure, executives have told the department. “The message was this is a real proposal that is being considered by the administration,” one of the people with knowledge of the meeting told me, calling the potential impact on the airline industry “devastating.”

When Mullin first mentioned the idea during the interview on Fox News, he described it as a creative way to pressure the cities to comply with ICE. The Trump administration wants access to city and county jails so ICE officers can take custody of potential deportees before they are released. “If they’re a sanctuary city and they’re receiving international flights, and we’re asking them to partner with us at the airport, but once they walk out of the airport, they’re not going to enforce immigration policy—maybe we need to have a really hard look at that,” Mullin said. “I’m going to have to be forced to make hard decisions.”

Mullin’s proposal appears to reflect a thin grasp of global-travel logistics, as well as an inflated sense of the government’s ability to impose economic pain on specific cities, according to industry executives and former DHS officials I spoke with. The U.S. airports where international travelers and cargo first arrive are often not their final destination. A German business traveler flying into JFK may be en route to a meeting in Cincinnati. A Korean family landing at Los Angeles International Airport could be headed for Disney World. The proportion of economic pain imposed on sanctuary cities might be relatively small compared with the wider ripple effects on the U.S. travel industry.

“If you thought the economy was bad with Trump’s war driving prices at the pump up … just wait until international travel is halted at some of the busiest airports in the world,” California Governor Gavin Newsom’s press account posted to X after Mullin first mentioned the proposal. “Talk about a stupid idea.”

DHS declined to respond to questions about Mullin’s meeting with the travel executives, instead pointing me to his interview with Fox News six weeks ago. One senior administration official told me no decision on the airport plan has been made, but DHS is looking at several ways to gain more leverage over sanctuary cities. Those options could include curbing federal benefits programs for legal immigrants through U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, such as green-card processing or citizenship naturalizations. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the internal discussions, said those options remain preliminary.

Mullin and other administration officials have been looking for new ways to revive the mass-deportation campaign President Trump promised in 2024. The administration last year tried pressuring sanctuary cities—including Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis—by flooding their streets with thousands of Border Patrol agents and ICE officers. That phase of the campaign came to an end, at least for now, after the killing of two protesters in Minneapolis, Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Since then the administration has been trying to shift attention away from ICE; Mullin told lawmakers during his confirmation hearing in March that he didn’t want DHS in the headlines every day. Greg Bovino, the brash Border Patrol commander who led the roving crackdown, was removed from the job and has now retired. Trump ousted his first DHS secretary this term, Kristi Noem, in March and replaced her with Mullin. Tom Homan, the White House border czar, has been mentoring Mullin on ICE operations and immigration politics. From the moment Trump sent Homan to defuse public anger in Minneapolis, the border czar has sought to shift blame to sanctuary policies and insisted that cooperation with ICE is urgent for public safety.

Homan has not been able to shield himself, or Mullin, from attacks by immigration hard-liners on the right—including Bovino—who say the administration has backed off the president’s mass-deportation promises. ICE statistics show arrests and deportations are down slightly since January. Homan has blamed the 76-day DHS-funding shutdown this spring. Both he and Mullin say ICE is taking a smarter, more targeted approach that prioritizes violent criminals and public-safety threats over mass roundups.

[Read: Kristi Noem is gone. Now mass deportations can really begin.]

Getting more cooperation from sanctuary cities, even on a limited basis, would amount to a political win for Mullin and Homan. Trump officials are suing many of these cities in federal court and have threatened to withhold federal grants, but Mullin’s airport proposal goes a step further, enlisting the travel industry in the pressure campaign.

John Rose, a risk analyst and consultant for the travel company Altour, told me he was struggling to understand how Mullin’s proposal would work. “It doesn’t really give the government a lot of leverage over those cities,” Rose said. “It hurts the airlines. It hurts the airports. But I don’t know if it’ll put a lot of pressure on the cities.”

Rose told me it would not be a simple matter for an airline to shift its international flights to airports in Texas or Florida or another non-sanctuary destination. Those locations have neither the capacity nor the personnel to absorb much traffic from large airports such as JFK and LAX. “There are only so many gates. There are only so many connection-availability options possible for travelers,” Rose said.

The restrictions would hit the tourism industry hard. “If travelers abroad want to go to New York, they won’t be able to fly there, and will have to fly somewhere else first,” Rose told me. But it’s not as if the burden would fall solely on foreign visitors. A traveler living in the New York City metro area would potentially have to fly to another U.S. city in a non-sanctuary jurisdiction just to leave the country.

Another challenge is that most of the country’s largest coastal cities have adopted sanctuary policies, so restricting travel to some might simply benefit the others. If, for example, Mullin began implementing his plan in a relatively small city such as Portland, where local leaders are staunch defenders of sanctuary policies, the flights would need to divert elsewhere. The Portland International Airport has routes to Mexico, Canada, and several European cities, although international flights account for only about 4 percent of operations, according to the most recent data. International travelers traveling to Portland would potentially have to connect through other West Coast hubs such as Seattle, San Francisco, or Los Angeles. But all of those cities are sanctuary jurisdictions, too, and they would end up benefiting at Portland’s expense, by the logic of Mullin’s proposal.

One senior DHS official I am in touch with—who is not authorized to speak to the media—said he remains skeptical Mullin will go forward with the plan. It risks drawing the administration into a new fight over immigration policy with Democrats at a time when the polls show Trump’s approval ratings on the issue have dropped. Trump created havoc at international airports at the beginning of his first term with his “Muslim ban” on travelers from majority-Muslim nations, and more recently, his administration didn’t appear to convince a majority of Americans that long security lines at airports during the congressional shutdown were the fault of Democrats. It may not be eager to produce a third airport debacle.

[Read: 78 Super Bowls]

DHS officials first need to get through the World Cup, which the United States will co-host with Mexico and Canada. DHS says that it is preparing to process as many as 7 million international travelers during the tournament, and Mullin has likened the security responsibilities of hosting the matches to protecting “78 Super Bowls.” There are worries about long waits for screening at airports and land-border crossings for fans traveling back and forth to matches in Canada and Mexico. DHS has been under significant strain as it recovers from the shutdown and scrambles to prepare for the tournament. But even when the World Cup is over, there may not be much appetite to use American airports and international-arrival halls as tools of political leverage.

The Real Reason Thomas Massie Lost

2026-05-20T15:37:26-04:00

Last night, Donald Trump notched the latest victory in his cross-country revenge campaign against political apostates. Ed Gallrein, a Navy SEAL backed by the president, soundly defeated the seven-term representative Thomas Massie in Kentucky’s Fourth Congressional District. The 10-point drubbing followed the triumphs of other Trump-tapped challengers in primaries in Louisiana and Indiana, which effectively ended the careers of local legislators and a sitting U.S. senator who had angered the president.

“This is basic political management of a party,” a senior White House adviser said yesterday, before the Kentucky contest. “You have to keep everybody on the reservation. Occasionally you have to shoot a hostage. The next one is Thomas Massie.” Less than two hours after polls closed, Gallrein was projected as the winner.

Gallrein has an illustrious military résumé, but he has never held elected office and barely campaigned for this one, skipping every debate with Massie. What Gallrein did have was Trump’s endorsement, and that was all that mattered.

This decisive outcome underscores what should already have been obvious: Even as Trump’s overall approval rating hits new lows, his hold on the Republican Party—and specifically its MAGA core—remains absolute. Contrary to months of breathless headlines, the president’s base never deserted him and continues to punish those who defy him. That’s because the MAGA movement is united, not by any particular set of ideological commitments but by commitment to a particular person.

[Russell Berman: Why Thomas Massie thought he was different]

Gallrein’s final online ad was just 15 seconds long, and he never said a word in it. “This is a real hero,” intoned a Trump voice-over. “Ed Gallrein has my complete and total endorsement.” In a video filmed in the Oval Office and posted on the eve of the election, Trump was more explicit about what was really at stake in this clash. “Ed Gallrein, he’s fantastic,” the president declared. “But forget that. Massie is the worst congressman in the history of our country, always voting against Republicans and good values. So get rid of Thomas Massie.” The next day, Republican voters obliged, and the Kentucky representative joined the ranks of Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia as recent casualties of Trump’s perpetual purge of the insufficiently subservient.

That list of victims is long and dates back to Trump’s first term. It includes nearly all GOP members of Congress who voted to impeach the president, as well as the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, who had the temerity to endorse Ron DeSantis over Trump in 2024. These people were drummed out of politics not because of their ideologies—some were establishment squishes, others hard-right gadflies—but because they violated the one real rule of the MAGA Republican Party: Never cross the boss.

Massie allied with Democrats to oppose Trump’s Middle East policy and his handling of the Epstein files, and voted against Trump’s signature tax-and-immigration bill. Louisiana’s Cassidy voted to convict Trump after the January 6 riot. Indiana’s local Republicans refused to redistrict the state according to the president’s wishes. What united—and doomed—all of these soon-to-be-former legislators was not their politics but their refusal to fall in line.

This dynamic also explains why none of Massie’s ideological attempts to defend his seat made a difference. As the tide turned against him, Massie leaned into anti-Israel advocacy as his closing argument. He told a reporter that if he lost, it would mean that “Israel controls this Congress,” and joked that his opponent’s phone number had an area code “in Tel Aviv,” a line he repeated in his concession speech last night.

He also openly engaged with anti-Semitic ideas and influencers. The weekend before the election, Massie invited a select group of supporters to his homestead in northeastern Kentucky, including the Holocaust denier Ryan Matta, who previously posed for a photo with Massie and hugged him while wearing an American Reich shirt. At the gathering, Massie played banjo alongside David Reilly, an activist who has described himself as an “anti-Semite.” In the final days of the campaign, a pro-Massie PAC ran an ad that superimposed a rainbow Star of David behind an image of Paul Singer, a conservative pro-Israel donor known to support LGBTQ causes. It warned that the ultraconservative Gallrein would bring “trans madness” to Kentucky at the Jewish donor’s behest: “The gay mafia will own Eddie.”

But whatever one thinks of Massie’s anti-Israel activism and anti-Jewish insinuations, neither was the reason he was excised. A libertarian opponent of all foreign aid, Massie voted year after year against assistance to Israel with little consequence. The White House began plotting his ouster only after he voted against Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” in May 2025. The Israel-critical Massie committed the same sin that prompted Trump to defenestrate the Israel hawk Liz Cheney: He defied a president who prized personal loyalty above all else and was punished by a GOP electorate that enforced their leader’s litmus test.

[Yair Rosenberg: The biggest myth about Trump’s base (and why many believe it)]

Massie and his allies knew that his break with Trump was his real liability, whether they admitted it or not. They ran ads emphasizing Massie’s alignment with the president and others accusing Gallrein of being a “Trump hater” and “Trump traitor.” On Election Day, the campaign sent a text message to voters touting Trump’s endorsement of Massie in 2022—with the date removed. This prompted Trump to return to X for the first time in months to demand that Massie disavow the ruse.

Massie did not. But his campaign’s desperation to deceive the electorate into thinking that he was actually allied with the president illustrates why he lost before the fight began: Even Massie’s own advertising accepted the premise of the case against him. Pro-Trump and pro-Israel groups poured millions into the race against Massie, but the ads they aired worked only because Republican primary voters were primed to accept their argument that those disloyal to Trump had to go.

That the current Republican Party is defined by allegiance to a person rather than any principle is not a new development. “America First” has always meant Trump first. “All this time, I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans,” one astute Republican congressman mused to the Washington Examiner as far back as 2017, “but after some soul searching I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron [Paul] and me in these primaries, they weren’t voting for libertarian ideas—they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along.”

The politician who said that was Thomas Massie.

Why Thomas Massie Thought He Was Different

2026-05-20T10:22:32-04:00

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For a long time, Representative Thomas Massie confidently defied an ironclad law of modern Republican politics—that to oppose President Trump was to start a ticking clock on your electoral career. “I’m not worried about losing,” he told me last spring inside the Capitol, as he explained to a group of reporters the strength of his support within his Kentucky district.

Massie had already angered Trump just a few months into the president’s second term, after clashing with him during his first. Massie voted against government-funding bills, criticized the president’s tariffs, and would soon become one of the only Republicans in Congress to oppose Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which the fiscally hawkish Massie deemed irresponsible. Trump lashed out at Massie and vowed to find a primary opponent to defeat his bid for an eighth term; as early as last summer, the president’s allies stood up a political-action committee to run ads attacking Massie in his district.

Still, Massie refused to fall in line. Over the next several months, he condemned Trump’s military adventurism, including his unilateral attacks on Iran, and he helped lead a remarkably successful bipartisan effort to force the administration to release its trove of files on the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Massie, an iconoclast to his fans and an ineffective gadfly to his detractors, had always gone his own way in Congress. Maybe he believed he was uniquely positioned to withstand a Trump-backed barrage. Or perhaps he knew he was toast and had resolved to go down on his own terms.

[Read: The ‘crazy’ plot to release the Epstein files]

Either way, last night Massie met the same fate as so many of Trump’s Republican critics: He lost his primary. In the end, Massie’s campaign against Ed Gallrein, a Navy SEAL whom the president had personally recruited to run, wasn’t particularly close. Gallrein won by about 10 points, and Massie conceded not long after the polls closed.

For months leading up to the primary, Massie had held up his race as an important test case for the Trump era: If he could criticize the president and win anyway, his victory would embolden other Republicans to speak out and vote against Trump when they felt compelled to, loosening his viselike grip on the party. As many as a dozen House Republicans, he told me last month, would then be “more liable to vote with their constituents instead of the party line.”

That prediction, however, looked dubious even before Massie’s defeat became clear, as Trump reasserted his dominance over the GOP elsewhere. Less than six months from the midterm elections, the president may be as unpopular as he’s ever been with the general public. But inside the Republican Party, he remains the undisputed kingmaker.

In Indiana earlier this month, Trump-backed challengers defeated five of the seven Republican incumbents who sought reelection to the state Senate after opposing the president’s push to adopt a newly gerrymandered congressional map. On Saturday in Louisiana, Senator Bill Cassidy finished third in a Republican primary after Trump endorsed one of his opponents. (Cassidy had voted to convict Trump during his second impeachment trial after the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.) Trump likely sealed the defeat of another GOP incumbent, Senator John Cornyn, yesterday by endorsing a primary challenge from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who had been leading in the polls.

Kentucky’s Fourth District includes the suburbs of Cincinnati and Louisville and stretches east nearly 200 miles, close to the West Virginia border. Massie had hoped that his base of younger libertarian voters would turn out in sufficient numbers to overcome Gallrein’s strength among older Republicans who wanted a representative more loyal to Trump. He had turned aside primary challengers before with relative ease. But the money Trump and his allies put behind Gallrein dwarfed anything Massie had previously faced. Pro-Israel groups, hostile to Massie because of his staunch opposition to the Iran war and aid to the Jewish state, spent millions to defeat him. Massie used Trump’s attacks on him to raise plenty of his own funds, and the total spent on both sides swelled to some $33 million, making the race the most expensive House primary in U.S. history.

[Read: The Republican who outsmarted Trump]

Massie told reporters that his internal polling found that although most Republicans in his district still backed Trump, the president’s support was notably weaker within the party than during his first term. (He also acknowledged that his position on Iran was unpopular among primary voters in the district.) But although Massie never renounced his criticism of Trump, he spent the final weeks of the campaign reminding his constituents that he sided with the president far more than he opposed him. “I agree with President Trump nearly all of the time,” Massie said in one ad. In an April interview, Massie told me he had been willing to serve in Trump’s Cabinet.

These efforts to downplay a long-running feud with the president seemed as good an indication as any that Massie knew he was in trouble. They also weren’t enough to save him. As the end neared, his jocular lack of concern about his chances began to give way to equanimity at the prospect of defeat. Last night, after the race was called early, Massie appeared for his concession speech before the sun had set in Kentucky. “I would have come out sooner,” he said, before taking a dig at his opponent’s support from pro-Israel donors, “but it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv.” He seemed to harbor some bitterness but few regrets, even as he joined the growing number of Republicans who have taken on Trump and lost.

The Most Interesting Part of Trump’s Prayer Rally

2026-05-18T16:00:36-04:00

By 10 a.m. yesterday, the line of people wishing to dedicate America to God was more than three hours long. They came ready with prayer flags to wave the Holy Spirit into action, and shofars to scatter demonic forces. They wore T-shirts declaring the sort of Christians they were. A muscular man wore one that read Prayer Warrior. A woman in cargo shorts announced that she was an Intercessor for America. An elderly woman wore one that read I Am the Weapon.

“You understand you’re not going to be able to get in with that,” a security guard told a man wheeling a huge cross toward the entrance to the National Mall, as thousands of people began spreading out across a swath of grass that many of them now considered a kind of occupied territory in a cosmic spiritual war.

“We are here to bring the Earth into alignment with God,” a man named Joel Balin, who had come with a friend from Atlanta, told me. “To bring the kingdom of heaven to Earth.”

The rally, called Rededicate 250, was billed as a “jubilee of prayer, praise and Thanksgiving” for “God’s presence” in American history. It was part of a series of events celebrating the nation’s anniversary put together by a Donald Trump–aligned nonprofit called Freedom 250, which is being funded by a public-private partnership that includes corporate donors such as Exxon Mobil, Lockheed Martin, and Palantir and for which Congress has allocated $150 million. Critics of the event denounced the reliance on government funds, the participation of administration officials, and the near-total lack of religious diversity as an attempt to make a certain version of Christianity a national religion. A minor protest went on outside the barricades—a small group of people holding signs supporting LGBTQ people, immigrants, and all of the other Americans they believed to be under threat from the Trump administration. They blasted metal music, and a woman with pink hair screamed into a bullhorn.

The people in line paid them little mind. The event was a long-sought triumph for those who came and for millions more grassroots believers who helped elect Trump twice, embracing prophecies that God anointed him for the great spiritual battle against demonic forces that they understand to be animating current events. This idea was the work of the apostles and prophets of the New Apostolic Reformation, a charismatic movement that began gathering momentum in the 1990s and is now the leading edge of the Christian right. Sunday was a clear display of the influence of the movement, whose leaders were instrumental in mobilizing voters to turn out in recent elections and to take part in the January 6 insurrection, when many people believed that they were taking the U.S. Capitol for God’s kingdom.

[Peter Wehner: The evangelicals who see Trump’s viciousness as virtue]

Speakers yesterday included Paula White-Cain, an apostle who now leads the White House Faith Office; Lou Engle, an apostle and prophet who is known for organizing the kind of mass-prayer gatherings that characterize the movement; and Guillermo Maldonado, an apostle who leads one of the largest Latino churches in the country, El Rey Jesús, in Florida. Administration officials including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose own theologies do not exactly align with the movement, told stories about God deploying miracles at key moments in the nation’s history, leveraging these anecdotes to argue that the United States was founded to be a Christian nation. Historians say this is a clear misunderstanding of the American Revolution. Trump, just back from China, appeared in a prerecorded video in which he reads from the Old Testament, which seemed to be the same video that he had recorded for a marathon reading of the Bible last month. More revealing than any of these speakers, though, were the thousands of people willing to stand in line for three hours and then roast for seven more in the hot sun.

Balin, who leads a men’s ministry called Wednesday Warriors, told me that by enabling the event, Trump was “opening up a door for us to do spiritual warfare,” and that the very presence of so many believers gathered in the nation’s capital was scattering demonic forces and advancing the kingdom. He said that church-state separation is a “myth” and that, really, any separation from God is a foolish denial of the cosmic reality of the spiritual battle under way. He said that people he knows are tired of “materialism” and “dualism” and “an Enlightenment mindset” that fails to account for how supernatural forces affect earthly life. “There are so many things happening in the supernatural realm, and in the ancient world and other cultures, they recognized this—there was no separation,” he said. “I think we are rediscovering that as Americans.”

It was past 11 a.m., and people were spreading out blankets on the green grass, taking selfies, and livestreaming to congregations back home. “This is Pastor John!” a man in a blue suit said into his cellphone. The crowd was mostly white, but many people I spoke with emphasized that their movement is international and multiethnic, even as some expressed skepticism about accepting Muslim and other non-Christian immigrants into the country. MAGA hats abounded.

[Tim Alberta: My father, my faith, and Donald Trump]

On the stage, the first of many praise bands blasted the surging worship music common in charismatic churches these days. People mouthed the words. A screen displayed what appeared to be two church windows, which sometimes were filled with images of stained glass, and sometimes with an American flag, and sometimes with swirling clouds and stars. In the crowd, several women danced free-form with prayer flags, and other people periodically blew a shofar, the hollowed-out ram’s horn used in traditional Jewish services and considered in charismatic circles to be a tool of spiritual warfare. Two women from the central coast of California looked around.

“This is what we’ve been praying for, for our country to turn back to God,” Debbie Cloud, a retiree, told me as she began to cry.

She and her friend Susan Fraze said that they are working on the long-shot campaign of an influential apostle named Ché Ahn, who is running for governor of California as a write-in candidate. Cloud said that she attends a nondenominational church called Calvary Chapel. Fraze goes to a nondenominational church called the Bridge. Almost everyone I spoke with had some story about how they used to be Baptist, or Pentecostal, or Methodist but had found their way to churches with names such as Oasis and Free Chapel and Anchor and Abundant Harvest, the kind of nondenominational congregations that are growing as most denominations continue to decline. At least 15 percent of all American adults now identify as nondenominational, and most of them are embracing charismatic ideas about signs and wonders and spiritual warfare. Many people told me about their involvement with prayer groups, prayer rooms, prayer closets, and so-called prayer furnaces, spaces dedicated to intense, dayslong prayer sessions that people believe can shape the spiritual destiny of the country.

Under the shade of a tree, a man named Adriel Lam told me that he’d flown in from Hawaii, where he works for Capitol Ministries, an organization that seeks to bring prayer into state capitols. Lam is also running for Congress. He said that yesterday’s gathering was more evidence that an outpouring of the Holy Spirit is under way across America, a moment that he described as “post-postmodernism.”

“Modernism told us, Let’s know our chemistry. Let’s know our physics. Science can explain the world,” he said. “Then postmodernism said, Let’s question the foundations of everything. Post-postmodernism is people saying, Let’s go back to zero. Let’s go back to the first century, when Jesus united the physical and the spiritual. God is moving our generation for renewal.”

On a blue towel in the grass, David Hitt, an accountant from Atlanta, huddled and kneeled with several friends. He told me afterward that they were submitting themselves to Jesus and aligning their spiritual posture with God.

“We underestimate what’s going on in the invisible realm,” he said. “Our assembly, our worship, our prayer is creating openings for God to do his will.” He elaborated that he meant actual openings, portals where the Holy Spirit could enter into battle against actual demonic forces. He estimated that the prayer of just one person could put 1,000 demons in flight, and the prayer of two people could eject 10,000.

[Stephanie McCrummen: The army of God comes out of the shadows]

“So here we’ve got how many people focused on God?” he said, envisioning legions of demons fleeing the capital.

“Praise Jesus,” someone said. A man walked by in a T-shirt that read Jesus is King, Repent or Die. Another wore one that read Blessed are those persecuted for righteousness.

Outside the metal barricades, the capital was quiet. People jogged and went to the Smithsonian, and beyond a block or so, you couldn’t hear the music or the loud cheers when House Speaker Mike Johnson said, “We hereby rededicate the United States of America as one nation under God.” Inside, though, the message was clear.

