Politics | The Atlantic

Trump Is Getting Tired of Losing Election Cases

2026-07-04T06:00:00-04:00

Earlier this year, President Trump claimed a new area of expertise: election law. “I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject,” Trump wrote on social media, and found an “irrefutable one” that he would soon present. He suggested that it would allow him to bypass Congress and gain approval from the courts to impose his will on the nation’s locally run election system, including requiring voters to show identification while casting ballots in the upcoming midterms.

It was a heady time for a man who obsesses over voting policy and is seeking to prove that the 2020 election was stolen out from under him. Two weeks before Trump claimed in his February 13 post to have broken new legal ground, the FBI had conducted a raid of an election warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia. Officials made off with more than 650 boxes of ballots as part of a criminal investigation stemming from Trump’s 2020 defeat, an unprecedented action that the president hailed as a major advance for his unsubstantiated claim that the contest was riddled with fraud. The House of Representatives had just passed the SAVE America Act, a bill that would force people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and to show photo identification when casting a ballot.

[Read: A serious debate about an unserious bill ]

Now a sense of gloom has replaced the hope that Trump and his allies had when they thought they were on the verge of making good on his election promises, which also included eliminating most voting by mail and conducting mass purges of voter rolls. The SAVE America Act is doomed to fail in Congress, and Trump is at war with his own party over it. Nothing, so far, has come of the Fulton County case. And the president’s legal arguments are a lot more refutable than he claimed. Trump is consistently being rebuffed in court; the Justice Department has lost at least a dozen election lawsuits. Some changes to the election system that Trump laid out in a March executive order have been blocked by judges. The president is running out of time and low on options to change the country’s voting policies—which he has denigrated as “rigged” and reminiscent of developing nations’—because the courts, Congress, and the Constitution seem to keep getting in the way.

District-level judges have, over the past two weeks, ruled against Trump’s most significant executive orders on voting, blocked efforts by his administration to compel states to hand their voter rolls over to the Justice Department, and outlawed the Department of Homeland Security’s modified Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system. The administration has expanded the SAVE database, which previously focused on noncitizens, by adding Social Security records and other data from native-born Americans to conduct checks of people’s voter eligibility. A judge said that the expanded system “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.” Other judges are undercutting Trump’s assertion that he can remake the election system—which is administered by state and local officials—as he sees fit.

“The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections,” U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani wrote in blocking much of Trump’s March executive order that aimed to give the U.S. Postal Service new authority to determine which Americans could vote by mail. She underlined the words does not for extra emphasis.

The administration’s “efforts have been rebuked by every court to consider them,” Cathy Bissoon, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for Western Pennsylvania, wrote in a ruling that blocked the Department of Justice’s push to obtain voter data from the state. Bissoon noted that 10 courts had already blocked similar efforts in other states, before punctuating her comments with a footnote: “The administration’s demands have yielded one unexpected benefit, namely, bipartisan agreement. Five of the district judges are Trump appointees.”

They include U.S. District Court Judge Stephanie Gallagher, whom Trump nominated to the bench in 2019. She dismissed a DOJ lawsuit against Maryland seeking its voting records. “The Court joins every court to have addressed this issue,” Gallagher wrote in determining that an unredacted voter file is not something a state is compelled to give to the federal government. Trump has also lost in the Supreme Court that he helped reshape: Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote on Monday that states could allow mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, essentially dismissing the president’s argument that such late-arriving votes fuel fraud and distrust.

David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, told reporters on Monday that the Trump administration’s cold streak is remarkable. “It is losing literally every single case it’s involved in,” Becker said. “I was a former voting section attorney in the DOJ, and I can’t remember the DOJ or any administration losing more than one or two trial-court cases a year, at the most. We are well into the double digits with this administration, and the year is not even half over yet.”

A Justice Department spokesperson told me that the Trump administration is “devoting significant resources” to continue the legal battle, including through its “litigation to ensure voter roll maintenance and a clear focus on ensuring that American elections are decided solely by American citizens.”

Publicly, the White House is shrugging off the legal setbacks. “President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, told me in a statement, asserting that existing laws give the Justice Department what it needs to compel states to maintain clean voter rolls. “This campaign pledge from the President is why millions of Americans sent him back to the White House.”

But the president has done little to hide his frustration over his inability to make good on that pledge. The stalled SAVE America Act has led to shouting matches and standoffs over strategy with Republican lawmakers, leaving Congress in a legislative quagmire. And this year’s losing streak is a continuation of the president’s dismal record in the courts when it comes to voting cases. After Trump’s 2020-election loss, the president and his allies filed dozens of lawsuits in an effort to overturn the results. In the end, they lost almost every case. A Washington Post review of court cases a month after Joe Biden’s victory found that 86 judges had ruled against Trump or his supporters.

This is not to say that Trump has not had success influencing America’s electoral system, particularly in the past year. The president has elevated MAGA-friendly election deniers into the federal government, sicced the Justice Department on his political enemies, and drafted multiple agencies into his relentless hunt to substantiate his broad claims of voter fraud. The Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais ruling in April gutted the Voting Rights Act and cleared the way for several Republican-led states to redraw congressional maps and eliminate Democrat-leaning districts with large portions of minority voters. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court rolled back campaign-finance restrictions on political parties, which Trump hailed as “A BIG WIN FOR REPUBLICANS.” At the state level, pro-Trump lawmakers have implemented miniature versions of the SAVE America Act or found other ways to support the president’s vision for voting. At least 10 states have voluntarily turned over the personal information of millions of voters to the Justice Department.

[Read: The election deniers are winning ]

“They’re trying to appease Trump in these ways and implement his will in the states,” Gréta Bedekovics, the former director of democracy at the Center for American Progress, told me. In a report released Monday, Bedekovics and her co-author, Devon Ombres, found that at least 12 states have passed laws requiring documentary proof of citizenship for people registering to vote or mandating citizenship-verification checks for voters since 2024.

The setbacks that Trump has faced in court and Congress increase the likelihood that the midterm elections will proceed as election officials have intended, even though the president has, with little evidence, continued to denigrate the system as rife with fraud. On Monday, he lamented the “tremendous loss in the Supreme Court” on late-arriving mail-in ballots and said “it is more important than ever to pass THE SAVE AMERICA ACT.”

The president’s growing desperation over election policy has begun to bleed into other parts of his agenda. Last month, he abruptly canceled a signing ceremony for a bipartisan housing bill, suggesting that it was a “yawn” compared with legislation on elections. He has likewise encouraged Congress to block other bills, including national-security legislation, if the SAVE America Act—which Trump has deemed a “National Emergency”—is not attached. Congress left town this week mired in disagreement over how to balance the president’s election obsession with other pressing priorities, including the annual defense-spending bill.

Time is running out. Judges generally frown on any major actions to change voting laws in the weeks before an election. Early voting for the midterms will begin as soon as September in some states.

With Congress gridlocked and the courts repeatedly brushing back Trump, there is growing fear among election officials that the president may try to influence election policy in unprecedented ways, such as seizing voting machines—something Trump has said he regrets having not ordered the National Guard to do in 2020—and deploying federal agents to polling places.

The courts have proved to be a solid bulwark against Trump’s push to disrupt the midterm elections. But the president is nothing if not persistent when it comes to trying to bend the rules in his favor. As a result, the sanctity of the vote could rely on whether other government institutions and, ultimately, the citizenry can also mount a stand against the president’s worst impulses.

The Capital Is a Mess

2026-07-02T09:15:00-04:00

Photographs by Caroline Gutman

The capital city is an absolute mess.

The White House is an active construction site, with cement trucks going through the same gates typically used by the president’s armored limousine. There’s a gaping hole where half of the building once stood, a project held up by lawsuits. The South Lawn and the Ellipse, a 52-acre park between the White House and the Washington Monument, are completely torn up. The once-green grass where a temporary arena held a bloody UFC fight last month has turned brown. It looks like a demolition derby took place.

The Reflecting Pool is a murky shade of green, despite a multimillion-dollar renovation to repaint it American-flag blue and mitigate its algae problem. It is now surrounded by fencing and ominous signs that read DANGER EXPLOSIVES and show a bomb being detonated. Ducks that died in the water are being tested.

The National Mall seems to be wrapped in a variety of fencing, some of it in place for construction reasons, some of it to create a security gantlet for the July 4 celebration. At East Potomac Golf Links, at nearby Hains Point, is a massive pile of dirt that some golfers have dubbed “Mount Trump,” taken from the East Wing debris in preparation for a golf-course redo. The Federal Reserve is under construction, as are various roads and bridges, and the Kennedy Center is allegedly in disrepair—and now has an odd contraption of scaffolding and flame-retardant tarps covering its signage at the main entrance like a giant Band-Aid. There are construction cranes, National Guard troops, and portable restrooms everywhere.

Throughout the city, there are government signs proclaiming, We are making DC safe and beautiful. D.C. may be relatively safe, but much of it certainly isn’t beautiful.

Caroline Gutman for The Atlantic

Construction materials sit near the Lincoln Memorial on June 25.

Donald Trump has often prided himself on being a builder of grand things. He laid out an expansive vision for Washington, including a gargantuan new triumphal arch in a traffic circle that leads to Arlington National Cemetery. He aggressively took over the 250th celebrations in Washington, redirecting tens of millions of dollars to glam up the tired capital. But so far, he has done more demolition and renovation than construction.

“It’s as if there were a natural disaster, and we’re looking at the damage after a hurricane. Or think of Manhattan after the World Trade Center was hit by an act of terrorism,” Charles A. Birnbaum, the president of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, told me. “If you were just to parachute into Washington, you’d say: Gosh, what happened here?”

Happy birthday, America.

When Trump was getting his start as a developer in New York in the 1980s, his attention to detail could be difficult to manage, Barbara Res, who oversaw construction for the Trump Organization and was placed in charge of building Trump Tower, told me. He kept tinkering with the design of his apartment, she said, making changes that stretched the patience of the architect. He didn’t like the braille markers in the elevator and wanted them removed from the designs. (They ultimately stayed, she said.)

Plans for the Trump Tower atrium and lobby called for a collection of ficus trees, which Res said were grown in Florida for a year and a half, with an employee dispatched every so often to check on them. Workers constructed a special tunnel to bring the larger ones into the building, in Midtown Manhattan. Once Trump saw how the specially grown trees blocked views in the atrium, leaving those on higher floors unable to see the pink marble floor and indoor waterfall below, he realized that they were a mistake.

[Read: Trump’s other paint job]

“One by one, he made us cut those trees,” Res said. “We begged him, Don’t cut down the last tree.”

Every ficus tree in the atrium was gone, but Trump allowed four to remain in the lobby. Years later, when their leaves eventually fell off, workers attached fake leaves to the real trees. Trump was probably right that cutting down the trees made the atrium look better, Res recalled. “He interfered, is what he did,” she said. “But he let us do our work. He respected us. Now he doesn’t respect anyone.”

Caroline Gutman for The Atlantic

A reflection of the Washington Monument through temporary fencing surrounding the Reflecting Pool.

Caroline Gutman for The Atlantic

Scaffolding and fencing surrounding one of the Arts of Peace sculptures.

Caroline Gutman for The Atlantic

Visitors look at the White House from behind fencing in Lafayette Square on June 25.

In Washington, Trump’s dreams have been slowed by lawsuits. The Cultural Landscape Foundation, Birnbaum’s Washington-based nonprofit, has filed a challenge to Trump’s renovations to the Reflecting Pool and joined as a co-plaintiff on suits related to the president’s plans for the Kennedy Center and a “National Garden of American Heroes” in West Potomac Park. Trump’s proposals for a ballroom and an arch also face legal challenges. Some of the suits are aimed at proving that the Trump administration is avoiding the normal review process for federal projects that would reshape the capital landscape in ways that it hasn’t been in decades. Birnbaum said that he has been “gobsmacked” that the careful layout of the city and the legal protections that have been in place for more than a century are being upended.

The desire to give the nation’s capital a fresh look for a big birthday is not unusual: When the United States celebrated its bicentennial, in 1976, the occasion became an accelerant for projects that reshaped the city. But in that case, it was the culmination of planning that had taken years. A reflecting pool in front of the U.S. Capitol building was completed in 1971, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden was finished in 1974. The Washington Metro system opened its initial, 4.6-mile line on March 27, 1976. The Constitution Gardens, a 50-acre park along the Mall, was dedicated as a bicentennial tribute in May 1976. The National Air and Space Museum opened to the public that July.

Trump has argued that his projects are an emergency and thus need to bypass certain rules that would typically apply. (“We knew the 250th was coming,” Birnbaum countered dryly. “It didn’t sneak up on us.”) This is how the administration gave no-bid contracts for work on the Reflecting Pool, providing $14.7 million to the contractors that installed sealant that has been peeling away, and another $1.7 million for a “high-tech nanobubble ozone technology” that is supposed to combat the algae that grew so rapidly in recent weeks.

Trump is thinking like a developer, seeing open space not as part of a design feature but as real estate that he can try to build upon. White House officials disputed the notion that the nation’s capital hasn’t seen improvements and said that Trump has done plenty to spruce it up. They gave me a lengthy list of improvements that includes the removal of 154 homeless encampments, the rehabilitation of 1,143 benches, the fixing of 1,695 lights, and the cleaning of 28 statues and 45 monuments and memorials. The administration also boasted of installing 134 “rat-resistant trash cans.”

[Read: The YOLO presidency]

Trump has been particularly proud of the improvements and repairs to 22 water fountains around the city and to the changes he’s made to the White House complex itself. He paved over the Rose Garden’s central lawn and added patio furniture, installed two 100-foot-tall flagpoles on the North and South Lawns, and repaved the colonnade with black granite (Trump said that he would pay for the repaving himself but has instead billed it to taxpayers, as my colleague Michael Scherer discovered). White House officials told me that the more ambitious projects—the ballroom and the arch—will take longer because of federal reviews and the amount of construction required.

Caroline Gutman for The Atlantic

A banner near the White House on June 25.

“For the first time in decades, America’s capital has been dramatically transformed thanks to President Trump’s commitment to Making DC Safe and Beautiful Again,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement.

Trump toured several of his projects on Sunday, looking at Lafayette Park and the restored fountains; going on a motorcade ride through Memorial Circle, where he wants to build the arch; and then inspecting the golf course that he wants to redesign. After his tour, he released a 589-word post on social media saying that progress was being was made throughout the city on statues, monuments, and fountains (“Truly beautiful, even nicer than the day they were built”); the Reflecting Pool (“The criminally made algae is gone”); and Lafayette Park (“Has not looked so good since its inception in 1820!”). “We will build one of the Greatest Golf Courses anywhere in the World,” he wrote, saying that work would begin on September 1, although a federal judge has ordered work not to proceed without required approvals and notification.

Don Folden, a 73-year-old, has been stationing himself on the north side of the White House for six years, speaking to tourists through his microphone and trying to convince the crowds to “stop hating each other because you disagree.” But lately, his message has been as much about spreading peace as it has been about handling disappointment. He’s seen one of Washington’s most sought-after photo backgrounds disappear behind fencing and other obstacles. The other day, he shouted: “You came at the wrong time! The other side is closed too!”

The construction has also made the White House, a symbol of American power, seem small. Much of Lafayette Square has been surrounded by fencing for most of the year, with crowds still gathering to get the best possible view they can, though it’s not a good one. “Is that claw thing still here?” one woman wondered aloud during a recent visit, inquiring about the UFC cage that loomed over the White House like a giant spider.

“People are disappointed,” Folden told me. “The one time they come to D.C., and people are surprised to find this. It is discouraging.” He’s hopeful that the end result will be a nicer park. But there have also been security concerns after a series of incidents, and the Secret Service is aiming to install a gating system to quickly secure the area if needed. The National Park Service wants to reopen the park by July 4, although it’s unclear whether it will meet the deadline. When I stopped by yesterday morning, the fencing had been opened slightly to make more space for tourists. Behind the fences, the fountains are working and the grass is green, but I watched as a woman extended her selfie stick above to try to get an unobstructed view.

[Read: What I saw inside the Kennedy Center]

Caroline Gutman

Two visitors look through temporary fencing on June 25.

Down by the Potomac River, the Kennedy Center has kept the wrapping over the entrance, where Trump’s name was attached to the marble walls before a judge ordered it removed. A spokesperson for the Kennedy Center would not provide a timeline for when the covering might come down, telling me, “The scaffolding and tarp will remain up as crews address maintenance needs of the marble and soffit panels.” The wrapping also just happens to restrict viewers from seeing that Trump’s name is no longer there. The grand entrance to the building now identifies it as: THE JOHN F. … ORMING ARTS. It’s like an exhibit by Christo, only with scaffolding instead of polypropylene fabric.

Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser described the state of the National Mall as “different” from anything she has seen over her years living in the city, but, she added, “I’ve also never been alive for the 250th anniversary.” On Monday, she urged residents and tourists who want to attend the July 4 celebration to plan ahead and be patient. The forecast is for sweltering temperatures and a possibility of rain. A heavy security presence is expected, and fireworks are not planned to begin until at least 10:30 p.m.—when they will illuminate the not-yet-transformed city below.

Something Is Happening in the Democratic Base

2026-07-01T16:10:48-04:00

Something is happening in the Democratic base.

For a year and a half Democrats have been disgusted with President Trump. They’ve been similarly outraged by the fecklessness of their own party leaders. Now, after a handful of surprising primary elections last night in Colorado, a third observation is coming into focus: The Democratic base would like to shove the entire political establishment into a blade grinder.

In Colorado’s deep-blue First Congressional District, a 29-year-old democratic socialist beat longtime Representative Diana DeGette; in the neighboring Eighth District, a young progressive trounced a more moderate Democrat and will go up against a Republican incumbent—who narrowly won his seat—in November. Statewide, one moderate officeholder won’t get the job he wants: Longtime Senator Michael Bennet lost his primary for governor to Colorado’s attorney general, who ran to his left.

Two years after Joe Biden’s visible decline helped Trump return to the White House, these results are further evidence that the base is angry—at institutions, about Israel and ICE, and about its own leadership’s handling of Trump. But more than using any specific set of policies as a litmus test, Democratic voters appear drawn to the candidates who most radiate disdain for the status quo. Maine’s Graham Platner, with his sweatshirts and tattoos and the damning revelations about his past, was the first to demonstrate this desire, when he beat the establishment-backed Janet Mills. Last week, a pair of candidates endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani ousted incumbent Representatives Adriano Espaillat and Dan Goldman.

[Read: New York’s warning for Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer ]

“If you look and sound like someone who should be in elected office,” one Democratic strategist told us, “voters want nothing to do with you.”

Like Espaillat in New York, the 68-year-old DeGette was slow to recognize the seriousness of the challenge she faced from Melat Kiros, a democratic socialist who was born a few months after DeGette began serving her first term in Congress. This is partly because DeGette is not exactly a mushy moderate. First elected in 1996, she has been a progressive voice close to the party leadership for decades—and she ran with the endorsement of a former Congressional Progressive Caucus chair, Representative Pramila Jayapal.

But last night, both DeGette and 74-year-old John Hickenlooper, who was able to beat back a challenge to his Senate seat, seemed to have underappreciated the Democratic base’s desire for generational and political change. Kiros defeated DeGette by nearly 10 points; Hickenlooper’s DSA-backed opponent came closer than expected. “Diana DeGette hasn’t done anything wrong,” but right now, “being in Congress really works against you,” the Democratic strategist, who is affiliated with a race in Colorado, told us, speaking on the condition of anonymity to offer an unvarnished assessment.

DeGette’s district, which encompasses almost all of Denver, is solidly Democratic and probably a guaranteed win for Kiros in November. This makes Kiros’s victory similar to some of the progressive movement’s victories last week in New York, where three Mamdani-backed candidates won in deep-blue districts.

But north of New York City, the Democratic establishment scored a big win: The party leadership’s preferred candidate, Cait Conley, won her primary in a purple district now held by GOP Representative Mike Lawler. Her success allowed some senior Democrats to claim that where it really mattered—in the swing districts that will determine which party controls the House next year—the party’s voters were sticking with candidates with more crossover appeal. DeGette’s defeat in a safely Democratic district followed that logic. “Is it shocking that a further-left progressive candidate wins in a further-left progressive area? I’m not surprised by it,” Representative Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat who represents the Denver suburbs, told us as polls were closing last night.

[Read: The Democratic base is angry]

But at least one progressive victory in Colorado yesterday could have more significant ramifications for the national balance of power. Colorado’s Eighth District, north of Denver, is not a liberal bastion. Republican Representative Gabe Evans beat a Democratic incumbent by about 2,500 votes two years ago, and he is now one of the Democrats’ top targets this fall.

Many in the party establishment were rooting for Shannon Bird, a 57-year-old former state legislator, to win the primary. She secured the backing of The Bench, a new Democratic group that has prioritized electability over ideology, and touted her experience finding common ground to pass legislation. But progressives rallied around a much younger state legislator, Manny Rutinel, who has emphasized his working-class roots and vowed to fight the Trump administration aggressively. Yesterday, Rutinel captured the nomination handily.

Rutinel, who is 31, is not nearly as far left as Kiros or Darializa Avila Chevalier, the candidate who toppled Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, last week in New York City. (Rutinel touted an endorsement from Espaillat in his race.) Rutinel reportedly shifted his stance on a number of issues during the primary, moving away from progressive positions opposing fracking and supporting single-payer health care and student-debt cancellation. But some Democrats worry that those earlier views, as well as Rutinel’s harsh critique of cattle farming—a big industry in the district—will make him a weaker choice than Bird in a general election.

Rutinel being the nominee “will hurt us writ large,” the Democratic strategist said. The voters in a general election will not all be the same burn-it-down Democrats who weighed in last night; they’ll be older, moderate Republicans and independents. His frank assessment: “We’re not going to flip this seat now.”

Not all Democrats share that fear. And Rutinel’s race this fall is one of several across the country that could redefine what it means to be electable. When we asked Crow, a moderate who touts his national-security credentials as a former Army Ranger, whether he shared the strategist’s concerns about Rutinel, he replied: “Whoever that consultant was doesn’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.” Ideological labels, Crow argued, are less relevant to voters now than “whether or not somebody is a street fighter, whether they’re willing to go to the mats for the people they represent.”

After Democrats lost big in the 2024 election, some party members speculated that a Great Ideological Rejiggering was in order. One group of strategists launched a think tank to help encourage candidates to embrace “heterodox ideas” that make their candidacies more palatable to independent and Republican voters. On his podcast, Ezra Klein suggested that Democrats should consider running candidates who oppose abortion in red areas. Other strategists launched groups such as Majority Democrats to recruit and support more “electable” Democrats.

[Read: The Democrats’ heterodoxy problem]

But the beauty of primary elections is that they reveal the preferences not of consultants or talking heads but of actual voters—albeit ones who tend to be more politically engaged. And this year, those highly engaged voters aren’t as interested in heterodoxy as they are in total disruption.

Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, is delighted with Kiros’s win over DeGette, and with the broader successes of insurgent Democrats so far this primary season. He predicts more of them to come, including in Michigan, where his organization has endorsed Abdul El-Sayed, the most progressive candidate running in the state’s competitive Democratic Senate primary. Candidates such as Kiros and El-Sayed, Green says, will redefine the conventional wisdom about what kind of Democrat can win in what kind of place. “Milquetoast, boring Democrats,” he said, “are not electable.”

The party’s base certainly feels this way. We’ll find out in November if their instincts are right.

The White House Considers Granting 250 Pardons for the Nation’s Birthday

2026-06-29T18:35:00-04:00

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This story was updated at 9:45 a.m. on June 30, 2026.

Presidents have generally treated their pardon power like an embarrassing secret, closely held among only a few trusted aides and exercised quietly in the final days of an administration. Some have signed clemency warrants just hours before boarding Marine One for their final flight.

But not Donald Trump.

Since returning to the White House for his second term, Trump has wielded his authority to grant clemency with abandon. He issued pardons or commuted the sentences of nearly 1,600 people associated with the January 6 Capitol riot on his first day back in office and has publicly mused since about preemptively pardoning aides and allies. Now the White House is discussing a possible announcement of presidential pardons as a centerpiece of the nation’s semiquincentennial celebrations over the Fourth of July weekend, according to 14 people familiar with the conversations. The idea has been described as “250 pardons for 250 years,” an initiative that would put one of the most politically fraught constitutional powers at the forefront of the country’s birthday festivities.

The president had not been presented with the proposal as of Friday, and the idea may never rise to his level, a White House official told us. Trump’s advisers are still split on whether mass pardons for the anniversary of American independence would be a good idea. One adviser said there had been polling that suggested that a mass pardon could benefit the president, but any action was unlikely by Independence Day. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that 250 pardons were being considered.

Advocates for the plan say that it would both underscore the president’s singular authority and reinforce an image he has long sought to cultivate: “Trump the merciful,” as a person close to the White House described it to us recently. Meanwhile, the prospect of a mass pardon has set off an international frenzy of lobbying and dealmaking, in which even slight proximity to the president can be monetized.

Five current and former administration officials and nine private-sector lawyers, lobbyists, and other individuals with ties to Trump’s orbit told us that the jockeying among those seeking clemency for past crimes has been intense. One criminal-defense attorney called it “a three-ring circus,” and a former administration official said that it was “batshit crazy.” One lobbyist told us that he had started turning off his cellphone as the ”“aggressive” requests from clients intensified in recent weeks. All spoke with us on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters with high stakes in the days ahead.

One former Trump associate who had been approached to help facilitate a pardon described the push to be included in the possible 250 for the celebration of American independence as distinctly different from what had occurred in Trump’s first term. “Everything is now out in the open,” he told me, drawing a contrast to previous attempts to keep plans under wraps and disguise the appearance of selling access. For those hoping to obtain a presidential pardon or other form of clemency, this person said, “now is the time.”

The White House did not respond in detail to the reporting in this story. “President Trump takes his absolute constitutional power to issue pardons and commutations seriously,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told us in a statement. “That’s why we have a rigorous review process involving the Department of Justice and the White House Counsel’s Office—a team of elite lawyers who carefully evaluate every request before it reaches the President’s desk, and he serves as the final decision maker.”