“We are the kingdom,” a woman named Robin Noll, who’d come to Washington, D.C., on a bus with 29 others from western Pennsylvania, told me. “God is driving us into the battlefield.”

The Great Gen Z Dividing Line

2026-05-18T10:40:23-04:00

A little less than two years ago, Gen Z underwent a rebrand. Donald Trump had just been reelected. Exit polls suggested that young voters—especially young men—had helped deliver the Republican victory. Rather suddenly, a generation associated with climate activism and trigger warnings became known for manosphere podcasts, fiscal conservatism, and gender relations so icy that they’ve contributed to the national panic about fertility rates.

But a lot has changed since 2024. Trump has begun a (thus far ineffectual) war with Iran, something he said wouldn’t happen. His administration’s handling of the Epstein files, where his name appears abundantly, has been criticized by Democrats and Republicans alike. He vowed to lower gas and grocery prices; instead, they keep rising. His approval ratings have hit record lows, and he’s losing favor among crucial voting blocs such as independents and Latinos. Journalists and political commentators keep speculating and debating: Will the young men who moved rightward crawl back in the other direction?

[Read: The not-so-woke Generation Z]

That may depend, it turns out, on whether you’re talking about young men—or even younger men. The spring 2026 Yale Youth Poll, released last month, found that a majority of respondents—and roughly 70 percent of the young adults—disapproved of Trump. Even with men under 30, the president lost ground compared with Yale’s fall 2025 poll. But the data also revealed a dividing line: Among 23-to-29-year-old men, support for Democrats increased by 14 percentage points. Among 18-to-22-year-old men, it fell by a percentage point—even while their approval of Trump declined somewhat. The women in that youngest age group, meanwhile, make up the single most liberal population: further left than the slightly older Gen Z women.

Of course, you can splice and dice any cohort differently and come up with what’s called a “microgeneration.” But this poll echoed something I’ve heard in my reporting before: Gen Z, which encompasses people born from 1997 to 2012, splinters into an older and a younger group that tend to behave quite differently. Rachel Janfaza, who researches and writes about this age group, has referred to them as Gen Z 1.0 and 2.0. The generational researcher Meghan Grace described them to me as “Big Zs” and “Little Zs.” Whatever you call them, the split seems like a meaningful one. You might think of Little Zs as the angstier siblings to their Big Z counterparts: more divided, less trusting, and even readier to shatter the status quo.

When you’re young, everything around you might shape your still-nascent beliefs: your family, your neighborhood, but also the state of the world in that chapter in time, Patrick Egan, a public-policy professor at NYU, told me. Your politics, in adolescence and early adulthood, are in the process of “crystalizing.” Just look at Gen Xers, he said, who came of age when Ronald Reagan was enjoying a popular presidency in the mid-to-late 1980s; perhaps partly for that reason, the group leans Republican compared with other generations.

Little Zs and Big Zs grew up nearly at the same time—but in different worlds. Big Zs might’ve texted their friends on flip phones; Little Zs grew up with smartphones, herded toward content by TikTok algorithms. Big Zs might have looked up assigned reading on SparkNotes, but Little Zs could use AI to write a high-school paper. Perhaps most important, Big Zs were already in college, or had even graduated, by the time COVID hit. That doesn’t mean the pandemic wasn’t difficult for many of them. But they’d done some real maturing—and gained some real self-understanding—before that blow. Little Zs were in middle or high school in 2020. They were at home when they should’ve been making new friends, breaking rules and getting grounded, falling in goofy early love.

The Little Zs who resented attending Zoom class and missing prom might have appreciated that many Republicans were criticizing school shutdowns, scorning mask mandates, and talking about personal freedom. More broadly, their anger with decision makers might have fed the anti-establishment impulse that researchers have noticed especially among younger Zoomers, who are “a lot less tethered,” Egan said, “to the traditional ways that people even a little bit older than them have been thinking about politics for a long time.” Many of them, he told me, like that Trump positions himself as a norm-flouting outsider to politics—despite the fact that he’s a second-term president.

[Read: 20-somethings are in trouble]

Clearly the MAGA mentality has spoken to the men of Little Z in particular. Perhaps that’s because many Republicans put a particular brand of masculinity on a pedestal at a time when these men were still developing a sense of self. They might have heard GOP leaders on “bro podcasts,” Grace said, or seen them partner with the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and understood those efforts as an invitation: “Yes, your voice does matter. And we want it to be on our side.” Now these men have graduated from high school. They’re thinking about how they’ll make a living. They’re seeing that job growth is happening largely in traditionally female-dominated fields—health care, retail, social services—rather than in, say, manufacturing, Egan told me. And they’re still hearing Trump claim he’ll fix the economy.

Republicans might have spoken to Little Z women, too—to their money anxiety, their COVID trauma, their frustration with the status quo. But in other ways they’ve been turning those young women away. The 2021 Dobbs decision that struck down abortion protections may have been a particular blow for the women who are now in their early 20s. Grace and her colleague Corey Seemiller have been studying Zoomers’ political ideology for years, and in 2021, they identified that Little Z men were starting to shift rightward compared with Big Z men. But they didn’t see much of a shift at all among women. Then Dobbs happened, and young women lurched left. They were perhaps old enough to be having sex but young enough to be especially terrified of pregnancy, and of the thought that men would be telling them what to do about it.

Much has been written about the gender gap in Gen Z politics. But that split seems to be especially dramatic among Little Zs. Judging, in part, by the Yale poll results, “it may be more pronounced than anyone’s really anticipated,” Egan said. That divergence could have profound implications for not only future elections but also how Little Zs continue to relate to one another. Grace and Seemiller surveyed young women and found that, of the respondents who didn’t plan to marry, a third said that was because they fear losing their independence. A lot of them, she said, feel like the men around them have already voted to take away their freedom.

[Read: Young men aren’t the only ones struggling]

But the beliefs of Little Z, as much as they might be crystallizing, are not set in stone. Little Zs are different from Big Zs because they’ve been through different formative experiences—but also simply because they’re younger. And many kinds of political figures, regardless of party, could still respond to their sense of disempowerment, their skepticism of elites, their hunger for authenticity. Egan has heard young voters talk glowingly not just of Trump but of Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “There’s just tremendous choice,” Egan told me—far more than when he, a member of Gen X, was younger. In his day, a 20-year-old didn’t have nearly as many disparate voices—on TikTok, CNN, or Fox News, or in the halls of Congress—acknowledging their particular struggles. Now, he said, one “can find messages that really speak to that sense of precarity, that sense of upheaval.”

If Trump keeps breaking his campaign promises, even Little Z men might turn toward other leaders. The midterms are around the corner. Young people don’t tend to show up in great numbers, historically, but Grace reminded me that in 2018 and 2022, Zoomers had notably high midterm-election turnout for their age group. They’re not like other generations; they’re not even like one another. Someday, Little Zs won’t be so little anymore—and their elders might be surprised by who they grow into.

A Different Kind of Fading President

2026-05-18T05:00:00-04:00

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When Donald Trump took the oath of office last January, he was the oldest president to begin a term, clocking in at 78 years and 220 days. He replaced the man who formerly held that title, Joe Biden, who had dropped out of the race after it became quite obvious to the entire country that he had aged too much, too quickly. But as Trump himself grows older—traveling less, switching to more comfortable shoes, and seeming to nod off during meetings—his age isn’t getting the same kind of scrutiny.

I have long thought that a reason for that is the president’s sheer size. Trump stands 6 foot 3 and, according to his most recent physical, weighs 224 pounds (yes, questioning that number is a legitimate thing to do). He is a big presence in any room, as opposed to Biden, who grew visibly thinner as he got older, adding to the appearance of frailty. Trump is also LOUD; Biden’s voice was frequently reduced to a gentle whisper. And Trump has the gift of omnipresence. His genius is in capturing attention. Biden’s public schedule grew sparse, and he actively avoided generating news; Trump holds multiple events in front of the press nearly every day. He fills Americans’ TV screens and social-media feeds seemingly nonstop, with an almost-unspoken message: How could he be fading if he’s everywhere?

But as Trump turns 80 next month, his recent behavior should prompt even more questions than usual about his stability, judgment, and mental sharpness. Among the points of concern: a late-night social-media storm a few days ago featuring more than 50 messages, many strewn with dangerous or nonsensical misinformation, which followed a similar Truth Social broadside weeks earlier; an apocalyptic threat to wipe out a civilization; more and more insults (“nasty,” “stupid,” “ugly,” “treasonous”) hurled at reporters; appearing to fall asleep in public, sometimes twice in one week; deep bruises on his hands, which are covered in makeup and accompanied by confusing explanations; and long, odd tangents in speeches that seem longer and odder than his usual tangents. Never known for his ability to self-censor, Trump seems to have completely abandoned any sort of filter, tossing out messages from one extreme (He’s glad that Robert Mueller is dead!) to the other (actually, Trump is Jesus and shall heal the sick).

Biden’s team relentlessly pushed back against worried murmurings about his age and ability to handle the responsibilities of the presidency, and, for a while, the storyline was mostly relegated to the background. Democrats who had concerns bit their tongue. The president had enough good days to allow his aides to try to dismiss the narrative as a right-wing talking point, while encouraging allies—and some in the media—to look the other way. But then Biden’s deficiencies burst into the open with his faltering, confused performance in a general-election debate that was followed by a wave of recriminations and finger-pointing that continues among Democrats and journalists to this day.

Trump’s White House, as you’d expect, has also vehemently brushed away concerns about having another octogenarian in the White House. Those close to him say that, yes, Trump moves a little slower these days, but that he’s still a commanding, charismatic force. That’s just it: Whereas Biden noticeably changed, Trump appears in many ways to be the same. He’s always been erratic; he’s always been bombastic. But as Trump has aged, he’s becoming a purer, less filtered version of himself. Because the changes are less obvious, they’ve drawn less attention. For now, at least.

The differences between first-term Trump and second-term Trump are numerous. One of the biggest: He has dramatically scaled back his travel. Though he has taken several foreign trips, including one last week to China, his domestic travel schedule is nowhere near as busy as it was in his first term, and months of White House promises that it would ramp up have gone unfulfilled. Trump has long prized what his staff deems “executive time”—unstructured hours in the morning usually filled by watching cable TV and using his phone—and he rarely has a public event before late morning.

Once in public, Trump’s remarks continue to feature many of his longtime hallmarks—disdain for scripts, a disregard for time, mixing up names and facts, and an impulse to say whatever pops into his head. But these days the displays of disinhibition are more pronounced, and many include seemingly aimless stories and distracted observations. (Take, as just one example, a White House Christmas reception five months ago when Trump spent nearly 10 minutes telling a story that involved a White House doctor—actually two White House doctors—and Barack Obama’s daughters and a poisonous snake in Peru. He interrupted himself to mention his own brush with death and to claim that his health is better than that of Obama or George W. Bush. “Trump is in the best health of all,” he said.)

A White House spokesperson ignored my long list of questions about Trump’s behavior and changes to his schedule and quickly sent me a personalized statement. “Here’s where you’re wrong, Jonathan,” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung told me. “President Trump has done more public events and has engaged with the press more than any other president in history.”

Republican lawmakers have, for years, given Trump notoriously wide latitude for his behavior. (“I haven’t seen the tweet” became an entire meme of deflection.) But some have quietly begun to wonder about the president’s judgment, particularly when it comes to political priorities. Gone is the promised attention to the economy and lowering prices. Instead, Trump’s focus is often on grandiose ways to burnish his own legacy, including trying to seize foreign lands and build over-the-top monuments to himself (“No one wants an arch when people can’t afford to buy gas,” one Republican lawmaker told me about Trump’s plans for a 250-foot monument, inevitably dubbed the Arc de Trump, between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery). When the president departed Beijing on Friday, one of his first China-related social-media posts from Air Force One was not about any deal struck in the summit but rather on the host nation’s grand ballroom and how the U.S. should have one too.

[Read: The YOLO presidency]

Trump has also switched to more comfortable shoes, tossing aside the dressier pairs he used to wear for $145 Florsheims, and then giving them to aides, an act of generosity that—call me cynical here—also makes his own pair stand out less. Then there are his hands: Throughout this term, Trump has sported a deep bruise on his right hand, which at times is covered up (poorly) with makeup. When asked about it, he has said he takes a lot of aspirin to have “thin blood,” perhaps to ward off clots, strokes, or heart attacks. White House aides have said that leads to bruising after handshakes. But in recent weeks, the bruising has also been spotted on his left, non-shaking hand.

Trump now notably delivers far more of his remarks while seated. In his first term, he typically spoke behind a podium either in the Oval Office or elsewhere in the White House. Now the standard configuration is Trump sitting behind the Resolute Desk, while officials and aides fan out behind him. And sometimes, while sitting in that chair, Trump’s eyes … begin … to … close. In what has become fodder for late-night comics and liberals on social media, Trump has had his eyes shut for a suspiciously long time, as if he might be sleeping, at a number of events lately. Trump aides have strenuously denied this, suggesting that the president is simply listening intently. Last Monday, when a reporter observed on X that Trump’s eyes were closed during an Oval Office event on maternal health care, the official White House Rapid Response account retorted, “He was blinking, you absolute moron.” If true, this blink lasted for at least 10 seconds.

Maybe Trump is tired because he’s up late. He has long boasted about how little sleep he needs, and reporters covering his two terms have grown accustomed to news made by social media both early in the morning and late at night. But even the wild Twitter sprees of his first term have been eclipsed by some of the Truth Social barrages of late. Aides long ago stopped trying to curb Trump’s social-media habits, even if they sometimes create political problems. The posts are normally created (or found to repost) by longtime aide Dan Scavino, other times by Trump’s executive assistant, Natalie Harp. They will bring printouts of the posts to Trump, who signs off on every one. But sometimes he just posts on his own. The White House wouldn’t tell me whether that is the case during these late-night spewfests.

Trump’s audience on Truth Social (which he owns) is far smaller than the one he had on Twitter—12.6 million versus 111.4 million—and that, at times, has seemed to limit awareness of his posting. (Trump was kicked off of Twitter after the January 6, 2021, Capitol riots; he was reinstated after Elon Musk bought the site two years later, but the president now prefers his own platform.) One night in December, he posted nearly 160 times, the most in one go during his second term. In February, he posted a racist video that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys. Early last month, he threatened Iran by saying “a whole civilization will die tonight.” A few days later, he decreed Pope Leo “WEAK on Crime.” And then overnight into the early morning hours of April 13, Trump amplified dozens of posts, including one that depicted him as Jesus. In just a few days, Trump had offended adherents of multiple religions and drew criticism from even some of his most loyal supporters. He eventually deleted the post that depicted him as the son of God, but only after absurdly claiming that he thought it showed him as a doctor, not Jesus. Last Monday night, his account posted 55 messages between 10:14 p.m. and 1:12 a.m., including a mix of his own thoughts and a slew of reposts of multiple messages that falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen and called for Obama’s arrest.

[Read: Trump voters are over it]

The strain on the president is obvious: The nation he leads is at war; the economy he promised to revive is teetering; and his approval ratings are falling. His behavior has renewed Democrats’ calls to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to remove the president from power for not being able to serve. (That would require the Cabinet to act and is a nonstarter.) Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has called Trump “an extremely sick person,” and his counterpart in the House, Hakeem Jefferies, deemed the president “unhinged” and “out of control.”

But it’s not just Democrats. Some former Trump allies have also questioned his psychological fitness, and a poll released last week found that 59 percent of Americans believe that Trump does not have the mental sharpness it takes to lead the country. But Republicans in Congress have defended Trump, and the White House, which always touts the president’s stamina, has mocked any suggestion that he was not up for the job.

That defensiveness reminds me of just how aggressively Biden’s aides would push back at journalists who dared to ask questions about his age. It’s worth revisiting how Biden’s declining health was shielded by those around him.

Biden’s age had been front and center during his 2020 campaign, and even some of his Democratic primary opponents wondered whether he was “declining” or “forgetting” things. He never formally vowed to serve only one term, but it was the expectation among many Democrats, and some in Biden’s inner circle, that he would act as a transitional figure, one who would vanquish Trump and steer the nation out of the coronavirus pandemic before stepping aside. He took the oath of office at age 78, the oldest man ever to serve as president. (He was 78 days older at the start of his term than Ronald Reagan was when he ended his.) But Biden enjoyed remarkable legislative success in his first two years, and then Democrats fared surprisingly well in the 2022 midterms.

With hindsight, many Democrats believe that had Biden announced then that he would step down after four years, he would have been remembered as one of the more accomplished recent presidents. Of course, he did not. Trump’s comeback on the Republican side fueled the belief among those close to Biden that he had to stay in the fight; he had beaten Trump once, and only he could do it again. But Biden’s decline, which was already the source of Washington whispers, seemed to accelerate in full public view. White House aides furiously fought any suggestion that Biden, then 81, was too old to run again, too old to serve another four years (he’d have been 86 when he left office in January 2029), and pushed back against any Democrats who suggested that their party needed a new, younger standard-bearer. They chided reporters who wrote about it.

[Read: How Biden destroyed his legacy ]

Stories came anyway. Then came the disastrous debate in Atlanta, and the three-plus weeks of calls for Biden to drop out of the race, a rancorous fight that nearly tore the Democratic Party apart. Trump, in private, boasted to aides that his “Sleepy Joe” nickname for Biden was spot-on, even as his own advanced age received less attention. “It was fair to ask about Trump’s health in 2024, but Democrats were afraid to do it because it would boomerang on Biden,” Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, told me. Veterans of Biden’s White House have expressed regret that their West Wing did not fully understand the groundswell of reservations about the president’s age, and some believe it grew too insular and overly protective of the president. Andrew Bates, who was the senior deputy press secretary for Biden, told me that their “outdated approach to media undercut Joe Biden’s superpower—his connection with working people.”

In Bates’s view, Trump has a different problem, one that exposes the president for who he really is. “The most obvious impact of age on him is that he has lost the capacity to pretend he cares about other people,” Bates said.

The White House announced this week that Trump will undergo a medical and dental checkup on May 26, which will be his fourth publicly disclosed doctor’s visit in his second term. (He has also had two dental visits in Florida.) Last year he had an annual physical in April 2025, and then what the White House described as a “routine yearly checkup” in October. Across his terms, Trump has bragged repeatedly about acing multiple cognitive tests, a boast that only raises more questions.

Many presidents have faced inquiries about their physical and mental health. Reagan seemed to slip late in his presidency in the years before he announced that he had Alzheimer’s. Franklin D. Roosevelt was in poor health before dying just a few months into his fourth term. Woodrow Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke. Abraham Lincoln battled depression. Dwight Eisenhower had a major heart attack. And some of Richard Nixon’s own aides privately worried about his drinking and his mental stability.

Nixon often utilized the “madman theory,” in which he would act unstable to intimidate foes and achieve better results. Trump’s aides say he does the same, including in his genocidal threats toward Iran; they are comfortable with that comparison to Nixon. But they may soon face more similarities with Biden.

Stephen Miller’s New Recusals

2026-05-15T18:15:00-04:00

When Paramount CEO David Ellison wanted to throw a Washington dinner party last month “honoring the Trump White House,” he got a helping hand from Katie Miller, the MAGA podcaster and onetime White House strategist. She sent follow-up invites to top Trump aides to encourage attendance for the “intimate gathering” at the U.S. Institute of Peace ahead of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 25.

The party turned a traditional celebration of the CBS News White House team into a high-profile corporate flex. Ellison, who is seeking federal approval for his company’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, ended up sitting at the same table as President Trump and in the same room as Miller’s husband, the Trump adviser Stephen Miller, and other senior administration officials, including acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, whose department is currently reviewing the deal.

Katie Miller’s involvement was not entirely unexpected. For months before, she had been talking informally with Paramount brass about selling her media property, The Katie Miller Podcast, to the news-media giant as it expands its offerings, according to two people familiar with the plans who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss the nonpublic information. Those talks, which were first reported by Axios, have yet to result in a finalized sale, the people familiar with the matter said.

But the conversations were serious enough that months earlier, Stephen Miller—who has a near-boundless role overseeing policy as deputy chief of staff—told the White House that he would recuse himself from all issues around Paramount’s efforts to win control of Warner, which he had not previously worked on, the White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told us.

Stephen also recused himself last year from matters involving artificial intelligence because Katie, a longtime adviser to Elon Musk, had maintained a part-time consulting contract with xAI, the owner of the Grok chatbot and the social-media company X. When SpaceX purchased xAI in February, Miller also recused himself from space issues, Jackson added.

“Katie Miller is an accomplished professional in her own right with over a decade of senior government and media experience—Stephen is incredibly proud of what his wife has achieved through her own hard work,” Jackson told us in a statement. “He fully complies with all ethics recommendations and rules and regularly consults with White House ethics officials to address any potential conflicts of interest.”

Stephen Miller has not recused himself from matters related to sponsors of Katie’s podcast, however, because the White House counsel has concluded that sponsorships differ from consulting arrangements. A White House official told us, when we inquired about this, that Stephen nonetheless makes a point not to interact with the sponsors of his wife’s podcast, including companies and trade groups that have been actively seeking favor from Trump and his team.

[Read: Stephen Miller in retreat]

Several people familiar with the operation, who spoke with us on the condition of anonymity, criticized Katie Miller, saying that her pitch to guests—who have included Cabinet secretaries and corporate leaders with interests before the White House—is inextricably tied to her marriage to Stephen, one of Trump’s most senior advisers. Some also charged that advertisers are coming to the show for similar reasons. People familiar with her pitch told us they felt like Miller was explicitly selling access.

Allies of Katie Miller contest this characterization. No evidence has surfaced that either of the Millers has done anything to help a podcast sponsor outside of the show. Another person involved in some partnerships told us that the podcast sponsorships reflected standard industry practices and terms, and did not include any services out of the norm.

Katie Miller, who launched the lucrative podcast in August after leaving work at the White House, has built her audience around unusually intimate conversations with top Trump administrations officials and their spouses, whom she knows socially and professionally. The podcast sponsors include the Southern Company, a major utility; the American Beverage Association, which represents the makers of sugary soda; Polymarket, an online prediction market; and the Merchants Payments Coalition, a group pushing for legislation to reduce credit-card swipe fees.

A purchase by Paramount would be a major win for Miller. She has made no secret of her affection for the company or her dislike of one of its major rivals, Netflix. When Netflix appeared to have an upper hand in acquiring Warner this spring, Miller took to X to accuse the Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings of overseeing “the push of sexualized & trans content to minors” on the streaming service; she also attacked the Netflix board member Susan Rice, a former adviser to President Biden, charging that the left is “hellbent on destroying our country and corrupting our kids.” (Paramount’s corporate team did not pay or ask for her social-media posts, a company insider told us.)

An acquisition would also bring Paramount’s growing network of news properties even closer to the inner sanctum of the Trump administration. Last year, Ellison appointed new leadership at CBS News that has revamped programming in ways that some insiders view as more sympathetic to Trump and his movement. CBS employees told The New York Times in April that they were taken aback by the existence of the “intimate gathering” honoring the Trump administration, which used the CBS logo on its invitation.

Ellison has met repeatedly with Trump, as has his father, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who is a major Republican donor and a financial backer of the media company. In July, Paramount agreed to pay $16 million, largely to the president’s future library, to settle a civil lawsuit by Trump over a 2024 60 Minutes segment that had been edited in a way he believed to be unfair. The settlement was widely seen as an effort to secure approval from the Trump administration for Paramount’s 2025 merger with Ellison’s company, Skydance.

The Ellisons’ vision for media has become a shorthand for the kind of coverage that the people inside Trump’s inner circle believe they deserve—and some have voiced their support for Ellison directly controlling CNN if regulators approve the pending merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said earlier this year at a Pentagon briefing in which he criticized CNN’s coverage.

[Listen: Rupert Murdoch gets his Succession finale ]

Katie Miller, a veteran of the first Trump administration who once worked for Vice President Pence, began working again for Trump after the 2024 election, when she helped sherpa Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. through the Senate confirmation process. In the first months of Trump’s second term, she worked as a special government employee, primarily as an adviser to Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency. She stopped working for Musk full-time in August but maintained a part-time consulting relationship with his company.

Miller launched her podcast by nabbing an interview with Vice President Vance, then had extended conversations with then–Attorney General Pam Bondi, then–Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and Kennedy. She has also persuaded leaders such as FBI Director Kash Patel, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Hegseth to make appearances with their partners. New York Stock Exchange President Lynn Martin, UFC boss Dana White, the Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby have made appearances, as have celebrities such as the former NBA player Tristan Thompson and the actor Jenny McCarthy.

A New Kind of Family-Separation Crisis

2026-05-15T07:00:00-04:00

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Early one morning behind the airport in La Lima, Honduras, before the first planeload of deportees landed, Sister Idalina Bordignon was meeting with her staff about an unsettling situation. Every day, parents were arriving without their children, and they were asking questions like What do I do if I don’t know where my child is? and Do I lose my rights as a parent if I’m deported? An American aid worker suggested a quick analysis of each case to determine which agencies or nonprofits might help the families. We’ll never have time for all this, Idalina thought. The Trump administration was sending too many people to Honduras too quickly, and soon the reception center that she oversees would be packed with more than 100 people who were exhausted, hungry, and in shock. They would need to be processed into the country as quickly as possible to make room for the next planeload.

Shackled to a seat on one of those planes was a 39-year-old single mother named Claudia. After she emerged from the reception center in a detainee sweatsuit, looking teary and depleted, she told me her story in the parking lot. She’d fled Honduras in 2023 because her ex-partner’s girlfriend was stalking her and had physically attacked her, and she’d settled in Atlanta with her 11-year-old son. In December she was arrested for driving without a license and spent three and a half months in ICE detention, where she pleaded to be reunited with her son, but was ignored. “I really wanted to bring him with me,” Claudia said. “Being with him is my top priority.” A cousin said he would start saving money to get her son a passport and bring him to Honduras, but it was unclear when that would happen.

Sofia Valiente for The Atlantic

Outside the deportee reception center in La Lima

Since retaking office, Donald Trump has sent hundreds of thousands of immigrants like Claudia into the deportation pipeline, where many are transferred from facility to facility—losing access to their families, lawyers, and journalists—before being sent abroad. ICE was holding 60,000 people in custody as of early April; 71 percent have no criminal convictions. The agency is detaining people who are in the middle of applying for legal status, and the Justice Department has directed hard-line immigration judges to deny bail and ICE attorneys to pursue deportations as vigorously as possible. “The only process invaders are due is deportation,” Stephen Miller, Trump’s chief immigration adviser, said in November.

I went to Honduras in late March to see the consequences of this mass expulsion. For more than 20 years, deportation flights arrived in La Lima five days a week; now they arrive every day, often more than once. Over the three days I was there, five planes delivered 479 people in shackles to a private airstrip. They were loaded into an old school bus and driven to the reception center, at the end of a dirt road.

The scene every day is chaotic. New arrivals are handed a cup of coffee, a burrito, and a bag with their personal belongings, then rushed through a series of cubicles where the Honduran government records their return. Volunteer doctors examine those who are visibly ill, injured, or pregnant. In between flights, the staff tries to advise people on common crises: ICE has separated them from their children or spouse, or they have no home to return to in Honduras, or a gang or ex-partner wants them dead. Idalina takes calls from families who are trying to track down lost relatives, and searches for their names on flight manifests.

Eight years after Trump backed away from the most controversial project of his first presidency—separating children from their parents at the border—I saw a new kind of separation crisis playing out. This time, the administration is dividing more families by greater distances than before, by expelling parents without their children, en masse. ICE policy requires officers to ask detainees, in each interaction, if they are the parent of a minor child, and to reunite families before deportation, or obtain a sworn statement from parents who choose to leave their child with a designated guardian. But Congress hasn’t codified these rules into law. And the policy is sprinkled with caveats such as “when operationally feasible” and “ICE reserves its right to make case-by-case removal decisions.” DHS officials have told me that the White House’s guidance has been clear: Nothing should slow down deportations.

[Read: They never thought Trump would have them deported]

In response to questions about this story, an ICE spokesperson said that the agency doesn’t separate families, that parents are given the option of being deported with their children, and that officers are following policies in a way that is consistent with previous administrations.

Of the 40 people I interviewed outside the reception center in La Lima, 24 said they had to leave children behind in the United States. Most said they were never asked about being a parent. One single mother said that when she was detained, an officer wrote on her documents that she was childless, and told her it “doesn’t matter” that she was being separated from her 3-year-old.

Most of these children were now with their other parent; some were with other relatives or friends, and some were in U.S.-government custody. Fifteen of them were younger than 5 years old, and four were infants. Almost all of the parents had no idea when they would see their children again.

Sofia Valiente for The Atlantic

A short-term migrant shelter run by the Scalabrinians

A few days before I arrived in Honduras, a young man with a machete broke into the gated compound where Sister Idalina lives, a 10-minute ride from the airport, in a ramshackle neighborhood divided by a center road. A gang called Barrio 18 controls one half, MS-13 the other. The intruder tied a rope around Idalina’s wrists and ankles. As she resisted, he cut a slice down the side of one of her hands. He demanded American dollars but she didn’t have any, so he took her cellphone, shoes, clothing, a gas tank, and a blender.

The attack on a nun in a heavily Catholic country was a reminder that “no one is untouchable here,” Alessia Villamar Castro, who volunteers with Idalina as part of the Italian Scalabrinian order, told me. Their religious work is unpaid, so in La Lima they sustain themselves by working for the Honduran government at the reception center. Recently, they opened a short-term shelter in their compound for people who arrive with nowhere to go.

Sofia Valiente for The Atlantic

Deportees, family members, and law enforcement gather outside the reception center.

Deportees from the United States are especially vulnerable to robbery and kidnapping because gangs and bandits assume that their families can pay larger ransoms. The Scalabrinians told me that since last fall, at least three have been murdered within days of their arrival. Alessia said she scans each new group at the center for anyone who might be facing an active threat. They tend to hang back, as if scared to walk out the front door. It’s too risky to house those people at the shelter, so she refers them directly to the Honduran government for protection.

Outside the reception center, I met a woman named Nora waiting to pick up her son, Jarol. She told me that, years ago, another son was killed 18 days after being deported, for reasons the family still doesn’t understand. Then, in 2021, Jarol was attacked here by men who cut off half of one of his fingers and left him bleeding in the street, so he fled to the United States. “We were thinking that it was a safer country,” she said, explaining that Jarol had applied for asylum and was working in Miami when ICE arrested him. Now he was being sent back into danger. “This is a disaster,” Nora said. (I’m identifying people by only their first name to avoid putting them at greater risk, and I corroborated their immigration and biographical details using public records.)

A few of the new arrivals were greeted with hugs and kisses and welcome balloons that locals were selling down the road. But many hadn’t had advance notice that they were being deported. They sat down on a concrete bench and called relatives, looking for someone to take them in. A man with a bag of cash strapped to his chest was hawking lempiras in exchange for U.S. dollars, promising the deportees a better rate than they would get in the streets.

Some of the people I met had been away so long, they had nothing to return to in Honduras (nearly half of all unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. have been there 20 years or longer). A woman named Denia told me she’d lived in Texas for 26 years, since she was 18. She arrived in La Lima wearing the pink knit shirt and Crocs she’d worn to work as a gas-station cook in February, when she was arrested. Her mobile home was about to be repossessed because she hadn’t been able to work and couldn’t pay the mortgage. Denia said her teenage son, who was staying with her sister, wouldn’t take her calls. He had wanted her to hire a lawyer and continue appealing her case from detention in Laredo, but the facility was filthy and cold, she said, with a wretched smell and cruel staff. She tried to explain to her son that it was futile to keep fighting under the current administration. She thought she was going to lose eventually, no matter what, so she accepted a deportation order. (Asylum grant rates are plummeting because the Justice Department has fired scores of immigration judges it considered too lenient.) “They’re collapsing families,” Denia said. “I had everything there. I had a house. I’ve lost everything. Everything, everything, everything.”

Sofia Valiente for The Atlantic

Jhonny left his wife and 3-year-old daughter in Arizona.

A man named Jhonny, detained in Phoenix in February, started to hyperventilate as he told me about seeing his 3-year-old daughter on video calls. “She wants to give me a kiss and hug me, and I can’t,” he said. “It just kills me.” He was peeling off the skin around his fingernails, and he lifted his baseball cap to show me that his hair had been falling out in chunks, from stress. After he lost his asylum case, his wife, a lawful permanent resident, filed a petition for him to gain legal status through her. It was still pending when ICE showed up at a job site where he was installing fiber optics and arrested him, despite his valid work permit. “I told everyone, ‘I have a 3-year-old daughter. I’m married,’” he recalled. “They said, ‘We can’t do anything.’”

[From the April 2026 issue: ‘America doesn’t want my children or grandchildren’]

Again and again, I heard about legal immigration processes that were cut short, and arrests that deportees believed were based on racial profiling alone. Luis, a 20-year-old with a mop of curly hair, said an officer provided no justification for pulling him over in Jacksonville, Florida, while he was driving to McDonald’s. He was detained despite having a driver’s license, a work permit, and a court date scheduled for 2028. A bystander who was listening to us chimed in: “They are pulling over every work truck in the state of Florida.” Adelmo, a slim 53-year-old wearing a polo shirt, said he also had a work permit and a driver’s license, and a court date this spring. But a police officer had pulled him over in Corpus Christi, Texas, claiming that his license plate was scratched, even though Adelmo said the plate was clearly readable. In ICE custody, he met men who’d been fighting deportation for more than a year and had little hope of being released. When he walked out of the reception center in La Lima, he was carrying a meticulously organized folder of evidence to present to an immigration judge, but said he’d given up his asylum case in despair.

The reception-center staff transports most of the new arrivals to a bus terminal 30 minutes away, in San Pedro Sula; Honduras’s new Trump-aligned president eliminated a cash-assistance program for deportees, but the government still provides a one-way bus ticket to anywhere in the country. I found a man named Cristian pacing in the parking lot one afternoon, waiting for a ride to the terminal. He said he had already tried and failed to get back to his family in Wilmington, North Carolina. After first being deported late last year, he crashed with a childhood friend in Tegucigalpa for two months, but couldn’t stand that his wife, who doesn’t work, was overwhelmed with parenting their 6- and 7-year-old sons alone as their savings ran out. Cristian had lived in the United States more than a decade, and said his parents and siblings were there, too. Border Patrol agents caught him after he crossed illegally into southern Arizona. Now he was back where he started.

Massaging her pregnant belly on a bench outside the center, a woman named Ana told me that she made a similar choice to get back to her 14-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son in Atlanta, where she had been living without authorization for 13 years. After Ana was caught driving without a license and deported in September, her daughter stopped eating and floundered in school. When Ana reached Honduras, she discovered that she was pregnant, which she said gave her another reason to get back to Georgia. She was apprehended at the border and detained until being deported again, less than two months from her due date. Most of her relatives live in the United States, so she plans to stay with her in-laws in Honduras until giving birth, and then decide what to do next. “I’m trying to stay calm for the baby,” she said.

Both Cristian and Ana said it would be too dangerous to move their children to Honduras. Though the country’s homicide rate has halved since the 2010s, when it spurred an exodus to the United States, it remains one of the highest in the world. Gangs terrorize civilians and demand monthly “protection” payments. Refusing to pay can be a death sentence, and Hondurans rarely call the police, who are likely to protect the gangs, extort victims, or do nothing.

As a group prepared to head to the bus terminal, Jhonny, the father who worked in fiber optics, said he would rather wait for his brother to pick him up, even if it meant sitting in the parking lot for hours. Boarding a bus full of deportees felt like attaching himself to a moving target.

Sofia Valiente for The Atlantic

Ana was seven months pregnant when she was deported to Honduras.

Reunifying separated families may prove to be a logistical nightmare, as well as an emotional one. Parents will have to navigate a multinational maze of government agencies. Many of them will issue travel documents or approve custody decisions for a child only with the consent of all of their legal guardians, which is difficult to secure if one or both parents have been deported. And these children have varied nationalities; some are Honduran or U.S. citizens, while others were born on the family’s migration journey, which means the process could involve a third country’s government and procedures.

[From the September 2022 issue: ‘We need to take away children’]

“We know that, right now, solutions are super, super complicated,” Amy Escoto, the aid worker who was addressing the La Lima reception-center staff on my second morning here, told me. “Sometimes the only way to succeed is with persistence.” Amy works for Kids in Need of Defense, one of the numerous U.S. advocacy groups that are racing to respond to the fallout from Trump’s deportation campaign, with less funding and at greater risk of retaliation than in the president’s first term. KIND had created a guide to the bureaucratic maze, with QR codes and maps, but Sister Idalina raised her hand, looking concerned. She pointed out that the staff was already overextended, and a pamphlet wouldn’t make this process navigable for frantic parents. “Even if the mother has all of this, sometimes her anxiety and nervousness can make it difficult for her to access these resources,” Idalina said. “And I think it’s very important that someone is here to listen, reassure her, and follow up.”

“You’re absolutely right,” Amy replied. “Right now, we’re doing everything we can.”

Groups like KIND are stretched thin because they are essentially acting alone, without government support. When other countries have challenged Trump’s immigration-enforcement blitz, he has bullied them into submission. Since retaking office, he has deported people in annual numbers similar to Barack Obama’s and Joe Biden’s, but he’s eliminated safeguards intended to prevent the kind of pain and chaos on display in La Lima. Obama eventually blocked ICE from deporting most people who didn’t have serious criminal records, and allowed sole caregivers of minor children to remain in the country if they reported for ICE check-ins. Biden did, too. Under Trump, deportations are happening so quickly that ICE routinely delivers people to La Lima who are not pre-cleared by the Honduran government, so they have to be returned to the U.S. on the plane they arrived in.

ICE disputes that people are deported before their identities have been confirmed, and said that claims of poor detention conditions are false. An agency spokesperson told me that ICE encourages people without legal status to leave the U.S. voluntarily through its CBP Home app, or face arrest and deportation without a chance to return.

Coyotes used to linger outside the reception center, ready to ferry people back to the border. But now they don’t bother. Demand to return has fallen among deportees, even though their families in the U.S. are struggling. A man named Osman, wearing a construction shirt still splattered with paint, cried as he told me that his disabled wife, a U.S. citizen, had moved into a homeless shelter in Tucson, Arizona, because she couldn’t work or pay the rent. “She’s completely dependent on me,” he said. “I took her to the doctor every week.” Another man, whom I’ll call Edwin, said that to avoid losing their apartment, his wife had continued working, creating a child-care emergency for their 4- and 12-year-old children, who had never been left alone before.

Speaking gently and with a stutter, Edwin said the family had moved to a Dallas suburb in 2023, after gang members started threatening them. (I’m referring to him by a pseudonym because the threat is ongoing.) They applied for asylum, and Edwin and his wife secured work permits. He did construction during the day and watched their children at night, when she worked as a janitor. But at a routine ICE check-in on January 10, officers took him into a back room and told his wife and children to wait outside. He never emerged, and ended up in La Lima.

Edwin and I stayed in touch after I left Honduras. He told me he still wasn’t sure if he was safe back in their hometown; he had heard that one of the men who threatened him had died and another was in jail, but the gang is still active in the community. Before overnight shifts, his wife starts a video call with him after dinner, and leaves her phone with the children when she goes to work. Edwin talks to them all evening as they do their homework and get ready for bed. His daughter leaves the phone on when they go to sleep, so he can watch over them until their mother comes home.

Sofia Valiente for The Atlantic

A discarded form from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security

The Election Deniers Are Winning

2026-05-14T12:06:20-04:00

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Updated on May 15 at 5:41 p.m. ET

Clay Parikh, a cybersecurity expert from Alabama, spent years as a bit player in the world of election denial. He wasn’t a star with his own media platform, like the MyPillow guy. But he still gained a modest following by circulating conspiracy theories about President Trump’s 2020 defeat, including that poll workers gave Trump supporters—but not other voters—felt-tip markers to fill out their ballots, rendering them invalid and unreadable by voting machines. More recently, he’s asserted that a group of federal lawmakers is covering up foreign election interference. “They’re all puppets,” he said on the Rumble-streamed Real AF Patriot show in January. “They’re bought and paid for; it’s just by who.” He claimed that because of “undeniable” evidence of malfeasance, justice was coming.

On that last point, Parikh may actually be in a position to know. He is now pushing debunked election claims from within the systems he rails against as a special government employee in the Trump administration. The search -warrant affidavit that allowed the FBI to seize election materials in Georgia in January—an extraordinary intervention by federal law enforcement—cited an analysis by Parikh. Last fall, Parikh began a contract with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office that made him a player in the state’s process for certifying election equipment. He boasts of access to the Wyoming secretary of state, who, he said on Rumble, has invited him to participate in an online presentation with residents. And at 1:01 a.m. on Christmas Day, Trump made Parikh internet famous when he reposted a video of the 63-year-old testifying in court that election equipment could be infiltrated remotely.

Parikh is just one of many election deniers who were long relegated to the fringe and are now—with Trump back in office and still not over his electoral defeat six years ago—embedded inside the government. Another is the attorney Kurt Olsen, who was brought on last fall by Trump to investigate the 2020 election. Olsen’s work in the government—following years of pushing debunked or unsubstantiated theories—helped lead to the seizure of the Georgia ballots. In Arizona, federal probes of the 2020 election by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are under way. Olsen and other Trump administration officials have participated in extensive meetings about U.S. elections with senior members of the Justice Department in recent months, four people familiar with the meetings told us. In a statement, a DOJ spokesperson said, “The Justice Department is committed to upholding the integrity of our electoral system and will continue to prioritize efforts to ensure all elections remain free, fair, and transparent.”

[Read: Arizona is now at the center of election investigations]

The president signed an executive order on March 31 that attempts to change the rules on mail-in voting, and his allies in Congress are endeavoring to reshape elections ahead of the midterms this fall, spending weeks debating a voter-ID bill that is almost certainly doomed. In April the Justice Department demanded that officials in Wayne County, Michigan, turn over ballots from the 2024 election. “There are some of us election deniers that are supporting the federal government, and things are changing,” Parikh—one of the people who helped Olsen unsuccessfully challenge voting systems in Arizona years ago—said on the Rumble show. Though he said the team he was working with was smaller than he’d like, he said it was filled with “quality people” who care about “fixing” elections.

Shortly before the Georgia affidavit became public, Parikh told us he wouldn’t get into the details of his work for the federal government. In a phone call, he said he would like voting equipment in all 50 states investigated but told us sternly and loudly that he could “neither confirm nor deny” the details of his government work. Yet in an interview with Talking Points Memo after the Georgia affidavit was unsealed, Parikh warned of a “cabal” that is compromising elections and compared himself to Ron Swanson from the sitcom Parks and Recreation, a character who despises the very government he serves. “Working for the government but hating them every bit. Right?” he told the news outlet. “That guy’s my hero.”

So many people are pressing debunked and unsubstantiated election theories from within the government that their presence has become a feature of the system. They range from those with immense power—including the president—all the way down to local officials. Others are investigating them. In Riverside County, California, Sheriff Chad Bianco, a Republican who is running for governor, seized about 650,000 ballots and other election materials in March after local activists alleged malfeasance when California voters last year overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure to redraw the state’s congressional map in favor of Democrats.

[Read: ‘California is allowed to hit back’]

Bianco told us that activists with a citizen group known as the Riverside Election Integrity Team had complained to his office that the number of ballots counted by election officials exceeded the number of votes cast. “There’s obviously something wrong with the machines,” he recalled activists claiming, citing their own research, “because we didn’t have that many ballots.” County elections officials explained that the activists were relying on imprecise data. But Bianco was determined to find out for himself. “The intent of the investigation is to count the ballots and see how many there are,” he told us in a video interview.

When we asked what steps his investigators took to assess the validity of the activists’ claims, the sheriff grew exasperated: “There’s no steps to determine the validity,” he said. “The validity is the records.” He brushed aside criticism from Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta, who went to court to try to stop the probe. And Bianco dismissed alarm among election experts who said that his moves could deepen public mistrust in the democratic process. “An investigation increases their confidence,” the sheriff told us. Soon after, the California Supreme Court ordered the sheriff to pause his investigation and preserve the seized material while it reviews the case.

Undeterred, the Riverside Election Integrity Team is working with activists from at least half a dozen California counties to help them get records from county officials to review the outcome of last year’s redistricting referendum. Greg Langworthy, who calls himself the group’s “de facto leader,” told us his group intends to scrutinize similar records after the midterm elections—before results are certified, a process that can take weeks in California.

At the federal level, one main focus appears to be proving foreign interference—which election deniers have floated as a possible justification for Trump to declare a national emergency that could allow him to attempt to take control over some aspects of the election. But the proof has been elusive.

Staff from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in recent months have briefed representatives for U.S. attorneys’ offices about potential vulnerabilities in voting machines and communications networks. Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has accused U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence personnel of participating in a “years-long coup” against Trump that began with the 2016 election. In January, she was present at the raid in Fulton County, a highly unusual move for an intelligence official whose purview is foreign threats, not domestic law enforcement.

Gabbard’s team has found that voting machines in Puerto Rico contained security weaknesses that could make them susceptible to manipulation, but found no evidence that the machines were actually tampered with or that any votes were altered, according to people familiar with the findings. Two people briefed on the activities said local officials in Puerto Rico have heard nothing more from ODNI since last year. Jason Wareham, the CEO of Mojave Research, the company that conducted the security review, documented his technical conclusions in a signed declaration to Gabbard, which we reviewed. It states that Olsen (who did not respond to multiple requests for comment) made assertions about stolen votes that were not backed up by sufficient forensic evidence. Wareham told us he was informed by an ODNI official that, after Mojave’s review was complete, Olsen wrote a letter to Trump in which he claimed that the company was taking money from the billionaire George Soros and acting at his direction. Wareham “emphatically” denies the allegation, he told us.

An ODNI official told us that Olsen wasn’t involved in the office’s examination of Puerto Rico voting systems, and that information he provided “was done so voluntarily” and “reviewed in the context of all of the other information available to ODNI.” The official added that the decision to examine the systems in Puerto Rico was made internally and “not directly connected to Mr. Olsen’s broader efforts.”

[Read: MAGA thinks Maduro will prove Trump won in 2020 ]

The White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told us in a statement that “election integrity has always been a top priority for President Trump, and the American people sent him back to the White House because they overwhelmingly supported his commonsense election integrity agenda. His entire Administration is working together closely on these issues,” she said. “The President will do everything in his power to lawfully defend the safety and security of American elections and to ensure that only American citizens are voting in them.”