Attorneys and lobbyists told us that they had been inundated with requests to take on pardon cases in recent weeks as word of the possibility of 250 pardons circulated; some firms have struggled to keep up with the demand. “In 30 years of practicing law, I’ve never seen anything like this,” another attorney told us wearily. “I’m exhausted.”

The “250 for 250” mass-pardon effort has been supported in part by Alice Johnson, who became the nation’s first “pardon czar” last February, as well as the Department of Justice pardon attorney Edward R. Martin Jr. and others in the president’s orbit. (Martin was previously the interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C.) Advocates say that the idea is to link the July 4 theme of freedom with correcting what some view as overly punitive criminal sentences or the “weaponization” of the justice system by the president’s Democratic predecessors.

The president’s advisers differ as to whether a July 4 mass pardon would be politically helpful because it would shore up support among the president’s allies, or harmful amid low approval ratings and weakening support among Republicans in Congress. Last month, members of Trump’s party openly balked at a DOJ plan to pay out $1.776 billion to those who claim to have been targeted by the government.

[Read: Trump isn’t giving up on his slush fund]

Those familiar with the pardon efforts said that although there had been indications by White House and Justice Department officials of “movement” in pardon cases in recent days, it was unclear what the president would ultimately decide if the plan was formally presented to him. “The list is ready when he asks for it,” one attorney who has been in contact with the White House told us.

Three people familiar with the pardon discussions told us that among the individuals being considered are the Malaysian fugitive Low Taek Jho, also known as “Jho Low,” who is wanted for his alleged role in an international financial-fraud scheme that diverted billions of dollars, involving a company known as 1MDB. Pras Michel, of the musical group the Fugees, is also being considered for a pardon after being convicted for conspiring with Jho Low and a Chinese-government official to carry out a lobbying campaign to end the U.S. criminal investigations into the scheme after the money was stolen. Another person being considered is Nicole Daedone, a co-founder of the OneTaste “orgasmic meditation” business, who was sentenced to nine years in prison for her role in a forced-labor conspiracy. The White House did not respond to this reporting before publication. After this story was published, a White House official said in a statement, “While the President is the final decision maker on all pardons, these individuals are not on the radar of the pardon team.”

Juda S. Engelmayer, a spokesperson for OneTaste, told us that the company was familiar with the “250 for 250” discussions but that “we know people are advocating for us” on behalf of Daedone. Engelmayer said that the company had not received any communication from the White House or other official channels. David Tafuri, who is among the attorneys representing Michel in his post-conviction motions and potential legal appeal, told us in an email that “we have never had any involvement in any matters related to a potential pardon and have had zero discussions with anyone in the US Government about it.” (Representatives for Low did not respond to a request for comment.)

One attorney familiar with the recent pardon efforts told us that there have been discussions involving “very rich, well-placed individuals” from India, Greece, Turkey, and France who were told that their cases were under consideration. Those who had recently spoken with the White House about potential pardons said that they were told that criminals sentenced by Barack Obama– or Joe Biden–appointed judges were viewed more favorably for pardons, and that those sentenced by Trump-appointed judges may be less likely to receive a pardon.

Two administration officials familiar with the “250 for 250” effort said that the White House could also consider individuals who had been charged under a law that imposes stiff mandatory minimum sentences for those in possession of firearms in relation to violent or drug-trafficking crimes.

In response to questions, a Justice Department spokesperson said, “Anyone is eligible to apply for a pardon and POTUS is the ultimate decider.”

The established process of applying for pardons runs through the Department of Justice’s Office of the Pardon Attorney, which is supposed to evaluate cases and compile a list of recommendations for the president. But people involved with the process told us that it has largely been replaced with an informal network of intermediaries to the White House. They use their connections to advocate for a pardon, in exchange for a fee.

“It is general knowledge in our practice that for $2 million, you can have a pardon,” one prominent white-collar defense attorney told me. “The clients come to us and tell us, I’ve been told I need to go hire this specific person, and [then] I will get a pardon.” Liz Oyer, who was the Justice Department’s Pardon Attorney under Biden and during the initial months of Trump’s second term, wrote to us that “Donald Trump has turned the pardon process into the Hunger Games.” Leavitt told us that the president “finds it detestable that anyone would even attempt to profit off pardons.”

We spoke with multiple people loosely affiliated with the Trump administration who had been approached in recent weeks by lawyers seeking pardons for clients as part of any Independence Day announcement. These people said they were told that they would make millions if they would use their connections to help facilitate the conversations necessary for a pardon—despite, in many cases, having no prior legal or lobbying experience. Most said that $1 million to $2 million was the going rate, though they were aware of clients offering many times that for more challenging cases. Some established white-collar defense lawyers told us that they were unwilling to continue to advise those who pursued pardons in a way that could be viewed as a potential felony by a future Justice Department once Trump is no longer in office.

Some of the president’s allies have been pushing for a mass-pardon announcement for more than a year. They came close to succeeding last year before the planned announcement was abruptly halted, two former administration officials told us. One former administration official told us that although previous administrations had focused on pardons at the end of the presidential term, officials wanted it known that the Trump White House Counsel’s Office and Justice Department were “open for business” from the earliest days of the second term.

Among the president’s advisers, some share the president’s belief that he should use his pardon power widely to correct for the “weaponization” of past Justice Departments. They see his pardon authority as a mechanism, in part, for currying support with key parts of his base as the midterms approach. Other advisers have warned that issuing pardons at this juncture may backfire politically. Republicans in Congress have also expressed their concerns about mass pardons and say that any action could complicate Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s already contentious confirmation process.

‘Rush Project at Request of POTUS’

2026-06-26T12:26:00-04:00

The pathway that connects the White House residence to the Oval Office has long been paved in Tennessee flagstone. Every president since Harry Truman made the 45-second commute, and made it without complaint, until Donald Trump. The dun rock would not do. Instead, Trump wanted polished African granite, carved in Italy, with a flamed-finish stripe—slightly raised, to prevent slips—running down the middle. As workers tore up the flagstone in March, a reporter asked Trump who was paying for the enhancements. “Paid for by me,” he replied.

But that wasn’t true. Budget documents from the National Park Service that I obtained show that the walkway replacement cost taxpayers $689,232, and is part of a $1.3 million project that included repairing adjacent stone and masonry and providing new hardware for nearby doors. A year earlier, in a separate “Rush project at request of POTUS,” the Park Service spent $347,503 to remove and replace the stucco on the colonnade wall, a project that cleared the way for Trump to affix gold frames and plaques mocking some of his predecessors.

This previously undisclosed spending is part of an enormous shift of taxpayer cash away from national parks around the country and into the Washington area. In order to pay for the president’s projects, the parks have had to cancel needed repairs, slash their budgets, and operate with fewer employees. Taxpayer spending on projects in the National Capital Region has increased 92 percent over the past year, according to the budget documents. The windfall draws on revolving maintenance accounts and more than $100 million in fees collected almost entirely from national parks elsewhere. Trump has ordered the refurbishment of fountains, the lining of the Reflecting Pool, and a $1.6 million Fourth of July fireworks display on the National Mall. He has requested billions more from lawmakers, who thus far have refused. “I’m so proud of Washington, D.C.,” Trump said Wednesday during a meeting in the Oval Office with the secretary-general of NATO. “It’s become one of the hottest cities in the world.”

But as Trump attempts to adorn his immediate surroundings with taxpayer-funded improvements, other parks are going without. Park Service employees I spoke with describe a quiet crisis unfolding as the Interior Department’s regular budget shrinks and political appointees redirect the dwindling funds. More than 900 Park Service projects that were expected to be funded this year never received the money, according to internal records. They include a $1.5 million roof-replacement project at the Yellowstone Center for Resources to halt pest invasions and water leaks, more than $3 million to continue operating the free-bus system in Acadia National Park, and a roughly $424,000 guardrail replacement on the cliff edge of Black Canyon in Colorado’s Gunnison National Park, a project needed to rectify a “significant safety hazard for visitors.”

“The president is prioritizing D.C. at the expense of parks throughout the country,” Emily Douce, a lobbyist for the National Parks Conservation Association, told me. “There is $24 billion of maintenance needs throughout the National Park Service system, and adding these new vanity projects just adds to the need.”

[Read: The YOLO presidency]

The dozens of pages of budgetary documentation show an $854 million, or 68 percent, decrease in spending on projects in park regions outside the Washington area in the first eight and a half months of fiscal year 2026, compared with the full prior fiscal year. That includes a $235 million decrease in spending in Pacific West parks such as Yosemite, a $254 million decrease in the Intermountain Region parks such as Yellowstone, and a $33 million decrease in Alaska. During that same period, spending around Washington increased by about $100 million, not counting about $310 million in donations that the Park Service received from allies of the president, most of which is going to fund a new White House ballroom.

Park Service staff have been told, in some cases, that their 2026 projects are being defunded because the Trump administration has prioritized America’s 250th birthday and other programs. A Park Service employee who was not authorized to speak publicly told me that some parks and projects have had “nearly 70 percent of their approved anticipated project funds pulled back,” forcing them to delay making crucial repairs to historic structures, hiring interns, and ensuring that trails are wheelchair accessible. “It means that signage and exhibits won’t be improved, youth programs can’t be offered, that a trail is not improved,” the employee said.

In response to my request for comment, a Department of the Interior spokesperson criticized spending by Barack Obama in his first term and boasted about collecting $2.4 million more in park fees during the first three months of this year by raising prices on foreign visitors. “The National Park Service has not only been focused on beautifying the district for the 250th celebrations in our nation’s capital but has also been working on many deferred maintenance projects throughout the country,” the spokesperson, whom the department would not identify, said in a statement.

The White House did not respond to a question about the source of funding for the new West Colonnade paving stones.

A memo distributed in March on behalf of the parks director, Jessica Bowron, warned employees of an “all-hands-on deck approach” for the semiquincentennial events that might make vacation time impossible over the summer. She also made clear that the employees may be required to take leave of their assigned posts for the events. “Resource sharing across parks and regions will be essential, and some staff may be called upon to support incident management teams or other mission-critical assignments,” the memo announced.

Earlier this month, about 400 staff from approximately 180 parks had been redeployed to the Washington region for various tasks related to the nation’s 250th celebrations, according to documents that I obtained. By this week, it had grown to about 450 staff from more than 200 parks. The cost of this deployment was not calculated in the documents. But under the park system’s policies, home parks continue to pay for the eight-hour work days of their redeployed staff, while additional costs such as transportation, overtime, hotels, and a per diem are shouldered by other service accounts.

[Read: Trump is setting the national parks up to fail]

That loss of staffing comes as many parks are already operating with fewer employees. The Park Service has lost nearly a quarter of its staff since Trump returned to office in 2025, because of terminations, early retirements, and a federal buyout initiated by the Trump administration, according to the National Parks Conservation Association. The Interior Department spokesperson did not dispute the major staffing cuts but attacked the National Parks Conservation Association, a nonpartisan group that advocates for increased national-park funding, for not donating a greater share of its revenue directly to the park system and for its current CEO’s public support of Vice President Harris in the last election.

Trump has proposed reducing the staff at national parks even more. His 2027 budget proposes cutting 3,967 full-time employees, a 31 percent reduction from the 2025 staffing level. The proposal is not popular on Capitol Hill, and unlikely to make it into law. Last month, the Senate rejected Trump’s request for $1 billion for “security enhancements” to the East Wing as it is reconstructed to make way for a new ballroom; Trump had tried to include that funding in an immigration-enforcement supplemental bill. The supplemental request to pay for the Iran war, which was released this week, includes $500 million in Park Service funding for D.C. projects such as a new seawall on the Potomac River. Trump’s 2027 budget calls for $10 billion to continue to beautify the Washington area—a request that was nearly eight times as large as all National Park Service project spending in 2025. In late May, Republicans on the appropriations subcommittee that oversees the Interior budget marked up a version of the president’s budget for consideration by the full committee. Trump’s $10 billion was not included.

In April, Senator Angus King of Maine questioned Interior Secretary Doug Burgum about how the money would be spent. Burgum said it would not go to new projects, such as the 250-foot memorial arch Trump plans to build on the Potomac. But he did not offer details on what projects in the area would require so much funding. “D.C. is like a state, and it’s not just the National Mall,” Burgum said. “It is for the greater capital region.”

[Read: The Cabinet secretary who wants his cookies freshly baked]

Many of the president’s projects are not onetime expenses, but will require increased funding on an ongoing basis. National Park Service managers in March approved using $32,095 from a maintenance account to care for the statues that Trump installed in his retrofitted Rose Garden. “The scope may be expanded in the future to include maintenance of any additional statues that are installed in the garden,” the budget document stated. “Work includes cleaning, waxing, inspection for damage, and minor conservation treatments as needed.”

When Trump began his renovation of the White House complex last year, the president said that he and his donors would bear the cost of his dreams. The Trust for the National Mall raised money to pave over the Rose Garden and put marble in the nearby Palm Room, a way station between the president’s residence and the West Colonnade. But the details of the spending, including price tags and the identity of the donors, have been murky. There are a number of other renovation and decorating projects with no public accounting of the costs: Trump’s marbling of a bathroom in the residence, his relocation of a copy of the Declaration of Independence to the Oval Office, his addition of gold filigree to the walls and coins on many of the internal doors.

Then there’s the most expensive project, the demolition of the East Wing to make way for a ballroom. Trump has been adamant that the new ballroom would not cost the American people anything. “We didn’t ask for any tax money. This is taxpayer free. We have no taxpayer putting up 10 cents,” Trump said on April 1. “The ballroom is a donation.” To date, $300 million of donations have been transferred to the National Park Service for the ballroom, according to the internal Park Service budget documents. But taxpayers will still likely need to chip in to pay for the broader project.

[Read: Donald Trump’s paint jobs]

Recently unearthed contractor documents, revealed by The Washington Post, describe the true cost of the East Wing reconstruction as closer to $600 million, with more than half coming from taxpayer-funded accounts managed by the White House Military Office and the Secret Service. The White House budget office released $351.6 million to the Secret Service this month, a transfer first reported by Roll Call. The White House has not confirmed the purpose of the funds, but the transfer happened after senators refused a White House request for $1 billion in funding for the Secret Service for security enhancements at the White House, including the East Wing project. White House spokesperson Davis Ingle described the East Wing project in a statement as “inextricably tied to the security of the President,” and said Trump was coordinating with “the White House Military Office and the United States Secret Service” on design and planning. Ingle said the president and his allies would fund the East Wing project “to the tune of approximately $400 million.”

The next projects on Trump’s agenda also lack clear funding sources or a defined budget. In addition to the memorial arch, Trump intends to rebuild the East Potomac golf course and install a new sculpture garden, and has floated plans to paint the Eisenhower Executive Office Building white, to match the West Wing next door. None of these projects has yet been added to the Park Service budget documents I reviewed.

Another project that is taking shape will be paid for by private donations with supervision by federal park officials: Trump plans to install a new landing pad on the South Lawn of the White House, which would allow the latest model of the president’s Marine One helicopter to take off without burning the grass. According to the budget documents, the project will be funded by a $5 million donation from defense contractor Lockheed Martin—the maker of the new helicopter.

The Meltdown

2026-06-25T19:34:00-04:00

A desultory, grievance-filled speech on what should have been a joyous occasion. The last-minute cancellation of a rare bipartisan bill signing in favor of yet another push for doomed, unpopular legislation. A loud confrontation with members of his own party followed by sneering remarks about some of the nation’s oldest allies. And a nonsensical accusation that, if we have it right, blames the algae-filled Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool not on his rushed renovations but on knife-wielding vandals … and maybe Barack Obama.

And that was just yesterday.

For President Trump, things aren’t going great. He normally thrives in chaos, reveling in unpredictability to keep his opponents off-balance. But right now, he’s just flailing. Despite his long-standing superpower of knowing how to control the national conversation and quickly change it, he has been unable to shake the consequences of a war with Iran that increased prices for Americans and weakened the country’s standing in the world. Trump’s poll numbers have plummeted. Republicans fear a November wipeout. Members of a panicked, fed-up GOP are beginning to defy their president. Trump, whose political image revolves around strength, finds himself diminished.

At this time roughly a year ago, Trump had overwhelmed Washington. He had slashed taxes, launched trade wars, angered longtime international allies, cracked down on border crossings, and eviscerated the federal government. The Democrats struggled to slow him down; Trump, meanwhile, openly mused about defying the Constitution to run for a third presidential term in 2028. On July Fourth, he punctuated the frenzy by signing a far-reaching and expensive piece of legislation—which he dubbed, in typical Trumpian fashion, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—at an outdoor White House ceremony complete with a flyover by the B-2 bomber that had just clobbered Iran’s nuclear facilities.

But as this Independence Day approaches—as the nation celebrates its semiquincentennial—Trump is unable to control the political narrative about a war that did not go the way he had hoped. A memorandum of understanding signed last week extended a shaky cease-fire and led to an initial round of negotiations involving Vice President Vance. A host of issues remains, including the fate of Iran’s uranium-enrichment program and its control over the Strait of Hormuz. Negotiations could take many months.

[Read: Trump in defeat]

This is not something that Trump wants to hear. He’s been bored of this war for a while, and in the West Wing, there was a race to be done with it. Allies have told us there are also quiet, behind-closed-doors doubts: What, exactly, did the conflict accomplish? Few, if any, of the president’s goals were achieved. Iran could close the strait again. Yet Trump has frantically tried to spin this as a victory, even as he walks away from some of his stated objections. He has taken to Truth Social repeatedly this week to defend the deal and once again seethe about comparisons with the agreement that Obama struck more than a decade ago. Trump continued to waffle as to what could come next—even suggesting a resumption of the bombing campaign if Iran does not comply, a threat that few take seriously. His attempts at unpredictability were quite predictable, and Iran has proved itself to be anything but cowed.

Still, many in Trump’s orbit tell us that they believe the war won’t have much political staying power. Their focus, at least for now, is not the long-term ramifications on the Middle East or America’s international relationships, but rather the political moment ahead of the midterms. They hope that the war will be soon forgotten—that the strait will reopen, that the price of gas will fall, that bombs will not need to fall again. Aides pointed us to a number of major events, including a series of Supreme Court decisions and even the World Cup, that could eclipse the war in the national consciousness. “The midterms are months away,” one official told us. “We’ll have lots of plot twists by then.”

But so far, Trump’s efforts aren’t working. And when his frustrations exploded yesterday, he lashed out against senators who have faithfully served him—and whose support he can’t afford to lose.

Tensions between Trump and Senate Republicans have been building for months. The president irked party leaders by endorsing a primary opponent to Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who lost his bid for a third term. Trump then infuriated them by snubbing Senator John Cornyn of Texas in favor of his scandal-plagued primary challenger, state Attorney General Ken Paxton—a move that appeared to seal Cornyn’s doom in last month’s primary runoff. Senate Majority Leader John Thune had strongly backed Cornyn, a former member of the Senate GOP leadership, and the party’s campaign arm had spent millions of dollars to boost his candidacy before Trump undercut them.

Senate Republicans gave Trump much of what he wanted last year, but he now faces some resistance as the GOP’s prospects in this year’s midterms worsen. Egged on by loyalists such as Senator Mike Lee of Utah, Trump has tried to jawbone Republicans into scrapping or circumventing the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold to pass legislation known as the SAVE America Act, which would require people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and photo identification when casting their ballot. (It would also, in some versions, significantly curtail voting by mail.) Republicans have never had a majority that supports eliminating the filibuster, and Trump’s refusal to accept that reality has frustrated senators.

On top of all that, Trump’s efforts to force members of his own party into retirement have created what’s become known as the “YOLO Caucus” in the Senate, as Republicans such as Cassidy, Cornyn, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina (who announced his retirement immediately after declaring his opposition to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year) have felt liberated to oppose and criticize the president in ways they would not have if they faced reelection. Tillis, in particular, has trashed some of Trump’s ideas and appointees with a newfound zeal—he called Bill Pulte, the acting director of national intelligence, “an incompetent sycophant.” And Cassidy decried the administration’s deal with Iran as “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.”

[Read: A serious debate about an unserious bill]

The intraparty feud came to a head yesterday, when Trump abruptly canceled a ceremony to sign a major housing bill—a rare example of significant bipartisan legislation—and demanded that Republicans first pass the partisan SAVE America Act if they wanted his approval. Things devolved from there. During a meeting with Senate Republicans in the Capitol, Trump berated them for allowing (through a combination of defections and absences) the passage of a resolution seeking to constrain his ability to wage war on Iran. Cassidy confronted him over the deal he had struck, and the two got into a loud argument in which Trump at one point reportedly told the senator to sit down. “I make no apologies for standing up to the president,” Cassidy told reporters afterward. “I am sticking up for the American people, even if I’m speaking to the president.”

Naturally, Trump proclaimed the whole thing a success anyway. “We had a really great meeting,” he told reporters. “We like our leader. We like our party. We like, really, everybody in the room—I don’t like a few people, but that’s okay.” The president was flanked by three of his loyalists: Senators Rick Scott of Florida, John Barrasso of Wyoming, and Lee, all of whom wore a Trump-style red tie. Thune stood to the side, his blue tie appearing—intentionally or not—like a small declaration of independence. By nightfall, the friction between Trump and Senate Republicans seemed to ease a bit—at least for the moment. The chamber took a symbolic revote of the war-powers resolution and defeated it. Two Republicans flipped their votes; one of them was Cassidy. White House officials pointed to that as a sign of Trump’s continued hold on the GOP.

When we reached out to the White House for comment, the spokesperson Taylor Rogers responded with a list of the president’s accomplishments and added: “President Trump is the leader of the free world, and thanks to his bold leadership, the United States of America has never been stronger.”

In the face of these struggles, Trump has continued to try to create his own reality. He returned to the White House from the Hill for a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. Yet even as Rutte lavished him with praise, Trump took the moment to attack some of NATO’s key members for not helping with the Iran war, and he unleashed particular bile on Italy as part of a diplomatic spat that began when the president claimed that its prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, had “begged” him for a photo at the G7 summit last week. Meloni denied that, which infuriated Trump.

But Trump was far angrier about something closer to home. As part of his expansive effort to remake Washington in his own image, he took on a project to fix up the Reflecting Pool. What he got instead was an on-the-nose metaphor for the state of his presidency: a no-bid contract to a crony that went over budget, ended in failure, and resulted in the pool being policed by federal troops. The pool’s liner has come apart, and the water has turned a brilliant, stubborn green—far from the “American-flag blue” that Trump intended. But rather than take responsibility, Trump has veered into conspiracy theories.

[Read: What color is the Reflecting Pool? An investigation.]

He has, predictably, turned America’s birthday into a commemoration of himself. Plans for a concert on the National Mall to kick off the festivities turned into a pro-Trump rally, and most of the music acts backed out once they realized how partisan the event had become. Trump went ahead anyway, making himself last night’s centerpiece with a few C-listers as his opening acts. But his heart didn’t seem in it as he delivered a short speech that included some nods to the republic’s founding and plenty of grievances. He spoke from behind bulletproof glass, and the crowd was small by Trump’s standards. Social-media footage showed many people leaving while he was still speaking.

Trump, ever attuned to what is trending, posted on social media today that he had a massive crowd and that “everybody stayed right until the end of my Speech.” He did not weigh in on the day’s breaking news from the Middle East: Despite the cease-fire agreement, Iran fired upon a vessel trying to transit the Strait of Hormuz, which underscored the challenges that lay ahead in negotiations. Try as he might, Trump can’t change the subject.

The True Believers at the Great MAGA Fair

2026-06-25T18:28:01-04:00

For one night, in the heart of deep-blue Washington, D.C., a fenced-off section of the National Mall became an oasis for members of the MAGA base. They had believed in President Trump from the beginning and carried him triumphantly back to power in 2024, and now they came to the grand opening of America’s 250th-birthday celebration in red-white-and-blue headbands, draped in flags, and sporting dangly blue AMERICA earrings. Doubts about anything related to Trump—his abysmal approval ratings, inflation accelerated by the war he started in Iran, his clashes with Republican senators earlier in the day—were, for an evening, drowned out by the roar of fighter jets overhead.

Last night’s festivities were meant to kick off two weeks in which Americans could come together and commemorate America’s semiquincentennial. But a string of artists had pulled out of events in Washington amid concerns that the celebrations would become the Trump show. And indeed, the evening felt like a Trump rally, with a montage of hits that his most die-hard fans know and love, including Trump’s favorite tenor singing “Ave Maria.” The president declared that America is “the hottest country anywhere in the world” and rattled off a list of ways in which his administration continues to “Make America Great Again.” “The best is yet to come!”

The crowd agreed. At this moment, attendees told me, when so much seems uncertain, the most logical thing for them to do is to put their faith in the president.

[Read: Thank you for your attention to this birthday]

Karen and Paul Depperschmidt are living the retirement they always dreamed about—road-tripping around America, visiting national parks. They live full-time in Wilmington, North Carolina, and they made the six-and-a-half-hour trip up to D.C. for the Great American State Fair—and the rally especially. The trip came with an added bonus—the chance to share RV parks with international visitors here for the World Cup. They met a family from Brazil and three Scottish tourists who were en route from Boston to Florida. “The nicest guys, they are having the best time,” Karen told me. “They love this country.”

The Trump rallies they’d previously attended—Karen’s been to two, Paul to three—had been a blast, they said. “Everybody’s so nice.” And, as lifelong conservatives originally from Texas, they wanted to show support for a president who they believe is keeping his word. “A lot of people don’t like it, but he is doing exactly what he said he was going to do,” Paul said.

When I asked them about the cost of gas—a particular concern for those living the camper-van lifestyle—it didn’t seem to matter: Prices at the pump are coming down, they said, which they knew would happen. More important, they told me, Trump was trying to eliminate the nuclear threat from Iran. When Paul finds himself questioning Trump’s decision making, he reminds himself to back up; the president has information that isn’t available to the public. “I think he’s earned our trust,” Paul told me. “I trust he’s going to do the right thing, and he hasn’t let us down yet.” The couple said they appreciate the breadth of the administration’s ambitions globally: across the Middle East and in China, Venezuela, and Cuba. In each place, Paul told me, he sees a president who’s “not ashamed to use the power that we have economically to benefit us and, in the long run, benefit the world.”