Puerto Rico Resident Commissioner Pablo José Hernández, who represents the island as a nonvoting member of Congress and caucuses with the Democrats, told us that in spite of the lack of evidence of infiltration, he worries that the Trump administration could “use Puerto Rico to build a conspiracy theory and a narrative to subvert elections in the broader United States.”

Many of the election deniers who now have power are familiar to anyone who was paying attention in the aftermath of the 2020 vote. Heather Honey, who as a Pennsylvania-based election activist sought to reverse Trump’s defeat and worked on numerous efforts to challenge elections in Arizona, now holds a key role at the Department of Homeland Security. There, she interacts with state election officials, many of whom don’t trust her, half a dozen of them told us. During a call with election officials last fall, Honey downplayed the impact of millions of dollars in funding cuts to cybersecurity initiatives (including one dedicated to elections) at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is tasked with securing the nation’s election systems, two officials told us. Honey told state and local officials that CISA had “strayed from its mission” and engaged in censorship, echoing claims by Trump supporters that CISA’s programs contributed to suppressing their views online. One of the officials, who works in cybersecurity, was stunned by her remark; his office’s previous work with CISA and federal law enforcement involved reporting death threats against elections officials and cyber risks. Those reports, he said, were driven by fears of violence and abuse, not political rhetoric. (Honey and CISA did not return calls for comment.)

The idea of finding foreign election interference in a past election and using it to declare a national emergency has been pushed by the attorney Peter Ticktin, a friend of Trump’s who helped promote a hypothetical executive order based on the theory. Ticktin—who also assisted in securing pardons for some January 6 rioters—admits he has no evidence that votes were flipped in 2020. But in an interview, he claimed that some machines used in that election had “chips” connected to a server farm in Serbia that could control electoral outcomes—and that Serbia is a “satellite of China.”

Ticktin is also trying to persuade Colorado Governor Jared Polis to grant clemency to Tina Peters, a former county clerk who was convicted of state charges tied to tampering with voting equipment. Last month, a Colorado appeals court upheld Peters’s conviction but ordered reconsideration of her nearly nine-year sentence. A January 21 clemency application that we obtained through an open-records request shows that Peters acknowledges having “made mistakes.” If granted clemency, Peters pledged that she would stay on the right side of the law. Her X account has since continued to feature dubious claims, including that Democrats oppose banning electronic equipment, because “They cheat.” (Polis commuted Peters’s sentence on Friday, cutting it in half from about 9 years to 4 years and 4.5 months. She will be released on parole on June 1).

[Read: The last MAGA prisoner ]

Mike Lindell, better known as the “MyPillow guy,” has railed for years against supposed election fraud, alleging various disproved theories, including that software was tampered with to delete votes for Trump. He has used his clout in the election-denial community to create his own news network, LindellTV, with credentialed reporters at the White House and Pentagon. He also gets personal access to figures at the highest level of government. Lindell told us he has given federal investigators reams of “evidence” of wrongdoing in the 2020 election.

In July 2025, Lindell spoke online about his meetings with Trump. “I did just meet with the president—now this is the third time—about two weeks ago, and I’ll be hopefully seeing him again next week,” he said during an appearance on the Stern American video show. One focus for the administration, he said, is its work on the 2020 vote. But he explained that “a team going forward” is working “to get rid of these machines and computers” and to require people to vote by paper ballots that are hand counted. Lindell told us recently that he talks regularly with Olsen. Although the pillow salesman complained about what he considered the slow pace of federal investigations, he told us it’s a “blessing” that people like Parikh and Olsen are in positions of real influence to address attempts to rig voting machines. “The big thing is, you can take whole countries without firing a shot,” he said.

Election deniers ultimately want an overhaul of how U.S. states and localities record and count votes. Olsen tried to ban electronic voting equipment in Arizona in 2022—and lost. He represented Kari Lake, who was then running for governor, and Mark Finchem, who was running for secretary of state. They alleged that the nation’s transition to electronic systems and computer voting technology decades ago created risks of hacking and fraud, and argued that the devices violated the rights of Arizonans because the voting systems were vulnerable to cyberattacks.

The candidates and their attorneys asked a federal judge to scrap vote-tabulation machines and order votes to be counted by hand at the precinct level. (A top county election official testified that a hand count would require the hiring of 25,000 temporary workers and a building the size of an NFL stadium.) The judge threw out the case, finding that the plaintiffs cited only hypothetical allegations about the voting equipment. Olsen and another attorney were slapped with $122,200 in legal sanctions.

At the time, the lawsuit was bizarre to Steve Gallardo, the lone Democrat on the governing board that has helped run elections in Maricopa County. Now he told us he thinks the case offers a preview of how Trump, aided by some of the same players, may be seeking to undermine the coming elections. “I was one of those that would real quickly just roll my eyes and think these people are just crazy,” Gallardo told us. These days, he takes them seriously. “They are hell-bent on making sure that elections are run under their purview—the way they want elections to be held.”

Finchem, now a state senator, is still trying to influence elections. He said during an online appearance in March that an election nonprofit he helps lead has been “feeding research” to federal authorities. “The dam is breaking,” he said in a recent fundraising appeal. Two weeks ago he posted a picture on X that appeared to be made with AI of a man bearing a resemblance to Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes walking near a county jail in handcuffs. (Fontes’s attorney sent a legal demand last week to Finchem asking him to retract the “defamatory content,” the letter, which we reviewed, said.)

[Read: The GOP’s stunningly swift gerrymandering drive]

Joanna Lydgate, the CEO and president of the nonpartisan States United Democracy Center, told us that she believes the ultimate goals of election deniers are to subvert America’s system of choosing its representatives and to make it easier to discard results that Trump and his allies don’t like. “I think it’s that simple; I really do,” she said. “Whether it’s an executive order or death by 5,000 cuts, it’s chipping away at our election system. They need to sow doubt; they need to undermine public trust; and each one of these narratives is a tactic to that end.”

In many ways, MAGA has already won its war against American elections. Confidence that a person’s state or local government will run a free and fair election is slipping. Trump’s administration is filled with election skeptics; federal investigations into 2020 are under way; and conspiracy theorists who were once marginalized now run some local election offices. Several officials who have been integral to running fair and transparent elections in past cycles told us they are already burned out—just as the deniers are getting started.

Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed reporting.

Hawaii vs. Citizens United

2026-05-14T11:00:00-04:00

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Fifteen years after Mitt Romney stood on an Iowa hay bale and proclaimed that “corporations are people, my friend,” his declaration is no longer mockable. The amount of money corporations spend anonymously to sway federal elections has increased from $359 million in 2012 to $1.4 billion in the most recent presidential cycle. All of that spending by “dark money” nonprofits is protected by the same right to free speech enjoyed by “natural persons,” because the Supreme Court decided in Citizens United v. FEC that U.S. corporations function as citizen associations under the Constitution.

But not all of these “people” are created exactly equal. Whereas humans are automatically granted certain rights at birth, corporate personhood comes into existence under state laws that define its powers—a fact that opponents of corporate money in politics hope to use to transform how U.S. elections are funded. Hawaii is the first state to try. Earlier this month, a nearly unanimous and bipartisan majority—well, as bipartisan as it gets in a state with so few Republicans—of Hawaii’s state legislature voted to change the powers of corporations doing business in the state and no longer grant them the ability to spend on most political causes.

“Corporations are not people. They are granted powers and privileges by the state,” State Senator Jarrett Keohokalole told me this week, explaining the rationale of the bill he sponsored. “How can a creation of the state have inalienable rights? It doesn’t make any sense.”

The legislation—which Hawaii Governor Josh Green, a Democrat, has not yet signed—is expected to apply to for-profit companies, so-called dark-money nonprofits, unions, and chambers of commerce, potentially cutting off a major revenue stream for the super PACs that dominate politics. The legislation makes exceptions for journalistic work—as in, newspaper editorials explicitly advocating for certain candidates—and company-organized political-action committees that pool individual donations.

Under the proposal, Hawaiian corporations would still enjoy personhood of a kind, but they would lack a single ability guaranteed to their living and breathing peers. Supporters point to Chief Justice John Marshall’s 1819 opinion in Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, a landmark case that set the course of corporate law that followed. “A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law,” Marshall wrote. “Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it.”

Tom Moore, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who previously worked for a chair of the Federal Election Commission, came up with this legal strategy as a bank-shot attempt to reverse the impact of the 2010 Citizens United decision without directly engaging its First Amendment logic. Moore argues that states can change their corporate laws while sidestepping free-speech questions because the corporate charter—that “mere creature of law”—precedes any constitutional right. “This is not a campaign-finance regulation,” he told me. “You have to look at it differently.”

This year, his evangelizing led to the introduction of legislation in 15 states, Moore said, but only Hawaii was able to get a bill to a governor’s desk. In Montana, activists are gathering signatures in hope of making the issue a ballot initiative in November. “We need to have an answer to all the money in politics these past 15 years,” Jeff Mangan, the organizer of that effort, told me.

[Read: Big Sky crack-up]

As a political matter, the gambit is likely popular. A 2023 Pew Research Center poll found that, among both Republicans and Democrats, more than seven in 10 support limits on the amount of money organizations can spend on political campaigns. YouGov polling last year for Issue One, a group advocating for more restrictions on money in politics, found that 73 percent of Democrats and 53 percent of Republicans disapproved of the Citizens United finding that corporations have the same free-speech rights as individual citizens.

But the idea, at least so far, has been widely dismissed by corporate-campaign-finance attorneys and some conservative constitutional scholars, who long ago internalized Romney’s maxim of corporate personhood, which he offered in Iowa as a defense of lower corporate taxes. They reject Moore’s arguments that state corporate charters are exempt from the Supreme Court’s protection of collective speech. “If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the Citizens United decision.

“This isn’t a semantic game. Partnerships and loose organizations, all of them have the same rights,” Ilya Shapiro, the director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, told me. “The bottom-line issue is you are trying to regulate corporate speech, and Citizens United speaks directly to that.”

Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez, a Democrat, agrees, and warned the state’s legislature that the bill is likely to be rejected by the courts, after some expense to the state in legal fees. “Although states have the authority to determine what powers a corporation has, if a state tries to remove a corporation’s power to engage in election activity or ballot-issue activity, under Citizens United, a state would then be attempting to take away a corporation’s right to speak,” she wrote earlier this year.

Nonetheless, the bill passed unanimously in the state Senate and lost only one vote in the state House—from a Republican who called the intent of the bill “amazing” but agreed with Lopez that the court fight would be futile. The next step will be a decision by Green about whether to sign the bill into law. Lawmakers involved in the effort told me they expect him to soon. (If he happens to not sign it, those same lawmakers said that the legislature is unlikely to override a veto.) Erika Engle, Green’s press secretary, told me in a statement that the governor would announce his decision “at the appropriate time” and that he “recognizes the precedent-setting nature of this legislation and thanks the Legislature for its hard work on this matter.”

Green’s signature would likely trigger lawsuits, setting off months or years of litigation that could eventually lead back to the Supreme Court. It would also provide fresh water-cooler fodder for corporate-law professors, who have begun to debate among themselves how to settle the conflicting interests of the First Amendment and state power to define corporations, two bodies of jurisprudence with long traditions in American law. “It’s novel enough that I think it is hard to predict how a conservative court would react,” Jill Fisch, a business-law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. “It is a great, creative initiative.”

It could also restart the national conversation over the growing role corporations play in American public life. Even in the age of emerging artificial intelligence, “people” without flesh and blood still have their limits. “That is what I have been arguing all along,” Hawaiian State Senator Karl Rhoads, another sponsor of the bill, told me. “Corporations are just piles of papers.”

The Men Who Want Women to Be Quiet

2026-05-14T05:55:00-04:00

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Douglas Wilson has a modest proposal to improve American life: He wants to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the vote. In his ideal system, “we would do it in our politics the same way we do it in our church structure,” he told me recently. “And that is, we vote by household.”

Wilson is a co-founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, based in Moscow, Idaho. Over the past five decades, he has built a small empire there, dedicated to disseminating his theocratic vision for the United States: a publishing house, a school, a liberal-arts college, and a video-streaming service. His denomination, which has about 170 affiliated churches, counts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as a member, and Wilson was invited to lead a prayer service at the Pentagon in February. So when the pastor casually suggests disenfranchising half of America, people listen.

When I asked him about this position, Wilson said it wasn’t his top priority—“We have bigger fish to fry”—but something he sees happening in perhaps 200 years’ time. I found this intellectual footsie maddening. “If I said to you, ‘I think all white men should be put in cages—but not now; it’s not my aspiration for now,’ ” I suggested, “then you wouldn’t be interested in a single other thing that I had to say at that point.”

Wilson chuckled. “Oh, I know you’d probably have all my attention.”

This is twinkly, avuncular Douglas Wilson, the guy who joined a hippie congregation fresh out of the Navy because he liked to play guitar, and ended up leading services once the regular pastor moved on. The same guy who once went on a multicity debating tour with the New Atheist Christopher Hitchens, and bonded with him over their shared love of P. G. Wodehouse. But the 72-year-old shows a different side on his website, Blog & Mablog. For more than two decades, Wilson has been airing piquant opinions on unruly women—or, as he calls them, “small-breasted biddies,” “harridans,” “lumberjack dykes,” and “Jezebels.” He once referred to Gloria Steinem and another feminist as “a couple of cunts.” And this is the polite version. Every year he celebrates “No Quarter November,” when he promises to tell readers what he really thinks.

Wilson believes that women should “not ordinarily” hold political office, and should never serve in combat roles in the military. Husbands should have dominion over misbehaving wives’ weight, spending habits, and choice of television programs. His uncompromising vision for America was once considered marginal, the conservative writer Karen Swallow Prior told me. Since his elevation by Hegseth, however, “no one can credibly say that Doug Wilson is fringe anymore.”

Wilson is a prominent voice in what is sometimes called “masculinism”: a movement to fight back against the advances of feminism and reassert the primacy of men. His version is religious, influenced by the notion of male “headship” of the family and Saint Paul’s belief that godly women should “be quiet.” There are also plenty of secular masculinists, as well as nominally Muslim ones, such as the streamer Sneako, the self-proclaimed pimp Andrew Tate, and the podcaster Myron Gaines. Woman-bashing plays well on social media and sells lots of ads for crypto, sports betting, and supplements. You can make good money telling men that they’re the truly oppressed sex.

But this isn’t just a movement of grifters exploiting a quirk of the algorithm. In the past decade, one of the New Right’s major challenges has been to retrofit a consistent ideology onto the electoral power of Donald Trump. Masculinism has been a great gift, because factions with different views on, say, protectionism or Israel or Big Tech can all agree on the overreach of feminism and the need for a return to traditional gender roles. Far from being a fringe belief system, masculinism has become the single most important force uniting the American right, bringing together an unlikely constellation of pastors, posters, senators, preachers, influencers, podcasters, and fanboys.

The MAGA movement is often framed as a reaction to the first Black president, and to a growing Latino population. But the multiracial appeal of the manosphere and Trump’s 2024 inroads with young minority men point in a different direction. “People ask me what the New Right is furious about,” the author Laura Field, whose book, Furious Minds, describes the intellectual underpinnings of Trumpism, told me. “And I think a good shorthand for that is they’re furious about their own loss of status in society over the last few years and the elites who made that happen, and I think that the pithiest short version of that is that it’s the women. It’s the women who took their status.”

Wilson’s approach to public life clearly has an element of what professional wrestlers call kayfabe—the winking, performative trollishness that now characterizes the online right. He wants feminists like me to get angry with his most outlandish proposals, making ourselves look like scolds or Chicken Littles in the process. But Wilson and a growing number of powerful allies are sincere in these beliefs, and would want to enact them if given the chance.

One of masculinism’s central claims is that no one is talking about men. So true! Men’s issues are not being discussed in Senator Josh Hawley’s 2023 book, Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs. They aren’t being discussed in Tucker Carlson’s documentary The End of Men. They aren’t being discussed in the panoply of Christian books available on Amazon with titles such as Man for the Job, Masculine Christianity, and It’s Good to Be a Man, or in their secular counterparts, such as Why Women Deserve Less. They aren’t being talked about on social-media feeds (which can be highly segregated by sex) or on some of America’s most popular independent podcasts, such as Modern Wisdom, Huberman Lab, and The Diary of a CEO.

For decades, each feminist advance in American public life has prompted an equally strong backlash. The first wave of women’s-rights activists won suffrage for women, against ferocious and sometimes violent opposition. After the second wave secured Title IX and other legal victories against sex discrimination, Phyllis Schlafly successfully fought back against the full ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. By the identity-obsessed 2010s, the full weight of corporate America had swung behind glib slogans such as “The future is female.” This commercial blitzkrieg inevitably convinced some people that women’s advancement had come at men’s expense. A refrain I kept hearing over the past few years was that boys were being made to feel ashamed of themselves, as if they were stained by some kind of original sin. These years have seen a counterreaction, with the total abandonment of the #MeToo movement, conservative gloating over the fall of Roe v. Wade, and the return of straightforwardly sexist put-downs—“Quiet, piggy”—to public life.

Like most popular movements, masculinism has many entry points, and both defensible and alarming forms. At one end of the spectrum are legitimate concerns about male loneliness, the declining share of men in higher education, stagnant wages for non-college-educated men, and the deadening effects of day-trading, gaming, and porn. At the other end of masculinism are a misogynist vocabulary about AWFULs and the longhouse (terms that we’ll come back to) and a political agenda close to that in The Handmaid’s Tale, whereby women are denied the right to work, vote, and control their own bodies.

On the internet, masculinism is presented as a rebellion—a transgressive middle finger to the liberal establishment, expressed in all the words a corporate HR department would order you not to say. In the past few years, leaked group chats have shown Young Republicans and college conservatives using sexism, infused with racism, as a bonding mechanism. “If your pilot is a she and she looks ten shades darker than someone from Sicily, just end it there. Scream the no no word,” read a message in a Telegram thread used by the leaders of Young Republican chapters in New York, Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont. (Several members of the chat were women.) Richard Hanania, who describes himself as a former white nationalist, calls this kind of in-group signaling “the Based Ritual,” a way for younger MAGA enthusiasts to prove their bona fides to one another.

Nick Fuentes has suggested that women be sent to “breeding gulags.” (Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Jacquelyn Martin / AP.)

Among Gen Zers, Douglas Wilson’s intellectual heir is Nick Fuentes, who leads a loose collection of trolls known as Groypers. A self-professed Christian nationalist, anti-Semite, and virgin, Fuentes has built a fan base in part by deploying vividly misogynistic language. “Our No. 1 political enemy is women, because women constrain everything, every conversation, every man—everything,” Fuentes said on a livestream earlier this year. He added: “Just like Hitler imprisoned Gypsies, Jews, Communists—all of his political rivals—we have to do the same thing with women.” He suggested that they be sent to “breeding gulags. The good ones will be liberated. The bad ones will toil in the mines forever.”

Fuentes’s rhetoric shows how this gendered view of the world can easily be interlaced with other prejudices. Gay men? Effeminate, uninterested in sports, therefore unmanly. Jews? Clever rather than athletic; also unmanly. University lecturers? Pencil-necked postmodernists; also unmanly. Trans people? Inevitably degenerate. Muslims? An invasion force of rapists. Black men? Thugs from whom white women should be protected (if only they would submit to patriarchy). Almost every facet of contemporary online rightism can be refracted through the prism of gender. Multiple people affiliated with the Heritage Foundation, perhaps the most influential MAGA policy organization, cut ties with the group after its president refused to condemn Fuentes’s anti-Semitism last year. But his view that women belong in forced-breeding camps has produced no such fuss.

Wilson told me he considers this sort of rhetoric unforgivably gauche. “The Bible says that a godly woman is a husband’s crown,” he said. “I’ve never seen a king talk about his crown the way Fuentes talks about women. It’s absurd.” I wanted to ask whether “small-breasted biddies” came from the Gospel of Mark or Luke, but Wilson was on a roll. He thought Fuentes was so extreme that he might even be an undercover federal agent sent to discredit the movement. “He is, as far as I’m concerned, on the other team.”

In theological terms, that might be true. But both men benefit from a shock-and-awe rhetorical strategy. In 2014, it was a minor scandal when the megachurch pastor Mark Driscoll was revealed to be “William Wallace II,” the author of dozens of pages of message-board rants about how America was a “pussified nation” where men are “raised by bitter penis envying burned feministed single mothers who make sure that Johnny grows up to be a very nice woman who sits down to pee.” Now such language would barely raise an eyebrow.

Writers who used to hide their masculinist impulses behind a pen name now write and say outrageous things under their real name. Take the manosphere provocateur known as Raw Egg Nationalist, whose handle on X, where he has more than 300,000 followers, is @Babygravy9. He combines lifestyle and nutritional advice—“slonking” raw egg yolks—with hard-right, anti-immigration politics. He writes for Infowars, the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s media outlet. He posts about antiwhiteness and has his own line of microplastic-free herbal-tea bags, Kindred Harvest.

In 2024, a left-wing activist group outed him as Charles Cornish-Dale, a religious historian who has studied at both Oxford and Cambridge, and whose Ph.D. thesis was titled Migrations of the Holy: The Devotional Culture of Wimborne Minster, c.1400–1640. When his name became public, Cornish-Dale, now 38, concluded that being doxxed has “only made me stronger and more committed to what I’m doing.”

He did not use a pseudonym for his new book, The Last Men, in which he questions whether it is “possible to be men fully in a liberal democracy.” His political prescriptions, like Wilson’s, might be described as uncompromising. “Someone asked me the other day—I think it was a girl, actually—she was like: ‘So would you take away the vote from women?’” he told me. “I was like, ‘I would take away the vote from the vast majority of men as well.’ ”

His book, published by the venerable conservative imprint Regnery, suggests that men with high testosterone levels voted for Trump because high T is correlated with an acceptance of hierarchy, status, and inequality. Liberalism, by contrast, suppresses men’s life force: “Leftists have now openly embraced emasculation and having low testosterone as part of their identity.” He also revisits an argument he first made in an article titled “Ecce Homos,” that the left had robbed straight men of their heroes by recasting them as gay. He wants to reclaim the male bonding of “Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great, the Spartan last stand at Thermopylae, cowboys, pirates, gang members.”

Charles Cornish-Dale, trained as a religious historian, is also a manosphere provocateur known as Raw Egg Nationalist. (Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Courtesy of New Culture Forum.)

The Last Men is a confounding book because it seems equally perturbed by falling birth rates and Brokeback Mountain winning three Oscars. Cornish-Dale identifies potentially worrisome phenomena, such as a reported decline in sperm counts around the world, and gestures toward genuine feelings of ennui experienced by many young American men, who are stuck in unrewarding jobs, searching for greater meaning in their lives. He lays the blame at the feet of the elites: They are keeping you fat; they are unhappy with risk taking and hierarchy; they are calling masculinity toxic.

In conversation, Cornish-Dale is cocky but likable, with a languorous way of speaking that reminded me of Simon Cowell. Our Zoom took place at 6 a.m. his time, and he appeared to be talking to me from his bed, wearing striped pajamas. His current aesthetic is shaved head and swole, though back in 2012, he gave up doing fieldwork in a Buddhist monastery when he was asked to cut off his man bun. “I was going through a hipster phase,” he told me. “They wanted me to wear a robe instead of skinny jeans, and I just wouldn’t do it.”

Cornish-Dale is essentially an influencer—albeit one who knows a lot of $10 words. But masculinism is not merely an outgrowth of the attention economy. Other figures with similar ideas have strong connections to conservative policy circles.