Rally attendees who didn’t want to stand shoulder to shoulder or who didn’t snag a chair close to the stage settled in on picnic blankets or broken-down cardboard boxes on the sidelines to take in nearly two hours of entertainment—including the U.S. Army’s rock band riling up the crowd with “Sweet Caroline,” Lee Greenwood singing “God Bless the U.S.A.,” and Alexis Wilkins, a country singer who is FBI Director Kash Patel’s girlfriend, performing the national anthem. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told the crowd that the night’s musical acts were “way better than those libtards that canceled on us,” to raucous cheers.

As I wove my way through the crowd before the show began, while many rally-goers were still making their way through security, it seemed that journalists and evangelists spreading the gospel were competing for families’ attention. More than once, eyeing attendees to see if they’d be willing to chat with me, I realized they were already speaking with a reporter. Multiple conversations were interrupted by someone hoping to share that Jesus loves us.

Suzanne Jones and Joey Ervin flew to Washington from Chattanooga, Tennessee, yesterday morning to celebrate their son’s birthday. They managed to squeeze in visits to both the National Air and Space Museum and the Washington Monument before arriving at the night’s festivities. Their son, Alex, was particularly excited to see the president do “the dance”—pumping his arms to the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.”

Jones told me that one of her biggest concerns going into the 2024 elections had been border security. She said she feels safer today than she did under President Biden, and she noted that the “disastrous” four years under him felt all too recent. “Having a president, somebody that’s protecting my country, that can’t even have a speech—that’s rough. It makes me feel, you know, insecure,” Ervin told me of Biden. He said that while he wasn’t necessarily a fan of Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran, “I’d prefer to do that than what we did when we withdrew out of Afghanistan—10 times out of 10.”

Not everything, the couple concedes, is perfect. They bought their house before interest rates dropped and prices skyrocketed in 2020, and said they wouldn’t move now, because the market is difficult and doesn’t seem to be getting better. “My view of the economy is once stuff goes up, it’s not coming back down—I don’t care who’s in charge.” Gas prices, Ervin said, were high long before the Iran war. “We were in L.A. in 2024 and the gas prices were $7. That was before any of the Iran stuff started.”

[Read: Trump in defeat]

Washington—where the president has called up the National Guard, put his mark on local parks, and turned the city’s monumental core into a construction zone—is a bastion of opposition to Trump. But not everyone in D.C. is critical of the president. Jessica Greenfield and her husband, a D.C. police officer, moved to the city from Virginia in 2024. She said she’s seen a “huge difference” in crime over the past year—the streets are clean, and there are fewer carjackings and robberies. She credits, in part, Trump’s decision to deploy the Guard. “I haven’t heard of crime in our neighborhood in a really long time,” Greenfield said.

The 2024 election marked Greenfield’s first time voting for Trump—a decision that put a strain on her relationship with some friends and family members. “It’s gotten tough with some of my more liberal friends, where they’ll really try to debate with me about it,” she told me. “I’m not really into that.” Greenfield said she reasons that “if I can have a nice street and walk my daughter and feel safe, that’s what’s important to me.”

Even those in the crowd who weren’t ardent Trump fans told me they appreciated that America’s birthday was being headlined by a showman. And they felt lucky to be at the party. “Is President Trump my favorite person in the world?” Ervin said. “No. But he is a good president; he does a good job. So we’re here to see him and put it on the bucket list: We saw the president.”

Trump’s Other Paint Job

2026-06-24T19:00:00-04:00

Halfway through President Trump’s first term, as construction crews were busy installing hundreds of miles of barriers along the southern border, a puzzling edict came down from America’s aesthete in chief. Trump wanted the border wall painted black.

The president had already lost an argument about what his “big, beautiful wall” should look like. Trump envisioned a solid-concrete structure, like the one Israel has built through the West Bank. But U.S. Customs and Border Protection already had a preferred prototype, consisting of vertical steel bars that, crucially, allowed border agents to see through to spot potential threats on the Mexican side. The competing visions pointed to a larger fundamental question: Whose border wall was it?

How quaint that seems now. Trump in his second term treats federal property as his own, demolishing the East Wing of the White House, adding his name to the Kennedy Center, and ordering the construction of a 250-foot arch opposite the Lincoln Memorial. His fixation with paint continued as he ordered a blue coating on the Reflecting Pool that turned it into a slime lagoon. He also wants to cover the Eisenhower Executive Office Building’s granite in white paint to make it better match the White House, next door.

Trump in 2017 was still willing to defer to experts, especially those in uniform. Although CBP officials managed to talk him out of the concrete-wall idea, along with a proposal to add sharp spikes to the top so that climbers would risk impaling themselves, they relented on the black paint. Trump saw it as another way to deter migrants. He told a story—since recited many times—about his golfing buddies scalding their arms after he installed a black-granite countertop at the snack bar of one of his clubs. The president even had a specific shade of paint that he called “flat black,” whose heat-retention properties he deemed superior. Potential border jumpers would burn their hands if they tried to touch the steel bars, Trump insisted. The president seemed to enjoy discussing the various ways that migrants could be injured or killed by the wall, according to his aides, who said often that he talked about grisly scenarios as the best way to prevent illegal crossings.

Neither CBP nor the Army Corps of Engineers, which manages the construction of the wall, thought that the paint was a good idea. It would add hundreds of millions in costs and saddle the structure with long-term maintenance expenses. And what if a future Democratic administration didn’t want to pay for more paint jobs?

Then there was the steel itself. CBP had selected a type of high-grade alloy that is well suited for the desert environment. It doesn’t require paint, because it develops a sheen of exterior rust, or weathering, that acts as a natural protective layer. Industrial-materials experts I consulted during Trump’s first term told me that a rough surface increases the steel’s ability to absorb solar radiation and transfer heat, leaving it nearly as hot, or even hotter, than black paint would, despite Trump’s claims.

The bigger problem was that Trump didn’t like the reddish rusted look. He told everyone that black paint would do a better job preserving the steel.

A former CBP official who was involved with the project at the time told me that Trump’s claims about the heat-transferring properties of black paint were “not the bang for the buck that was touted.” The official, who retains good relations with Trump-administration officials and didn’t want to be identified, said that the steel used for the border wall “needs the rust layer to protect it and make it last longer.” There was also discomfort at CBP with the idea of explicitly trying to injure people. “The negative optics behind trying to make the wall too hot to touch were a detractor for us,” he said.

[Read: The ‘big black scar’]

The border-wall project was more cost-sensitive back then too. The standoff with Democrats over funding in late 2018 led to a 35-day congressional shutdown. Trump lost the fight but moved billions from Department of Defense budgets to the project. His advisers persuaded him to prioritize getting as many miles of new barriers into the ground as possible, even if they couldn’t be painted, before he left office.

Trump pushed for the black coating anyway. He sent soldiers with brushes and rollers to paint the wall by hand, not unlike his use of National Guard troops to police the Reflecting Pool for alleged vandals. The Pentagon referred to the black paint as an “anti-climb coating.”

Trump ended up installing about 450 miles of new barriers during his first term, at a cost of more than $11 billion. Most of that was not painted black. During President Biden’s term, I went to a few locations in Arizona where Trump’s crews had rolled on the black paint. Some of it was already peeling off in the punishing desert sun. It was hot to the touch, but unpainted segments were too. And by then, smugglers on the Mexico side were already building cheap ladders out of rebar or wood. By leaning them against the top of the wall, they could bring migrants over the top, using ropes to lower them down the U.S. side.

Trump was still talking about the black paint after Biden took office in 2021. Biden halted border-wall construction, leaving Trump’s legacy project incomplete. When Trump visited a segment of the wall in the Rio Grande Valley with Texas Governor Greg Abbott that year, he stood near an unfinished gap and complained about the lack of black paint, saying that Biden had left the structure “rusting and rotting.”

“If they don’t paint it, bad things are happening,” Trump said. “And the best color to paint it is black. Because if you paint it black, it’s so hot, nobody can even try to climb it.”

By the time Trump returned to office, he was no longer interested in what experts or CBP officials had to say about paint. And money was no longer a limit. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act approved by Republican lawmakers last year included $46.5 billion for the barrier, enough to pay for 700 additional miles and all of the black paint Trump wants. The segments of fencing that I saw going up in southern Arizona earlier this year arrived at the border pre-painted with a uniform, factory-grade coating.

[Read: Every state is a Border Patrol State]

Trump spoke at length about the black paint last summer when FIFA President Gianni Infantino visited the Oval Office amid planning discussions for the World Cup soccer tournament. Then–Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was there, and Trump said that he’d been pleased to see her painting the wall by hand with a roller on television the night before.

“I built the same wall that the Border Patrol asked me to build,” Trump said. “It wasn’t my first choice. I wanted to do concrete plank and everything nice, but you wouldn’t have been able to see through it.”

The president proceeded to tout the wall’s various physical properties. Infantino stood next to him, holding up an oversize World Cup–finals ticket with the president’s name on it, but Trump wasn’t interested in talking about soccer. “Good black flat paint. It would look beautiful,” Trump mused.

“If it’s white, it’s not hot,” Trump added. It wasn’t clear whether anyone had proposed painting the border wall that color, or whether it was just something he’d considered before choosing black.

New York’s Warning for Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer

2026-06-24T15:56:17-04:00

In the weeks after he was elected mayor of New York City last fall, Zohran Mamdani worked behind the scenes to torpedo a bid by one of his allies, a charismatic young democratic socialist, to challenge the reelection of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in Brooklyn. Such a high-profile primary fight, Mamdani reportedly argued at the time, could slow his agenda for the city.

In light of what happened last night, Mamdani’s intervention might have saved the political career of a man who could become the nation’s first Black House speaker next year. Mamdani picked other primary battles across the city, and he won them all. Candidates whom the mayor backed defeated two House Democratic incumbents: Representative Dan Goldman in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and Harlem Representative Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. In an open-seat race, the Mamdani-endorsed state legislator Claire Valdez swamped a Democrat who had the support of much of the party’s local establishment.

The insurgent victories exposed a striking dynamic with significant implications for national politics: America’s two most powerful Democrats, Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, both hail from New York City, but they are not the dominant force in their own hometown. For the moment, that distinction belongs indisputably to Mamdani, the 34-year-old whose winning mayoral campaign last year took both men—and almost everyone else—by surprise.

Mamdani first endorsed Brad Lander, a rival turned ally in last year’s mayoral race. Lander trounced Goldman, a second-term Democrat and an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, largely by playing up their differences over Israel in a district that includes some of the city’s most progressive neighborhoods. The mayor made a much bigger bet in backing Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old democratic socialist challenging Espaillat, a five-term incumbent whom Mamdani had initially promised to endorse. Avila Chevalier has taken positions that could make her the most far-left Democrat elected to Congress in the past decade; she has said that “all deportations are wrong,” describes herself as a prison abolitionist, and attended a rally on the day after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that was widely perceived as expressing support for the attack. (Lander, who now accuses Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, condemned the event at the time.) Avila Chevalier narrowly defeated Espaillat, who had the support of Jeffries and New York Governor Kathy Hochul, among other establishment figures.

[Read: The liberal district that could oust a Trump-defying Democrat ]

“Mayor Mamdani made a calculation that this was a moment where we could get progressive fighters into Congress,” Rebecca Katz, a Democratic strategist whose agency made ads for Mamdani’s campaign last year, told me. “He took that risk, and he is reaping that reward.”

The wins by Lander, Avila Chevalier, and Valdez reflect the recent success of the left in deep-blue areas across the country. Last week, the democratic socialist Janeese Lewis George won the Democratic nomination for mayor of Washington, D.C.; in Los Angeles, Nithya Raman advanced in a primary to challenge Mayor Karen Bass in November. The Senate candidacy of Graham Platner in Maine will test how well leftist candidates can do in more closely divided and rural areas.

[Read: D.C. progressives’ great socialist hope ]

Republicans are—unsurprisingly—trying to use the left-wing victories to paint the entire Democratic Party as captive to extremists. The National Republican Congressional Committee headlined a press release last night, “The Democrat Party Officially Belongs to the Socialists.” It also included a photo of condolence flowers placed at Jeffries’s office door. “Every House Democrat, in safe and competitive districts alike, will now answer to the radicals calling the shots,” the NRCC spokesperson Mike Marinella said in the press release. “And Americans should be terrified by where the Democrat Party is headed.”

In New York, the influence of a new mayor at the height of his popularity seemed to be as big a factor as any last night. Establishment candidates fared better in races that Mamdani chose to sit out. In a Manhattan contest that became one of the nation’s most expensive House races, Micah Lasher prevailed over Alex Bores; President John F. Kennedy’s grandson, Jack Schlossberg; and George Conway, a former Republican who is one of President Trump’s biggest critics. Lasher won with the support of both retiring Representative Jerry Nadler and former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is not popular with left-wing Democrats in New York. North of the city, in New York’s Hudson Valley, the moderate Cait Conley easily defeated a more progressive opponent in a GOP-held district that Democrats will contest aggressively this fall.

Whether Mamdani can sustain his clout remains to be seen. His moderate predecessor, Eric Adams, flamed out quickly after an initial political honeymoon; Adams’s bid for a second term last year ended before Election Day. The three previous New York City mayors—Rudy Giuliani, Bloomberg, and Bill de Blasio—all failed badly in their campaign for the presidency. (Lest we get ahead of ourselves: Mamdani is constitutionally ineligible to become president, because he was born in Uganda, and no New York City mayor has risen to higher office in more than 150 years.)

Yet it’s clear that Mamdani is a more powerful broker in New York than either Schumer or Jeffries, whose decisions as national party leaders have often put them at odds with Democratic-base voters back home. “If I’m Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer, and I’m looking at 2028, I would be somewhat nervous—especially Hakeem,” Christina Greer, a political scientist at Fordham University, told me.

Jeffries’s team has been dismissive of would-be left-wing challengers, referring to them as “Team Gentrification.” After last night, progressives told me, that attitude has to change. “It’s time for Leader Jeffries to recognize the left as a part of the bigger Democratic coalition and start building with it, not around it,” Katz said. “That’s how we win.”

Jeffries has said that he and Mamdani have a good working relationship, and he told reporters yesterday that he and the mayor had simply “agreed to strongly disagree” on the primary races involving Espaillat and Goldman. “A handful of primaries,” he said, would not “reshape” the Democratic caucus in the House.

Allies of Jeffries defend his relationship with progressives and insist that he is much better positioned to withstand a primary challenge in 2028 than was Espaillat, pointing to frequent appearances he makes in his district.

Schumer has kept even more distance from Mamdani, which some New York progressives see as a sign that he might not seek a sixth Senate term in 2028, when he’ll turn 78. The Senate leader, who lives in Brooklyn, did not endorse Mamdani even after he won the Democratic mayoral nomination, and he stayed out of this year’s primary fights entirely. (His office did not return a request for comment.) The left’s preferred successor to Schumer is Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but she could instead run for president in 2028. Ocasio-Cortez won her House seat by toppling a Democratic leader in a primary, but she declined to endorse in any of this year’s competitive congressional races.

The progressive movement is a considerably stronger force within the five boroughs of New York City than it is in the rest of the state, and the past few years have demonstrated that it’s not particularly hard to mount a serious challenge against an incumbent in the city, where turnout for House primaries is frequently low. Jeffries, who is hoping to make history in a few months, would certainly not want to spend his early tenure as speaker fighting both Trump in Washington and a Mamdani-backed opponent in Brooklyn.

New York City’s ascendant left might not care, however. At Valdez’s victory party, which took place not far from Jeffries’s own district, the crowd began booing when Jeffries appeared on TV screens. Then it began chanting: “You’re next!”

The Election System Wasn’t Built for This

2026-06-22T07:00:00-04:00

Not so long ago, the Republicans who ran elections in one of the nation’s most important battlegrounds—Maricopa County, Arizona—largely got along. There were egos and quibbles, sure. But in the face of unyielding attacks on elections led by President Trump, the recorder and board of supervisors—which together split election duties—resolved conflicts without blowing up a delicate system built on trust and cooperation.

Today’s recorder and board, a mostly new cast chosen by voters in 2024, are different. They’re locked in an all-out war over the machinery, money, and operations that make the democratic process possible. Both sides agree that the standoff threatens their ability to carry out November’s midterm elections free of complications for the county’s 2.6 million voters, more than half the state’s total. The recorder’s side describes the situation in dire terms, writing to a judge that “the legal validity of the election results themselves” is at risk. The recorder’s critics fear that the fight could be used as pretext to cancel results MAGA doesn’t like in elections that could tip the balance in Congress.

Before this battle for control fully exploded in recent weeks—with the recorder insisting the Republican-dominated board pay six-figure contempt-of-court fines and election staff facing possible prosecution for setting up ballot drop boxes—he floated an idea through his attorney. Recorder Justin Heap, a Trump ally who was elected two years ago on a pledge to “end the laughingstock elections,” suggested that the two sides mediate their dispute using Cleta Mitchell, the lawyer and election activist who worked closely with Trump to try to reverse his 2020 defeat. “Ms. Mitchell would be ideal,” the attorney wrote, according to records I obtained, which cited “her expertise.”

The suggestion that Mitchell be brought in to broker the conflict astonished county staff still haunted by a 2020 cycle that drew protests at the tabulation center, pressure from Trump and his allies to overturn his loss, years of death threats, and ceaseless trolling from critics. In February, Mitchell told me that “Maricopa County is a complete disaster” and that federal investigators should turn their attention to the desert swing county. The recorder’s proposal to bring her in as a mediator of the dispute went nowhere. But the very idea that a lawyer who plotted to overturn the 2020 election could be a neutral arbiter signaled how differently Heap and the Board of Supervisors see the situation, people involved in the private deliberations told me.

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

Trump has spent his second term trying to “nationalize” elections that are, by constitutional design, run by state and local governments. He’s sought to advance his voter-ID legislation, and pressed the Justice Department to probe his loss six years ago. None of those efforts have yielded very much. But far from Washington, his allies have gained influence inside the local offices that do the hard work of actually administering the vote.

That includes the Maricopa recorder’s office, which over the past year has had striking success in court. Heap last year brought on an Arizona attorney who works for the America First Legal Foundation—co-founded by Stephen Miller, the powerful Trump adviser who supports stricter voter-registration verification and voter-roll purges—to represent him in his fights. The group’s involvement has alarmed the Republican county attorney, whose lawyer argues that the group is usurping her authority and using its representation of the recorder as a “launching pad for an unprecedented power grab.”

American election systems weren’t built for this. The brawl in Maricopa County has exposed the vulnerabilities of election structures that divided functions and duties between different offices, requiring cooperation in the service of democracy. Though the split-authority model worked well for decades, it is fraying under the weight of today’s hyper-partisan and conspiratorial environment.

“This is a new front in what appears to be a long-term play by America First to change how elections are run,” one person involved in the dispute on the board’s side told me. “They want them to be run by not just the Republican Party—but the MAGA movement.”

To his critics, Heap represents a dire threat to free and fair elections. To his supporters, he is a gutsy conservative who is unafraid to challenge the status quo. For an Arizona judge—whose opinions mattered most until Thursday, when an appellate court weighed in—Heap simply made a persuasive case that he is entitled to more power over elections than his office previously enjoyed. Heap’s office did not make him available for an interview.

An attorney and one-term state lawmaker, Heap was bolstered in his 2024 campaign for recorder by support from Charlie Kirk’s Arizona-based Turning Point USA’s political wing and the failed Senate and gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. In the primary, he faced a Republican incumbent, Stephen Richer, who had been outspoken in his opposition to Trump-inspired election denial and in his support for the integrity of the voting system. Heap won convincingly. Trump allies welcomed Heap’s ascent to an office that holds sway over election procedures in a county that generally dictates on which side of the red-blue divide Arizona will fall. “I’m confident that Maricopa County is about to get a huge upgrade in its election administration,” Harmeet Dhillon, now a senior Justice Department official, wrote on X after Heap won his race. But the board of supervisors continued to be controlled by Republicans who are more in the mold of Richer—conservative, yes, but unwilling to go along with wild theories that the voting system is rigged.

[Read: The election deniers are winning]

In Arizona, the legislature assigns election responsibilities such as voter registration and early voting to county recorders. Other responsibilities, such as Election Day operations and tabulation, fall under the county boards of supervisors. In Maricopa County, the board’s elections department carries out many of those duties.

After taking office in January 2025, Heap terminated a power-sharing agreement that Richer had made with the previous board in the final months of their tenures—after his primary loss and before the November general election. That agreement transferred the recorder’s IT department—including personnel and about $4.5 million in funding—to the board’s control. Though the idea had been percolating well before Heap’s election, he argued it was punitive and disrupted his ability to carry out his duties. County supervisors sought to negotiate new terms, and Rachel Mitchell, the Republican county attorney, authorized two outside lawyers, including a former state Supreme Court justice, to help Heap negotiate a new agreement. Instead, Heap brought on America First Legal and, last summer, sued the board, which has a 4–1 Republican majority. Heap alleged that the board had illegally taken over IT staff, servers, databases, equipment, and key election functions, including maintaining ballot drop boxes during early voting.

On April 16, following a contentious trial, Heap largely won his case. The judge ruled that the board “acted unlawfully and exceeded its statutory authority by seizing the Recorder’s personnel, systems and equipment and refusing to return them to the Recorder’s control.” He concluded that the board must give those things back or fund a new system for Heap. The judge also found that certain election duties that the board had considered its own fell to the recorder instead.

The ruling complicated an already messy situation. With the recorder and board preparing for the start of early voting, which begins this week for a July 21 primary, the board and election staff said it was impossible on such a short time frame to untangle their complex procedures, implement new protocols, and train staff to fully comply with the judge’s order. An attorney who represents most of the board has warned that the recorder’s “burgeoning cyclone of chaos also threatens to envelop the voters.” The judge refused to pause, but on Thursday, the board won an appeal to stop the changes. In intervening, the appellate court said that the fight was “no mere backroom dispute over accounting principles or organizational charts. It is, by everyone’s assessment, a live conflict hurtling toward real-world consequences in elections about to begin.”

Arizona this fall has a competitive governor’s race, and two House contests that could help determine who controls the chamber. But the dispute over who gets to run the election shows no signs of clearing up anytime soon. In fact, it has only escalated. Heap’s America First lawyer recently threatened possible criminal prosecution of the supervisors and their election staff unless they fully comply with the judge’s order, which has been stayed. Heap has also asked that the board be punished with $100,000 daily fines (which taxpayers would pay, a county official told me). The board argues that a redistribution of election duties risks delays and confusion and envisions a nightmare scenario in which tabulation is conducted by two separate offices. The conflict has already chilled participation among poll workers who are declining to work the election because “they fear the Recorder’s threats of retribution,” the attorney who represents most of the board has said.

During a recent hearing, a judge ordered the two sides to try to work things out. “I know it would be a miracle,” the judge said. Heap on Friday asked the state supreme court to review the appeal court’s decision, and has said he is “fully committed to conducting a secure, orderly, and lawful election while this litigation continues.”

Even in the best of circumstances, pulling off elections is difficult. This one features a president with sagging poll numbers whose administration is determined to prove the 2020 vote was stolen, rising pressure on slow-moving courts to act as arbiters of democratic legitimacy, and a battle for control of Congress with implications for Trump’s agenda. Mix in local fights for control like the one in Maricopa, and it’s little wonder that election officials I speak with are fearful of a disaster.

Democrats’ Great Alaskan Hope

2026-06-22T07:00:00-04:00

Updated at 12:25 p.m. ET on June 24, 2026

The Democrat Mary Peltola has led in every public poll since she declared for the U.S. Senate election this year in Alaska, a state that Donald Trump won by double digits in 2024. A former U.S representative, Peltola is a culturally moderate mother of seven whose top issue is fish. Unlike the candidates dominating national headlines, she’s neither a social-media sensation nor a charismatic progressive. Most people outside Alaska have never heard of her. That’s a problem from a fundraising perspective—but an asset from an electoral one. If Peltola is a little boring, that’s exactly why she’s the Democrat most likely to flip a red-state Senate seat this year.

Peltola does not resemble a stereotypical Democratic politician. Both her biography and her political positions suggest someone attuned to the importance of environmental preservation—and to the simultaneous economic value of resource extraction. She has worked as a commercial fisher and a spokesperson for a gold-mining company, a job she quit after a different mining company spilled toxic waste into local waters. Peltola, who is Yup’ik on her mother’s side, then became a tribal lobbyist and worked at a tribal fishing commission. Fishing is a huge part of her political brand. Her campaign slogan in every federal race she has run in has been “Fish, family, freedom,” and one of her top policy goals is to enact stricter regulations, favored by small-scale fishers, on the use of dragnets by industrial fishing companies. At a time when even local races can easily get subsumed by national politics, this approach has helped Peltola come across as singularly focused on Alaska-specific issues—as she puts it, “Alaska first.”

[Elaine Godfrey: The Democratic base is ready to go]

In 2022, Peltola won two statewide elections: first in a special election to become Alaska’s at-large House representative, and then again by a larger margin that November, even as Republicans gained seats in the House. In 2024, when Kamala Harris lost Alaska by 13 points, Peltola lost her seat by fewer than three points.

During her two years in office, she followed a middle lane on mining and drilling. She pushed for the Biden administration to approve the Willow oil-drilling project in 2023, and when the same administration canceled oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, she became the only Democratic sponsor of a bill to overturn the decision. But she opposed a Republican move to use the bill to remove environmental protections from part of the Bering Sea. She also urged the EPA to block a locally unpopular copper-mine-development project.

This middle lane has not satisfied everyone. After she signed an amicus brief endorsing a local gold-mine development, a tribal group opposed to the mine declared, “We elected Representative Peltola to represent us, and by signing this amicus brief, she is going against us.” The League of Conservation Voters, a powerful environmentalist group, maintains a list of her 14 “anti-environment votes” during her two years in Congress.

Peltola, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has taken moderate positions on other cultural issues. She has said she owns 176 long guns, and in her 2024 run, she became the first Democrat in four years to secure an NRA endorsement. (No Democrat has gotten one since.) And she was one of six Democrats to vote to condemn Joe Biden’s immigration policies.

Her independent image has, however, won the admiration of Alaska Republicans. When Don Young, the longtime Republican Alaska congressman, died in 2022, some of his staffers endorsed Peltola to replace him over former Governor Sarah Palin. So did Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski. (Peltola returned the favor, supporting Murkowski in that year’s Senate race.) John-Henry Heckendorn, an Alaska political consultant who helped recruit Peltola for federal office, told me that those are “the kind of odd-couple endorsements that really catch people’s attention.” When Palin lost the congressional race, even she couldn’t help being charmed by the experience, texting Peltola in the days after the election that she was “a real Alaskan chick. Beautiful and smart and tough.”

The caricature of a bipartisan centrist is someone who avoids controversy and bold ideas, standing helplessly athwart the people’s will for change. Peltola is not that. This cycle, her two campaign pillars are affordability and “fixing the rigged system.” In the latter category, she’s proposing term limits, a ban on members of Congress trading stocks, and a crackdown on waste and foreign influence. On the affordability side, she offers some ideas generally beloved by centrist intellectuals (permitting reform, a larger child tax credit, “right to repair” laws) alongside other, more economically irresponsible proposals that they’d dismiss as “slopulism,” such as eliminating taxes on Social Security and the first $92,000 of income. This combination—economic populism and cultural moderation—comes across to many voters as sensible. It also distinguishes Peltola from most would-be Democratic populists, who are reluctant to give an inch on progressive social-policy commitments.

All of these traits—her bipartisanship, her cultural moderation, her focus on local issues—come at a cost: Peltola gets less attention and fewer donations than other similarly situated Democratic Senate candidates. By Alaska standards, the nearly $9 million Peltola raised from January to March is a huge haul. But it’s minimal compared with the $40 million war chest that Texas’s James Talarico has built up, or with the more than $16 million that Maine’s Graham Platner has raised. Even Alexander Vindman, the star witness in Trump’s 2019 impeachment trial, has significantly outraised Peltola in small donations for his much unlikelier Senate candidacy in Florida.

Donors are different from the average voter, Raymond La Raja, a political scientist and co-author of a book about small-dollar donors, told me. “First and foremost, they’re partisans,” he said. Their ideal candidate is a doctrinaire progressive in a high-profile race who seems to “have a chance of beating Darth Vader.” Dan Sullivan, the incumbent Republican whom Peltola is challenging, has one of the lowest in-state approval ratings of any senator, but he’s basically unknown outside Alaska. And Peltola is anything but doctrinaire. “You don’t see people who are more moderate, or people who tend to just focus on policy, getting a lot of small donations,” La Raja said.

[Mark Leibovich: Democrats could use a cold shower before the midterms]

But Peltola’s relative fundraising disadvantage is really a symptom of her success at being the type of candidate who appeals to Alaska voters more than to national Democrats. She looks poised to pull off the upset. Public polls released in the past few months show her leading Sullivan by five to seven percentage points. Bettors on Kalshi and Polymarket believe that she has a higher than 60 percent chance of winning, better odds than Talarico in Texas, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Joshua Turek in Iowa, and Vindman in Florida.

Alaska has some quirks that make a candidate like Peltola especially viable. Since 2022, the state has had open, nonpartisan primaries. The top four candidates advance to the general, which features ranked-choice voting. This design benefits a candidate with cross-partisan support. Because there is no partisan primary, Peltola doesn’t have to worry about being outflanked by a more left-wing candidate who appeals to the Democratic base. And the ranked-choice system is designed to benefit candidates who are acceptable to a majority of the electorate. In the 2022 general election that sent Peltola to Congress, the two Republican candidates combined for 59 percent of the first-choice vote, but so many voters ranked Peltola second that she still prevailed.

Still, Peltola’s past overperformance and current lead in the polls suggest that the big mystery of how to win over Trump voters is not such a mystery at all. Peltola is succeeding by catering to the deeply held views of the citizens of her state—not just the ones in her party.

This article originally stated that Mary Peltola's former employer had spilled toxic waste into Alaskan waters. In fact, a different mining company was involved in that spill.

Science Has a Name for What’s Plaguing the Reflecting Pool

2026-06-19T15:50:00-04:00

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Donald Trump has a new nemesis, with a name worthy of a supervillain: Scenedesmus.

The Reflecting Pool on the National Mall has become the country’s most high-profile science experiment, with workers battling against nature. After a week of combat, they have essentially killed off one type of algae infesting the pool, only to create the conditions for a new type to take over. And Scenedesmus, a genus of green algae nicknamed “Skinny Dead Mouse” by scientists, is now flourishing, according to testing that was run at the request of The Atlantic.

The pool, at the moment, looks like a strange bit of modern art. As workers treat different sections, the areas where they succeed in reducing the algae turn lighter shades of green. In some places, the water is relatively clear. In others, it’s an oily sludge. A quick glance, though, is enough to confirm that this is not the American-flag blue it was supposed to be.

Over the past few days, I’ve seen baby ducks swim through the pool; National Park Service workers wading around as they try to clean it; small children bending over to touch it. But none of the NPS workers at the site have been able to definitively tell me whether despite all of the algae—some species of which can be toxic—the water remains safe.

A spokesperson at the Department of Interior told me “there is ongoing water testing happening,” but would not disclose the results of those tests. Requests to spokespeople at the NPS have gone unanswered. I have been in touch with scientists who have applied for permits to get into the pool and conduct their own tests, but those permits have yet to be granted.

With the lack of transparency from the federal government and no clarity on what’s inside that murky water, I decided to dig—or dip—a little deeper myself. So late on Thursday morning, I filled several water bottles from different areas of the pool. Some were fairly clear, while other samples were dark green. My samples were delivered to two different scientists by that evening.

Algae from the Reflecting Pool seen under a microscope (Courtesy of Greg Boyer)

When algae first began to flourish in the Reflecting Pool, it appeared to be a blue-green cyanobacterial bloom that had taken over. Photos showed the kind of greenish surface film that can be indicative of that algae, which in some instances may produce neurotoxins harmful to people and pets. When Hans W. Paerl, a professor of marine and environmental sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, opened the bottle of one of the samples I collected, he detected the distinctive earthy scents reminiscent of other cyanobacterial blooms he’d previously smelled. Under the microscope, he could see remnants of the previous bloom, but they were too degraded to identify. He attributed this, in part, to the endless jugs of hydrogen peroxide that workers had dumped into the pool to kill off the algae. “The guys dealing with peroxide treatment can pat themselves on the back,” he told me. “But it doesn’t really solve the overall problem.”

In fact, it’s created a new problem: The green algae, perhaps in the absence of the blue-green algae, are absolutely flourishing. “It is a pretty aggressive grower,” Paerl said. “What’s happened is they’ve just switched the players. And the green algae are just taking over.”

“I’ve never seen it bloom quite this thick,” Greg Boyer, a professor emeritus of biochemistry at the State University of New York, who analyzed our other samples, told me.

Read: What color is the Reflecting Pool? An investigation.

Boyer ran additional tests that determined there was little to no blue-green algae in the samples, making it highly unlikely to be toxic. That is to be expected, he said, at least for the moment. “This is peak season for green algae,” he said. “We’re pretty early in the season for blue-green algae.” In the next few weeks, by late July, that could change.

The treatments that NPS is now using to combat the bloom—hydrogen peroxide and nanobubble technology—are more effective at fighting blue-green algae. The green algae that are growing now, both Boyer and Paerl told me, are not likely to be discouraged by those methods, and so far they are proving to be resilient. Boyer was able to run tests to determine the current health of the algae. “They are stressed, but they are definitely not dead,” he said. “If I was going to design a facility to grow algae, I would probably design a facility that had a lot of surface area and was very shallow, so you have sunlight down to the bottom. And put a lot of nutrients in it. And that’s pretty much what the Reflecting Pool is. It’s just a perfect facility for growing algae.” The decision to paint the bottom a deep shade of blue, scientists have told me, raised the water temperature and accelerated the growth.

Bottom line? “The water will probably remain green for the foreseeable future,” Paerl said.

For the past week, workers at the Reflecting Pool have attempted to vacuum algae from the bottom, with hoses connected to the vacuums pumping water down nearby drains. The work, apparently, has become something of an emergency, with an email going out to NPS employees asking for volunteers to work 12-hour shifts and help pump out the algae as part of “critical pre-July 4th operational needs.” The email, which was reported by MeidasTouch Network, referred to the operation as a “regional and national priority.”

[Read: Inside America’s ugly birthday battle]

Yesterday evening, I saw several people in the center of the pool. They were dressed in the D.C. office uniform of khakis and a dress shirt, wearing waders as they vacuumed. As one of them ended a shift, handing his equipment back to NPS workers, he said he was “just doing my part.”

But another problem has also emerged: The sealant at the bottom of the pool, which was the bulk of the $16.4 million renovation project, is beginning to peel off. By yesterday evening, a whole chunk was gone. Tourists and locals were converging on the site where Martin Luther King Jr. spoke and where protesters denounced the Vietnam War, just to catch a glimpse of the wayward sealant—or perhaps even a souvenir.

“Taking a piece of paint is like taking a piece of the Berlin Wall,” one cyclist passing by told me. “It’s a piece of history.”

The Democratic Base Is Angry

2026-06-18T11:00:00-04:00

Perhaps I should’ve expected the meeting to devolve into chaos. It was predictable, especially if you subscribe to the essential maxim that any room containing several dozen women of a certain age and Summer Shandy on tap is bound to get a little rowdy. Unfortunately, the chair of the Ohio Democrats did not see it coming.

Kathleen Clyde, the state party leader, was standing on a small stage at a bar in the Cleveland suburbs, having just finished delivering what was supposed to be a stirring call to action to a group of local Democratic activists. Her tone, however, had not conveyed any particular sense of passion about the upcoming midterms. The ladies in the audience did not seem impressed. And now—oh, no—it was time for questions.

“What are we going to do differently?” one woman asked, pointing out that the Democrats’ brand is terrible. Eventually, the microphone was abandoned, and another woman asked: “Why don’t the Democrats have a good message?” A third woman chimed in, a little frantically: “What can we do?!”

Clyde’s eyes were wide. She hadn’t expected friendly fire. “We do have a good message!” she sputtered. “Affordability!” But the women smelled weakness, and now, several of them were shouting at once. “How are you going to do that?” one demanded. “It has to be more specific!” From the back, an older woman offered: “We need smart!” Clyde assured the group that the party’s message was smart, and it was going to resonate in November. But moments later, she was off the stage and hightailing it back to Columbus.

Afterward, one of the attendees joked in a group chat that she had witnessed a murder. Actually, what she’d witnessed was a tidy encapsulation of the broader tension at play in her party: Ahead of the midterms, the base is raring to go. But it’s also demanding a reckoning from its highest ranks that hasn’t come. “The party needs to be able to answer tough questions,” Susan Polakoff Shaw, a leader of the group at the bar, told me. “We’re still pissed that we lost the election in 2024—and we’re pissed at them for not doing a better job of standing up to the Republicans and to Trump.”

It’s a dynamic that has some Democrats chewing their cuticles, despite a fairly promising political landscape for their party. These Democrats expect, of course, that many of their candidates will perform well in November. But they worry that victory will paint a too-cheery gloss over the party’s bigger issues—and prolong the time it takes to solve them.

Let’s back up. The women at that Ohio bar were veterans of political activism. They launched GRR, short for Grass Roots Resistance, roughly a week after Donald Trump won his first election, one of hundreds of activist groups to do so. In 2020, I wrote about the women’s evolution from passive or occasional voters to active party organizers. GRR helped flip a state House seat from red to blue, the only such success in Ohio that year.

In the past decade, GRR has ballooned from a dozen women to more than 200, and is now large enough to fill a party room at the back of a suburban bar. One GRR member I interviewed in 2020, who was then leading a school-levy campaign, is now president of the local school board. At each GRR meeting, there is a table for new-member sign-up sheets, a table for the petition du jour, and a table for snacks. Attendees show up half an hour early for “W(h)ine time,” an opportunity to vent about the latest affront to democracy from Trump or state Republicans. Newcomers receive a button that reads I survived my 1st GRR meeting, and it won’t be my last! and introduce themselves onstage in a ritual known as the “GRRgin Sacrifice.” At the meeting where Clyde spoke, eight new GRRgins were initiated.

Right now, the group is campaigning for one of its longtime members, who is running for the state House. The women are also volunteering for Sherrod Brown’s U.S. Senate bid and for Amy Acton, who is running for Ohio governor. Next month, group leaders will unveil GRR’s week-by-week plan of action for the midterms. Enthusiasm inside GRR has never been higher. “This year feels like 2018 on steroids,” Shaw said.

[Read: Sherrod Brown is grinding it out]

But GRR is not unique. Across America, the Democrats’ cup runneth over with activist spirit. Indivisible, the national network of activist groups, says that it now has about 2,800 confirmed active chapters—more than double what it had before the 2024 election. The number of people getting involved during Trump’s second term as president “is dramatically higher” than it was in his first, Leah Greenberg, a co-founder of the group, told me. Similarly, about 80,000 people signed up to run for office through Run for Something in 2025, more than the number who did during the entirety of Trump’s first term, the group told me. Red, Wine & Blue, a group that launched in 2019 to activate swing voters in the suburbs, has welcomed 200,000 new members after Trump’s second inauguration—a faster rate of growth than in either the 2020 or 2022 cycles. Organizers of the third “No Kings” protest, held in March, say they had 8 million participants, which would make it the largest single-day protest in American history.

But the tenor of all of this grassroots activism is angrier and more desperate than it was in 2018, the last time a midterm election was held while Trump was in the White House. “In 2018, there was a top-down resistance,” Amanda Litman, the executive director of Run for Something, told me. “That hasn’t felt true this time.” Instead, the base has led the way. And base voters are furious—partly at Trump, but also at their own leaders.

Impatience is growing among volunteers and donors “about the cultural sclerosis” inside Democratic organizations, Yasmin Radjy, the executive director of the progressive group Swing Left, told me. “The question we hear over and over is, What are Democrats doing differently than in 2024 to make sure we win?”

This is, of course, the million-dollar question—and there has been no genuine institutional attempt to answer it. Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin has demonstrated an almost impressive inability to reassure and reinvigorate his party after its devastating losses in the 2024 election. Only after a sustained bullying campaign led, in part, by the Pod Save America hosts did Martin release the promised 2024 autopsy. The result? A half-finished report with few clear conclusions.

[From the March issue: The Democrats aren’t built for this]

There are other, more existential items that Democrats have yet to address. The first is their brand, which multiple party strategists described to me as “in the toilet.” A poll from earlier this year presented Democrats with the discomfiting revelation that among the American public, their party is more popular than Iran—but less popular than AI. Another challenge facing Democrats is that their leaders are reviled but, for some reason, still sticking around. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, for example, is poised to return as majority leader if Democrats win back the Senate, even though he is more passionately disliked than Trump, according to some polling.

Still, the consensus at the moment suggests that things are going to go pretty well for Democrats in November. They will probably win back the House. If they’re lucky in Ohio, North Carolina, Maine, and Alaska, they might even win back the Senate. But none of those wins can be attributed to some new, inspiring message—or to the party having undergone some fundamental evolution. Victory is expected, mainly, because the alternative is worse: Trump is a historically unpopular president who has embroiled the country in a new Middle Eastern conflict, the results of which are rising costs and, for many, a general sense of precariousness.

“Are we gonna win a bunch of seats in November? Yes. Do we have the enthusiasm to carry that forward into ’28? Yes,” Kelly Dietrich, the founder of the National Democratic Training Committee, told me. “Do we have the infrastructure we need to do that? No.” Dietrich has proposed a “Democratic Innovation Fund” for investing in state and local elections even in off-year election cycles. He also points to conservative groups such as Turning Point USA and the Leadership Institute as models for building trust and the party’s volunteer base beyond the federal level. If Democrats invested in similar “long-term brand-building outside the party,” he said, “people would understand who we are.”

[Read: My disorienting weekend with the women of Turning Point]

Last year, Radjy’s group, Swing Left, started its own brand-building operation called Ground Truth, a year-round canvassing program that uses AI to summarize and transmit voter concerns back to the party. The excitement about the midterms is wonderful, Radjy told me. But “we need to ask ourselves: Are we building something durable, or is it all a house of sand?” she said. “Are we going to wake up in June 2027 and say, Oh shit, now we gotta go build this stuff?”

When I reached out to Clyde, the Ohio Democrats chair, to ask about her experience at the GRR meeting, and about what specific lessons Democrats have learned since 2024, her office sent back a statement that did not directly address any of my questions. “Ohio Democrats are laser-focused on lowering costs, protecting Ohioans’ freedoms, and getting our state and country back on track,” the statement attributed to Clyde stated. “Ohioans of all political backgrounds are getting involved with our Democratic candidates because of the strength of their winning message.”

There was more, but none of it acknowledged the Democrats’ broader problems—or any of the related concerns that the ladies of GRR had brought up at the meeting. When I texted Shaw to ask what she made of Clyde’s response, she replied immediately with a GIF of Liz Lemon rolling her eyes.

What Color Is the Reflecting Pool? An Investigation.

2026-06-17T15:30:00-04:00

Workers on the National Mall, desperate to turn the Reflecting Pool to President Trump’s preferred shade of blue, poured jug after jug of hydrogen peroxide into the water yesterday morning. As they did so, members of the National Guard, deployed to clean up crime, looked on. The water, at that moment, matched their mossy-green fatigues.

The Reflecting Pool now evokes the joy of a Green Bay Packers victory. Or a high-school prank. Or St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago. It most certainly is not the gleaming American-flag blue that Trump’s repainting of the pool was supposed to produce. That project—the one that cost taxpayers at least $16.4 million and came with a nanobubbling system that promised to kill off algae growth—is hidden under 18 to 30 inches of swamp water dense with scraggly plumes of algae.

“Yeah, it’s gross!” said one woman passing by.

“Quite green,” remarked another.

A woman visiting from Fort Worth, Texas, told me she just hopes it’s fixed in time for America’s 250th birthday, on July 4: “We came and expected it to be blue, and we’re like, What is all this green junk in there?”

It’s a question that has ignited internet memes and conspiracy theories, posing the latest political Rorschach test to a divided nation. A not insignificant number of federal workers have now been mobilized to fight the green junk and answer questions about whether the green junk is under control. After the morning doses of hydrogen peroxide came the midday deployment of half a dozen National Park Service workers in bright-yellow vests, many with long-poled contraptions that they swept through the water. “Is that … a vacuum?” a passing man wondered aloud. Yes, he was told. It is a vacuum.

By evening, the situation had escalated: Workers strapped on waders, grabbed handfuls of tubing, and got in the pool. Generators hummed; water pumped; workers scraped. By dusk, some areas—though by no means all—had transformed to a hopeful shade of teal. Aerial views, as some noted, made it look like a painting by the abstract artist Mark Rothko.

So it’s come to this: A nation launched on the Founding Fathers’ grand dreams about democracy—one that survived a civil war and foreign attacks, that endured depressions and recessions and assassinations—is celebrating its semiquincentennial by watching to see whether we can clean the water in a century-old concrete pool. Even a stone-faced Abraham Lincoln is looking on.

Trump’s second term has been all about attempting tasks big and small that presidents before him failed to accomplish—or never thought of in the first place. That includes his pledge to freshen the water in the Reflecting Pool, an issue that has bedeviled administrations for decades. In April, he announced a solution: a swimming-pool liner. A blue one. To complete the project before July 4, the Trump administration awarded no-bid contracts to redo the base of the pool and install a nanobubbling system that was meant to kill off algae growth. “This was highly sophisticated material, industrial strength, that could last for 100 years, applied by very talented people,” Trump explained on Truth Social on June 5. “The material is thick, strong, flexible, and has a natural, beautiful color, the dark blue of the American Flag!”

But it didn’t take long for the algae to reappear.

[Read: Inside America’s ugly birthday battle]

The cloudiness of the pool has triggered a predictable descent into polarizing politics: Some Trump supporters have claimed that the water isn’t actually green, and others have suggested there’s some outside force trying to undermine the pool renovation—and, by extension, Trump himself. Fox News dispatched the producer Johnny Belisario to the National Mall to interview tourists and mock anyone critical of the project. “And the Democrats, they’re going to tell you, Oh, there’s green algae; it looks soooo bad,” he said. “But there’s pool guys cleaning it up right now. No other president would do that.”

Grant Stinchfield, a conservative host on the Real America’s Voice network, made his own trip to the pool and concluded that the water was, in fact, green—but he found that fact suspicious and decided to do some investigating. He interviewed a woman who noticed that the water at the nearby World War II memorial was fine. “I feel like it’s sabotage!” Stinchfield concluded. “Is it nefarious? I tend to think so. You wouldn’t have so much algae that you see in here—you would not have that that quickly unless somebody did something. I’m telling you! I think they want Trump to fail so badly that they’ll come out here and do anything.”

I took it upon myself to clear up any murkiness by speaking with some of the country’s foremost experts on algae. They were in universal agreement: There’s no conspiracy. All of this was utterly predictable. Trump undertook this transformation during the hottest part of the year, when algae flourish, and he made the cement dark blue, which retains even more heat, turning the shallow pool into an algae incubator.

“Algae, particularly blue-green algae, like it hot. So this time of year is their optimal growth period. It’s sort of Biology 101,” Hans Paerl, a professor of marine and environmental sciences at the University of North Carolina, told me. “This is not rocket science.” Don Anderson, the director of the U.S. National Office for Harmful Algal Blooms at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, told me that the shallow water in warm weather created the perfect conditions for algae to flourish, and he’s baffled why no one appeared to anticipate that, either by using water with fewer of the nutrients that help algae grow, or by sealing the system to prevent residual algae from seeping back into the pool. “This is a pretty simple system to control,” he said. “It’s the same idea as keeping a swimming pool clean, but it’s much larger.”

It would have been better to do a project like this one in the fall or winter. As it is, Paerl said he was doubtful that the situation could be reversed. Hydrogen peroxide is one option, he said, but it is expensive to use effectively in a 4-million-gallon pool. In warm weather, multiple applications and enormous quantities may be required. Climate change, he noted, has made these problems only more acute.

[Read: Donald Trump’s paint jobs]

“I think we’re just going to have to appreciate that it’s green right now,” he told me. “And it’ll turn blue later. And hopefully the algae blooming in there are not toxic.” Oh yes, there’s a chance this situation gets even worse. The experts I spoke with were uncertain what species of algae has been growing in the pool but warned that some could be harmful to pets and other animals if they drink it, especially when it’s laced with hydrogen peroxide. And that hydrogen peroxide? It may be killing the algae, causing them to release pigments that make the water more blue, but not without side effects. “When you get dead algae in water, there’s lots of other problems. It can get stinky,” Paerl told me. “It sounds like a horror story that never ends. But it will, in the winter, when the water cools.”

Again, all of this was avoidable, Wayne Carmichael, a professor emeritus of biological sciences at Wright State University, told me. “The rush to get it done combined with not using a company that understood pool-water management, plus a serious injection of political hubris, allowed the bloom to happen,” he said.

The stink over the Reflecting Pool happens to coincide with a congressional fight over reauthorization of the Harmful Algal Bloom and Hypoxia Research and Control Act. (Yes, really.) Some scientists hope they can use the new petri dish on the Mall as part of their lobbying campaign, but concern is also simmering that the fight against the kind of algae that can harm drinking water, fisheries, and tourism—a topic that has enjoyed bipartisan support—may now enter the political vortex.

No one wants to take responsibility for this money-sucking algae bloom. Eddie Wood—an owner of Atlantic Industrial Coatings, which was paid $14.7 million to line the pool—told me his company is not at fault because they were “only responsible for the installation of a waterproof liner.” Representatives from Green Water Solutions—that is the actual name of the company—which provided the $1.7 million nanobubbling system, did not respond to requests for comment. That system is supposed to inject nanobubbles containing the powerful oxidant ozone that can kill algae and break down the organic material they have produced, including their toxins. One of the experts, Anderson, told me that the product can be effective but isn’t in all situations, making this particular project “a very expensive trial.”

[Read: Thank you for your attention to this birthday]

The Department of Interior blamed the Obama administration for an earlier renovation “that resulted in massive algae clumps taking over the pool’s surface following years of construction that cost taxpayers millions upon millions, only to be broken and disgusting days later.” In a lengthy response to my questions, the department’s press team stated that the National Park Service is properly maintaining the Reflecting Pool. “Due to deploying the advanced nanobubbler technology, the algae is dead and being vacuumed up as we speak,” they wrote in a statement. “We thank President Trump for fixing the Reflecting Pool for good.”

Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, said that the new lining “will permanently seal the Reflecting Pool, which previously leaked 16 million gallons per year and wasted countless taxpayer dollars.” Given some time, Rogers suggested, the color will improve: “A high-tech nanobubble ozone technology will be deployed to kill the algae and keep the Reflecting Pool crystal clear.”

Steve Padler, a Washington local who was watching the cleanup operation, told me he empathized with a problem that has vexed several presidents. But he’s frustrated that the Trump administration spent such an “absurd” amount of money trying to find a quick fix to a problem not so easily solved. “It looks like it did before,” he said. “It’s green.”

One of the workers vacuuming the water yesterday told me that he thought their efforts were having an impact, having noticed a difference in the small corner he was working on. Aerial views showed some progress along the edges of the pool, and Reuters launched a livestream for those wanting to watch in real time. Meanwhile, tourists as well as locals are now coming to check out the latest Washington attraction, which reflects not the majesty of the Mall but something more humbling: how clumps of aquatic plant matter foiled the wishes of the most powerful man in the world. And how the president who said he’d drain the swamp has instead created the conditions for a new one.