One of these is Scott Yenor, who has declared that modern women are “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome.” Since 2000, Yenor has taught political philosophy at Boise State University, in Idaho, 300 miles south of Douglas Wilson’s stronghold in Moscow. He has also worked with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on rolling back DEI programs, which conservatives see as a de facto racial and gender quota system that is harmful to white men. “The core of what we oppose is ‘anti-discrimination,’ ” Yenor wrote in a 2021 email, released to The New York Times under a public-records request.

Yenor now fancies doing a little discrimination of his own. As he wrote in an essay for the Claremont Institute last fall, he believes that the law should change to allow businesses “to support traditional family life by hiring only male heads of households, or by paying a family wage”—that is, compensating men more so that their wives do not need to work. (Currently, this would be straightforwardly unconstitutional sex-based discrimination.) In 2021, he argued that colleges should not try to recruit more women to become engineers, but instead should “recruit and demand more of men who become engineers. Ditto for med school and the law and every trade.”

Like J. D. Vance, he reserves particular scorn for women who do not have children. Heaven help the “childless media scold” or “barren bureaucratic apparatchik”—Yenor’s terms—who decides she would prefer having a career to having babies. His rhetoric is unpleasant and extreme enough that he could not get confirmed to a university board in Florida. As for repealing the Nineteenth Amendment, Yenor told me via email that “when America had household voting or some rough equivalent, it was not a tyranny, the country was well governed, and the family was supported. The country is different today, and the same voting system would be uncongenial to our conditions.” (Although he responded to my question about the Nineteenth Amendment, Yenor did not make time for an interview with me.)

[From the May 2023 issue: Helen Lewis on how freedom-loving Florida fell for Ron DeSantis]

Yenor recently became the chair of the American Citizenship Initiative at the Heritage Foundation. A January report from the foundation called for a “culture-wide Manhattan Project” to promote family building through generous tax giveaways to married couples in which one parent is employed. At the same time, abortion, birth control, single-parent benefits, day care, dating apps, and no-fault divorce would be discouraged. The report contains one of the least romantic sentences I have ever read: “Marriage also opens unique retirement planning opportunities.”

Scott Yenor has declared that modern women are “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome,” but says that denying them the vote would be “uncongenial to our conditions.” (Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Heritage Foundation.)

All of this is a continuation of themes found in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for Trump’s second term. The document, in the words of my colleague David Graham, offers a vision of America where “men are breadwinners and women are mothers.”

[David A. Graham: The top goal of Project 2025 is still to come]

Yenor’s suggestion that feminism—with its attendant horrors of work outside the home, birth control, and financial independence—has made women neurotic and dependent on pharmaceuticals is now an article of faith on the right. Anonymous online posters frequently bring up data suggesting that liberal women are most likely to report suffering from anxiety. But to attribute female unhappiness to feminism seems wildly ahistorical. Have these people never read, say, The Feminine Mystique, which exhaustively cataloged the despair of mid-century stay-at-home mothers? (“Many suburban housewives were taking tranquilizers like cough drops,” the author, Betty Friedan, wrote.) Across the manosphere, however, young people are told that before feminism ruined everything, women used to be cherished and pampered by their husbands. Now women are supposedly subsidized by government handouts or earning six figures in pointless “email jobs.” In the masculinist paradigm, every woman does HR for cats and every man is a plumber or merchant seaman.

I asked Wilson about his allies’ nostalgic distortion of history. “Just a simple question,” he responded. “If you went back to 1850 and said: Out of all these women who had to get husbands’ permission to travel, to visit a sick cousin or whatever, how many—take 10,000 of those women—how many of them were on antidepressants? And how many of them today are on antidepressants?”

That wasn’t a fair comparison, I said, because today everyone is on antidepressants. Also, in the 1850s, SSRIs hadn’t been invented. You just got told to take some laudanum and go to the baths.

How popular are masculinist ideas? Last year, research by King’s College London and Ipsos found that Gen Z men in 30 nations were far more likely than male Baby Boomers to say that the fight for women’s equality had gone so far that men were now disadvantaged. They were also more than twice as likely to say that a father who stayed home with his children was “less of a man.” Meanwhile, 83 percent of Republican men younger than 50 think society is too feminized, according to a survey by the conservative Manhattan Institute. Intriguingly, this survey did not replicate the usual trope of working-class men revolting against snooty female elites: It found that “college-educated Republicans are more likely than their non-college counterparts to endorse the view that society has become too feminine.”

The most recent presidential election, pitting Trump against Kamala Harris, was a gift to masculinists. After all, the movement’s villains include female bosses, feminists, and women who don’t bear children—and Harris was the embodiment of all three. The male podcasters who got behind Trump in 2024 now host outright misogynists: Consider the career of the Christian debater Andrew Wilson, who in January appeared on arguably the most popular podcast in America, The Joe Rogan Experience—the manosphere-influencer equivalent of singing the national anthem at the Super Bowl.

[From the October 2024 issue: Helen Lewis on how Joe Rogan remade Austin]

Rogan’s choice of guests is a useful bellwether of the American political mood; he himself drifted from 2020 Bernie bro to 2024 Trump endorser via anti-wokeness, annoyance at COVID lockdowns, and a deep investment in conspiracy theories. He has lately begun to take an interest in Christianity, and has attended a nondenominational church.

Wilson, who appeared on Rogan’s show to promote his online debating courses, originally became famous for appearing repeatedly on Whatever, a dating podcast with 4.6 million YouTube subscribers. The show’s specialty is goading models and OnlyFans girls into delivering ragebait, such as one recent guest’s suggestion that she deserves a millionaire husband. Women are never supposed to win in the Whatever bear pit, but sometimes they do, just by remaining calm while the men try to trip them up.

In one episode, Wilson told a female fellow guest that she was too stupid to understand him, so she raised the fact that Wilson’s wife, Rachel, has children with three different men. He went thermonuclear. “You lick snizz,” he barked. “You’re a fucking dyke. Don’t talk shit about my wife, you stupid bitch.” He added, “I’m better than you.” It was an extraordinary display of uncontrolled aggression. In another clip, he mocked a female guest for being unable to open a pickle jar. She handed it to him, and he failed too. “Your hand greased the whole top of it,” he complained. Wilson has one of the most unpleasant internet personas I’ve ever encountered, and I’ve been on Bluesky. (He did not reply to my request for an interview, which was a relief.)

Unsurprisingly, Wilson treated Rogan, a high-status man, with far more respect than he showed the models of Whatever. In full bro-ing-out mode, he told Rogan that “feminists would immediately stop being feminist if they just had a taste of, like, well, you know, people actually did have to shut themselves up at night from wolves.” (How a chain-smoking middle-aged man who podcasts for a living would fare against a wolf is an open question.) The difference between this Andrew Wilson and the one from Whatever was remarkable—as was the fact that Rogan was prepared to host the benevolent version without any apparent concern for the malevolent one.

Wilson also took the opportunity to plug his wife’s book, Occult Feminism, which argues that feminism is “born of occult belief, because at its core, feminism seeks to make women gods over men, or at the very least to deify women.” I’ve read it (spoiler alert: The suffragists loved séances; Miley Cyrus’s tongue is pagan) and can say that the experience is eerily reminiscent of a friend recounting half a dozen Wikipedia pages that they read while drunk.

Wilson, however, promoted his wife so successfully that a few weeks later, Rachel Wilson made her own appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience. “I didn’t really have much of an opinion on feminism,” Rogan told her—except that he’d noticed that some feminists hated men. But listening to her book had made him realize that its origins were “bonkers.”

What followed was a greatest hits of anti-feminism—which, as Phyllis Schlafly learned, is the one subject where women’s contributions are always welcome. “Nobody wants to talk about this,” Rachel Wilson told Rogan. “This is the conversation no one’s ready for. Women’s access to higher education is the No. 1 correlate around the world—regardless of economics, race, culture, status, anything—to falling birth rates.”

In fact, observing a link between education and birth rates would be considered utterly banal in policy circles: The United Nations was publishing research on the phenomenon back in the 1990s. But everything in the manosphere has to be presented as allegedly forbidden knowledge. A few weeks later, the podcaster Katie Miller—wife of the Trump White House adviser Stephen—was making the exact same point to Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, also with the air of someone breaking a taboo. Feminism was destroying the family, she told Ingraham, because it “pushed women into the workplace.” As the writer Jill Filipovic noted, “These two women are having this conversation at their jobs.”

In fact, the challenge of falling birth rates is so well-known that many countries have implemented pronatalist policies in response: Singapore offers $11,000 “baby bonuses,” while Hungary exempts mothers of three or more children from income taxes. So far, though, none of the carrots has worked. The actually unspeakable bit is whether women’s access to education and the job market should be restricted, in the name of producing more babies and saving civilization. I wish people like Rachel Wilson would just come out and say that they favor this, so we can have a proper argument about it.

Instead they deploy a classic masculinist tactic: Tiptoe up to the edge of a policy that would poll as well as mandatory Ebola, then pirouette away at the last minute. Joel Webbon, a hard-right pastor based in Austin who has built a large social-media following by opposing feminism and the “LGBT Mafia,” is one of those prepared to say openly that he would like to restrict women’s participation in public life. “I know a lot of people, and I’m obviously not going to name them, but a lot of people and names that you would recognize are much further to the right than they are willing to publicly say,” he told me. However, he did not mind their bait-and-switch style, because the left has used it for decades. A small group of people argued that “love is love” to pass gay marriage, “and then, you know, it’s like: Oh, actually, Drag Queen Story Hour.” Masculinists were only turning lefties’ own strategy against them.

Joel Webbon, a hard-right pastor with a large social-media following, says openly that he would like to restrict women’s participation in public life. (Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Right Response Ministries.)

Like Douglas Wilson, Webbon is regularly described as a hate preacher; he told me that his services in Austin attract protesters who photograph his congregation. And as with Wilson, and Cornish-Dale, there is an enormous gulf between Webbon’s combative online persona and the person I interviewed. On his podcast, he talks trollishly about “the fake sin of raaaycism,” but one-on-one, he was scrupulously polite, calling me “ma’am” and listening without interruption as I told him that the system he advocates for is closer to Saudi Arabian guardianship than anything from the Christian tradition. He sees his internet presence, he told me, “like the Apostle Paul arguing and lecturing in the hall of Tyrannus,” an important period of evangelism for the early Church. When I checked his X feed later, he was talking about “Jewish sodomites” and reposting an account called @IfindRetards.

The Phyllis Schlafly of today is the writer Helen Andrews, with whom I am sometimes confused by liberals with Helen blindness. In a viral 2025 essay for Compact magazine called “The Great Feminization,” Andrews asked whether greater female participation in the workforce was “a threat to civilization.” (Honestly, women can be so overwrought.)

[Hillary Rodham Clinton: MAGA’s war on empathy]

She was building on an influential thesis on the right known as “the longhouse,” which argues that modern, feminized society resembles the communal living halls of the past, which were dominated by “den mothers” who ruled by passive aggression, offense-taking, and ostracizing their enemies—all classically feminine modes of behavior. The most famous outlining of the longhouse thesis came from a writer calling himself L0m3z in the religious magazine First Things. He declined to cite any specific historical examples and added that one could not really define the longhouse, anyway, because “its definition must remain elastic, lest it lose its power to lampoon the vast constellation of social forces it reviles.” How convenient! Instead, the longhouse was “a metonym for the disequilibrium afflicting the contemporary social imaginary.” Let me shock you: L0m3z was eventually outed as a humanities academic.

Andrews took this thesis further, arguing that “everything you think of as ‘wokeness’ is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.” To translate that into English, the claim is that women don’t settle arguments like characters in a Guy Ritchie film, with fisticuffs outside the smoking shed and no hard feelings two hours later. Instead, Andrews writes, they “covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.” Therefore, “all cancellations are feminine.” Again, a quick glance at the history books presents a few challenges: The backstabbing in the Roman Senate was both literal and figurative, and the Vatican has always been a nest of scheming cardinals. And who pressured ABC to take Jimmy Kimmel off the air after Charlie Kirk’s assassination? Brendan Carr, who is Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chair—and the possessor of a Y chromosome.

[Read: The ‘easy way’ to crush the mainstream media]

Later in the essay, Andrews offered a testable proposition: “If a business loses its swashbuckling spirit and becomes a feminized, inward-focused bureaucracy, will it not stagnate?” As it happens, the labor economist Revana Sharfuddin has crunched the data on factories in the Second World War—one of the greatest periods of “demographic feminization” in American history—and found no evidence that they became paralyzed by cancel culture and petty HR disputes. When I asked Andrews about this, she noted that wartime automobile and electrical factories were still essentially segregated by sex, and that even so, some managers hired counselors to help them deal with their new workforce. “For what it’s worth, the counterargument that most landed with me was the example of communism,” she wrote in an email. “Women were well represented in medicine and science in the Soviet Bloc, and their society didn’t collapse—well, it did, but probably not because of the women.”

Andrews’s essay comes to the defense of former Harvard President Larry Summers, who resigned under pressure in 2006 after arguing that women might be underrepresented in the hard sciences because of their innate lack of interest in those fields and their inability to perform at the highest levels. It later emerged in the Epstein files that this was a sanitized version of his private view, which was that women have lower IQs than men. (Out of curiosity, I hunted down the diversity stats for 2006, the year Summers resigned. At the time, four-fifths of Harvard’s tenured professors were men.) In retrospect, Summers’s ouster doesn’t look like the product of feminist hysteria; rather, his colleagues may have seen him as an embarrassing liability and seized on the opportunity to offload him.

To my surprise, when I put this to Andrews, she partially agreed. “Saying Larry Summers was fired because of the controversy is like saying America entered World War II because of Pearl Harbor,” she said. “It’s a simplification: good enough for the one-sentence version, but definitely omitting important factors.” In our communication, she was wry and self-deprecating, apologizing for any inconvenience I’d experienced by being mistaken for her—“the bad Helen.” I reflected that this version of Andrews wouldn’t have gone viral in the way that the one warning that working women are a “threat to civilization” did.

[Read: Renee Nicole Good, Grok, and the punishing of women]

On the right, creeping feminization has become an all-purpose explanation for many recent events: Women pity the underdog, pander to self-proclaimed victims, and care about hurt feelings more than the truth—all of which are exploited by undocumented immigrants and violent criminals. In this analysis, Renee Good—the woman shot by an immigration-enforcement officer in Minneapolis—was killed because she’d adopted left-wing values. “An AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal) is dead after running her car into an ICE agent who opened fire on her,” the right-wing pundit Erick Erickson posted immediately after her death. Women are childlike, naive, immature; they simply do not understand the real world.

Helen Andrews wrote a viral 2025 essay that questioned whether greater female participation in the workforce was a “threat to civilization.” (Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Jon Meadows.)

Many MAGA figures have identified the surfeit of feminine empathy as a political issue. The first episode of Douglas Wilson’s Man Rampant podcast was called “The Sin of Empathy.” The Canadian marketing professor Gad Saad issues regular condemnations of “suicidal empathy” between posts complaining that women “no longer wear any real clothes and instead are always in athleisure.”

[Elizabeth Bruenig: The conservative attack on empathy]

This disdain for empathy often leads to the conclusion that women’s political participation is a problem, because the little ladies will insist on voting for the wrong candidates and policies. “The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics,” Peter Thiel, an early advocate for Trump in Silicon Valley, wrote in a 2009 essay for a Cato Institute journal. “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” In this view, the gender split in American politics—55 percent of men but only 46 percent of women voted for Trump in 2024—is not merely a reflection of differing priorities but a problem to be solved.

At the same time that people like Wilson are saying out loud that they want to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment, the suggestion that anyone seriously wants to end female suffrage is often dismissed by mainstream conservatives as lib hysteria. After all, changing the Constitution would require the assent of three-quarters of the 50 states. “I’ll be concerned about the 19th thing the day a single state—just one out of 38—passes a repeal,” Inez Stepman, a former fellow at the Claremont Institute, posted in March. Liberals were “humorlessly chasing fumes of jokes and bar chatter, and dishonestly using it to silence real policy and cultural debate.” Personally, I would feel better about this line of argument had I not sat opposite the conservative intellectual Jordan Peterson in 2018 while he sneered at my suggestion that Trump-appointed justices would overturn Roe v. Wade. Or if the Trump administration had not taken the issue of birthright citizenship all the way to the Supreme Court. Or if Pete Hegseth had not already blocked the promotion of female (and Black) military officers, and frequently expressed his opposition to women serving in combat.

Masculinism is now approaching its imperial-overreach phase, like the Roman empire that many of its leaders so admire. For some of its most ardent adherents, if someone on the left is doing anything, regardless of their sex, it’s feminized and bad. Meanwhile, when Trump sends out a bitchy Truth Social post about a petty grievance, that is a display of manly vigor. Tucker Carlson’s perfectly buoyant coiffure? Rugged—butch, even. Ben Shapiro’s heartwarming enjoyment of musical theater? In the best tradition of the Vikings or Spartans, probably. This reductive view of the world—women things bad, men things good—is the mirror image of the worst excesses of 2010s Tumblr feminism, when introverted teenage girls posted hashtags like #KillAllMen and drank from mugs that read MALE TEARS.

In March, the anti-DEI activist Christopher Rufo had to fend off a horde of anonymous right-wing posters claiming, apparently seriously, that white men “are very easily the most oppressed group in history.” When he described this view as “brain damaged” and invoked a little-known American phenomenon called slavery, he was besieged with complaints.

For me, this episode gets to the core of MAGA masculinism. Which of its faces is the real one—the conservative think-tankers seeking to undo antidiscrimination laws, or the soap opera of influencers railing against “small-breasted biddies” and AWFULs, wallowing in self-pity, and labeling everything they dislike as feminine?

But of course, the sober thinkers and the shock troops feed off each other. Sometimes, as with Wilson, they coexist in a single person. This is a movement with real policy goals: the rollback of no-fault divorce. Tax breaks to reward male breadwinners and female homemakers. An end to anything with a whiff of DEI, even leadership programs for women in the military, like one cut by Hegseth. A return to the workplace culture of the 1970s, where sexual harassment was normalized. An open preference for male employees in hiring, promotion, and pay awards—in other words, affirmative action for men.

Yet masculinism also functions as a perpetual-motion machine of grievance, an inarticulate howl of anguish at the status quo—whatever that currently is. Masculinism is both serious and silly, sometimes camp and sometimes chilling, an attention-grabbing performance and a genuine proposition. No wonder it has become the cornerstone of Trumpism.

This article appears in the June 2026 print edition with the headline “The Men Who Don’t Want Women to Vote.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

I Remember America Before the Measles Vaccine

2026-05-11T07:00:00-04:00

Lately, I’ve come to notice that the strangest and most terrible pieces of my childhood are roaring back. I was born in 1933, and much of what I remember as a little girl was defined by either the war or what we called, simply, sickness.

I myself was blessed with exceptionally good health, but my friends, family, and community were regularly struck with childhood diseases. Neighborhoods were frozen in fear when maladies suddenly erupted: pool closures during polio epidemics, quarantines when mumps or measles raged. I remember one particularly galling time when my older sister Mimi and I were confined to the house, morosely watching our friends playing on the construction site of a new house across the street. We were fine; they all had whooping cough. Whooping cough was often deadly for babies and toddlers but among the less debilitating of childhood diseases past for older children, thus the freedom to play while coughing. Neither Mimi nor I ever caught it—a fact I was grateful for 40 years later, when I met with a pulmonologist about my cigarette-compromised lungs and he remarked, “At least you never had whooping cough.”

We did, however, catch chicken pox simultaneously with our older sisters, Jane and Helen; we were then 5, 7, 11, and 13. Just thinking of it can resurrect the itch. (And lest I forget, some 70 years later, following a time of extended stress, that long-dormant varicella-zoster virus returned as a bout of shingles.) But that was nothing compared with the measles Jane contracted. Memories of those days, among the most vivid of my early life, still evoke tremors in the bottom of my stomach. There was widespread fear of measles causing blindness, which had indeed happened to a young family acquaintance. So for several days at the height of her illness, Jane was quarantined in one bedroom while Helen moved in with Mimi and me. The shades were drawn and curtains closed in Jane’s room, and the door was opened only after the hallway was darkened. She survived—and later went on to become a wife, mother, and well-regarded artist. But that was just the luck of the draw. Measles killed some 10,000 American children in the 1930s and ’40s—roughly 500 kids died every year. In my generation, we were the guinea pigs for what science would soon discover: This pesky childhood sickness increases the risk of stroke, chronic lung problems, and impaired neurodevelopment.

[Read: His daughter was America’s first measles death in a decade]

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was not born yet when all of this took place. By the time he turned 13, in 1967, most of the diseases that ravaged my childhood had been eradicated by the vaccines he now disdains. The unfortunate thing about that disdain is that Kennedy has the power to impose his bizarre notions on the entire country. It’s too bad that we have no way to time-capsule him back several decades (or time-travel forward, for that matter) in hopes that he might understand the havoc he will wreak upon future generations.

RFK Jr. would have liked my friend Jack, a rambunctious child given to sudden mischief. Jack was part of a foursome, the others being Mary Sue and Tommy and me. We bonded days after I arrived in Ashland, Virginia, having just turned 6. For several years we were inseparable, even when Jack developed rheumatic fever and was bedridden for weeks. We simply detoured from climbing trees and playing ball into spending afternoons staging battles with toy soldiers on his bed or listening, enraptured, to his favorite radio serials, including The Lone Ranger and Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy. Jack was isolated even from the three of us when whooping cough rampaged through the town, but he still managed to catch that too. He died of heart failure at age 19; how much of that good young heart’s failure was due to those earlier illnesses, we’ll never know. That was more than half a century ago. I never forgot Jack. I wish I could tell Kennedy about him, and the pain his death caused everyone who loved him.

[From the January 2026 issue: Why is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. so convinced he’s right?]

The other childhood friend I would most like our health secretary to know is Susan, who moved to our neighborhood in second grade and contracted polio when we were in our early teens. I remember being taken to visit her when she was in an iron lung. Though she was in a highly restricted part of the hospital, I was allowed to visit, largely because she was not expected to live and we were desperate to see each other. In those days of family doctors who made house calls for everything but major emergencies, I had been in a hospital once or twice at most. I knew all about the iron lung and was thoroughly familiar with Susan’s precarious state; still, I was not prepared for the sight of a giant monster of a machine on sturdy legs, with only my friend’s head protruding from one end.

There were six of them in all, I think, in a cold room smelling of ether and rubbing alcohol: six futuristic creatures with human heads. Nurses in starched white uniforms and rubber-soled white shoes walked wordlessly among the machines, which kept up a steady thrum as they forced air in and out of failing lungs. Susan’s mother stood on one side, stroking her daughter’s hair, while Susan and I talked in voices just above a whisper, as if we were in church. She wanted to tell me about the boy who had been in the iron lung behind where I sat, who was there when she arrived but a few days ago had vanished. There was only one other visitor, another mother stroking another small head. Happy as I was to see Susan, I couldn’t help wondering if I would be able to summon the courage to endure such hardship just to survive. But survive she did, unexpectedly, to live to adulthood with some disabilities.

[From the February 1957 issue: How good is the polio vaccine?]