The Conversions of J. D. Vance

2026-06-15T12:01:00-04:00

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Driving back to his Marine Corps base in North Carolina alone after attending his grandmother’s funeral, a despondent J. D. Vance was steering through Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains when a combination of slippery roads and bad luck sent his car hurtling toward a guardrail. What came next, he describes as an almost “supernatural experience.” Instead of crashing through the guardrail and sliding off the mountain, the car, he says, mysteriously stopped.

“Even during my later years as a strident atheist, the experience sat there inconveniently in the back of my mind,” Vance writes in his new book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith. “It was as if it existed to annoy me, to challenge the confidence I had in the laws of the universe and the idea that I sat firmly—and alone—in life’s driver’s seat.”

Communion, a copy of which I obtained in advance of its release tomorrow, reads as a sequel to Vance’s first book, Hillbilly Elegy. It is billed as a conversion narrative, a reflection on Vance’s 2019 embrace of Catholicism. In an interview, Vance told me that he believes it is appropriate for political leaders “to talk about what influences them, what motivates them, what inspires them.” He added that there is a certain “humility and grace” required of political leaders and said it was his aim to project those things in the book.

A memoir is a rite of passage for anyone contemplating a run for president. Vance’s first book catapulted him to prominence with its portrait of working-class white America. In the decade since it was published, however, much has changed—both for the country and for Vance.

Communion also tells the story of Vance’s other conversion: from ardent Never Trumper to Donald Trump’s vice president, a shift that he argues was driven not by ambition but by the belief that Trump had proved himself an effective president. Not that he expects everyone to believe that. “To my critics, it was a politically cynical maneuver to gain political power. I doubt I’ll ever change their minds,” he writes.

Much of the book is a rumination on matters ethical and spiritual—a perhaps not-so-subtle way to show how he’s different from the man currently in the White House, whose office Vance is widely expected to seek two years from now. Although the book doesn’t directly address whether the vice president intends to run in 2028, it offers some clues, including a notably softer tone than Vance has frequently employed when doing digital battle with opponents on social media. And the man whom White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles dubbed a “conspiracy theorist” is not much in evidence.

But Vance does venture beyond his own faith journey to offer commentary on the spiritual health of the country, much of it in line with diagnoses popular among the religious right. He describes America as a nation that has lost its Christian foundations, and he calls Christianity “America’s creed” while allowing that one doesn’t have to be Christian to be an American. Both political parties, he writes, are “guilty of casting aside the Christian inheritance of our civilization.” This, he adds, has had an impact on issues such as marriage rates and population: “Our abandonment of Christian culture has coincided with an apparent decline in our collective will to live.”

I told him that I noticed a tonal difference between what he writes in the book and what he’s projected to the world, especially in some of his hyper-partisan posts on social media. Even compared with the first book, he curses less in this one. Vance told me he’s trying to reduce his use of profanity. Is that, I asked, an effort to appeal to a broader group of voters? “I definitely curse like a sailor,” he responded, sidestepping the question while noting that his habit is not ideal with young kids at home and a wife who’d prefer fewer obscenities. “I’ve tried to cut back on that.”

[Read: What atheism could not explain ]

The book traces Vance’s path from religious drift and skepticism of faith during his younger years to his eventual embrace of Catholicism. He writes of an upbringing in which faith was deep-rooted, but also untethered from the Church. “Our family attended church very rarely,” he writes. “Our faith was amorphous, tied to family and oral traditions and not to institutional orthodoxy.” Many of his foundational religious memories center on his grandmother, whom he calls Mamaw and who largely raised Vance. He describes her religion as unconventional. “She loved to say the f-word, and when she died she owned nineteen loaded handguns,” he writes of the woman who is at the heart of Hillbilly Elegy. “Mamaw’s God suited her: loving and forgiving, but tough, demanding, and possibly packing.”

At one point, Vance acknowledges that his grandmother believed abortion should be legal and felt that the government should stay out of a woman’s business—a striking contrast to his own self-described “100 percent pro-life” views, which have shifted in their specifics over time. Vance describes over the course of his childhood and adolescence bouncing among Pentecostal and Southern Baptist congregations, all of them broadly conservative. “I didn’t know then about the various theological differences between these churches,” he writes. “Nor did I know of the host of mainline Protestant denominations whose teachings aligned more closely with the American Left than the Right.”

Catholicism, he writes, was foreign to him, but its teachings, as he got older, began to engage him on an intellectual level “more than anything I’d seen in either the secular or religious worlds I’d previously operated in.” He also describes a “rich social tradition” of Catholicism, which fostered in him a deeper understanding about relationships with others, but also with himself. “This resonated with me,” he writes.

I was interested to know how he squares this concept of a Christian creed in America with the First Amendment guarantee of separation between Church and state. He pointed to the founding of the country, when many of the original colonies had officially established churches. “There was this recognition that public religion would have a significant role in public life,” Vance told me. “We just didn’t want Congress mandating or requiring religion, or really getting involved at the federal level in questions of faith.”

He insisted that Christian teachings can complement American life. He told me he also embraced the notion that “different people could come at different truths with some broad understanding, but also some disagreement. And that dynamism was, I think, very much part of the American founding too.”

After publishing Hillbilly Elegy in 2016, Vance writes, he found a “comfortable niche as a Trump skeptic.” He was criticizing Trump “from a conservative perspective while defending his voters,” he writes in Communion. (The account soft-pedals the extent of Vance’s discomfort with Trump, whom he referred to in 2016 as “reprehensible” and an “idiot” who could well become “America’s Hitler.” In a story 10 years ago for this magazine, Vance wrote that Trump was “cultural heroin.”) Vance explains his stance then in the context of “social rituals” of political commentary: “I was rewarded for saying bad things about Donald Trump even though my background and politics made me an odd fit for elite media culture.”

“Trump criticism,” he adds, “functioned as social immunity.”

But he noticed that his family and friends back in Ohio and Kentucky supported Trump overwhelmingly and were unbothered by his coarse approach to communication. Vance came to believe that he needed to focus less on the “stylistic element” of Trump and pay more attention to his policies. “Part of the reason the anti-Trump conservatives hated Donald Trump,” he says, revisiting comments he made to The New York Times, “was that he represented a threat to a way of doing things in this country that has been very good for them.” Vance voted for Trump in his losing 2020 bid.

[Read: The MAGA intellectual who prophesied a Queen Melania]

By the time Vance ran for Senate in 2022, he was fully on board with Trumpism, perpetuating the then-former president’s claims of a stolen election, downplaying the gravity of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and claiming that Democrats had encouraged illegal immigration to grow their support base. With Trump’s backing, he won. He recalls being stunned two years later to make Trump’s vice-presidential shortlist, given that he was a white senator from a non-swing state, and describes enduring a somewhat jarring vetting process that scrutinized everything, including his marriage (“Have you cheated on your wife?” he says he was asked, in a conversation that included his wife).

Usha, his wife, is Hindu. But Vance credits her with propelling him on his journey back to Christianity, through her openness to exploring the world and challenging received ideas and teachings. There is, he writes, “at least a little irony in the fact that my non-Christian wife helped lead me back to my own Christian faith, and then made it possible for me to discuss the journey on paper. The Lord works in mysterious ways, indeed.”

Vance blends together his reflections on faith and politics in Communion, not least in his discussion of the Vatican, an institution with which Vance has been unafraid to tangle. He briefly mentions his meeting last year with Pope Francis, whom he says was more frail than he had expected. (Francis died a day after the meeting.) He also reflects on his conversation with Cardinal Pietro Parolin, who was then viewed as a favorite to be the next pope. He writes that he found the conversations “unsettling” because the Vatican’s criticism of the Trump administration’s immigration policies struck him as disconnected from the hard choices involved in governance. Vatican officials acknowledged America’s right to secure its borders while also urging humane treatment of migrants, but didn’t seem to Vance to recognize just how difficult it was to balance the two. “Here I was, the most senior Catholic in the United States government, and the Vatican seemed unwilling to move its moral guidance past the point of trite platitudes,” he writes.

The Vatican’s stance has become a more direct point of tension under Pope Leo XIV, the first American pontiff. Since his election in May, Leo has emerged as a sharp critic of the administration’s immigration policies and its approach to the war with Iran, prompting Vance to publicly defend the White House.

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

At a Turning Point USA event at the University of Georgia in April, he admonished the pope to be “careful when he talks about matters of theology,” after the pope posted on social media that anyone who is a disciple of Christ “is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.” The pope’s comments were widely interpreted as criticism of the Iran war—a conflict that Trump launched despite his vice president’s reservations. Leo has also urged Catholics to heed U.S. bishops’ calls for a more humane approach to immigration, arguing that people who have spent years or decades building lives in America deserve to be treated with dignity.

In the book, Vance tries to reconcile his record on immigration—which has included spreading unverified rumors about immigrants in Ohio eating pets—with his Christian beliefs. “Real engagement with the immigration issue requires real engagement with the trade-offs. Law enforcement is an inherently difficult business,” he writes. “The difficulty is applying these principles in a messy world with competing values.”

In recent months, Trump’s once-impenetrable MAGA coalition has begun to show cracks, with divisions emerging over the Iran war and the Epstein files, among other things. I asked Vance if he feels well placed to bridge those divides, both as a possible Trump heir and as a onetime Never Trumper. His answer was carefully calibrated to avoid alienating Trump: “The president is the person most uniquely placed, obviously, as the leader of the party and the leader of the movement,” he told me.

If Vance runs in 2028, he’ll have to reckon with how he’s applied his principles during his service to Trump. Ingratiating himself with the man who has dominated Republican politics for the past decade once seemed an expedient political bet—but not anymore, as Trump’s popularity falters. The vice president will soon need to decide how loyal he can afford to be. His latest conversions may not be his last.

My Descent Into Mah-Jongg

2026-06-15T05:00:00-04:00

When my mom found out I was planning to travel to Dallas to play in a Lunar New Year mah-jongg tournament, she texted a reasonable query: “Don’t they require some level of competence?”

And yet, during the third week of February, I found myself first at a dazzling private home in Dallas, and then at a luxury hotel, sitting down with my more refined counterparts to play in a competition in the epicenter of the country’s American mah-jongg resurgence.

First, a bit about how I got here. One of my oldest friends, Catherine—who, like seemingly half of all women in my middle-aged-mom peer group, had suddenly become obsessed with the game—came over to visit one afternoon when I was back in my childhood home for a stretch last summer, helping my mom recover from surgery. Catherine brought her mah-jongg set, along with the promise that she’d teach us and we’d love it and it would be so much fun. Initially, it did not feel particularly fun; it felt like learning a confounding new language, with Chinese characters, complicated rules (and exceptions for every rule), and hard-to-recall new words: crak, pung, chow, bam (and birdbam, another name for one bam, and also an excuse for players drinking alcohol to clink glasses and take a sip). At one point, I realized my brow was actually furrowed, my hands were on my head, and I was having flashbacks to BC Calculus—brain fully engaged, answer still elusive.

“At some point,” Catherine assured us, with a sunniness I did not yet feel, “you’ll even be able to chat while you play.”

I wasn’t hooked, but I was intrigued. I liked the way the tiles—colorful and sleek, each the size of a chunky domino—looked and felt, slightly weighty in my hand. I liked how they clacked when I swirled them together or stacked them in neat rows. I liked that I hadn’t checked my phone—hadn’t been able to, such was the required concentration—as we played. And I liked the promise of the game: that if I put in the effort to learn the tiles and the language and customs and the rules, I could become privy to a subculture of sorts, an activity that connected me not only to my peers but to those who came before. I also realized that to get good, or even competent, I needed to play regularly and continue to be taught, and that is how I began my monthslong descent into the delightful rabbit hole that is mah-jongg.

In the stretch since Catherine gave me that first rudimentary lesson, I have played mah-jongg with one group that meets Tuesday afternoons in a small café in downtown Washington, D.C.; another that gets together Wednesday afternoons at a series of rotating locations; and yet another that plays Friday afternoons at the local Jewish community center; at a weekly mah-jongg night at a D.C. public library; at a fundraiser for my 7-year-old’s elementary school; in the kitchen of a mom’s home in my neighborhood; in the foyer of the home belonging to a woman I met through the Tuesday-afternoon group; in an airport bar with Catherine; with a group of college friends when we gathered at the home of one undergoing a particularly grueling regimen of chemotherapy; with Catherine and another childhood friend during a weekend getaway to Annapolis, Maryland; and at the office of a publicist I’d last talked to nearly two decades ago but whom I reconnected with once I learned she represents Oh My Mahjong, the company that hosted the Lunar New Year tournament. “That’s mah-jongg for you!” she said.

I have played American mah-jongg, Chinese classical mah-jongg, and various online versions. I have paid to play and played for free. I have played in casual games with fellow beginners, where lessons were part of the experience, and in more competitive games, where I struggled to keep pace. But what I found, almost everywhere I played, was an incredibly welcoming group of people. Unlike, say, joining a running club—where my postpartum body and slow pace would leave me self-conscious—I never once felt uncomfortable showing up solo to a group full of strangers and announcing, “I’m here to play mah-jongg.” The barrier to entry, I found, was almost always just an eagerness to learn. So I bought a $300 ticket for the tournament in Dallas, the equivalent of someone who has just discovered rec-league basketball deciding to show up at WNBA tryouts.

Mah-jongg has hit its loose sesquicentennial, and the game suddenly seems to be everywhere, all at once. Celebrities, too, have been gushing about the pastime. Meghan Markle featured her “Mahj squad” on an episode of her Netflix show, Amy Poehler spoke of her “Mah-jongg May” (presumably like Dry January, but more fun), and Kelly Ripa and Sarah Jessica Parker enthused about the game too. Blake Lively reportedly had her chauffeur bring her bespoke mah-jongg set to a long day of court during her suit against her former co-star Justin Baldoni. And when Oh My Mahjong hosted a suite at the Super Bowl this year for the players’ wives, the Patriots’ Drake Maye and Hunter Henry both stopped by to play. I was not entirely surprised, then, to see that designers have gotten in on the action, offering over-the-top sets ranging from $695 (Jonathan Adler) to $14,600 (Hermès). By contrast, a seemingly perpetually sold-out Costco set came in at roughly $100, and stores such as Target and Hobby Lobby offer sets for even cheaper.

I understood the appeal. The beguiling combination of strategy and luck. The state of flow, for a phone-free hour or two. The mental stimulation, not unlike jigsawing a puzzle or inking a crossword. The sensory delight of the tiles and colors. The excuse to gather, and sense of community, because four people are required to play (though you can improvise your way through games with three, or even play “Siamese mahj” with just two). The joy of a book club, without the stress of reading a book. But I also wondered: Why now?

Mah-jongg started sometime in the mid-to-late 1800s around Shanghai’s Yangtze Delta area—a part of China known for its rich history of game development—before slowly spreading to the country’s urban centers, where it gained popularity as a mostly male, mostly gambling pastime, according to Annelise Heinz, a historian at the University of Oregon. In the early 1900s, an American Standard Oil representative named Joseph Park Babcock became instrumental in introducing the game to other Americans living in China. Along with his wife and business partner, he kicked off mah-jongg’s U.S. debut with a massive advertising campaign in 1922. The game was so successful that by 1924, Congress passed a law that included a specific duty category for mah-jongg sets.

“It’s hard to overstate how big of a fad this was,” Heinz, the author of Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture, told me. Like most fads, mah-jongg slowly began to fade. It was still played in some pockets (in Chinese American communities, among the wives of Air Force officers), but its next resurgence did not come until the late ’30s, this one driven by a group of enterprising Jewish women. As Jewish families entered the middle class and began moving to the suburbs, Heinz told me, these women did not need to work outside the home, but they found themselves bored and isolated in their new communities, looking for ways to connect. So, in 1937, they founded the National Mah Jongg League—which still exists today and has become the unofficial governing body for American mah-jongg—and began tweaking the game, which came to include joker tiles and a changing card that players must purchase anew each year for $14 ($15 for large print).

Until recently, mah-jongg was mainly played by older Chinese Americans (both men and women) and Jewish women. But as I started dabbling in the game, and as my social-media feed mysteriously filled with mah-jongg content, I noticed what I began to think of as the Lilly Pulitzerization of mah-jongg. Or, put more bluntly, Bougie White Woman Mah-Jongg. I was flooded not just with images of mah-jongg mats and tips on how to best deploy my flower tiles (never pass them during the Charleston), but with mah-jongg luxury: beautiful tablescapes of bright pastels (dainty glasses of rosé alongside dusty rose tiles), sun-kissed tableaus of “AquaMahj” (floating mah-jongg tables in glinting private pools), offers to upscale mah-jongg retreats, and gauzy photo upon gauzy photo of jauntily dressed, gel-manicured—and, yes, almost always white—women playing mah-jongg. (I should note here that I am white, nominally Jewish, and also partial to gel manicures.)

Although all versions of mah-jongg use, broadly, the same set of tiles, and involve four players around a table forming sets and sequences to try to complete winning hands, variants of the games diverge significantly from there. Many Asian versions more closely resemble gin rummy, and the strategy rests in the much more elaborate scoring. In American mah-jongg, much of the real strategy comes before official play ever begins, when players engage in the “Charleston”—named after the Roaring ’20s energetic dance—by passing tiles around the table up to six times. This pregame swapping allows you to begin to make your hand, discarding tiles you don’t need, while simultaneously sussing out which tiles your opponents might be hoarding.

The American version of mah-jongg has prompted a backlash, especially against white-owned companies, whose tiles are sometimes unrecognizable to a traditional player familiar with the three main suits—craks (the Chinese characters for the numbers one through nine), bams (short for bamboo), and dots. Even more confusing, the American version’s popularity has spawned regional varieties; a “New England” set, for instance, has lobster buoys for dots, sailing boats for craks, and yes, lacrosse-stick and cranberry-bog jokers. When the game has changed so much that a longtime aficionado can’t simply sit down and play, then perhaps it is time to reconsider how we got to a moment where some people are claiming to have just discovered an amazing new game that Chinese people have been playing for nearly two centuries—and that, in fact, has already been appropriated at least once.

“It’s the capitalization of it. American mah-jongg is the Americanization of mah-jongg, because they’ve found a way to monetize it,” Tim Ma, the chef and owner of Lucky Danger, a Chinese restaurant in D.C., told me. (The game’s annually changing card and its required fee, Ma said, are “like Amazon Prime.”) Lucky Danger features a red-lantern-lit “hidden” mah-jongg parlor in the back, inspired by the illegal mah-jongg parlor in Jackie Chan’s Rush Hour 2. Ma, a Chinese and Taiwanese American, grew up playing Taiwanese mah-jongg, and along with his father—the elder Tim Ma—began hosting weekly lessons at his restaurant. As I sat with Ma at one of the self-shuffling mah-jongg tables in “Lucky Club,” his gaming den, he explained that he and his dad “are a bit of purists,” and personally teach only the Taiwanese and Chinese versions of the game.

Ma was surprised at how quickly their class offerings—which, at one point, included a partnership with a group providing American-mah-jongg lessons—became popular, initially with (again, mainly white) moms from the D.C. suburbs. Ma told me that his dad was born in China, lived through the Communist Revolution, and now “brings all of his Chinese trauma into his class.” “He says it in a nice way, but he says, like, ‘Why would you do that? Are you not smart?’” Ma said. “People think it’s endearing, but I’m like, Can you imagine growing up with this guy?”

Ma described how, when he and his friends play, they put down a bottle of bourbon and click-clack-click until 6 a.m., smoking and drinking and chatting, almost instantaneously calculating their odds and only occasionally glancing at their tiles, when it’s their turn to discard. He was amused to see how newbies played: “They’re only looking at their tiles and they just keep looking at them, and that’s all that happens,” he said.

Nicole Wong, the author of Mahjong: House Rules From Across the Asian Diaspora, grew up in Santa Monica, California, the daughter of New Zealand immigrants of Chinese descent. She came of age in the ’90s and aughts, when, she told me, being Asian was not considered cool, and she connected with her culture mainly through food. Then, the summer after she graduated college in 2009, Wong went to stay with her paternal grandparents in New Zealand, where they taught her the game. But house rules often differ by family or culture. When she went to a mah-jongg night with some Asian American friends a few years later, she was frustrated to realize that she didn’t understand their version of the game, nor her own well enough to teach it to them. And so the Mahjong Project was born, her effort to document her Chinese New Zealand family’s mah-jongg rules, which existed primarily as oral traditions, and to gather other variations from across the Asian diaspora.

Wong’s reason for learning was personal, but she offered me some theories for the current resurgence. She noted that in the wake of recent anti-Asian violence, younger Asian Americans, especially Gen Zers and Millennials, are eager to reconnect (or, in some cases, just connect) with a culture that they might not have fully appreciated or understood growing up. “What excites me the most about mah-jongg are the opportunities to meet new people, to sit down next to someone in their 70s and hear about their childhood memories of the game and therefore of their life,” she said.

And, like nearly everyone else I spoke with, she also mentioned Crazy Rich Asians, the wildly successful 2018 rom-com set in Singapore, which features a pivotal scene—a face-off between a would-be mother-in-law and daughter-in-law—at a mah-jongg parlor. Much like the mah-jongg scene in The Joy Luck Club more than two decades prior, the movie helped push mah-jongg back into popular culture. Following the coronavirus pandemic, Wong said, people were eager to leave their houses and connect with one another, and mah-jongg offered an affordable way to gather with existing friends or make new ones—at a time when this sort of connection was perhaps needed most. “You have to sit; you have to use your mouth to talk to people; you have to use your eyes to look at things—all those very basic human things that can feel woefully out of practice,” she said.

Ma grew up watching his family elders play, and was relegated to the kids’ table himself. Even now, he told me that he and his cousins—some of whom are in their 60s—have still not been promoted to the adult game. “As long as they have four old Chinese people, they play,” he said. “We still play at the kids’ table.”

But now, he explained, the Americanization of mah-jongg has opened the game to everyone—and ultimately, he thinks more mah-jongg is a good thing. Laughing, he assessed the current moment with both praise and insult. “It’s not like, Go sit at the kids’ table,” Ma told me. “Every table is the kids’ table now.”

When I traveled to Dallas for the tournament, I finally got a sense of the true cult of American mah-jongg, and how the other half—the mah-jongg one-percenters, if you will—live. On my first night in town, Catherine and I ended up at an event hosted by the Mahjong Country Club, a group of 200 people (with a waiting list double that) who pay $500 a year for membership and play once a week at the estate at which we found ourselves, among other locales. The club also offers small group trips to places such as Aspen, Colorado, and Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. On arrival, the organizers encouraged us to “shop the shed”—a converted pool house featuring mah-jongg sets, mah-jongg jewelry, and Goyard handbags.

The next morning, we met Megan Trottier, the Oh My Mahjong founder, at the company’s warehouse, where a neon sign read Modern twist to a timeless tradition. Trottier said she wants her tiles to be recognizable to people who have played for decades, but also “updated and funky.” Her line first took off in what I began to think of as the SEC belt—small southern towns and suburbs that have a culture of aspirational hostessing. (The brand has even begun throwing “Oh My Sisterhood” events at sorority houses, and is now the largest American mah-jongg company.) “A lot of our customers are returning customers,” Trottier said, explaining that these aficionados swap out their sets, like china or crystal, depending on the season or crowd. A starter kit, which includes tiles, a mat, pushers, and a storage bag starts at about $665. I splurged, spending more than $300 on a solo set of navy “Gatsby” tiles (“classic, refined, and effortlessly sophisticated”).

The actual tournament was the extravagant culmination of an already over-the-top whirlwind, with nearly every decoration a shade of pink—an Oh My Mahjong twist on the traditional red for the Lunar New Year. That included a giant Year-of-the-Horse horse that had been assembled in the middle of the bar. Outside, two women in shimmering magenta-fringed cowboy jackets sat astride actual horses, welcoming the players.

I chose a table with three moms slightly younger than me, and we started to play. They all played socially in Dallas, and two also played in a competitive league, but our actual tournament games—we made it through four—were surprisingly chill. In our first game, when one woman realized she was a tile short, we simply let her pick up a new one. And in our second game, when I first incorrectly called a four dot to complete a run of consecutive numbers (you can’t call a tile to complete a run, unless it’s to win mah-jongg) and then later incorrectly used a joker to complete a run and falsely declare “mah-jongg!,” no one cared and we just played on. We kept up a polite patter—“I want to convert my children’s room into a mahj room,” one said, to which the other cooed, “That would be so perfect”—and I somehow, confusingly, won my table but did not advance to the final round.

As others have observed, the game, at its core, requires you to attempt order from chaos. To play mah-jongg, at least the way I have mainly played it—occasionally with close friends, but more often with casual acquaintances and total strangers—also forces you to pause and focus on something outside of your own life, if only fleetingly.

That I was in Dallas at all continued to surprise me. About a week before the tournament, my dad, who had been sick with dementia for more than a decade, was unexpectedly moved to hospice care. He died on Valentine’s Day, two days before I was set to fly out. I debated what to do, but his memorial service wasn’t for nearly a week, Catherine and I had already bought tickets, and I rationalized that it would be a good distraction. Finding myself playing mah-jongg in Texas in the period between my dad’s death and his memorial was purely coincidental, but what was perhaps less of a coincidence was that I had first learned the game when my mom was recovering after surgery. I had needed a forced break from my daily routine—work, kids, life—before I could even begin to learn the game that helps people slow down.

Once I learned how to pause, I found myself able to breathe during those few days in Dallas. Tears still periodically plinked down my cheeks, and I did not totally abandon myself to the gods of the tiles. But the distance and the distraction, along with an old friend, offered a welcome respite. I thought of my hands (Would it be crazy to go for all winds?) and, just as easily, I thought of my dad. And then, in the days after I returned home, Catherine—mah-jongg set in tow—stopped by my mom’s house yet again, for another few games as we waited for my dad’s ashes to be returned to us.

The ‘Broken Veteran’ Excuse

2026-06-14T08:00:00-04:00

Graham Platner’s victory this week in Maine’s Democratic Senate primary would have been a stunning achievement for a political newcomer under any circumstances. What makes it truly remarkable is that Platner pulled this off despite a decades-long trail of questionable behavior: a Nazi tattoo; contemptible written statements about sexual-abuse victims, Black people, and women; admissions of past substance abuse and marital infidelity; allegations of demeaning, disturbing, and physically threatening behavior toward former girlfriends. (Platner has denied any physical intimidation or violence.)

Platner and his surrogates have rolled out a catch-all excuse, meant not only to clarify how he could have made so many bad decisions, but also to shame people who criticize him: Platner, a Marine Corps veteran, was dealing with the heavy emotional burden and mental toll of the wars this nation sent him to fight. It’s not his fault. And he’s a better person now.

But that argument—and I say this as a veteran of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars—is nonsense, a convenient answer intended to divert the conversation from legitimate questions about Platner’s many flaws. It plays on Americans’ sympathy for those who have fought in war and overplays the distinction between veterans and civilians. Whether this justification is used cynically or sincerely—or ignorantly—it is insulting to veterans. Many of them suffer from their time in combat but don’t engage in the kind of behavior that Platner has. And many of them—despite, or because of, their wartime experience—are among our nation’s most accomplished, ethical, hardworking, and patriotic citizens and leaders.

Let me put this as plainly as possible: I know quite literally hundreds of combat veterans, and the soldiers I fought with, to my knowledge, all somehow managed to avoid getting Nazi tattoos. It doesn’t take much effort to avoid being inked with an SS symbol.

[Mike Nelson: Condemning a Nazi tattoo shouldn’t be this hard]

Platner himself has said repeatedly that much of his bad behavior stemmed from his war experience. “I’ve been very up front since the beginning of this campaign that that was a pretty dark period of my life after I came back from my combat service,” he recently told MS NOW’s Chris Hayes, admitting to “not being a good boyfriend” and “self-medicating with alcohol.” He has spoken about having PTSD and, in an interview with The New York Times, described an incident in which his friend was badly injured when their vehicle got hit by an IED in Iraq. The morning after his primary win, Platner said that he had only started to feel like himself again in 2021, and added, “I wake up every single morning just trying to be a little bit better and a little bit kinder than the way I was before.”

His surrogates echo this defense, which plays into the dangerous and condescending stereotype of American veterans as broken people. Speaking at a Platner rally a few days before the primary, Representative Ro Khanna acknowledged that some of Platner’s past relationships were “toxic and volatile,” before pivoting to: “But we need to have an honest conversation in this country. We broke thousands of young men by sending them into dumb wars.” Senator Chris Van Hollen has defended Platner, saying, “Let’s take a couple issues, including the comments he’s made in the past. I mean, he’s been very clear that he went into combat on behalf of the United States. He went through a really rough period, PTSD-type period.”

According to this logic, Platner is not responsible for his own actions. The burdens he carries excuse things he has done over the course of two decades—in the military, after returning to civilian life, and apparently up until he decided to run for Senate.

Some of these defenses are well-intentioned. They suggest an admiration for the sacrifices that veterans have made. Perhaps some civilians feel unqualified to judge people who have served and who may well still experience the effects of their time overseas. The chasm between those who have been in combat and those who’ve only watched news of it is massive and growing: A smaller percentage of Americans served in the global War on Terror than in any other major war over the past century. This can lead some civilians to be overly deferential to veterans, who are, after all, human.

But showing respect to the point of refusing to judge someone’s questionable actions is a version of what George W. Bush called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Some Americans seem to view Afghanistan and Iraq veterans almost as an alien species, whose experiences cannot be understood and who therefore have a separate set of expectations. This attitude reduces an incredibly diverse group of individuals to the “broken veteran” cliché.

In some cases, Platner supporters who are veterans themselves have tried to lend credibility to this explanation. In a Substack essay published shortly before the primary, Daniel Barkhuff, the founder of Veterans for Responsible Leadership, a super PAC that endorsed Platner, wrote: “He said dumb things. He did dumb things.” Platner, Barkhuff added, seems to have “the sort of impulsive aggressiveness that is curated and encouraged in ground combat units where 99% of your problems can be solved by getting more violent and faster than the other guy. None of that is hidden, and none of it needs to be excused.” Barkhuff explained that he himself has used offensive language in online arguments. But that analogy doesn’t amount to much of a defense of Platner, whose troubling history goes well beyond a few bad words.

Platner and his supporters frequently talk about his personal story as one of redemption and recovery after his time at war. “Graham clearly made a mistake. What I appreciated about him is he owned that mistake. He took responsibility for it,” Representative Seth Moulton said in reference to Platner’s tattoo. But has he owned his mistakes? Although Platner claims that he didn’t know the significance of his Nazi Totenkopf tattoo, others have disputed this. His former campaign political director said that Platner “knows damn well what it means.” A former romantic partner, Lyndsey Fifield, told The New York Times that Platner had referred to the tattoo years ago as “my Totenkopf.” When Hayes asked Platner about a text in which Fifield referred to the “Nazi tattoo on his chest” before the tattoo became public, Platner responded, “Well, she certainly didn’t send that text to me.” His denial proved even more absurd when an unnamed second former romantic partner told The New York Post that she’d had a conversation with Platner about the tattoo and its Nazi meaning in 2021, and shared screenshots demonstrating her awareness of the tattoo prior to the public disclosure.

In reaction to a New York Times story in which Fifield alleged that Platner had grabbed her, pushed her, and twisted her arm, Platner denied not only that behavior but also that he and Fifield had ever dated, despite contemporaneous texts and social-media posts suggesting that they had been in a relationship. Platner’s campaign has also attacked Fifield, who has been active in conservative circles, as a political operative, though the Times found no evidence that Fifield was acting on Collins’s behalf. Part of redemption is accounting for one’s faults, and targeting the people who bear witness to those faults is not accountability—it’s defensiveness. When Morning Joe’s Mika Brzezinski recently asked Platner whether additional controversies might come out, Platner said, “There’s nothing out there that’s actually concerning. People will make everything seem very concerning.”

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Yet more damning revelations about Graham Platner]

I have seen veterans deal with the very real stresses of America’s long wars—physical wounds as well as psychological ones that linger after witnessing death and carnage, or coming close to it oneself. The separation from home, family, and social networks to deploy to high-stress and high-risk environments, repeated cyclically over the course of decades, took a toll on every veteran of the War-on-Terror generation—whether they deployed once or a dozen times, whether they were directly in harm’s way or far from the explosions. Many veterans have sunk into substance abuse or engaged in questionable personal behavior, and I can understand why. Some no doubt have felt the need to “cut loose,” and we shouldn’t be surprised that the kinds of people who sign up to exit an aircraft mid-flight might also have a high risk tolerance in their personal lives.

But even if Platner’s pattern of behavior isn’t unique, that doesn’t mean it’s representative of the experiences or choices of the great majority of people who have served. And if all veterans who have suffered or stumbled deserve help and treatment, that doesn’t mean their hardship is a blanket excuse for immoral behavior. Everyone is responsible for the choices they make. That’s a lesson we learn in the military.

Anyone who claims that this kind of baggage is the cost of getting “regular” people—and specifically veterans—to run for office doesn’t realize how smug and out of touch that claim is. This argument implies that veterans are all a bunch of drunks with a history of contemptible beliefs and actions. We can’t claim to pay tribute to veterans while holding them to such low standards. This logic also ignores the many veterans who have entered public life without such questionable pasts.

Veterans are a part of American society, and many will continue to run for public office. But their status as veterans, though an important component of their story, should never excuse decisions they have made. Nor should veteran candidates use their service as automatic proof of their worthiness for office. If a candidate wishes to make his wartime service an essential part of why voters should select him, then he should highlight the traits he wishes to bring to the office, not dismiss the traits he wishes them to ignore.

Thank You for Your Attention to This Birthday

2026-06-12T05:00:00-04:00

Donald Trump is old. The president turns 80 on Sunday, becoming the second man to mark that milestone birthday in office. The other, of course, was his predecessor, Joe Biden. Neither particularly likes to be reminded of his age, and both have had White House aides furiously try to stymie any attempts to question their fitness for office. But that’s about where the similarities end when it comes to how each man prepared to ring in his ninth decade.

Biden said little about his 80th as it approached, in November 2022, as if wishing to avoid contributing to the debate over whether he was too old to seek reelection. He stayed out of sight and quietly marked the occasion with an understated brunch that fell between his granddaughter’s wedding and a Thanksgiving trip to Nantucket. Trump, however, is building an illuminated octagon with a 92-foot-tall portable-canopy stage, known as the “Claw,” on the White House South Lawn, where he and thousands of spectators will watch half-naked men brutally assault each other. To each their own, I guess.

Trump’s fight night is not solely for his birthday; it’s part of several weeks of events in Washington, D.C., to mark the nation’s 250th anniversary—and, hey, it’s also Flag Day. But it’s mostly about celebrating Trump, who first suggested staging a UFC fight at the White House not long after he won the 2024 election. The White House soon connected the fight with the birthdays of Trump and the nation. The more than $60 million event is so Trump; he is fond of over-the-top spectacles, he’s pals with UFC President and CEO Dana White, and he has attended multiple mixed martial arts fights across his two terms (I was in the press pool covering one in 2019 when a fighter got knocked unconscious right in front of us).

[Read: Inside America’s ugly birthday battle]

He’s certainly getting a spectacle. The Claw towers over the executive mansion and has clear sight lines to the Washington Monument. It’s lit up in patriotic red, white, and blue, and sometimes blasts Vegas-nightclub-style spotlights into the sky. The bleachers can seat 4,300 people for seven fights on Sunday night. A few of the fighters may even enter the octagon from the Oval Office. For some, this is Trump’s latest assault on the character and history of “the People’s House,” following the destruction of the East Wing for a proposed ballroom and the paving-over of the Rose Garden for a dinner patio. Last week, Trump compared the Claw to the Eiffel Tower and joked (I think?) that, just like the Paris landmark, the stage could be a temporary attraction turned permanent part of his ongoing effort to remake Washington in his image.

Although it’s unlikely that Trump will publicly dwell on his advancing age, he’s certainly not hiding from his birthday. This is all part of an in-your-face presidency, one meant to dominate and overwhelm, to blot out the sun. Prices are high, the Iran war is not going well, Republicans are panicking over November’s midterms, and polls show that a majority of Americans believe that the president’s priorities are misplaced. But Trump doesn’t care. He is simply doing what he wants, which is to be the center of all things, political consequences be damned.

The president has told confidants that he has become more aware of his mortality since he was nearly assassinated in Butler, Pennsylvania, two summers ago. His first term seems downright docile compared with the frenetic pace at which he is conducting Trump 2.0. A longtime Trump friend told me, on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, that the president “can hear the clock ticking.” Trump knows that term limits will end his time in office, the friend explained, but the president “can read an actuarial table too.” Trump’s parents lived until they were 93 (his dad) and 88 (his mom). Questions have begun to swirl about Trump’s own health, focused on his bruised hands and swollen ankles and penchant for dozing off in front of the White House press pool. Whatever the motivation, Trump seems focused on cramming in as much as he can as quickly as he can—and racing to accumulate presidential power and wealth for himself and his family.

[Read: The YOLO presidency]

Trump has cut back on domestic travel, he is doing little to campaign for fellow Republicans, and he barely made an effort to sell this Congress’s signature piece of legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, to the country. He holds fewer rallies than he once did, causing him to lose connection with his supporters while he surrounds himself with sycophants and rich friends. When he does leave the White House, in most cases it’s to go to one of his own clubs or a luxury box at a sporting event. (On Monday, he showed up at Madison Square Garden for an NBA Finals game and was blamed by some for ending the New York Knicks’ 13-game winning streak. When he skipped Wednesday’s game, the Knicks responded with a record-setting comeback win.) Trump has become obsessed with seeking vengeance against his political foes and has abandoned his promise to bring prices down, even mocking the nation’s affordability crisis. Many midterm elections are decided based on the economy, and Republicans have cringed when Trump, in recent days, has said things such as, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation,” and, “I love the inflation.” The GOP is now at risk of losing both chambers of Congress.

But Trump seems indifferent to the criticisms and is instead focused on his entry in the history books. He’s drawn to attempting to achieve things that his predecessors could not, including seizing territory for the United States (Greenland, for sure, but maybe Canada, too) and toppling antagonistic regimes (Venezuela, Iran, possibly Cuba). But the war in Iran has not gone according to plan: The hard-liners in Tehran have been emboldened as oil prices have soared. Efforts to bring the conflict to a close have so far failed. This week, hostilities reignited. And back at home, Trump has treated the nation’s capital as his own plaything, restoring the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, adding his name to the Kennedy Center (only to have a judge order its removal), and planning to build a triumphal arch that would obscure the view between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery.

Which is why, I suppose, he thought nothing of using the nation’s most symbolic address as the backdrop for his bloody birthday bash.

President Theodore Roosevelt had been a boxer at Harvard and would occasionally spar at the White House. But, to the best of my knowledge, Trump is the first president to toast his birthday with a blood sport. Some took Biden’s low-key approach; Jimmy Carter, for instance, treated his birthday like any other workday, save for a piece of pistachio cake. Neither George Washington nor Abraham Lincoln was fond of public celebrations for their own birthdays (yet they became state and federal holidays anyway; it’s a safe bet that Trump wouldn’t object to such honors).

But other presidents have gone big: Ronald Reagan, who held the title of oldest president until Biden and Trump came along, didn’t shy away from birthdays and hosted a big gathering for his 75th. One of Lyndon B. Johnson’s birthdays fell on the final day of the 1964 Democratic National Convention, so he accepted his nomination in front of a celebrating, singing crowd. Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose time in office was defined by the Great Depression and World War II, used his birthdays as fundraising events that eventually became the March of Dimes. Years later, Bill Clinton turned 50 with a fundraiser at Radio City Music Hall. Barack Obama celebrated the same milestone with a star-studded outdoor barbecue on the same lawn that now hosts the UFC cage. The most famous presidential birthday party was for John F. Kennedy’s 45th, a fundraiser held at Madison Square Garden that will be forever remembered for Marilyn Monroe’s sultry rendition of “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.”

Assuming that the weather cooperates (thunderstorms are in the forecast), how will history recall Trump’s festivities? Perhaps they will be remembered as an ideal representation of his id, or as a testament to excess at a time of war and economic worry. Or maybe the UFC fights will become a historical curiosity that’s remembered mainly by the fighters, their broken bones and bloodied noses souvenirs of the night they did battle in a makeshift cage outside the White House.

Inside America’s Ugly Birthday Battle

2026-06-11T08:30:00-04:00

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Years before Poison’s Bret Michaels, Young MC, and the Commodores dropped out of this summer’s concert series on the National Mall celebrating America’s 250th birthday, planners envisioned a Smithsonian-led blockbuster festival stretching from the Washington Monument to the U.S. Capitol that would be open to all and free of partisanship. They wanted a party bigger than the Folklife Festival, an annual two-week summer exhibition, and much longer-lasting. This new “Festival of Festivals” would focus on the semiquincentennial, with four to six weeks of performances, workshops, and displays to “celebrate the nation’s successes,” “contemplate the consequences of our history,” and “commit to advancing our multicultural democracy,” according to a November 27, 2023, memo that I obtained.

But last summer, with little fanfare, President Trump took control of the event and renamed it. While campaigning, he had promised to work with all 50 state governors to put on his own “Great American State Fair” at the Iowa State Fairgrounds. Last July, he traveled to Iowa to announce a change of plans: “a giant patriotic festival next summer on the National Mall featuring exhibits from all 50 states.” The announcement got little attention, because at the same event, Trump said this about congressional Democrats: “I hate them.” The Smithsonian quietly recast the Festival of Festivals as a series of events around the country.

So began Trump’s multipronged takeover of the historic celebrations, which will culminate on July 4—the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence—amid growing disarray and conflict, according to documents I obtained and interviews with 10 people involved in the planning or oversight of the event, most of whom requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly.

They described frayed trust and growing conflict that has become so acrimonious that the Department of the Interior is refusing to honor a December agreement with America250, a bipartisan group authorized by Congress in 2016 to plan the nation’s festivities. A memorandum of agreement I obtained shows that the department pledged to transfer $50 million in congressional appropriations by February 1, but only $25 million has been delivered so far. “Spending taxpayer money on frivolous, poorly attended events and D.C. consultants who are trying to get rich off America’s 250th is the exact opposite of what was intended,” the Department of the Interior press office told me yesterday in an unsigned statement, when I asked why the America250 money had not been transferred. “This administration will not light taxpayer money on fire. Full stop.”

Democratic and Republican lawmakers have expressed frustration at the breakdown, with one House committee opening its own investigations into the Trump administration’s handling of taxpayer funding for America’s birthday party. “This is straight out of It’s a Wonderful Life, when Henry Potter steals George Bailey’s money and tries to drive him to the brink,” one commissioner for America250 told me. “With less than a month away from this historic milestone, there is just no room for politics, and we remain hopeful that cooler heads will prevail.”

Trump’s team is similarly frustrated. The White House created its own rival group, Freedom 250, late last year to improve on the existing plans. Trump aides now accuse the bipartisan group of resisting the rightful role of the commander in chief to put his own mark on the celebrations. “America250 can’t get over the fact that Trump won,” Trump’s former co–campaign manager Chris LaCivita, who worked as a top contractor for America250 last year before switching to Freedom 250, told me. “They want to apologize for America’s 250th. We don’t.”

The discord broke into public view late last month when seven music acts bowed out of the Great American State Fair after they learned that Freedom 250, not the bipartisan planners, were organizing it. Trump angrily canceled the live-music series and pledged to make the event more explicitly political. Days later, he announced a June 24 rally on the National Mall to launch the state fair, an event he is now billing as a “Rally to end all Rallies,” featuring him as the centerpiece and no “singers with no talent.” He invited U.S. military bands; the country singer Lee Greenwood, whose “God Bless the U.S.A.” was Trump’s campaign walk-out song; and the opera tenor Christopher Macchio, who sang at Trump’s 2025 inauguration.

Some supporters of America250, which is backed by a bipartisan caucus of 421 federal lawmakers, view this event as further proof that Trump always planned to remake the national celebration in his image. They point to a draft Freedom 250 document, which details how organizers could encourage Americans to host their own events—town halls or rallies, say, “around a core America First issue” such as parental rights, free speech, and election integrity. Cathy Gillespie, a lifelong Republican who has been an America250 commissioner for eight years, told me in a statement that her group’s mission is to “honor and celebrate” the anniversary “in a way that engages and inspires all Americans, regardless of political affiliation.” She added, “There is nothing anywhere that validates a claim it has failed in this mission, let alone apologize for our 250th Anniversary.”

But with weeks to go, relations between the two sides could deteriorate further, potentially marring a national event that both say should be unifying. The White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told me in a statement that the celebrations “shouldn’t be ruined by people or organizations more concerned with partisanship and apologizing for America than celebrating the greatest nation in history.” Late last month, America250’s leadership sent a letter to Trump inviting him to participate in the events, including a ball drop at midnight on July 3 in Times Square, a concert in Los Angeles, and the burying of a time capsule in Philadelphia.

Discussions have followed, but the president has not yet committed to attending. Kellyanne Conway, another Republican America250 commissioner who has spoken with Trump about the celebrations, has been pushing to lower temperatures. “America’s birthday party will be epic,” she told me in a statement. “I have witnessed more collaboration than confrontation, and hope all can operate toward the same goal.”

At first, the two teams worked as one. Trump had publicly shared his vision for the 250th celebration in a May 2023 campaign video. Festivities would last an entire year, starting in 2025 on Memorial Day, he explained, and would include a Great American State Fair, a high-school athletic competition called the Patriot Games, a National Garden of American Heroes with sculptures, and a prayer event. None of those ideas appeared on the congressional planners’ agenda, but the two teams agreed that there was still time to add more events.

The America250 chair, Rosie Rios, who had served as the U.S. treasurer during the Barack Obama presidency, sent a November 2024 memo to Trump asking him to issue an executive order to mobilize federal resources for the celebrations, according to an annual report released in January. She also suggested that Trump invite King Charles III for a visit, to replicate Queen Elizabeth’s 1976 visit to mark the bicentennial. He took her up on both suggestions.

[Read: The King’s admirer in chief]

Rios brought on a number of Trump’s top advisers, including LaCivita, the fundraiser Meredith O’Rourke, and Justin Caporale, the producer of Trump’s political events. The White House then appointed Ariel Abergel—a former producer at Fox News who had worked for First Lady Melania Trump—as America250’s executive director.

When Trump wanted to stage a military parade in Washington, D.C., on his birthday last June to commemorate the Army’s 250th anniversary, America250 allowed the president’s team to raise money for that and for a series of other Trump-focused events through their nonprofit operation. The parade—along with Trump’s speech in Iowa, his remarks at the 2025 West Point graduation, and a speech at Fort Bragg—were paid for with more than $30 million that the Trump team routed through the group, according to the America250 annual report. Sponsorships came from companies seeking Trump’s favor, such as Palantir, Amazon, Oracle, and Coinbase, and the group reported an $849,000 “fundraising fee and commission” for these programs, according to America250 documents. Some of the money raised went to other programs, including a plan for mobile museum exhibits.

But relations became strained last July after Trump declared his hatred of the Democrats at the Iowa rally, as the crowd waved America250 signs. Around the same time, Abergel suggested to four commissioners that they resign, angering some in the organization and raising concern on Capitol Hill. He pushed internally for America250 to focus more on televised events, not the less visible programming at the core of the effort. In September, he used the group’s official Instagram account to post “God bless Charlie Kirk” after the conservative activist’s assassination. Abergel was pushed out of the organization.

Tensions also emerged over money. America250 had initially planned to request $100 million in onetime funding from the Republican-backed One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025, according to an account given by America250 organizers to investigators of the House Natural Resources Committee, which I obtained. But at LaCivita’s recommendation, America250 changed the ask to $150 million, with the understanding that $100 million would finance America250 programming and the remaining $50 million would be spent by the White House for its own 250th events, they told the investigators. Congress assigned the Interior Department to distribute the funds.

After the bill passed, leaders of America250—which then employed LaCivita, Caporale, and O’Rourke—met with the White House staff, including Vince Haley, the director of the domestic-policy council. Caporale drafted a budget for the coming 18 months, which I obtained, that projected about $130 million in spending on America250 projects, a number that presumed $100 million in federal funds from the One Big Beautiful Bill and $30 million in other appropriations, according to the America250 response to House investigators. Under the plan, America250 expected O’Rourke to raise $85 million in private funds that would pay mostly for the programming championed by Trump, including the Great American State Fair, the Navy and Marine celebrations that fall, and the Patriot Games.

The agreement fell apart, as commissioners for America250 pushed for distance from the events that Trump’s team was planning, and the president’s advisers began raising questions about America250 spending. In November, with the support of America250, Trump’s advisers set up Freedom 250 as a LLC inside the nonpartisan National Park Foundation and began raising money for celebrations in the Washington area. America250 agreed to focus elsewhere in the country. The original talking points for the group described Freedom 250 as “complementary and reinforcing” with America250, designed to “unite Americans across political, geographic, and demographic lines.” But instead, it has become a rival effort, taking an increasing share of federal funding, scooping up donations, and assuming responsibility for long-planned events while sometimes placing Trump at the center of the celebrations.

Corporate-sponsorship packages for Freedom 250 offered top donors access to a “thank you reception hosted by President Donald J. Trump,” along with VIP access and speaking opportunities for events. Donors who give more than $2.5 million have been promised a “dedicated” press release announcing their support and a “historic” photo opportunity with Trump. A list of donors has not been disclosed, but the defense contractor Northrop Grumman and the manufacturer John Deere, which are also America250 donors, were announced in Freedom 250 press releases as “partners.”

[Read: The YOLO presidency ]

Trump’s campaign advisers who’d initially worked for America250 left and became major vendors for Freedom 250. Caporale’s firm, Event Strategies Inc., which organized the Army parade for Trump last summer, began producing Trump’s 250th program. Trump’s campaign-merchandise vendor, a Louisiana-based firm called Ace Specialties, began operating the Freedom 250 online storefront, which offered similar merchandise as the America250 store.

The dueling celebrations of the nation were often at odds. On New Year’s Eve, Freedom 250 spent about $3 million to broadcast a light show on the Washington Monument, an idea that America250 had originally developed. America250 spent about $4 million for a televised New Year’s promotion in Times Square of its America Gives volunteer initiative. America250 partnered with the NFL during this year’s Super Bowl; Freedom 250 bought ad time around the event to promote its own brand. While America250 promoted its America’s Field Trip program, a patriotic-essay-writing contest that allowed schoolkids to win trips to historic landmarks, Freedom 250 launched the American Heroes Student Art Contest, with a trip to the Great American State Fair as the prize.

America250 adopted “350 for 250” as its motto around the time Trump retook office, a reference to the congressional mandate to include all 350 million Americans in the semiquincentennial celebration. Trump’s advisers began using a variation of the slogan—“250 for 250”—to promote the construction of a 250-foot-tall memorial arch by Arlington National Cemetery. The planned arch, which is yet to begin construction and is opposed by Democrats, has been included in promotional images for the Great American State Fair.

The nastiest fights have arisen over money. Trump-administration officials signaled late last year that America250’s programming would not receive $100 million from the One Big Beautiful Bill. Instead, the National Park Service, which was handling the funds for the Interior Department, signed a memorandum of agreement with America250 in December to transfer $50 million to the group by February 1. The full amount never arrived.

“We thought we’d taken care of that in last year’s budget—$150 million for America250, promised $50 million; they only received $25 so far,” Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, a Republican who is a member of the America250 commission, said at an April hearing with Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum. “I am still concerned about this additional $25 million that was to be directed to America250.”

“We are working closely with the White House on that, and so we’ll get back to you,” Burgum responded. The Interior press office suggested yesterday that the money would not be coming anytime soon. “The Trump administration has been clear since day one that we will be good stewards of taxpayer money,” it told me in a statement. “The Memorandum of Understanding signed with all 250th related entities made that clear.”

The Trump team now says that it became concerned about the cost of America250’s programming. It inquired about the decision to provide Rios with an apartment in Washington. “There are serious concerns about America250’s accountability,” one person in Trump’s orbit who is familiar with the discussions told me. “Since 2016, the organization has received over $120 million in public and private funding per their own documents. Now they claim a budget deficit, and they need another $130 million? What about their bloated budget and lame programming is worth $250 million?”