The disabilities resulting from those childhood diseases far exceeded the recorded life-and-death statistics: the compromised lungs, the weakened hearts, the bones and muscles and systems unable to develop as they might have. It’s impossible to calculate the awful toll. Vaccines, though, changed it all, essentially vanquishing those diseases in the United States and much of the rest of the world. The rejection of science is sending us back to those dark ages.

When I was 12, Americans everywhere threw what can only be described as a two-day party. It was 1945, and Japan had surrendered. Euphoria swept across the country, including in small towns like Ashland, where my friends and I had pulled red wagons around to gather scrap for the war effort. There had been a slight exhaling of breath the previous May, on what came to be known as V-E Day, and another one after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August. (Only later would I learn the grim moral complexity of such weapons.) But with the end of the war came a widespread belief that lasting peace was no longer just a dream. Flags went up on every front porch, the sounds of long-hoarded firecrackers pierced the air, perfect strangers hugged each other on sidewalks, and high-school bands paraded in the streets.

[Tom Nichols: Reclaiming real American patriotism]

Those of us who are now in our 90s might be forgiven a twinge of nostalgia for that moment. But this is no plea to return to some imaginary good old days. Indelibly etched into my brain are memories from the decade leading up to our entry into the war. I was 4, at most, the night my father woke Mimi and me in what seemed the middle of the night and gently carried us downstairs into the living room. He deposited us on the floor in front of the Philco radio. We sat at the feet of our mother, who was on the sofa darning socks. There were crackling sounds coming from the radio, someone speaking over the noise of a crowd. My father explained that we were in no danger but that terrible things were happening in the world, largely because of one very bad man, and he wanted us to hear what this madman sounded like: Adolf Hitler on a shortwave-radio broadcast. We, of course, had no idea what Hitler was saying. But the angry shouts to a cheering crowd, sounds reinforced later in newsreel clips shown at movies we occasionally attended, carried a powerful message I have never forgotten. They were the sounds of evil, the antithesis of “Love thy neighbor.”

Americans survived those years on kindness and collective effort. In the 1930s, when hunger, poverty, and despair were at levels hard to imagine today, you could have nothing and still be kind. As a child who never went hungry, I was spared the traumas suffered by many, but I witnessed hardship in the nation’s psyche. My father had a job that paid enough to feed four daughters and cover the mortgage on our tiny three-bedroom house, albeit just barely. Several times a week, men in worn coats and brown fedoras in search of food and work would knock on our back door. My mother would make peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, hand them to me with glasses of milk, and instruct me to be very polite to “our visitors.”

[From the November 2025 issue: I don’t want to stop believing in America’s decency]

Throughout World War II, we knitted socks for soldiers and went with our mother to deliver hot cross buns to neighbors when a new Gold Star was hung in someone’s front window. We kids were also serious about collecting scrap and were occasionally enlisted to help watch the skies from a small rural hut for the rare passing airplane, whose description we would carefully record in a government logbook. My memories of these long-ago years are spotty; I was just a child. Far more clearly I recall the aftermath, when all of those men (and a few women) in uniform came home—Jane married one of them—and war stories were left behind. Everyone was in a hurry to move forward into a newly peaceful world, a world without the tragedies of war abroad and the curse of sickness at home.

It was a time of singular, optimistic patriotism. No one thought the road ahead would be easy; everyone believed that peace and shared prosperity were possible. For nearly a century, I’ve been privileged to watch the fits, starts, and swings of that optimism: the forward leaps of science and technology, the backward falls into tragic wars, the sidesteps into misguided ideologies. But the collective effort behind those hot cross buns and front-porch flags? That is still who we are, if we choose to be.

This article appears in the June 2026 print edition with the headline “The America I’ve Known.”

Stephen Miller in Retreat

2026-05-11T06:00:00-04:00

Just hours before Stephen Miller arrived at the Mar-a-Lago ballroom on New Year’s Eve—where he would welcome 2026 by dancing next to the soon-to-be-defenestrated homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, as the 1990s cultural relic Vanilla Ice performed—he won a great, though ultimately fleeting, victory. The Labor Department’s Foreign Labor Certification office announced that the Trump administration would cut the number of approved visas for seasonal workers by about 50 percent. Miller had been trying since his days as a Senate aide to reduce reliance on visas granted annually to the hospitality, construction, and landscaping industries.

But the plan unraveled within weeks. After the killing of two protesters in Minneapolis, President Trump reversed the visa cuts as part of a late-January retreat from Miller’s hard-edged goals. Miller was not involved in the walk-back, according to two people with knowledge of the process and who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Instead, Trump made the decision with the “border czar,” Tom Homan, and others after hearing about concerns from hospitality-industry employers, they said.

The reversal was one of the earliest signs that Miller’s influence is on the wane. Others have followed. The White House deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser designed Trump’s second-term immigration agenda. But weeks into the new year, the president dismantled the roving Border Patrol strike forces that Miller had encouraged; turned on Noem, who had carried out Miller’s aggressive instructions; and handed control of the deportation program back to career law-enforcement officials.

White House insiders said that Miller remains a top adviser to the president, that he has a singular relationship to Trump built over the past decade, and that his job is not in jeopardy. Immigration enforcement remains a central theme of the administration and is expected to feature prominently in Trump’s midterm-election messaging. They said that Miller has always seen himself as a staffer who subordinates his own opinions on policy to the agenda of the president, even when it shifts. “The President loves Stephen,” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung told us in a statement. “And the White House staff respects him tremendously.”

But Trump, who has previously joked that Miller’s “truest feelings” are so extreme that they should not be aired publicly, has also told others in recent weeks that he understands Miller sometimes goes too far, advisers told us. They said that Trump recognized immediately after the second killing in Minneapolis, of the protester Alex Pretti, that the policy needed to shift, and he did not embrace Miller’s public description of Pretti as a “domestic terrorist.” The question now is how long Trump will hold Miller and his policy prescriptions at a distance.

“I think the president knows very, very well what he can go to Stephen for, and what he probably shouldn’t tell him if he doesn’t want to get an earful,” one former administration official told us. Another adviser described Trump’s view of Miller more bluntly: “The president knows who he is, period.”

The setback for Miller is striking largely because his rise was so stunning. No White House official in recent history—since Vice President Dick Cheney in the early 2000s, perhaps—has had such a dramatic and direct impact on U.S. government policy and such operational sway over so many parts of government.

Miller oversaw the drafting and release of executive orders in the early days of Trump’s second term, sat at the table for early national-security decisions, and was the driving force behind legislation that awarded $175 billion in funding for immigration enforcement, allowing for more Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, detention centers, and deportation flights. It was Miller who set a goal of 3,000 ICE arrests a day to hit his target of 1 million deportations a year, matching the legislative goals that he helped draft. He instructed ICE officers to sweep through Home Depot parking lots to help meet that goal. When street clashes over enforcement started, he publicly declared that officers had “federal immunity” for their actions on the job, and he helped draft a national-security memorandum that told law enforcement to treat even peaceful anti-deportation protests and the release of personal details about government officials as telltale signs of potential “domestic terrorism” conspiracies.

But the second year of Trump’s second term is being directed by a new immigration-enforcement team. The new secretary of homeland security, former Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, took over in late March with a mandate to get back to basics. Leaders of the department who had been sidelined by Noem, such as Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott, suddenly found themselves empowered. Employees she had pushed out, such as former Deputy Secretary Troy Edgar and the CBP official Matt Eagan, were welcomed back. Andrew Block, a close ally of Miller who served as CBP’s chief counsel, was shown the door, according to two people briefed on the change. (Block did not respond to a request for comment.)

[Read: The $97 million Utah warehouse ICE bought for $145 million]

Underlying all of the changes was a return to conventional ICE “targeted enforcement” tactics that prioritize immigrants with criminal records or pending deportation orders, and that seek to make arrests with less drama. The change in policy has shown up in the numbers. In March, ICE made about 30,000 arrests, down from 36,000 in January, the data show—well below Miller’s goal of 3,000 detentions a day. The drop is even more remarkable because it follows a hiring surge last fall—pushed by Miller—to add 12,000 ICE officers and agents. ICE also has fewer immigrants in its jails now, the latest statistics show. The number of detainees has dropped from about 70,000 in late January to roughly 60,000 late last month, according to the latest internal data.

The strategy, blessed by Trump, is a relief for Republican campaign strategists who watched with trepidation as the street battles in Minneapolis turned immigration, an issue that Trump had dominated in 2024, into a liability. Of all the standard policy-approval questions asked about presidents, immigration was the one that Trump came into office for his second term with the highest ratings on—a net positive of 7 percentage points, according to the polling average kept by Silver Bulletin, Nate Silver’s Substack. That fell to a negative-14-point rating in February 2026, before recovering to negative-10 points since then. Miller’s allies, for their part, blame the Department of Homeland Security for feeding the White House incorrect information after Pretti’s death that suggested that he was the aggressor.

Mullin, who has no prior federal-law-enforcement experience, is being mentored by Homan, a former acting director of ICE, who started working for the federal government in 1984. Homan gave a keynote speech at a border-security conference in Phoenix this week that was attended by top DHS officials, telling the audience that the mass-deportation plan remains on track. “You ain’t seen shit yet,” Homan said, drawing cheers. His message was mostly aimed at critics on the right who say the administration is backing off.

Homan, who kept an arm’s-length relationship with Noem, has said that he speaks with Mullin “every day, several times a day.” Miller also speaks with Mullin regularly, a White House official told us. In a statement for this story, Mullin told us that he works closely with both Homan and Miller. “Everyone’s on the same page,” Mullin said.

But in contrast with the legislative negotiations over DHS funding last year, Homan and Mullin, not Miller, were the ones involved in talks on Capitol Hill to restore DHS funding this year, according to two DHS officials. Miller continues to conduct daily 10 a.m. conference calls with senior officials at the department and with other agencies involved in immigration enforcement, but the general tone has been less demanding in recent weeks, two people with knowledge of the calls told us. And the power center has shifted. “The new secretary is listening to Tom Homan and Rodney Scott before he is ever listening to Stephen Miller,” a senior administration official told us. “We just have law enforcement in charge.”

Miller allies say that much of his direct involvement last year with the Department of Homeland Security was needed to help Noem, who regularly feuded with heads of other agencies, requiring Miller to play a more hands-on role. “The entire White House has to worry less about cleaning up after DHS with new leadership in there,” the White House official told us.

There have been no accounts of clashes or tension between Homan and Miller, and the former has even praised the latter as “one of the most brilliant people I’ve met in my entire life.” But from the start of the administration, they have advocated for different approaches to Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. Miller has emphasized sheer numbers, and Homan prefers a quality-over-quantity approach that prioritizes immigrants with criminal records. “I have always worked, and continue to work closely, with Stephen and now Secretary Mullin to deliver on the President’s commitment to the American people,” Homan told us in a statement.

But Homan’s approach is the predominant one right now, and the department has been quietly reversing changes that Miller ordered. Miller had pushed aggressively to fast-track training for new ICE hires, slashing the academy course to about eight weeks. The accelerated schedule alarmed veteran ICE officers, and the hiring surge was marred by high dropout rates. In recent weeks, ICE reverted to a four-and-a-half-month training program similar to its former academy course, according to three officials who were not authorized to discuss the change.

[Read: ICE’s ‘athletically allergic’ recruits]

Miller has moved his focus to a new task force aimed at uncovering “fraud” among immigrant communities. He still posts regularly on social media about violent crime by undocumented migrants. He has stopped publicly railing against the domestic-terrorism threat of liberal activists, although a new counterterrorism strategy released this week still lists “Violent Left-Wing Extremists” (but not violent right-wing extremists) as a threat on par with narco- and Islamic terrorists. He has also begun to push for more radical congressional redistricting, arguing that Republicans could pick up 40 seats or more if they take advantage of the recent Supreme Court Voting Rights Act ruling, overhaul the Census, and persuade courts to exclude undocumented immigrants from population counts that determine how many seats are given to each state.

Several people we spoke with said that it is just a matter of time before Miller is able to reassert himself with new initiatives inside the administration. One former department official cautioned us against counting out Miller or predicting a long-term loss of influence on immigration policy. “In the end, Stephen is the one who comes up with new ideas,” the former official said. “As much as everyone loves Tom Homan, he’s not going to say ‘Here’s a unique authority we could use to do X, Y and Z.’ But the president likes Homan’s approach at the moment.”

This is not the first time Miller’s hard-line approach has hurt Trump politically. In the spring of 2018, Miller championed the policy of separating migrant parents from their children at the border, saying at the time that he viewed it as an effective way of deterring migrants from attempting the journey in the first place. That backlash was bipartisan and intense, forcing Trump to reverse course within weeks. The episode became one of the most glaring missteps of Trump’s first term, and it galvanized Democrats, fueling the party’s midterm victories. Miller took the setback in stride, retreating to craft new restrictions on migration that used laws designed to protect the nation from disease to cut refugee admissions and block asylum seekers after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.

But there are clear signs that Miller has not backed away from his own views on immigration—including on H-2B visas. As an aide to Senator Jeff Sessions in 2015, Miller helped oppose an effort by then–Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, a Republican, to raise the cap on the visas. (Sessions argued that temporary workers threatened “jobs and livelihoods of thousands of loyal Americans.”) In 2017, Miller emailed then–Labor Secretary Alex Acosta an article about rising wages in a Maine resort town after a shortage of H-2B visas. “Markets work,” was the subject line, according to a document obtained through a public-records request by American Oversight.

The day after the news broke this year that Trump had reversed his cuts to the H-2B visa program, Miller took to social media to broadly condemn any effort to experiment with “importing a foreign labor class.” “All visas,” he wrote, “are a bridge to citizenship.” It was as close as the staffer would get to criticizing his boss.

*Illustration sources: Aaron Schwartz / CNP / Bloomberg / Getty; Anna Moneymaker / Getty; Kevin Dietsch / Getty; Getty; Richard Tsong-Taatarii / The Minnesota Star Tribune / Getty.

Is Marco Rubio the Happiest Cabinet Member?

2026-05-09T06:00:00-04:00

It’s a low bar, perhaps, but no one in the Trump administration seems to be having more fun at the moment than Marco Rubio. Last weekend, he was acting as a DJ at a family wedding, headphones to his ear with head and hand pumping to the beat. Midweek, the secretary of state was at the podium in the White House briefing room, spitting rap lyrics and cracking jokes. (“Two more questions!” he said, before entertaining seven more.) And toward the end of the week, he was in Vatican City, being escorted through marble hallways by members of the Pontifical Swiss Guard for an audience with Pope Leo XIV, who has been criticized by the president and vice president.

Rubio comes across as the happy warrior, not the angry one—the one offering lighthearted jokes more than brash confrontation.

In a more normal time, he would seem like just another glad-handing politician. But consider the moment: Gas prices are rising, the GOP midterm outlook is dimming, and the war that President Trump launched against Iran continues with no tidy ending in sight. The president faces record-high disapproval ratings. Three Cabinet members have been ousted, and others worry they could be next. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is up on Capitol Hill testifying about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, and FBI Director Kash Patel faces questions about his alleged excessive drinking, which he denies. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is navigating the war with Iran and a closed Strait of Hormuz. Vice President Vance, despite his original reservations about that war, has been pulled in as a negotiator and defender.

But Rubio—the guy who once became a meme because of the way he sat uncomfortably on an Oval Office couch, looking exhausted with his many jobs—suddenly looks joyful and light. He seemed to be everywhere all at once this week, followed by a hum and then a buzz of: Hmm, he sure looks like he’s running in 2028. That’s the murmur that once followed Vance. Although people close to Rubio and Vance downplay any rivalry—insisting that they are close friends and ardent allies—it’s hard not to see a shadow Republican presidential primary beginning to emerge. Vance made his first trip to Iowa as vice president on Tuesday, to campaign for vulnerable midterm candidates, raise money for the party, and stoke interest in his own political future.

Toward the end of the Tuesday briefing, a reporter from the Christian Broadcasting Network lobbed a softball question at the country’s top diplomat: “What is your hope for America at a time such as this?" Rubio took a big swing. “It’s the hope I hope we all share. We want it to continue to be the place where anyone from anywhere can achieve anything, where you’re not limited by the circumstances of your birth, by the color of your skin, by your ethnicity,” he said.

He continued for nearly a minute in what sounded awfully like a stump speech I’d heard before—and, in fact, it was. Rubio had delivered, in portions nearly word for word, the same formula in his 2016 campaign. He said it on the campaign trail, and he said it from the debate stage. On Wednesday, Rubio’s official State Department X account released a campaign-style video, in which his lofty words played over a montage of Rubio and Trump and American flags. It even included a clip of Ronald Reagan as music from the Superman movie Man of Steel swelled. It has been viewed more than 4 million times.

Rubio is the secretary of state, but last year he also became the national security adviser. For a time, he was also the acting head of the National Archives and USAID. And this week, he was tasked with filling in for White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who had given birth a few days prior. “Another job?” the official White House X account posted to preview his briefing-room appearance as must-see TV. “Don’t miss it!”

At the podium, Rubio deadpanned and joked, bantered and riffed. He spoke in Spanish at the request of a Telemundo reporter and called on an Italian reporter he said he recognized from his tenure as a senator. He tried to work the room, lamenting that no one had a name tag on (“Back row, yellow tie!” “In the pink.” “I need to get a laser pointer!” “Right there in the white!”) He was learning, he explained; he was “winging it, guys.”

“They gave me a little map—I don’t know where I put it—of the people here. Some of you had, like, red X’s. I’m kidding. No, that’s not true.” He next tried to call on someone wearing black before multiple people butted in, prompting Rubio to marvel: “This is chaos, guys!”

[Read: The Pentagon may not be giving Trump the full picture of the war]

He parried questions about Iran and gas prices, trying to reframe the debate. Sure, Iran is pushing gas prices up, he argued, but imagine how little leverage the United States would have if the regime also possessed a nuclear weapon. “A nuclear-armed Iran could do whatever the hell they want with the Straits, and there’s nothing anyone would be able to do about it,” he said. (The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said in March that the development of a weapon was not imminent.)

Close listeners would have detected Rubio’s use—perhaps to make the complexities of geopolitical diplomacy and threat of nuclear warfare slightly more digestible—of early-’90s rap lyrics: He said that top officials in the Iranian government were “insane in the brain” (a nod to Cypress Hill’s 1993 hit) and added that “they should check themselves before they wreck themselves” (a paraphrase of Ice Cube’s 1992 song “Check Yo Self”). Toward the end, Rubio said he would take a last question. He pointed to Jacqui Heinrich of Fox News. “Many people want to know: What is your DJ name?” she asked. “My DJ name?” he responded. “You’re not ready for my DJ name.”

About 36 hours after leaving the briefing room, Rubio was preparing to arrive at the Vatican. He was the parishioner with the pontiff, a secretary of state with the head of one of the world’s largest religions, a Florida man connecting with the guy formerly known as Robert Prevost from Chicago, the former football player with the ardent White Sox fan. Perhaps most crucial, Rubio was the conduit between a U.S. president who has become a constant critic of the pope and an American-born pope marking the one-year anniversary of his elevation. For Rubio, it was one of his highest-wire acts of diplomacy yet.

Rubio is a practicing Catholic who regularly attends Mass, but he has an eclectic religious background. For a period after moving to Las Vegas as a child, he converted to Mormonism—immersing himself in its theology, studying church literature, and joining a neighborhood-church-sponsored Cub Scout pack—but after watching a televised papal Mass during Easter Week in 1983, he switched back to Catholicism. His family has regularly attended a megachurch affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, but he has maintained his home in the Catholic Church and written about its deep influence on his life.

Rubio presents a less outspoken version of Catholicism than Vance, who in several weeks is releasing a book on his 2019 Catholic conversion. Vance last month threw an eyebrow-raising brushback pitch to the pope, who had criticized the U.S.-led war in Iran. “I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology,” Vance said. Later, after the pope sought to defuse some of the tension, Vance said he was grateful for the pope’s remarks and that “he will be in our prayers, and I hope that we’ll be in his.”

Rubio earlier in the week downplayed the idea that he was on a special mission to smooth things over, saying: “No, I mean, it’s a trip we had planned from before, and obviously we had some stuff that happened.” The White House referred me to the State Department on questions about the president’s hope for the trip, and the roles of Rubio and Vance. “Secretary Rubio decided to go to the Vatican (as is normal for a secretary to do), and no one ‘asked’ or ‘told’ him to,” a State Department official told me, requesting not to be identified to discuss the planning of the trip. Last year Vance led a delegation, which included Rubio, to attend the pope’s inaugural Mass. Vance had also met with Pope Francis a few weeks earlier, a meeting that occurred hours before his death.

[Read: The tiny White House club making major national-security decisions]

In the lead-up to Rubio’s trip, Trump seemed to make diplomacy as hard as possible. He had called the pope “WEAK on crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy.” In an interview three days before Rubio was to arrive, Trump said that the pope had been “endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people.” “He thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” the president told the conservative-radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt. The remarks were baffling to the Vatican. Outside the papal residence at Castel Gandolfo the next night, Pope Leo spoke with journalists and, reading between the diplo-speak, said Trump should stop mischaracterizing his position. He said it should be clear, through the decades, that the Church has routinely spoken out against nuclear weapons.

No tension was evident in the few images and video footage that emerged from Rubio’s two-and-a-half-hour visit inside the Vatican, where he also met with Cardinal Pietro Parolin, secretary of state of the Holy See. Rubio and Leo posed for a stiff photo: the secretary of state in a blue tie and an American flag pin, the pope in all-white vestments and a silver cross necklace. While acknowledging that the pope is “a baseball guy,” Rubio for some reason presented him with a small crystal football bearing the seal of the State Department.

“What to get someone who has everything?” Rubio asked, even though the pope, famously, gives up all material possessions. The pope presented Rubio with several gifts, including a pen made from the wood of an olive tree. “Olive being, of course,” the pope reminded him, “the plant of peace.”

By yesterday afternoon in Rome, when Rubio addressed reporters for about 20 minutes at the end of his trip, he seemed to grow more defensive about whether any progress had been made. He had updated the pope, he said, on the situation with Iran and how seriously the U.S. takes the nuclear threat. He emphasized his respect for the pope as a spiritual leader and said that, “obviously, the church has always interacted on behalf of a mission for peace and a respect for all of humanity.”

Would he recommend that the president stop criticizing the pope? “Why would I tell you what I’m going to recommend to the president?” Rubio responded. “But beyond that, the president will always speak clearly about how he feels about the U.S. and U.S. policy.”

Did he ask the pope to stop criticizing the Iran war? Rubio refused to say and then made plain that that wasn’t why he was there: “This was a trip that had been planned even before all these things had happened.”

Would there be a phone call between the pope and the president anytime soon? “Um, I don’t know. Maybe? I don’t know. I mean, it could happen.” By the end of the week, it was clear: The same could be said about a 2028 presidential run.

The GOP’s Stunningly Swift Gerrymandering Drive

2026-05-08T16:37:11-04:00

For more than four decades, the Ninth Congressional District of Tennessee stood as a bulwark, ensuring that the Black voters who compose a majority of the city of Memphis could choose their representative in Washington. With a nod from the Supreme Court, the state’s ruling Republicans took barely a week to wipe that district off the map.

Tennessee yesterday enacted legislation that splits much of Memphis among three separate districts, diluting the votes of Black residents and all but guaranteeing Republicans an additional House seat. The move was the first, and surely not the last, GOP legislative response to the Supreme Court’s decision last week gutting enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. Across the South, Republicans are rushing to redraw congressional districts that, because of the Court’s 6–3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, they believe they are no longer required to reserve for nonwhite voters, who predominantly cast ballots for Democrats.