Trump’s team was particularly concerned about America’s Field Trip, an essay-writing contest that has provided trips for 275 students and their chaperones to historic locales across the country, along with $500 cash awards for an equal number of runners-up. The budget for the program is not fixed, but one projection I viewed put it at $10.4 million over eight years, or about $38,000 per field-trip winner. “Whatever way you cut the math, it doesn’t work,” the person in Trump’s orbit said.

Representatives of America250 rejected the suggestion that money had been mishandled, and they pointed out that the goal of the field-trip project was to engage students across the country, not just to award prizes. More than 20,000 students have submitted patriotic essays as part of the program. The group has re-budgeted its programming to account for the decreased allocations from the One Big Beautiful Bill, though it continues to seek the second $25 million promised in the Interior agreement. “Any claim that America250 has misused taxpayer resources or operated as a partisan organization is completely unfounded and wrong,” Gillespie said. The Washington apartment used by Rios was rented for use by any America250 commissioner, who all work as volunteers, after it was determined that the arrangement would be less expensive than renting hotel rooms, an America250 official told me.

[Read: Donald Trump’s paint jobs]

From December to April, the Interior Department transferred $68 million to the National Park Foundation, which houses Freedom 250, for semiquincentennial programming, according to federal records. The White House also asked the department to transfer other funds to the Defense Department to pay for the Navy and Marine 250th celebrations last fall, according to the person in Trump’s orbit familiar with the discussions.

At the same time, the Trump administration has given Washington a glam-up ahead of the summer’s festivities, upsetting some Democrats. Federal payment records show that since the start of November, the Interior Department has transferred about $98 million from the National Park Service’s entry-fee program to beautification efforts around D.C., including the retrofit of the Reflecting Pool and multiple nearby fountains and monuments.

All of this spending by Trump’s team is now the subject of a Democratic investigation in the House, an inquiry that could expand if the party wins control of Congress in the November elections. “We’ve found a lot in our investigations and will keep digging,” Representative Jared Huffman of California, the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, told me in a statement, “but it seems pretty clear this con man is at it again and has co-opted America’s birthday to rake in foreign donations, siphon taxpayer dollars from the legitimate America 250 into this shadowy LLC, and use it all to celebrate himself instead of the country.”

Republicans on the same committee, meanwhile, have attacked America250 while praising Freedom 250. “The America250 organization had ten years to prepare for this historic milestone, yet they have been accused of mismanaging taxpayer dollars,” Representative Addison McDowell of North Carolina told me in a statement. “Freedom 250 is celebrating our country in the patriotic way it deserves.”

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a group that represents federal workers, has also filed a lawsuit to force Interior to turn over more documents detailing spending on Freedom 250 and separate spending by the National Park Service to prepare Washington-area monuments for the summer events. “This really doesn’t feel like a bipartisan celebration that is inclusive of all Americans,” PEER Executive Director Tim Whitehouse told me. “This feels like a political prop show for the president.”

[Read: The most interesting part of Trump’s prayer rally]

At the Department of the Interior, employees have been instructed to treat Freedom 250 as a trusted partner. In an April 30 internal National Park Service email that I reviewed, the agency urged its staff to wear Freedom 250 commemorative pins on their uniform lapels. Those who do not wear uniforms were told to wear the pin with business attire “as a mark of Esprit de Corps.” Park Service volunteers were also encouraged to wear the pin.

“This pin serves as a symbol of our shared history and commitment to the values of service and liberty that have defined this nation for two and a half centuries,” the email to staff reads. The Park Service said in the email that the pins, which retail individually for $8 on the Freedom 250 website, could be ordered in batches of “100 or more” from Trump’s campaign vendor in Louisiana. “Any insinuation that employees were tasked with buying Freedom 250 pins is categorically false,” the Interior press office told me in a statement.

The Smithsonian, meanwhile, is moving ahead with its 250th celebrations, far from the controversy in Washington. The Festival of Festivals will now take place in 27 states and two territories, according to the Smithsonian, integrating the federal museum programming into far-flung events that were already planned. While Trump gathers Americans for his rally and fair, the Smithsonian will make appearances at Farm Aid, a Virginia Beach concert organized by the musicians Willie Nelson, Neil Young, and Dave Matthews that is scheduled for September, and at Burning Man, an annual arts bacchanal in the Nevada desert. The Burning Man plan, according to Smithsonian officials, is to set up a “mobile recording station” where revelers can give five-to-10-minute oral-history interviews “on culture, identity, and democracy” for the 250th.

Trump Isn’t Giving Up on His Slush Fund

2026-06-11T07:00:00-04:00

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When Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche appeared before Congress last Tuesday, senior administration officials hoped that his testimony would be enough to quell the uproar over a $1.776 billion payout scheme for Trump loyalists, including January 6 rioters. “We’re not moving forward with the fund,” he told a House appropriations subcommittee.

But Blanche, who was not under oath, refused requests from a representative to put that in writing. He asked instead for Congress to take him at his word that President Trump’s politically inconvenient project for rewarding those who were allegedly victimized by the Biden-era Justice Department had truly been abandoned.

It turns out that it’s not that simple. Behind the scenes, Justice Department and other Trump-administration officials have quietly assured allies that plans for some form of payout remain on track. I spoke with eight people familiar with the so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund—including current and former Justice Department officials, current and former members of Congress, a defense attorney, and political operatives close to the administration. All said that Justice Department officials and people close to the White House have indicated that the payout idea has not actually been scrapped. Rather, they say, officials are exploring whether elements of the fund can be reactivated while also examining alternative arrangements to make sure loyalists get compensated. Across the administration, and even within the Justice Department, officials have differing perspectives on whether the fund itself will ultimately be restored. But either way, officials see a path forward for the government to pay those who say they are victims of supposed government “weaponization.”

A White House official told me in response to a list of emailed questions that “any speculation about potential future actions is just that—speculation. President Trump remains committed to addressing Biden-era weaponization.” A senior DOJ official who was familiar with the department’s plans said there have been no discussions at the highest levels about reviving the fund since Blanche testified, though the official acknowledged DOJ was a large institution and there may have been conversations at lower levels.

Those familiar with the internal conversations—all of whom spoke with me on the condition of anonymity because they feared possible retaliation—told me that the work is being kept quiet while the Trump administration waits for opposition to the fund to blow over. Crucially, the administration is also trying to avoid a fight over the payout plan, which has been deemed a political slush fund by critics, while the Senate considers Blanche’s nomination for attorney general.

[Read: Trump might already be a lame duck]

Republican John Curtis of Utah suggested to reporters earlier this month that holding up Blanche’s nomination was an option for the Senate, noting that congressional amendments are “not our only chance to kill the fund.” Republican Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who has grown vocal in his criticism of the administration as he heads toward retirement, has indicated that he may not vote to confirm Blanche unless the fund is truly dead. Republicans currently maintain a slim majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Republicans I spoke with acknowledged that defections over the fund could prevent a nomination from moving out of the committee, though it is too early to know for sure, given that the process could take weeks. But Republicans have little margin for error if they want the nomination to go to the full Senate. Blanche’s confirmation depends in part on his ability to convince skeptical Republican senators that the fund is no longer a live possibility.

Shortly after Trump took office for the second time, the White House asked the Justice Department and Trump’s legal advisers to find a way to reimburse him and those close to him for the millions of dollars in legal expenses he has incurred, including over the Mueller probe into his campaign’s relationship with Russia as well as multiple impeachments and criminal investigations. That effort was later combined with a separate but related push by Trump supporters to pursue financial restitution for those convicted of crimes related to January 6, providing a broader context for a massive transfer of taxpayer dollars from the government to those who have been charged with, and in many cases convicted of, federal crimes.

On May 18, Blanche announced the establishment of a $1.776 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund as part of a settlement to a suit brought by Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization against the IRS and Treasury Department. The settlement resolved claims related to the disclosure of Trump’s tax returns, and a subsequent addendum barred the IRS from auditing the tax returns of Trump, his family, and his businesses. A DOJ press release highlighted Blanche’s central role in the fund’s creation and administration, explaining that he would appoint a five-member commission to decide who would get paid, and how much. The president was given the authority to remove any of the commission’s members. “The machinery of government should never be weaponized against any American, and it is this Department’s intention to make right the wrongs that were previously done while ensuring this never happens again,” Blanche said at the time.

The announcement provoked bipartisan criticism. Democrats pointed out that the fund could be used to pay January 6 defendants who had assaulted police officers. Some Republican critics said the same, while noting that the political optics of paying taxpayer money to presidential allies would be terrible for the party at a time of rising gas prices and other costs. Tillis derided the fund as a “payout for punks.”

Under pressure from fellow Republicans, the administration backed off the plan—but never renounced it. One DOJ official and one political strategist close to the White House told me that that officials there didn’t think the fund was a bad idea; they just regretted that the rollout, which had been intended in part as a way of shoring up Republican support ahead of the midterm elections, had been too public and invited too much scrutiny. They hoped to do things more quietly in the future—and those who are seeking money from the government say that’s exactly what’s happening.

“Right now, you have to be an insider to know who to talk to,” one attorney who had advised multiple individuals seeking compensation told me. One Republican former member of Congress told me that he and others had been assured that the administration’s public statements about the weaponization fund being abandoned were “all part of the plan; nothing has changed.” One Justice Department official and two Republican political advisers told me that public backing for the fund was dropped to clear the way for Blanche’s confirmation, but that they had been promised that payments would eventually be made to January 6 defendants, pardon recipients, and those close to the president. “Trump didn’t want to fight this out in public,” the official told me.

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

Justice Department officials are still figuring out the exact mechanisms by which people who seek compensation can be paid. Officials told me that those who believe they were victims of a weaponized government may ultimately need to file lawsuits so they can then receive settlements from a previously established Justice Department fund. Suing the government is not a new idea. But typically the government looks for ways to defend itself; in this case, officials are exploring proposals to facilitate litigation and to expedite payments without requiring an expensive and lengthy process that might draw attention. One former DOJ official told me that discussions are happening about how to provide legal support at scale to those who want to file lawsuits. “They’ll sue, and they’ll settle,” the former official said of the plan.

Blanche may have denied before Congress that the weaponization fund was moving ahead, but others have been less categorical, dropping hints that payouts remain in play. Last week, Stanley Woodward Jr., a former Trump White House official who now serves as associate attorney general and who signed the settlement agreement, appeared to telegraph that the financial-restitution effort was still in progress. He responded “we’re on it” to a post by Senator Lindsey Graham on X that suggested that victims of so-called weaponization during the Biden era could still be compensated through claims under the Federal Torts Claims Act. That law enables individuals to pursue claims in federal court for personal injuries, wrongful death, or property loss caused by the negligent or wrongful acts of federal employees. Woodward later deleted the post.

In multiple interviews over the past week, Trump has declined to confirm that the payout effort has been abandoned. When asked by NBC News if he was “looking for a way to revive it,” Trump did not dispute that: “Well, look. If it was up to me, I’d pay them the kind of money that they deserve,” he said. He added, “I think the weaponization fund is a great idea, and so do many other Republicans.” Although officials say the fund was intended to be available to any victims of government weaponization, regardless of party, the president has focused his comments exclusively on allies who he feels were wrongfully targeted.

[Read: Why Republicans aren’t condemning Trump’s Meet the Press walkout]

When Blanche testified, the acting attorney general resisted multiple attempts from lawmakers to pin him down. Representative Grace Meng of New York asked repeatedly if he would provide written statements that reflected his comments to the committee, but the acting attorney general declined. “I’m not committing to putting anything in writing. I’m going to say it over and over again. I don’t know what the purpose of putting something in writing,” he told lawmakers, growing visibly frustrated.

Four days before Blanche’s appearance in front of Congress, a federal judge had ordered DOJ to cease “any further action pursuant to the creation or operation” of the fund before a June 12 hearing. The Justice Department said it would comply with the court’s order, and later cited Blanche’s statements to Congress in its motion to dismiss the case, arguing that litigation that had been brought by Trump critics and other entities was now moot, because the fund was not going ahead.

On Monday, Woodward wrote, in a letter to plaintiffs’ attorneys that I reviewed, that “no members have been appointed to the Anti-Weaponization Fund, no process for accepting claims has been established, no money has been moved, and no claims have been paid.” Still, DOJ would not provide any additional statements that would clarify the status of the fund.

On Tuesday evening, lawyers for plaintiffs who are challenging the fund, from the legal advocacy group Democracy Forward, submitted filings alleging that the government’s shifting posture made it “impossible for Plaintiffs or the Court to credit Defendants’ representations” regarding the fund. The filings cite the president’s own words expressing continued support of the weaponization fund, while declining to answer whether the effort has been halted. “We’ve seen this administration say one thing and do the complete opposite far too many times, and we’re asking the court to have them show us the truth about their assurances that the slush fund has actually been abandoned,” Skye Perryman, the president and CEO of Democracy Forward, said in a statement to me. She was more direct in her response to Blanche on social media: “If you can say it on TV, you should say it in court.”

Blanche’s nomination hearing is expected to be scheduled after he submits the required documentation, which includes financial disclosures and an FBI background check. Democrats and Republicans told me it is unclear whether Blanche will be able to win confirmation. Rejection of Blanche, who was Trump’s personal attorney before he returned to office, would mark another setback for a president who is not used to taking no for an answer. Trump has privately told associates that he was drawn to the idea of the Anti-Weaponization Fund because he believes he is “owed” for the “witchhunt” investigations he’s endured, a senior aide and an outside adviser told my colleague Jonathan Lemire. He has raged against the Russia probe that he felt consumed his first term and the criminal investigations he faced while out of office. Now he is seething about acts of defiance from members of his own party on Capitol Hill, including their opposition to the fund. “Republicans wouldn’t have balked,” the outside Trump adviser said, “if his poll numbers were better.” But the historically unpopular president now seems powerless to bring them back into line.

Jonathan Lemire and Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed reporting.

Trump Once Played Soccer

2026-06-11T06:00:00-04:00

By the time Donald Trump was in his senior year at New York Military Academy, he had quit playing football and decided to join the varsity soccer team. Most of his teammates were from South or Central America, the children of diplomats and military officers: four Colombians, two Peruvians, and players from Mexico, Costa Rica, Argentina, and Venezuela.

The coach wasn’t particularly good, former teammates told me, and the season was not particularly successful. The yearbook recorded three wins and eight losses, as recently reported by The Guardian. Latin music filled the team bus en route to away games, and the players’ pregame chant culminated in a plea for togetherness: “¡Nosotros! ¡Nosotros! Rah, rah, rah!”

“It was like you were in another country,” Alfred Harrison, one of Trump’s teammates, told me. “You didn’t really get the ball unless you spoke Spanish.” Harrison recalls Trump being a decent player, working on the back line as a defender and kicking the occasional long ball over the midfield to start an attack. “He was fairly active on the field,” he said. “That guy had an abundance of testosterone, that’s for sure.”

Trump didn’t seem to play much soccer beyond that year, and it’s unclear whether he watches or cares much about the game today. His son Barron played in Arlington and for the D.C. United Academy team during Trump’s first term as president, but there’s no evidence that Trump embraced being a “soccer dad,” let alone that he ever showed up to watch a game. He reportedly considered buying Rangers FC in Scotland, where his mother is from and where he owns golf courses, and the Colombian team Atlético Nacional, which was once linked with the drug trafficker Pablo Escobar, but passed on both. When he was asked last year to identify his favorite player, he named Pelé but recognized that the choice was a bit old-fashioned. (Golf caddies also used to refer to Trump as Pelé for the number of times he kicked the ball on the golf course.) Most of all, Trump seems to love the spectacle around the game, especially the trophies and star players, and he has tried to brand himself as something of a soccer president, hosting both Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo on separate visits at the White House.

As the United States prepares to host the World Cup, along with Mexico and Canada, the president is expected to force himself uncomfortably into the center of attention. The tournament comes amid an uncertain and unpopular war, rising gas prices, and predictions that the president’s party will lose badly in the midterm elections. “The worse that things get for Trump in terms of popularity ratings or the war in Iran, the more he’s going to cling to sports,” Jules Boykoff, the author of Red Card: The 2026 World Cup, Sportswashing, and the FIFA Greed Machine, told me.

Trump often seems to want little to do with the rest of the world, but he wants everything to do with hosting one of the few events that most of the globe still tunes in to watch. The tournament is meant to mark a celebration of the world and its varied cultures, and it is coinciding with the 250th anniversary of America. Trump seems to see it as a chance for nationalistic pride—and self-promotion.

Last July, FIFA hosted a dress rehearsal of sorts when it held the 2025 Club World Cup final at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. Trump attended, eager to soak it all in from a luxury box as Chelsea played against Paris Saint-Germain. The fans hated it.

As I sat in the upper rows near the center of the field, I heard the resounding boos whenever Trump’s face came on the big screen. This happened right from the beginning, even during the national anthem, and continued through the end of the match, as Trump strolled onto the field with FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino. But Trump waved and smiled through the shouts. He beamed as he handed out medals to the winners. He lingered awkwardly as Chelsea players celebrated the match that they, not Trump, had just won. “I thought that he was going to exit the stage, but he wanted to stay,” a befuddled team captain, Reece James, told reporters afterward. The midfielder Cole Palmer added: “I was a bit confused, yes.”

[Read: The World Cup of ugh]

Infantino had specially made a trophy for the event and presented it earlier to Trump at the White House, allowing the president to keep that original. FIFA awarded a separate one to the actual winners. Later that summer, Infantino brought the World Cup trophy to the Oval Office, telling Trump that it was the same one that Messi, of Argentina, had lifted in triumph in 2022. Only winners are allowed to touch this trophy, Infantino told the president, adding: “And since you are a winner, of course, you can as well touch it.” Trump asked if he could keep it, saying he wanted to add it to his golden collection, but this one he had to give back.

Infantino has seemed to recognize that the way to Trump’s heart is through gifts. He has presented Trump with a blue FIFA jersey, a white U.S. men’s national team jersey, a golden frame containing a photo of the two of them, a red card and a yellow card that referees use, a soccer ball with an image of the American flag affixed on it, a soccer ball for the Club World Cup, and an oversize match ticket for the World Cup final, a seat in “Row 1 Seat 1.”

The ultimate gift came in December. When Trump was passed over for the Nobel Peace Prize that he had so coveted, Infantino created a whole new honor: the FIFA Peace Prize. Infantino gave Trump a custom golden trophy—five disembodied hands holding a globe in the shape of a soccer ball—during the World Cup draw at the Kennedy Center, which Trump had already taken over. The presentation also included a gold medal for Trump to “wear everywhere you want to go” and a certificate inside a bound book. Soon after, the president continued his celebration of peace as he invaded Venezuela, threatened to seize Greenland, and started a war with Iran.

Infantino has appeared with Trump more than actual world leaders have, and he has made at least half a dozen visits to the Oval Office. He was there at the inauguration, a few rows behind former presidents, in January 2025. He was front and center with Trump during a UFC fight. When Melania Trump’s movie premiered at the Kennedy Center, Infantino attended. Even when Trump traveled to Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to finalize a cease-fire agreement in Gaza, Infantino came along to grin for the photos. When Trump went to speak at the United Nations General Assembly, Infantino posed with him in front of a blue curtain.

[Read: 78 Super Bowls]

Infantino reportedly has a home in South Florida, not far from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, and opened a 75,000-square-foot FIFA office near Miami. FIFA also set up an office in Trump Tower to great fanfare last year, and Eric Trump told Infantino at a related ceremony: “On behalf of myself, on behalf of New York, on behalf of the Trump Organization and everybody that works in this building: We love you.” The lease is for 4,852 square feet on a portion of the tower’s 17th floor, according to data from CompStak, a commercial-real-estate-analytics company. The organization is paying nearly $38,500 a month, the data show, which is about 28 percent higher than other Trump Tower tenants but roughly in line with other rents in the area. The lease agreement ends in October 2032. It is unclear what work is being done there, how many employees are based in the office, or why the lease is so long. (FIFA and the Trump Organization declined to respond to my questions. The White House declined to comment.)

On the face of it, theirs is an odd partnership: Infantino is a European who oversees a tournament designed to bring the world together; Trump has tried to tear down the NATO alliance. But the two men share a thirst for profits and a knowledge of brand marketability. They both want to bolster their own image with the help of the world’s best soccer players, and each has a desire to expand their global reach with glitz and glamour, wealth and power. They have demonstrated that they are both willing to stretch ethical boundaries—and at times have an admiration for autocrats. They are transactional in ways that can elevate countries with questionable records in human rights.

Their ties date back nearly a decade, to Trump’s first term, when he lobbied Infantino to pick the United States, along with Mexico and Canada, to host the World Cup. At the time, Trump wrote several letters pledging to host the tournament in an “open and festive manner” and vowing that “all eligible athletes, officials and fans from all countries around the world would be able to enter the United States without discrimination.” (Fans from Iran, Haiti, Côte d’Ivoire, and Senegal now face travel restrictions.) Trump has remarked that the upside of his nonconsecutive presidential terms is that he can host the World Cup, the semiquincentennial celebration, and the Olympics.

[Read: The absurd World Cup]

It’s unclear whether Infantino and Trump’s largely transactional partnership will continue when there are no more transactions to conduct. Trump is hoping that the World Cup showcases him as a popular leader of a prosperous country, and Infantino is hoping that the World Cup brings in the more than $9 billion that FIFA has projected. Trump has joked about a third term, which is unconstitutional. Infantino last month announced that he is seeking an unprecedented fourth term as FIFA president. Even though he’s term-limited, Infantino argues that because his first term began after the ouster of his predecessor amid a corruption scandal, he is able to seek a fourth.

At a dinner in Davos in 2020, Infantino introduced Trump with lavish praise and compared him to a top soccer player. “He is a competitor,” Infantino said. “He wants to compete. He wants to win. He wants to show who is the best.” Whether that’s still Trump’s aim is unclear. But more than six decades after huddling with his Spanish-speaking teammates to chant “¡Nosotros! ¡Nosotros! Rah, rah, rah!” he is now hosting a World Cup plagued by problems. And it is unlikely that the United States, or Trump, will be the best.

Democrats Are Starting to Worry About California

2026-06-10T17:44:41-04:00

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When it comes to counting votes, there’s no rushing California. America’s most populous state is also home to the nation’s most frustrating political tradition—a lengthy wait to find out the winners of key elections. Californians only learned yesterday evening—a full week after they finished casting ballots in the state’s primaries—which candidates had been nominated for governor. The state also took several days to determine who will advance in U.S. House races that could play a decisive role in which party controls Congress next year. And the counting is far from done.

California’s glacial vote count is a function of its enormous size and generous ballot-access laws; most people vote by mail, and the state will accept ballots that are postmarked by Election Day and arrive up to a week after. For years, Democratic state officials saw little urgency in hurrying the process, prioritizing accuracy and voter participation over speed in determining results. But this conspiracist political era, when the country’s loudest election denier happens to be its president, has started to change that mindset.

[Read: The election deniers are winning]

“We want to maximize participation and protect the fundamental right to vote. That being said, can California counties count more quickly? Sure,” Senator Alex Padilla, a Democrat who previously served as California’s secretary of state and top elections official, told us.

President Trump has made baseless claims of fraud in California’s vote for nearly a decade; over the weekend, he became so agitated as he raged about California’s “rigged” primary that he stormed out of an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press. The biggest difference between Trump’s rantings now and in 2017 is that top Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have joined the president in sowing doubts about the accuracy and legitimacy of California’s elections. In each of the past two congressional elections, the nation has had to wait more than a week to find out which party would control the House while California and other western states finished counting mail ballots. One tight race in California remained uncalled for nearly a month.

In this month’s closely watched primary for governor, in which the top two vote-getters advance, Californians waited a week to learn that the Trump-backed conservative Steve Hilton edged out the progressive billionaire Tom Steyer for second place. Hilton will face Xavier Becerra, a former Biden-administration Cabinet secretary and California attorney general, who came in first. Becerra is now the heavy favorite in November, but the stakes of a drawn-out vote count could be much higher in the battle for power in Congress. As in previous elections, the first ballots counted in many areas of the state tended to favor Republicans, and when candidates including Spencer Pratt, the former reality-TV star running for mayor in Los Angeles, fell short in subsequent tallies, their supporters cried foul.

Democrats in California and elsewhere worry that Trump and his allies might be claiming fraud in the primaries now to lay the groundwork for federal interference with the state’s vote-counting in November, when a predictable flurry of last-minute Democratic mail-in ballots could tip the House majority. After the president began attacking California’s elections anew last week, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California dispatched an official to observe Los Angeles County’s ballot processing. “The kind of questions he was asking, quite frankly, were questions coming from theories that are being spread on social media,” Dean Logan, the top elections official in the county, told us. (The U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to comment about the observer’s work.)

Even as they dismiss the GOP’s unsubstantiated claims, some Democrats have become fed up with California, arguing that the state should have long since figured out a way to determine the winners of its elections more efficiently. “It should be embarrassing to California Democrats,” Tré Easton, the vice president of public affairs at the Searchlight Institute, a center-left think tank, told us. “It should be embarrassing that Democrats at the national level have just sort of gotten used to this kind of thing. It’s absurd.”

“Before you even get to Republicans being bad actors in all of this,” Easton added, “it’s a small-d democratic failure that California can’t get this right.” Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat considering a run for president in 2028, said Tuesday that a close friend of his had canceled his voter registration because he had become convinced that Pratt “was robbed of the election.” While acknowledging California’s desire to maximize participation, Khanna said the state needed to move faster. “It is worth spending the resources to get the vast majority of the vote counted within 48 hours,” he posted on X. “Right now the system is eroding trust and spawning conspiracy theories.” After working through the weekend at Los Angeles County’s cavernous ballot-processing center, Logan seemed to have come to the same conclusion about California’s system. “Sadly, I do think it doesn’t meet the moment,” he said, citing the toll that rampant conspiracy theories have taken. “That has crossed the line where it is now impacting public trust and confidence, because it is being repeated so much.”