Voting-rights advocates expected GOP-led states to use the ruling to escalate a nationwide gerrymandering race. But the speed and blunt force of the Republican response have been astonishing. Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry invoked emergency powers usually meant for natural disasters to suspend a primary election that was already under way to give lawmakers time to redistrict. Alabama Republicans held votes during a tornado watch while a storm flooded the state capitol to allow for new primary elections if federal courts clear the state’s path to redistrict. South Carolina legislators also took an initial step toward gerrymandering the district of Representative James Clyburn, one of the nation’s most prominent Black leaders.

Collectively, the moves could increase the GOP’s chances of retaining its narrow House majority in this fall’s midterm elections. Republicans received another major judicial boost this morning, when Virginia’s highest court struck down a statewide referendum designed by Democrats to give them as many as four additional House seats.

The Virginia decision will help Republicans in the short term, but the Callais ruling, written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by the Supreme Court’s five other conservative members, could benefit the GOP and reshape congressional representation in the South for years to come. “This feels like the echoes of the ‘southern strategy’ of the ’60s,” Anneshia Hardy, the executive director of the advocacy group Alabama Values, told us. “This is diluting Black political power.” When the Court issued its ruling last week, Hardy had just finished speaking at an event at the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery. She got back to her car and wept.

In Louisiana, more than 42,000 voters had already cast ballots in the state’s May 16 primaries when Landry halted the elections for U.S. House races. The move prompted chaos and confusion, election officials told us. Years of attacks on the integrity of elections have already sowed distrust among voters in the system, making the difficult task of election administration all the more challenging. Among election workers, “it’s crushing for morale,” David Becker, the executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, told us. He equated Landry’s move to ripping a tablecloth off an already set table.

To complicate matters further, Landry postponed only the House primaries. He did not call off the state’s highly competitive Senate primary, leading to worries that turnout for that race will plummet. In southern Louisiana’s Lafayette Parish, Registrar of Voters Charlene Meaux-Menard told us that many of the parish’s 160,000 voters are baffled about why three polling locations are open for voting, because they thought the entire election was canceled. The Republican visited the sites and wrote on Facebook that the election was still on: “The voters are confused—besides us—having to do this new process,” she said. “They’re thinking the election is not happening at all.”

In Tangipahoa Parish, an hour east of Baton Rouge, Andi Matheu, the registrar of voters, told us that her biggest challenge is getting the message out to 80,000 voters that an election is under way. She said many people seem to be reading only news headlines but not the information in the stories. “The headline says ‘Election Suspended,’ and that’s not true,” she said, exasperated. “Then it’s like a bad game of Telephone—somebody tells somebody else, who tells somebody else. And by the time it gets to the fifth person, we’re never going to have elections again in Louisiana.”

While election officials in Louisiana are scrambling, Republicans in the GOP-controlled legislature are now deciding whether to carve up one or both of the House districts in New Orleans and Baton Rouge that Black Democrats currently represent. Either way, their choice will likely contribute to a steep decline in Black representation in Congress.

By the time the Callais decision came down last week, Florida Republicans were already voting on a newly gerrymandered map that presumed the Court would weaken Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Tennessee Republicans were ready too. On Wednesday, they introduced a map slicing up state Democrats’ lone remaining stronghold in Memphis and its suburbs. The proposal cleared both chambers of the legislature yesterday, overcoming loud protests that included a tense confrontation between a Democratic lawmaker and state troopers. (The lawmaker’s brother was arrested). “They destroyed the votes of one community for their own political partisan gain,” Democratic State Senator London Lamar told us. “They knew that they would take away the Black vote, and it’s just downright disgusting and egregious.”

Kermit Moore, the president of the Memphis chapter of the NAACP, described his reaction as “anger and disgust.” “This mid-decade power grab by the Republicans is unlawful, unethical, and is taking the power away from a community that had the chance to vote and elect their own representative,” he told us. (For nearly 20 years, Memphis has voted to send a white progressive, Steve Cohen, to Congress. “That doesn’t matter,” Moore said when we brought this up. “Blacks had a choice in who represented them, and Steve Cohen has been that choice.”)

Although the Supreme Court has already blessed Louisiana’s move to immediately redraw its congressional districts, the legality of the GOP’s gerrymandering push elsewhere is not as clear-cut. The Alito decision directly invalidated only Louisiana’s map. “These other states are using” the Callais decision “as pretext to do what they wanted to do anyway,” Omar Noureldin, a former Justice Department official who now leads the litigation team at the watchdog group Common Cause, told us. Democrats and voting-rights advocates are holding out a slim hope of challenging Tennessee’s map, but the burden for proving intentional racial discrimination under the new standards established in Callais will be exceedingly difficult to meet. “I’m not optimistic,” Noureldin said. In Florida, voters in 2010 approved a constitutional amendment explicitly outlawing partisan gerrymandering, but Democrats remain skeptical that the state’s entirely Republican-appointed supreme court will toss out its new map.

[Read: The fight-club rule on gerrymandering]

The legal outlook is different in Alabama, which even after Callais remains under a federal court order not to redraw its congressional districts until the 2030 Census. The state is trying to get the injunction lifted, but that directive, along with impending primaries on May 19, initially caused Governor Kay Ivey to hold off on calling the legislature back for a special session. She soon changed her mind, and GOP lawmakers approved bills that would set a new election for House races if the Supreme Court rules in its favor.

Whether South Carolina redraws its map might depend on internal GOP politics as much as the courts. Republican leaders were hesitant to act until recently, in part because targeting Clyburn’s seat could put GOP-held districts at risk in a Democratic-wave election. But following the Callais decision, President Trump has ramped up his pressure on red states to gerrymander as aggressively as possible—even if they have to scrap primary elections that have already occurred. “If they have to vote twice, so be it,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

The president’s bullhorn became louder two days later, when most of the candidates he backed in Indiana state-Senate primaries defeated incumbent Republicans who had defied Trump by voting down a gerrymandering proposal in December. “There was no intent to redraw congressional district lines in South Carolina. Then the pressure came from up above to do that, and all of a sudden, we were off to the races,” Gilda Cobb-Hunter, a Democrat and the longest-serving member of South Carolina’s state House of Representatives, told us. Still, Cobb-Hunter said she wasn’t sure that Republicans would ultimately vote to redistrict, nor that they would definitely gain a seat if they did. “I’m just not convinced that what they think is going to happen will actually happen,” she said.

[Read: The fear taking hold among Indiana Republicans]

Whether or not Republicans succeed in redistricting South Carolina, they have over the past week retaken a decisive lead in the nationwide gerrymandering battle. Democrats had briefly evened the score in Virginia, but the nullification of their election victory combined with the post-Callais GOP moves in the South will make their bid to retake the House more difficult. If they are disappointed by the aggressiveness of the Republican response to the Supreme Court’s ruling, they do not claim to be surprised. Nor does Hardy, the Alabama advocate. “This is not un-American. This is very much so American,” she told us. “This is a textbook example of how power operates in this country.”

Democrats Might Actually Win Iowa

2026-05-08T09:26:03-04:00

Updated on May 8 at 5:24 p.m. ET

There are a few ways to think about Iowa. You might imagine America’s 29th state as the land of corn and pigs (20 million hogs can’t be wrong, reads my favorite T-shirt for sale at the Eastern Iowa Airport). Maybe you associate it with Field of Dreams, Caitlin Clark, or the future birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk.

You might also picture Iowa as flat, like a pancake. But you would be wrong. Iowa is not even in the top five flattest U.S. states, which is a fact I was considering last month as I watched Josh Turek size up a daunting set of stairs in a hilly Cedar Rapids neighborhood. After a moment’s consideration, the 47-year-old Democrat, who uses a wheelchair, shook his head, deciding against it. It would be the only house that Turek would skip that afternoon as he knocked on doors in the warm spring sunlight. At all the other homes, he followed the same elaborate routine without appearing to break a sweat: lowering his body out of his chair and onto the ground; hoisting himself backwards up a step using just his arms; yanking the wheelchair up after him; and repeating that until he reached the doorbell, which is when he would announce, “Hi! I’m Josh Turek, and I’m running for the U.S. Senate!”

In his bid to replace Republican Senator Joni Ernst, Turek is hoping to correct what he believes is another popular misconception about Iowa: that it is a red state. For the past decade, if not longer, many Americans have thought of Iowa this way—and for good reason. Although voters here famously helped propel Barack Obama to the presidency by choosing him in the 2008 Democratic caucuses, they later chose Donald Trump in three consecutive elections. Every member of Iowa’s congressional delegation is, at present, a Republican. Terrace Hill, the governor’s mansion in Des Moines, has housed a member of the GOP for the past 15 years.

But lately, a sense of deep frustration—with rising costs, with Trump, with Republican leadership in general—is rippling across Iowa.

As a result, Iowa Democrats have found themselves in an unusually charmed electoral position. This year, they’ve got a more-than-decent chance of winning back not just a Senate seat, but at least two seats in the House, plus the governor’s office. The November midterms could, in other words, mark the beginning of a shift for Iowa, a turn back toward the state’s more aubergine roots. “Voters are in a mood to send a message, and it’s not gonna be a great message,” one state Republican strategist, who requested anonymity in order to be honest about this, told me. At least that’s the Democrats’ hope.

The task will be tough, mostly on account of the math: Active registered Republicans in the state outnumber Democrats by 200,000. But other factors, including a surprisingly strong slate of candidates and the remarkably grim conditions facing Trump’s party nationally, have collided to make circumstances for Democrats here sunnier than they’ve been at any point in recent memory. “Iowa is a commonsense state masquerading as a red state,” Turek told me after an hour of door-knocking. For the past decade, Iowa Democrats have been repeating some version of this phrase like a prayer or an incantation. In November, they’ll have a chance to prove it’s true.

Turek has an undeniably striking backstory—the kind that tends to stay with voters. Born with spina bifida from his father’s exposure to Agent Orange in the Vietnam War, Turek has used a wheelchair since he was a child. After college, he was a professional wheelchair-basketball player and a four-time U.S. Paralympian, before working for a wheelchair and mobility-assistance company. He grew up in a working-class family in Council Bluffs, a part of southwest Iowa that, despite its traditionally conservative bent—his own father voted for Trump not once but all three times—Turek was able to win when he ran for the state legislature. “I know that I can win” Iowa, he told me, “because the district that I represent is more red than the state as a whole.”

But there is another compelling candidate in the Senate primary, one known to many Iowans as a progressive folk hero. Iowans first met Zach Wahls back in 2011, when he was a 19-year-old college freshman testifying before the Iowa House Judiciary Committee about his two moms. As a high schooler, I watched as Wahls’s young face appeared on the local news, and later, on Ellen. (His now-wife was watching, too, and would catch his attention with a blog post titled, “Marry Me, Zach Wahls.”) Now a 34-year-old state lawmaker, Wahls was the youngest person ever chosen to lead the Iowa Senate Democrats. He stepped down from leadership in 2023 after a messy internal Democratic dispute, and reemerged to launch this Senate bid, during which he has positioned himself as part of a new generation of Democrats who loudly reject the stale maneuverings of one Chuck Schumer. Winning statewide in Iowa will be “a hell of a lot harder” if Democrats can’t “be honest with people about the failures of the national Democratic Party leadership,” Wahls told me.

[From the March 2026 issue: Do the Democrats have a plan?]

But the truth is that Turek and Wahls are not all that different, ideologically. They seem equally likely, at least according to the polling on hand, to beat Ashley Hinson, the former newscaster turned representative who is the Republican nominee—which is to say, a little bit likely. Hinson’s biggest weakness in November will be the simple fact of her party affiliation, not to mention the pledge she made last year to be Trump’s “top ally” in the Senate, a vow that came before the president’s approval ratings plummeted like foreign demand for U.S. soybeans.

The Iowa playing host to this Senate race is different from the one I grew up in—and markedly so from the one my father did. Which is why some of the Democratic campaign rhetoric has taken on a Kodak Gold nostalgia. Turek, for example, invokes former Senator Tom Harkin’s “prairie populism” at every turn—Harkin endorsed Turek today—while Wahls conjures the bygone era of the blue-collar, river-town Democrat.

For much of the past 50 years, Iowa voter registration was roughly split between Democrats, Republicans, and no-party voters. Governorships passed back and forth between the parties like a pendulum. Thousands of pragmatic Iowa voters repeatedly chose to send Harkin, a Democrat, and the Republican Chuck Grassley to the Senate. But by the early 2010s, amid the rumblings of a new working-class realignment, Iowa Republicans began to outnumber Democrats. That shift cemented in 2016, when once-reliably-blue chunks of the state turned berry red, and then scarlet. Republicans took control of the state legislature. By 2024, Trump defeated Kamala Harris in Iowa by 13 points.

The focus of Turek, Wahls, and every other Democratic candidate in Iowa this year is on what they say are the consequences of that rightward shift. Some of the trends that these campaigners will highlight during the next six months include the historically high price of gas and fertilizer, and the fact that Iowa has one of the slowest-growing economies in the country. Voters will be reminded that Iowa Republicans banned abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and implemented a private-school voucher program that has undercut public education. They will hear the alarming statistic that Iowa has the second-highest rate of new cancer diagnoses in America.

Perhaps unsurprising, given the national party’s unique ability to wrest defeat from the hay baler of victory, Iowa Democrats have not managed to gain much traction before now. But circumstances are shifting fundamentally. In a previously unthinkable twist, more Iowans are now more unhappy with Trump than happy with him. Ernst’s polling numbers collapsed before she announced that she wasn’t seeking reelection, and this year, Governor Kim Reynolds was ranked the least popular governor in the country for the eighth quarter in a row.

Against this backdrop, Turek and Wahls aren’t the only Democrats trying their luck; candidates are running to replace Republicans in all four of Iowa’s House districts, at least two of which seem very competitive. Many more are running to take back the state legislature. The candidate currently getting the most attention is Rob Sand, the 43-year-old state auditor running for governor.

A baby-faced former prosecutor, Sand cuts a pleasantly inoffensive figure. He goes to church, and he hunts. He seems smart but not intimidatingly so—a good ol’ boy who reads. Sand’s ads, in which he pushes government efficiency and jail time for politicians who misuse taxpayer dollars, are difficult to categorize ideologically, which is, of course, intentional. He often professes his frustration with the two-party system, and one gets the impression that Sand is a Democrat in the same way that a platypus is a mammal: only technically. Even Republicans acknowledge this. “He tries to—and does—sound like a post-partisan truth teller,” the Iowa GOP strategist told me.

[Read: The most dangerous Democrat in Iowa]

Sand has raised more money than any other candidate in the governor’s race. None of his would-be opponents—including GOP-primary front-runner Randy Feenstra, a religious conservative whom much of the MAGA base views as insufficiently loyal to Trump, or Zach Lahn, an “Iowa First” Republican with a breathy new TV ad about taking schools back from “the Marxists” and protecting the “Western tradition”—seem to have the juice to beat him. Recent surveys have Sand leading Feenstra by 8 to 12 points.

Here is the part of the story where icy water rains down on all of the Democrats’ dreams. They will probably not take back either chamber of the Iowa state legislature. And on the federal level, let’s not forget that Democrats have had false hope before. In the last days of the 2024 election season, a report from the renowned Iowa pollster Ann Selzer showed Harris leading Trump by three points among likely voters in the state. Trump trounced her by four times that margin.

The truth of the matter is that politics is a numbers game, and the Democrats will probably enter November with an enormous voter disadvantage. Even if they can persuade some independents to pull the lever for them, will it be enough?

Only 15 or 20 people showed up to the United Auto Workers hall in Burlington to see Wahls speak on April 23. Burlington, my hometown, is one of those Iowa river communities that used to be home to a highly organized labor movement and a reliably Democratic electorate. That movement is weaker now, as manufacturers keep leaving, including, most recently, the Case New Holland backhoe-manufacturing plant. I arrived early to Wahls’s event, where a handful of people were taping up posters and unpacking containers of Billy Sims Barbecue. A gray-haired woman introduced herself. “I’m Tall Mom,” she said. It took me a second to realize that she was Terry Wahls, the taller of Zach’s mothers. The shorter one, Jackie Reger, was busy pouring ice over a bucket of pop cans. Tall Mom and I spoke for a minute about her son, until she broached the subject of Turek and the fact that he, not Zach, had been endorsed by the national political-action committee VoteVets. “One thing I think is interesting—” Tall Mom began, before a Wahls campaign aide rushed over to assign her an urgent task.

Iowa’s Democratic Senate primary hasn’t felt nearly as ugly as the one currently playing out in Michigan, or the race that just wrapped in Texas. Still, discussion about Turek and Wahls has lately taken on a fevered quality. Wahls is accusing Turek of being a Washington insider; in response, Turek has accused Wahls of spending too much energy campaigning against Schumer, rather than Republicans. Online, East Coast party strategists post elaborate X threads about Who Is More Electable.

[Read: Things are about to get ugly in Texas]

The people who will actually decide the race—Iowa Democrats—seem caught in the middle. Talking to them about Sand is one thing; the state auditor seems so universally beloved by state Democrats that one wonders how he escapes party events without being smothered by kisses. But talking with those same voters about Turek and Wahls reminded me of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, when Iowans, tasked with choosing the most electable candidate from a pack of popular ones, seemed frantic. Now, as then, they are painfully aware of the opportunity before them, and desperate not to squander it.

Wahls is better known in Iowa. Plus, he’s younger. “It’s time for new leadership,” Tom Courtney, a former state lawmaker, told me in the UAW hall. Iowa labor groups have mostly aligned behind Wahls. He’s more electable, former Representative Dave Loebsack told me, because he’s had more experience in the state house, and therefore more experience working with people who don’t agree with him.

But Wahls has never campaigned against a Republican, and many Iowans see Turek as more electable, given that he has twice beaten Republican opponents in a competitive district. “When we made the decision, it was not cavalier; it was extremely thoughtful,” Sue Dvorsky, a former chair of the Iowa Democratic Party, told me. Given the uncertain political dynamics, it is “critical who we put at the top” of the November ballot, she said. Turek “wins,” she added. “And he wins hard, hard places.” The race might ultimately come down to geography. Hailing from a part of the state so incorrigibly blue as to have earned itself the nickname the “People’s Republic of Johnson County” will be a difficult burden to overcome. “It’s not anything Zach has done,” Jeff Link, a Democratic strategist, told me. “It’s the fact that he’s from Iowa City.” (During my interview with Turek, he assured me that he would never, under any circumstances, deign to live in eastern Iowa.)

We don’t have much in the way of pure, unbiased polling. A survey sponsored by VoteVets had Turek up 20 points over Wahls. Another, brought by a Teamsters local union, showed Wahls up 18. Which helps to explain all the deliberation and careful couching from Democrats, who seem to recognize the hurdles ahead. They’ve watched demographics shift, counties transform, and voters lose interest, all in the span of a decade and a half.

[Read: Trump voters are over it ]

Still, opportunity glimmers.

During Turek’s door-knocking expedition in Cedar Rapids, he’d rung a few bells at the houses of voters who weren’t home, left a flyer, and carried on. But as he rolled through the neighborhood, with me trotting alongside him, three different residents—two on foot, one by car—chased him down to say hello. They’d been so disappointed to have missed him, and each was eager to assure Turek that this year, things just feel different in Iowa. One of them, a former teacher named Tom Holmes, spent a moment lamenting the “Republican domination” of the state. But Holmes also had urgent advice for the Democrat: “Keep it going, keep it going, keep it going.”

This article originally misstated the nature of Turek's previous electoral victories.

Kash Patel’s Personalized Bourbon Stash

2026-05-06T16:26:00-04:00

One of J. Edgar Hoover’s greatest reforms at the FBI was his embrace of fingerprinting. During the 1930s, visitors to the FBI offices in Washington, D.C., received souvenir fingerprint cards featuring his name. The men who succeeded him as FBI director were more discreet and judicious, mindful of the cult of personality that had developed around Hoover. They generally avoided giving out branded swag.

But then came Kash Patel.

President Trump’s FBI director has a great deal of affection for swag. Merchandise for sale on a website he co-founded—still operating, nearly 15 months into his term—includes beanies ($35), T-shirts ($35), orange camo hoodies ($65), trucker caps ($25), “government gangsters” playing cards (on sale for $10), and a Fight With Kash Punisher scarf ($25).

One thing not for sale is liquor, because liquor is something Patel gives away for free.

Last month, I reported that FBI personnel were alarmed by what they said was erratic behavior and excessive drinking by Patel. (The FBI director has denied the allegations and filed a defamation suit against The Atlantic and me.)

After my story appeared, I heard from people in Patel’s orbit and people he has met at public functions, who told me that it is not unusual for him to travel with a supply of personalized branded bourbon. The bottles bear the imprint of the Kentucky distillery Woodford Reserve, and are engraved with the words “Kash Patel FBI Director,” as well as a rendering of an FBI shield. Surrounding the shield is a band of text featuring Patel’s director title and his favored spelling of his first name: Ka$h. An eagle holds the shield in its talons, along with the number 9, presumably a reference to Patel’s place in the history of FBI directors. In some cases, the 750-milliliter bottles bear Patel’s signature, with “#9” there as well. One such bottle popped up on an online auction site shortly after my story appeared, and The Atlantic later purchased it. (The person who sold it to us did not want to be named, but said that the bottle was a gift from Patel at an event in Las Vegas.)

The Atlantic

Patel’s signature and “#9” appears on the bottle obtained by The Atlantic. The “#9” is presumably a reference to his place in the history of FBI directors.

Patel has given out bottles of his personalized whiskey to FBI staff as well as civilians he encounters in his duties, according to eight people, including current and former FBI and Department of Justice employees and others who are familiar with Patel’s distribution of the bottles. Most of them spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal.

Patel has distributed his self-branded bottles while on official business, including during at least one FBI event. He and his team have transported the whiskey using a DOJ plane, including when he went to Milan during the Olympics in February. One of the bottles was left behind in a locker room, according to a person who was there. (I reviewed a photograph of the bottle.) On the same trip, Patel was filmed drinking beer with the gold-medal-winning U.S. men’s hockey team—behavior that officials have said did not sit well with the teetotaling president. Patel defended himself at the time, saying he was just celebrating with his “friends” on the hockey team. Patel’s use of DOJ aircraft to transport cases of alcohol has been the subject of discussion among FBI staff.

The FBI did not dispute that Patel gives out bottles of whiskey inscribed with his name, but in response to a detailed list of questions, a spokesperson portrayed the gifts as routine within the FBI and the broader government. He added that “the bottles in question are part of a tradition in the FBI that started well over a decade ago, long before Director Patel arrived. Senior Bureau officials have long exchanged commemorative items in formal gift settings consistent with ethics rules. Director Patel has followed all applicable ethical guidelines and pays for any personal gift himself.”

The spokesperson declined to clarify which ethical rules Patel was following, when the bottles were engraved with Patel’s name, or whether any bottles had actually been reimbursed as personal gifts. The FBI also declined to provide images of bottles bearing the names of past directors. When I reached a former longtime senior FBI official to ask whether he’d ever seen personally branded liquor bottles distributed by a previous FBI director, he burst out laughing.

[Listen: The Kash Patel fallout]

Several current and former FBI employees, including multiple senior leaders, told me that the director regularly handing out his own personally branded bourbon, including to civilians outside the bureau, was unheard-of. Current and former agents also told me they were concerned by Patel’s gifts of personalized bourbon. The FBI has traditionally had a zero-tolerance approach to unauthorized use of alcohol on the job and for its misuse while off duty. But that standard is bending under Patel’s leadership, one former agent told me. “It is so weird and uncomfortable,” this person said. Another former agent described the bottles as “demoralizing,” because they suggest one set of standards for the director and another for the rest of the bureau. This person said he believes that many agents would worry that if the director offers you a bottle, and “you aren’t on board on receiving it enthusiastically, you are getting polygraphed for loyalty.” The fear of retribution has deterred some staff from reporting their concerns to supervisors or through channels reserved for whistleblowers.

In March, Patel and his team brought at least one case of bourbon to the FBI’s training facility in Quantico, Virginia, for a “training seminar,” where Ultimate Fighting Championship athletes provided mixed-martial-arts instruction to aspiring FBI agents and senior staff. At one point at least one bottle went missing, which caused the director to “lose his mind,” according to clients of Kurt Siuzdak, a retired agent who has assisted FBI agents, including whistleblowers, with legal issues. Siuzdak told me that multiple agents contacted him for legal guidance after Patel began threatening to polygraph and prosecute his staff over the missing bottle. “It turned into a shitshow,” Siuzdak said. Other attorneys told me they received similar calls from FBI employees regarding concerns about Patel’s bottles.

Siuzdak and the other attorneys said their clients find themselves in a difficult situation. FBI agents “have a duty to disclose wrongdoing,” Siuzdak said. But if you make allegations against Patel, “you’re screwed.” Siuzdak said agents are particularly troubled about reputational damage from proximity to conduct that is not clearly within FBI rules and norms, which could be used to challenge their professional credibility. “Street agents know that integrity is the most important thing for their jobs,” he said. “Without integrity, you can’t testify.”

Siuzdak, whose career spanned more than 20 years in the FBI as well as time in the military, has given unusual advice to current FBI employees who seek his counsel: “I tell people to run from him.”

A spokesperson for Woodford Reserve said she did not have information about who had ordered the bottles or when. “Consumers who purchase Woodford Reserve occasionally have images and messages engraved on the bottle,” Elizabeth Conway, the director of external communications for the distillery’s parent company, told me. “These engravings occur after the point of purchase.”

Patel’s affection for bourbon is long-standing; during the first Trump administration, he and his colleagues at the National Security Council kept a barrel of it on hand to celebrate successful hostage negotiations and rescues, The New Yorker reported last year. (Patel served as the council’s senior director for counterterrorism at the time.)

Patel’s enthusiasm for self-branded merchandise is also well documented. “He is known as being very merch forward,” one DOJ employee told me. Even before he was confirmed as FBI director, Patel sent out Ka$h-branded merch boxes that included hats, socks, and other items depicting the comic-book character the Punisher, one person who received such a box told me. As my colleague Elaina Plott Calabro reported in 2024, before Patel became FBI director, he previously sold “Justice for All” #J6PC tees in honor of those arrested for their actions on January 6, 2021. (That item is no longer available from the Kash Foundation, which was founded by Patel but is now, according to its website, “an independent nonprofit, not endorsed by, associated with, or influenced by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Justice, or any government agency.”)

Ebay; CSPAN; William Turton / X; Health Ranger Report

From top left: A screenshot of a Kash Patel challenge coin; Patel wearing one of his scarves; Kash Patel–branded shoes; Patel wearing his own merchandise on the Health Ranger Report podcast; another Patel challenge coin. Bottom right: A photo taken in an Olympic locker room and provided to The Atlantic shows another personalized Kash Patel bottle of bourbon.

In a wrongful-termination lawsuit filed in September, former Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office Steven Jensen described an interaction in Patel’s conference room in which the director presented him with an abnormally large challenge coin—a memento often given out by leaders in law-enforcement and military organizations. The coin was inscribed Director at the top and Ka$h Patel at the bottom.

“Jensen then noticed a collection of whiskey bottles and cigars on Patel’s desk,” the complaint states. According to the complaint, “Patel explained that he used to produce his own brand of cigars, but they are not in production anymore.” Jensen, who oversaw parts of the investigation into the pro-Trump rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6, was fired in August. (The U.S. government has moved to dismiss the case, and the lawsuit is pending.) Jensen’s lawyer, Margaret Donovan, told me in a statement that “there are line agents out there spending their nights and weekends trying to finish warrants, write reports, plan arrests. Yet the FBI Director apparently has the time to design logos, go to hockey games, sit for multi-hour podcast interviews. This is one of the most serious jobs in the country, not a vehicle for self-promotion and branding.”

A month before Jensen’s firing, Patel’s merchandise caused an international diplomatic incident. In July, Patel gave 3-D-printed replica revolvers to two New Zealand cabinet members, as well as multiple members of the country’s police and intelligence services, the Associated Press reported. The New Zealand security officials had to destroy the items because they were illegal under local law, according to the AP. A spokesperson for Patel said in a statement to the AP that “the gifted item was a 3D-printed replica of a firearm, and it was specially designed to be incapable of firing ammunition.”

[Read: Trump’s purge may be just beginning]

George Hill, a former FBI supervisory intelligence analyst, told me that Patel’s conduct represented a fundamental misunderstanding of the bureau’s history and of the culture of quiet professionalism that he had observed working under previous FBI directors. “Handing out bottles of liquor at the premier law-enforcement agency—it makes me frightened for the country,” he said. “Standards apply to everything and everyone—especially the boss.”

Hill and others described an organization struggling to uphold its mission amid purges of experienced staff and under a distracted leadership. “When you degrade the office like that, you degrade the impact,” Hill said, adding that he was particularly concerned about what would happen in a time of crisis. “It’s a failure to lead.”

Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed to this report.

The FBI Is Reportedly Investigating a Leak to an Atlantic Writer

2026-05-06T10:50:05-04:00

This story was updated on May 6, 2026, at 4:50 p.m.

Nearly three weeks after The Atlantic reported that some government officials were alarmed by FBI Director Kash Patel’s behavior, including conspicuous inebriation and unexplained absences, MS NOW reported this morning that the bureau has “launched a criminal leak investigation” that focuses on the Atlantic journalist who wrote the story, Sarah Fitzpatrick.

MS NOW reported that there is concern among FBI agents assigned to the investigation, citing two people familiar with the matter who were granted anonymity. Leak investigations are typically focused on government officials, not on journalists, with the goal of avoiding scrutinizing the reporters’ private communications, notes, or other work material. Investigators rarely subpoena a reporter’s records, to avoid encroaching on activity protected by the First Amendment. But the MS NOW reporting suggests a reversal of the normal process, with investigators possibly beginning their work with Fitzpatrick, former U.S. officials who are familiar with leak investigations but did not have firsthand knowledge of this situation told us.

“They know they are not supposed to do this,” one source told MS NOW about the purported scrutiny of a journalist. “But if they don’t go forward, they could lose their jobs. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”

The FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson denied the investigation and said in a statement, “This is completely false. No such investigation like this exists and the reporter you mention is not being investigated at all.” The White House referred me to the FBI.

The MS NOW report said that it was unclear whether internal interviews have taken place to determine who would have had “the kind of information” that appeared in the Atlantic story. It also said it was not known what steps investigators have taken in the case, including whether the FBI had sought to obtain Fitzpatrick’s phone records, examined her social-media contacts, or run her name and information through FBI databases. The government would need to obtain a warrant, approved by a judge, to review the contents of Fitzpatrick’s communications, or to seize her phone or computer.

“If confirmed to be true, this would represent an outrageous attack on the free press and the First Amendment itself,” The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, said in a statement. “We will defend The Atlantic and its staff vigorously; we will not be intimidated by illegitimate investigations or other acts of politically motivated retaliation; we will continue to cover the FBI professionally, fairly, and thoroughly; and we will continue to practice journalism in the public interest.”

This is not the first time in recent months that federal law enforcement has targeted traditional news-gathering practices in ways that seem designed to intimidate journalists and discourage critical news stories. In January, FBI agents executed a search warrant at the home of the Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, seizing her phone and other devices as part of an investigation into a government contractor who was charged with unlawfully transmitting and retaining classified information. Weeks earlier, Natanson had published an essay about how she had connected with more than 1,000 sources about the Trump administration’s overhaul of the federal government. Some of that work, along with that of Natanson’s colleagues, was recognized this week when the Post was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. In March, the FBI began investigating the New York Times reporter Elizabeth Williamson after she wrote about Patel using bureau personnel to protect his girlfriend and ferry her around, the paper reported. (It also reported that the FBI decided not to pursue a case.)

In an April 17 article titled “The FBI Director Is MIA,” Fitzpatrick wrote that she interviewed more than two dozen people about Patel’s conduct, including current and former FBI officials, staff at law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, hospitality-industry workers, members of Congress, political operatives, lobbyists, and former advisers. The article included several anecdotes about Patel that had not been previously reported, including an incident in which Patel struggled to log on to an internal computer system and thought he might have been fired, according to nine people familiar with what happened. Fitzpatrick also wrote that there was concern across the government about Patel’s drinking, according to several officials, and that he was known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication. At one point last year, Patel’s security detail requested “breaching equipment” because the director had been unreachable behind locked doors, according to multiple people familiar with the request.

Patel denied the details in the story and sued The Atlantic and Fitzpatrick for defamation, seeking $250 million in damages. The lawsuit alleges that the article contains “false and obviously fabricated allegations” and claims that the magazine did not give the agency enough time to respond. The Atlantic has defended its reporting and called the lawsuit “meritless.” White House aides have said that President Trump continues to support the FBI director, although he has not mounted a vociferous defense of Patel.

Last year, Patel sued the former FBI official Frank Figliuzzi for stating on Morning Joe that the FBI director had “been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover Building,” where the agency is headquartered. On April 21, a day after Patel filed the defamation suit against The Atlantic, a federal judge in the Southern District of Texas dismissed the suit against Figliuzzi.

The House of Representatives Is Turning Into the Electoral College

2026-05-05T07:00:00-04:00

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The very short list of constraints on partisan gerrymandering has gotten even shorter. Until last week, the Supreme Court had interpreted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to require states to draw some majority-minority districts. But in Louisiana v. Callais, it overturned that requirement and held that the VRA prohibits gerrymandering only if it’s done with the explicit goal of racial discrimination. If the intent behind disenfranchising minority voters appears to be merely partisan, the gerrymander is now legal. The ruling will allow Republican state legislatures in the South to erase most if not all of the region’s few blue House districts without fear of being blocked in court.

And so the gerrymandering wars, already awful, are poised to get even worse. Democrats will respond to the Republican response to Callais; Republicans will respond to the response to the response; voters will lose in the process. In a few years, almost every seat in the House of Representatives could be safely occupied by a hyper-partisan incumbent, beholden only to primary voters. The chamber could become something like the Electoral College: Whoever wins a state gets all of its representatives, and the winners are there just to vote for or against the president.

Because of the timing of the ruling, the effects are likely to be modest for the upcoming midterms. On Thursday, Louisiana suspended its primary election to give the state time to redraw the map. The legislature might eliminate just the one seat at issue in Callais, or it could try to eliminate both of the state’s majority-Black, Democratic-leaning districts. A few more seats could be in play elsewhere in the South. On Friday, after saying two days earlier that she would not do so, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey announced that she would call a special legislative session to redraw the state’s maps. Donald Trump has claimed that he has the Tennessee governor’s promise to do likewise. In other deep-red states, key deadlines have already passed, making last-minute map-drawing difficult or impossible.

The implications for 2028 and onward are more dramatic. Trump’s successful push to get Republican states to do off-cycle redistricting this year already blew past one long-standing impediment to gerrymandering maximalism. The removal of the VRA will make the arms race even more cutthroat. “It’s gonna be awful,” Sean Trende, a prominent districting expert, told me. Kyle Kondik, an elections analyst at the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, compared the situation to “an all-you-can-eat buffet.” Republicans could draw Democrats completely out of the delegations of Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, and Tennessee, and take another district or two in Georgia.

Presumably, Democrats would feel the need to respond. In some blue states, including New York, New Jersey, Colorado, and Washington, voters and legislators would have to decide to scrap nonpartisan redistricting commissions in order to join the gerrymandering free-for-all. In others, such as Oregon and Maryland, that wouldn’t be necessary. “I’d take 52 seats from California and 17 seats from Illinois,” Representative Terri Sewell, a Black Democrat who represents a sure-to-be-torn-up district in Alabama, said at a press conference after the Callais decision came down. By that, she meant all 52 and all 17. Could California, a state with more registered Republicans than any other, really send zero Republican representatives to Congress? It’s mathematically conceivable. Likewise, Illinois could theoretically engineer a blue-wash. The key is to draw districts that start in big cities and stretch all the way across the state, so that urban Democratic voters outweigh rural Republicans in every district. These maps are sometimes called “baconmanders,” because the districts resemble thin, curvy strips.

[David A. Graham: How the Supreme Court came to accept a practice it called unjust]

Democratic hardball would probably inspire Republicans outside the South to get even more ambitious. Their job would be easier, because red states tend not to have redistricting commissions. Opportunities abound in Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, and Kentucky. Even Ohio and Texas could probably find a few more blue seats to eliminate.

Figuring out which party benefits more from this mass disenfranchisement is extremely difficult, because so many variables—including referenda, legislator preferences, and state-court legal challenges—go into determining what happens in each state. “I just feel like you’d really just be guessing,” Kondik told me. Zachary Donnini, the head of data science at VoteHub, was willing to game it out. He tentatively predicted that states would stop just short of the absolute maximum level of gerrymandering, winding up with 206 safe Republican seats and 203 safe Democratic seats. Because there are 435 total seats in the House of Representatives, this would leave the whole country with only 26 competitive districts.

One factor that could stop legislators from enacting the most ruthless possible gerrymander—which even the Supreme Court cannot overturn—is a bias in favor of preserving incumbents’ districts. Creating a new Democratic (or Republican) district generally requires taking some territory away from another district that votes so overwhelmingly Democratic (or Republican) that it has votes to spare. But a congressman who usually wins by 20 does not want to see his advantage suddenly cut to five points—that means more pressure to campaign, fundraise, and worry about what voters think. A similar fear is that of the infelicitously named “dummymander,” in which one party tries to create so many seats for itself that it winds up spreading its support too thin. In North Carolina, for example, Republicans entirely control the map-drawing process, but both parties are competitive statewide. The state legislature could draw 14 districts that all slightly broke for Trump in 2024, but that could mean losing all 14 if the state shifts a few points to the left. (A final factor limiting gerrymandering is shame on the part of state legislators. But this is in steadily dwindling supply.)

Whichever party ultimately gains more seats from the gerrymandering wars, the loser is clear: American democracy. In a maximum-gerrymandering scenario, more than 400 seats in the House could be safe and essentially uncontestable, delivering to voters year after year an unresponsive and unimpeachable class of lazy representatives with little incentive to represent them. At a high-enough level of abstraction, the way out is simple: Congress could enact a federal law prohibiting partisan gerrymandering. The details are not quite as straightforward. One major impediment is, simply, that Republicans have never expressed much interest in ending gerrymandering. As each state gerrymanders, moreover, it sends ever more partisan representatives to the House—the exact representatives least likely to mutually disarm and end the practice that brought them there.

And no single reform is without its flaws. The Democrats’ 2021 voting-reform package, which all but one House Democrat voted for before it died in the Senate, mandated independent commissions in every state. But those commissions can deadlock or produce maps that are still unfair in some way, sometimes requiring the courts to intervene. Academics tend to prefer more creative solutions—such as having one party draw a map with twice as many districts as necessary and then letting the other party choose how to combine them, or switching entirely to a system of proportional representation with multimember districts—but academics are not in charge. If Republicans were to finally join the fight against gerrymandering, they’d likely have their own ideas for how to fix it.

None of these approaches would be perfect. All would be preferable to the status quo, in which politicians elected to represent the will of the voters find more and more elaborate ways to avoid having to do so.

Democrats Could Use a Cold Shower Before the Midterms

2026-05-05T07:00:00-04:00

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The Democratic wilderness is starting to look awfully sunny. Gone, for the most part, are the blame-casting, hand-wringing, and paralysis-by-analysis that gripped the party after Donald Trump’s reelection. Same with the constant grousing about how the party is fractured, leaderless, locked out of power in Washington, and unloved across the country.

Actually, that might all still be true. But you don’t hear about it as much. Democrats are too busy being giddy with anticipation for the midterms. Examples of this hyper-confidence began popping up at the beginning of the year (“Democrats will cruise to victory, including Senate control,” the writer Brian Beutler predicted) and have proliferated since then. Nearly every day seems to bring another Democratic overperformance in a special or off-year election, or another great poll for the party, improved House or Senate forecast, or headline about how Republicans are bracing for a brutal November. Is a blue wave coming? A blue tsunami? Or another blue mirage?

The causes for Democratic optimism are legitimate. The president’s approval ratings—historically a solid predictor of a party’s midterm outlook—have now dropped consistently into the 30s. Trump was already underwater on his two most important issues, the economy and the cost of living. Then he launched a protracted, unpopular war of choice with Iran that sent gas prices soaring, the Middle East into turmoil, and his numbers ever further south—all while he dismissed Democrats’ talk of affordability as a “good line of bullshit” and spoke nonstop about the need for an extravagant ballroom at the White House.

According to The New York Times’ polling average, 58 percent of Americans disapprove of the president’s overall performance, the highest share since right after the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. A recent Fox News poll also showed that, by four percentage points, Americans prefer Democrats to Republicans on the economy, the first time since 2010 that Democrats have prevailed on that question.

[Read: The fight-club rule on gerrymandering]

Yet to hear some bullish Democrats talk, the idea that the party might merely win the few seats it needs to flip the House—which was widely expected to begin with—feels needlessly cautious. In many cases, Democrats have become unnervingly unrestrained in expressing their higher-end hopes. “Your viewers need to know that the Democrats are going to pick up at a minimum 25 seats,” the unnervingly unrestrained James Carville told Fox News in January. “Maybe as high as 45.”

Until recently, arguing that the Democrats could net the four seats required to take back the Senate would have been a major reach. That scenario now seems more realistic, as Democratic candidates are polling competitively (or better) in a number of states—Ohio, Alaska, Texas—that once looked far beyond reach. But some Democrats are allowing themselves to think beyond the merely conceivable. “I feel like we’re going to take back the Senate,” Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told NOTUS, which reported that Schumer envisioned “as many as eight seats in play.”

“This cycle very well might be more like a 1974 post-Watergate cycle, where voters are saying ‘burn the ships,’” David Jolly, a former Republican House member from Florida who is running for governor as a Democrat, told The Bulwark.

Before anyone starts burning ships, a reality check: Democrats have been left devastated by elections in the recent past that they’d also felt great about. The midterms are also still six months away. And presidents—none more than the 45th and 47th—have an unrivaled ability to make news and redirect prevailing narratives. So, for that matter, do Republican-friendly judges, such as the ones on the Supreme Court who last week tossed a grenade of uncertainty onto congressional maps by potentially jeopardizing Democratic seats in majority-Black districts.

Democrats picking up 49 House seats—as they did in 1974—would be exceedingly unlikely in this or any modern cycle. The country is too solidly 50–50, and the congressional maps have been redrawn over the years in a way that will ensure a high degree of stasis. After Democrats won a net total of 41 seats in 2018—their biggest gain since 1974—they significantly exhausted their body of “winnable” seats and thus the potential for future pickups. Only three Republicans carried districts won by Kamala Harris in 2024.

“The pool of possible defections for either party in a bad year is a very small number,” Charlie Cook, a veteran political analyst and the founder of the Cook Political Report, told me.

Dan Pfeiffer, a former top Barack Obama aide and a Pod Save America co-host, told me that even if Democrats manage this year to repeat their popular-vote margin from 2018—eight points—they would win considerably fewer than 41 seats and probably closer to 20. Cook said that Democrats are likely to have a “good” year in the House elections—“good defined between a dozen and 30 seats,” he explained. “But I have a hard time seeing that go north of 30.”

As for the Senate, Democrats face an extremely high degree of difficulty. Cook pointed out that they would not only have to take at least some states that Trump won three times (North Carolina, Ohio, Alaska, Texas). They would also have to hold Democratic seats in places that Trump won in 2024 (Georgia, Michigan) and would likely have to defeat the Republican Susan Collins in Maine, who has proved over three decades to be a unicorn of electoral resilience. Her likely opponent, the Bernie Sanders–backed oyster farmer Graham Platner, has generally been polling ahead of her. But he is a political novice who is packing heavy baggage, which pro-Collins committees will undoubtedly unpack for maximum effect.

Cook believes that Republicans are still more likely to hold the Senate, in spite of the optimistic Democratic projections. “For a lot of these folks, they’re going with the vibe and not looking at the arithmetic,” he said. Still, neither he nor Pfeiffer, both committed data gluttons, thinks that the Democrats’ buoyancy is misplaced. “I mean, the situation is quite good,” Pfeiffer said. “It does keep getting better.” He added that 2026 might be “the best political environment Democrats have had since 2006, and may be better than that.” (Democrats flipped both the House and the Senate in 2006.)

It’s worth recalling that Republicans had similarly high hopes before the 2022 midterms. A consensus of forecasters in the media and from both parties predicted big Republican wins, while a much smaller contingent of Democratic analysts argued that the election would in fact not be so bad. Simon Rosenberg, a longtime Democratic operative, was the most visible proponent of this contrarian view—and a purveyor of what became known as Democratic “hopium.”

As it turned out, Democrats performed far better than expected that November. Republicans won nine House seats, enough to take only a small majority in Congress. Democrats also gained a Senate seat by winning a large majority of close battleground states. There was no red wave to speak of. Rosenberg was seemingly vindicated, and was celebrated as a corrective to the Democratic Party’s pessimistic impulses. He launched a popular Substack called Hopium Chronicles, which remains widely read. Yet his hopium-laced prognosis for Democratic victory in 2024 turned out to be quite off.

[Ben Ritz: Democrats learned the wrong lesson from 2024]

When I spoke with Rosenberg recently, he sounded cautiously sanguine about November but still generous with his hopium offerings. He thinks that Democrats have a genuine shot at winning the Senate. He pointed out that national GOP committees and super PACs have in recent weeks engaged in “defensive spending”—they are putting huge sums of money into states that appeared solidly red a few months ago.

“This was an admission that those states are really in play, right?” Rosenberg told me. Republicans, he said, are “really panicking.” (Republicans can spend near-unlimited sums—defensively and otherwise—because they enjoy a huge fundraising advantage over Democrats.)

As the hopium pipe keeps getting passed around the Democratic campfire, could it also carry a risk of complacency? Improved morale is great for the party, but not if it saps voters of their most vital asset: urgency. Pfeiffer did not sound concerned when I asked him about this. “No one’s going to stay home because they’re overconfident,” he said. “We are so far from that.”

The elections of 2024 and 2016 remain fresh in the party consciousness, which is its own activation energy. And Democrats turned out in large numbers in 2018, during Trump’s first term, whereas Republicans have voted less reliably in midterms. The president’s willingness to campaign could boost GOP turnout, but that’s assuming that he will be motivated to do so—and he has not seemed to be up to this point. It’s also assuming that his supporters will vote as he says.

Trump is still here, though, despite many past predictions of his demise. That alone should serve as the Democrats’ main antidote to hopium.