California is not alone in its struggle to quickly tabulate the deluge of mail ballots that come in on or shortly after Election Day. Arizona and Nevada have taken several days to determine election winners in recent years as the popularity of voting by mail has surged and certain races have grown more competitive. The relentless attacks on voting systems have sent civil servants and political operatives from both parties scrambling to avert electoral damage. A GOP-led governing board in Cochise County, Arizona, threatened to withhold certification of the 2022 election results there because of suspicion about vote-counting machines and ballot printers’ failures on Election Day in another part of the state. Staff at the National Republican Congressional Committee became so concerned that they considered asking then–House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a Republican, to call local officials to urge them to sign off on the results so that the Republican winner of a House race—Juan Ciscomani—could be seated, a Republican familiar with the private deliberations who is not authorized to talk about them publicly told us. (The county officials certified the results after a court order compelled them to do so.)

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

Earlier this spring, we sat down with Nevada’s secretary of state, Cisco Aguilar, who cautioned us not to “judge Nevada on its past” and described his efforts to speed up its vote count. In 2024, the state was able to process 90 percent of its ballots on Election Night—a significant improvement from two years earlier, he said. Aguilar was hesitant to talk about California: “I don’t know California’s system.” But he also chairs the national Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, and in that capacity, we asked him what message he would send to his neighbor to the West. “Get your shit together,” he replied.

The thing about California is that it’s huge. As Padilla pointed out to us, Los Angeles County by itself has more residents than 40 different states do. California sends a ballot to more than 23 million registered voters, and about 80 percent of ballots come back through the mail—many arriving close to or on Election Day. “They just have a ton of mail to go through. That’s where the bottleneck is. There’s no mystery to it,” Rick Hasen, an election-law expert at UCLA, told us.

This year, because of the close—and volatile—race for governor, many voters held on to their primary ballots until the last minute, creating a crushing pileup for election officials of ballots to process, signatures to verify, and votes to tabulate. On top of that, when election officials cannot match a voter’s signatures to those they have on file, those voters have a chance to fix the problem by proving their identity, adding time to the process.

“Voters want to wait until the last minute to vote—you know, they’re waiting for the next shoe to drop, the next big story,” Tricia Webber, the clerk in Santa Cruz County, told us. “Voter behavior is saying, ‘Hold it to the end.’” In her county of about 173,000 registered voters, the office received about 38,000 ballots in the mail or through voting locations and drop boxes on Election Day—more than it had received since the voting period started, she said. (Each ballot takes about 48 hours to be processed and tabulated, she added.)

The Supreme Court is currently weighing a challenge to late-arriving ballots, and it could force California and other states that accept ballots postmarked by Election Day but received afterward to move up their deadlines. (A decision is expected within the next few weeks.) Hasen said such a ruling, however, wouldn’t have a major impact on the pace of California’s vote-counting. “It’s not the late-arriving ballots that are the logjam,” he said. “It’s the stuff that comes in the days before Election Day.”

Election officials and experts have repeatedly sought to set the public’s expectations for a lengthy vote count in competitive races, while urging voters to return their ballots sooner rather than later. Democratic leaders in the state have also found themselves in the uncomfortable position of defending the integrity of California’s election system while urging the state to count its votes as fast as possible, if only to preempt a Republican disinformation campaign. “We must acknowledge that the longer the voting count takes, the more mis- and disinformation spreads. That means we must do all that we can do to tabulate votes quickly and accurately,” Governor Gavin Newsom wrote in a letter to state election officials that his office made public last month. “Time is of the essence in preventing election lies from taking hold.”

California has taken some steps to speed up the counting. Newsom signed laws last year to require counties to finish their tallies within 13 days of Election Day (down from 30 days) while allowing them to begin counting early mail ballots before Election Day. Marc Berman, an author of one of those bills and a member of the state assembly’s elections committee (as well as its former chair), told us the goal was to get ahead of the attacks on California’s vote count that he knew would be coming this year. He couldn’t yet say whether the laws were making a difference. “Clearly, the timelines that we have aren’t enough to satisfy President Trump,” Berman said.

[Read: “California is allowed to hit back”]

Elections officials and experts told us that California also needed to devote more money to vote-counting if it wanted faster results. “If you want something different, give us the resources and give us the authority to do it,” Juan Pablo Cervantes, the Humboldt County clerk-recorder and registrar of voters, told us. Kim Alexander, the president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation, said that Californians can have both speed and accuracy “if our lawmakers are willing to invest the money” to make it happen. (Her group is urging state officials to allocate $55 million for county election offices to buy equipment and space and pay staff to help speed up the count and $35 million for a campaign to raise public awareness about early and in-person voting and tabulation).

Cervantes also said state lawmakers had to reckon with the trade-offs of the system they devised. “If you want things done faster, you need to understand it’s going to come at the cost of making things less flexible for voters,” he said. “I don’t think that’s anything that anyone wants to say.”

Republicans often contrast California with Florida, which endured the 36-day ballot-counting nightmare of the 2000 presidential election but now reports nearly all of its vote within a few hours of polls closing. The comparison exasperates California Democrats, who point out that Florida has stricter voter-access rules and requires ballots to be received by Election Day. “If your goal is voter participation, if your goal is counting the validly cast ballots of every voter possible, then I think California has a much better system,” Berman said. “If your goal is immediate gratification, then Florida has a better system.”

Indeed, California’s halting attempts to quicken its vote count have been in large part because the system’s defenders believe that it works pretty well as it is. “The only reason it’s problematic is because of Donald Trump,” Hasen said. The eventual winners of this month’s primaries will have months to campaign before the general election, and the winners of the November vote won’t take office until nearly two months later. “If we were a normal democracy, this would not be a very big deal.”

Yet California Democrats have come to realize, perhaps belatedly, that the attacks on their state’s election are quite a big deal. Berman said his fear about what might happen in November “is very real, and it is very high.” We asked him what more the state could do to prepare. He cited a law the legislature recently passed to safeguard ballots, including from the federal government’s interference, as well as efforts to increase transparency around the vote-counting process. But he said the state could only do so much. “If the president is hell-bent on creating a constitutional crisis in this country by having the federal government seize ballots and interfere in elections in a way that they don’t have the authority to do,” Berman conceded, “he can do that.”

The modest steps that California has taken might help speed up its vote count a little bit. But the state has probably run out of time for major changes before the fall. And so the message its Democratic leaders have for the rest of the country remains the same as it’s been for years: If control of Congress comes down to California this November, you’re just going to have to settle in and wait.

A Disorienting Weekend With the Women of Turning Point

2026-06-09T17:48:13-04:00

If the conservative manosphere is associated with protein powder, pomade, and ancient Rome, then the conservative womanosphere is its aesthetic opposite: a frilly wonderland of gingham tablecloths and Bible verses, as soft as goose down and as cotton-candy pink as Polly Pocket’s Country Cottage. Which is why the cannons were so startling.

Before each speaker took the podium at Turning Point USA’s annual Women’s Leadership Summit to advise feminine gentleness in all situations, tall columns of magenta smoke blasted from both ends of the stage, and the music’s bass dropped, rattling the skulls of all 3,000 women in the ballroom of the San Antonio Marriott Rivercenter. This year’s event was full of such subtle contradictions.

It is difficult to tidily define womanhood, or to attach to the term a set of clear expectations. Yet Turning Point, the conservative organization founded by the late Charlie Kirk, professes to understand womanhood deeply—so deeply, in fact, that it holds a conference every June to elucidate the concept: Womanhood is getting married as soon as you can, and having babies—more “than you can afford,” as Kirk often advised. It is embracing God and renouncing feminism.

But the messages from this year’s speakers and attendees were different than in years past: So diverse and inclusive that the summit occasionally felt, dare I say, a little feminist. “Never getting married is not a failure,” Alex Clark, the host of Turning Point’s Culture Apothecary podcast, said on the first day. Some speakers warned against the dreaded girlboss, but others seemed accepting of all types of women. The summit “is all about support and recognizing that everybody’s journey is different,” Alyssa Cromwell, a college junior from California, told me. “It’s just coming together, supporting women, and being a safe space to embrace ourselves.”

Ariana Gomez for The Atlantic

What was this, UC Berkeley? And what would Charlie think of it all? Before he was assassinated last year, Kirk had consistently advised women to skip college and prioritize marriage (or to go to college for an “MRS degree”). At last year’s summit, only weeks before his death, Kirk told the crowd, rather pointedly, that women who weren’t married by the age of 30 were less likely to find a husband and, therefore, less likely to have children. When his wife, Erika, who married him at age 32, tried to soften his message for all of the single 30-somethings in the audience, Kirk dismissed her words as “happy talk.”

For Charlie, the point of Turning Point was to change the culture—and, by extension, American politics. So it was odd, too, that I didn’t hear a single speaker allude, even casually, to the upcoming midterm elections, or attempt to rally women to prevent a Republican shellacking in November. Instead, this once-doctrinaire and overtly political women’s conference felt more like a Christian women’s-empowerment seminar—set not in a state with one of the country’s most closely watched Senate races but instead on a remote island where elections don’t exist.

[Read: ‘We have not seen ugly yet’]

Ariana Gomez for The Atlantic

The last Turning Point women’s summit I attended took place at the same hotel in 2024. Back then, the vibes were very different. The speaker lineup included some women with explicitly political messages, including Alina Habba, Donald Trump’s former lawyer, and Lara Trump, his daughter-in-law and a then-co-chair of the Republican National Committee. The conference doubled as a get-out-the-vote operation for an election that Trump would win decisively. The 2024 speaker roster also included the podcast hosts Candace Owens and Megyn Kelly.

Things have changed. For the past several months, Owens has waged a digital terror campaign against Erika Kirk, spreading conspiracy theories about her husband’s death (and appearing to imply that Erika was involved in covering it up, an unsubstantiated narrative that somehow also involves Israel and Tucker Carlson). Kelly has been criticized, too, for failing to sufficiently defend Erika from Owens and her followers. Tack on the gloomy set of circumstances for Republicans ahead of November—high prices, a never-ending conflict with Iran, general Trump fatigue—and this year’s Women’s Leadership Summit came at a difficult time for American conservatives.

In her speech kicking off this year’s event, Erika Kirk gave advice you might hear at any Christian empowerment conference: Count your virtues and hone them. It was genuinely moving to hear the young widow say that she wanted her children to look back on this moment and see that their mother had kept her composure. When a protester briefly interrupted to shout that “Erika Kirk protects pedophiles!” Kirk looked pained but wished the heckler well: “Happiness comes and goes,” she said. “I hope you find it.”

Other speakers offered predictable messages: They railed against abortion and shared Christian wisdom on dating and motherhood. As usual, denunciations of cancel culture were big. One former Disney Channel actor, who claims to have been boxed out of Hollywood after protesting a school mask mandate, managed to juice the experience for a 20-minute speech. Then there was the typical array of merchandise booths, arranged outside the ballroom like candy in the Trader Joe’s checkout line: Streetwear embroidered with Charlie’s favorite sayings (Make heaven crowded). Longevity supplements. A vibrating plate that I balanced on for 10 minutes, having received assurances that doing so would produce the same health benefits as walking for 60. At the Birthright-supplement booth, women sold prenatal vitamins made from fish eggs and dandelion, and encouraged attendees to contribute their favorite baby names to a bulletin board. (“Melatonin,” one suggested. “Meli” for short.)

But the overall message of the summit was, admittedly, a little hard to parse. After several speakers reminded the young ladies in the audience that family should be their top priority, another presenter advertised an array of job-training programs for women hoping to become phlebotomists or plumbers. Former White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany cheerfully declared, “I believe there could be a future president of the United States in this room today!”

Attendees I interviewed appreciated the flexibility. Womanhood “can be a little bit nuanced,” a 28-year-old single woman named Faith told me. Personally, she couldn’t have imagined getting married or having kids in her early 20s. But women shouldn’t “be afraid of being okay with the way that femininity was defined in the past.”

Ariana Gomez for The Atlantic

On the first day, a short video chronicling the role of women in America’s history celebrated women’s suffrage and the Nineteenth Amendment. Outside, in the merch hall, stickers bragged that a Turning Point woman “never misses Election Day” and advised women to “raise kids, raise turnout.” The following afternoon, when Savanna Faith Stone—a conservative influencer who is perhaps best known for arguing that women should not have the right to vote—took the stage, she did not mention this particular belief, and instead stuck to denouncing feminism as “Jezebel spirit.”

[Read: The manosphere turns on Trump]

When I asked attendees whether America should ditch the Nineteenth Amendment, as Stone has suggested, they were flabbergasted. “I’ll always cherish my right to vote!” Erica Sims, an attendee from Missouri, told me, clutching her tote as though that right was tucked inside it.

Perhaps the most revealing moment of the conference occurred at the end of the first day, during the keynote speech from 33-year-old Alex Clark. Clark, who has worked with Turning Point for seven years, is, by now, the queen of the Women’s Leadership Summit. Her appeal, both at this event and on her health-focused podcast, is that she is funny and totally unvarnished—a speaker you might actually want to grab drinks with.

Clark played the clip of Charlie Kirk talking about marriage last year, during which he claimed that if a woman doesn’t get married by age 30, she has only a 50 percent chance of ever doing so, a statistic that does not appear to be true.

Charlie’s words had “stung a little” when she first heard them, Clark admitted, because at the time she was unmarried and sad about it. So today she wanted to offer a comforting addendum to his message: “Your marital status is not God’s report card on your life,” Clark assured the audience. Single women, she advised, can and should build beautiful lives on their own—and “become the kind of person” they’re looking for in a partner. (Lefties might call this “self-care.”) After all that, Clark delighted the room by announcing her engagement, and walked off the stage to Taylor Swift’s most tradwife anthem, “Wi$h Li$t.”

It was an empowering message—but to what end, for an organization that was built in part to win elections?

Ariana Gomez for The Atlantic

No attendee I spoke with seemed interested in the midterms. When I asked a 35-year-old from Virginia named Whitney whether she was paying attention to any races in her state, she laughed and said, “Not even a little bit.” Even the politicians barely talked politics at the summit: Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders spoke for several minutes about Yad Vashem. Texas State Senator Angela Paxton, who is currently divorcing her husband, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, on “Biblical grounds,” did not spend a second on Ken’s high-profile Senate campaign, or any other race. (Instead, Angela Paxton gave advice about what to do when life is not turning out the way you’d hoped: Rather than daydreaming about murdering those who wrong you, she said, turn to God. Relatedly, I would also like to get a drink with Angela Paxton.)

Read: Ken Paxton is actually doing this

For the past many months, conservatives have wondered whether Turning Point would change under Erika’s leadership. The group seems to be only growing; last year, it expanded its outreach to more than 1,000 high schools across the country. But its message for young women may have evolved into something slightly less doctrinaire, and perhaps even less explicitly political. With Erika, a former New York City entrepreneur, now serving as CEO, it’s difficult to avoid the ambitious career-woman associations. Perhaps, consciously or not, the organization is making room for them.

Being Black in Pete Hegseth’s Military

2026-06-09T07:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Nate Langston Palmer

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Daniel “Chappie” James Jr. became commander of the Wheelus Air Base, near Tripoli, just after rebels under Muammar Qaddafi took control of Libya in a coup in 1969. In the midst of the insurgency, Qaddafi led an effort to break into the U.S. air base, but James managed to close the gate in time to prevent the young rebel from entering. The incident, which James recounted in a 1978 interview, would come to be the stuff of Air Force lore. As the two men confronted each other, the story goes, Qaddafi got out of his vehicle and reached for his gun. James had a .45 in his belt. He told Qaddafi that he’d better not pull the gun, or he’d regret it. They stared at each other for a moment as the future dictator considered James. Then Qaddafi pulled his hand away, got back in his vehicle, and drove off. The rebels never attempted a similar stunt again. One reporter later referred to James as a “black John Wayne.”

By the time he was facing off with Qaddafi in Libya, James had already served in the military for 26 years. During World War II, he’d trained at the Tuskegee Institute, before joining the 477th Bombardment Group—the first unit of Black bombers in U.S. military history. He then flew 101 combat missions in the Korean War, and 78 more in the Vietnam War.

James was eventually promoted to four-star general, becoming the first Black American in the history of the U.S. military to reach that rank. “If my making an advancement can serve as some kind of spark to some young Black or other minority, it will be worth all the years, all the blood and sweat it took in getting here,” he said at the time. The general became a hero to Black Democrats and white Republicans alike. At a 1987 ceremony dedicating an aerospace-science and health-education center at Tuskegee University to James, Ronald Reagan called him a “darned good pilot and a revered military officer and a truly great American.” In 2020, the state of Florida named a bridge after James; the bill was signed by Governor Ron DeSantis.

But last year, after Donald Trump signed executive orders gutting DEI programs across the federal government and the military, people in the Pentagon noticed that a painting of James had been taken down from its prominent location in the Air Force Art Gallery. Instead of putting a new painting in the spot where James’s portrait had been, the Pentagon kept the space empty, leaving employees with the impression that, in spite of his many achievements, the new administration viewed the general as a symbol of unearned advancement, unworthy of recognition.

[Clint Smith: Tell students the truth about American history]

James, who died in 1978, might not have been surprised. “One of the most insulting questions that gets asked to me sometimes is Did they give you your fourth star just because it’s the bicentennial year coming up and they wanted to say we got a Black general? ” he said in a 1975 interview. “They didn’t give me anything. And they don’t give away stars in my service. You got to earn them.”

U.S. Air Force / Interim Archives / Getty

Daniel “Chappie” James Jr. during the Vietnam War. James became the first Black American to be promoted to four-star general.

He may as well have been responding directly to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who derided “affirmative action promotions” in the military in his 2024 book, The War on Warriors. “Our strength,” Hegseth wrote, “is not in our diversity.” At the Pentagon, Hegseth has directly intervened to block or delay the promotions of more than a dozen Black and female senior officers; he has dismissed or pushed out several high-ranking Black and female officers; he has presided over the restoration of tributes to Confederate soldiers, traitors to the United States who fought a war predicated on maintaining and expanding the institution of slavery. All of these actions are extensions of the same project: delegitimizing the accomplishments—and the very presence—of Black people in the military. Some Black service members have chosen to quit or retire early in response to what they see as a newly hostile environment; others are still serving but feel deeply demoralized.

[Adam Serwer: Pete Hegseth is trying to resegregate the military]

In interviews with two dozen currently enlisted, civilian, and retired Black members of the military across the armed forces, person after person told me they have watched in dismay as a new administration has diminished and erased a proud history. Many of the officers I spoke with were the second or third generation in their family to serve, and had children who were serving as well. Racism in the military, they were quick to remind me, is not new. Those who came before them had it much harder. At the same time, it has been difficult to see the gains of their forebears undermined so starkly in such a short period. They are concerned about the cost of this administration’s actions for individual Black service members, and for Black Americans more generally.

“Right now,” one retired senior Air Force officer told me, “I’m questioning whether it was all in vain.”

When Colonel Gerald Curry was a child, he and his family visited a cousin who lived on Fort Knox, in Kentucky. The base had a movie theater and a shopping center, and the house, to his astonishment, had a basement. “In my small mind, this was luxury,” he told me. Curry looked at his cousin standing in his beautiful home, in his pristine Army uniform, and saw security and pride. He began to imagine himself in a uniform and a house just like those.

That trip to Fort Knox stayed with Curry. At Tennessee State University, a historically Black university in Nashville, he joined ROTC; later, after graduation, he joined the Air Force. Most of the men in Curry’s family—including his father and grandfather—had served, but they had been drafted and had not remained in uniform long enough to procure the same benefits that his cousin had. If he stayed in the service for 20 years, he would receive a pension for the rest of his life. Service would provide not only stability, he understood, but also mobility: a chance to see the world, educational opportunities (Curry would go on to earn a Ph.D.), the kind of house he’d dreamed of since he was a kid, a safety net for future generations. A chance to follow his father’s and grandfather’s lead and prove that the country belonged as much to them as it did to anyone else; going back to the Revolution and the Civil War, military service for Black Americans has been a powerful symbol of their commitment to a country that has not always shown commitment to them.

Curry also understood that racism was still present in the Air Force. In the early 1980s, during basic training in Wichita, Kansas, at McConnell Air Force Base, Curry’s roommate, a Black man from Ohio, had been asked by a white captain to help prepare a meal. When the white captain found out that the roommate had blown off the task, he slapped him “and called him a fucking nigger.” Curry, who at the time was a top-ranked kickboxer in the United States, glared at the captain and stepped toward him, daring him to do or say something else. The captain backed off, but Curry never forgot the look in his eyes, or the venom in his voice.

Curry graduated and received his officer commission in 1983. He was smart, athletic, and likable, and he ascended the ranks quickly. By 1989, Curry had become a squadron commander, responsible for law enforcement for the entire Hahn Air Base, which had about 10,000 people, in Germany. At 28, he told me, he was the youngest Air Force squadron commander in all of Europe. “The Cold War was still going on, and we had medium-range nuclear missiles that were pointed toward Moscow,” Curry recalled. His job was to protect these tactical nuclear weapons and the F-16s on base. The job brought prestige, but also a sense of isolation. It was not uncommon for Curry to be the only Black officer in meetings.

Nate Langston Palmer for The Atlantic

Curry at home in Virginia

Nate Langston Palmer for The Atlantic

Gerald Curry’s photo album. Curry, who joined ROTC in college, rose quickly in the ranks of the Air Force.

He and the few other Black officers on base made a point of getting to know the more junior Black service members and their families; they would all get together at one another’s homes after church, bonding over shared culture while far from home. “It was important to build a community that would support you in your career,” Curry said, “because oftentimes you had to navigate hostile waters.” During meetings where promotions were decided, white officers would sometimes make disparaging comments to Black airmen, Curry recalled. Sometimes they wouldn’t say anything at all. “You would walk away from a meeting knowing that you had done everything in your power and you had outdone your white peers, and you still wouldn’t get selected.”

Curry served 27 years on active duty, and another 15 in a civilian capacity in the Pentagon. In 2019, he became the director of the Air Force Review Boards Agency (Curry likens it to the Supreme Court of the Air Force), the equivalent of a two-star-general position. Racial progress in the military had been slow, but visible: When Curry graduated from Tennessee State in 1983, there had been only a handful of active-duty Black generals and admirals. By 2024, there were more than 80. Among them were Lloyd Austin, who had become the first Black secretary of defense in 2021; C. Q. Brown, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Michael E. Langley, the first Black four-star general in Marine Corps history; and Darryl A. Williams, who’d been West Point’s first Black superintendent.

When Trump took office last year, Curry tried to keep an open mind. But just after he was inaugurated, Trump signed the anti-DEI executive orders. Then, four weeks after he was confirmed as secretary of defense, Hegseth told Brown that he’d been fired while Brown was visiting troops on the southern border. Curry became furious as he watched the Department of Defense take down the portrait of General James, whom he considers a hero, from the Air Force Art Gallery. He said he’d passed the painting daily on the way to his office for more than a decade; it made him smile and buoyed him to “keep on keeping on.” Curry is writing a leadership book based on James’s service, and meets regularly with James’s son and granddaughter; he is also working with the family to develop a film about James’s life. Seeing the newly empty wall space “really, really hurt.” (When reached for comment before this article went to press, Joel Valdez, the acting Pentagon press secretary, said that the Air Force had “added” a portrait of James to a different location “in the past two to three weeks.”)

In May 2025, Troy Meink was confirmed as secretary of the Air Force. Shortly after Meink arrived at the Pentagon, he told senior leadership, including Curry, that the Air Force would remove books from military libraries and educational institutions that fell under the wide umbrella of “DEI.” Curry was aghast. This, on top of the broader dismantling of initiatives that he believed were finally bringing some measure of equal opportunity to the military, was too much. Curry notified senior Pentagon leadership that he would retire.

He did not, however, want more junior officers to be pushed out of the military by a racist administration. At a luncheon held a few months later to celebrate his decades of service, he told the young Black officers in the room that it was now their responsibility to support one another. He encouraged them to stay in the service to defend the country and the Constitution. “You’ve got to carry it on. It’s going to be tough. And sometimes you’re going to have to swallow your pride,” he recalled saying to them. As Brigadier General Jimmy E. McMillian, a retired Air Force officer, told me, “If everybody that cares walks away, there will be nobody left who cares.”

Other senior Black military officials I spoke with expressed a similar sentiment. As one told me, “This country is great because of us, despite how they have treated us. And when I think about what I’m willing to live or die for, I would not sit idly by and let someone else come in and take away what we’ve built, despite some folks not recognizing the role that we played in building it.”

But there was a disconnect, it seemed, between these ideas and Curry’s actions. He was encouraging young officers to stay in the military and fight for their place within it when he himself had chosen to retire. How did he reconcile those two things?

Curry considered the question. “Just because you’re not in uniform doesn’t mean that you’re not still serving, that you’re not still contributing value to the fight,” he said. In retirement, he noted, he has the ability to speak more freely than if he had remained at the Pentagon. He also acknowledged that being able to step away is a privilege; he had long since completed the two decades of military service necessary to receive his pension. He got the house. He got the promotions. He got the recognition from his peers and the insignia on his uniform. He got the financial stability that allowed him to support his family.

For younger service members, deciding to quit comes with professional and financial consequences. Curry worries about the long-term damage being done to Black officers; some young Black Americans who see what’s happening in the military today, he realizes, may decide not to enlist at all. “In my opinion, it’s going to take us about 30 or 40 years to be able to create the appetite for Black men and women to want to serve and see the military as a viable career option,” he said. Curry and others hope that day will return eventually. (Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesperson, said in a statement that “individuals from all races, religions, and backgrounds are enlisting in our armed forces with greater enthusiasm than ever before.”)

The retired senior Air Force officer who told me he was “questioning whether it was all in vain” also spoke about his hopes for the future. The officer was one of several people I interviewed who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of personal or professional retribution. “I look at this as a bad fever,” he said, “and one day that fever is going to break.” But who will be left once it does?

Brigadier General McMillian worries that more early retirements could mean that young Black service members end up with fewer senior Black officers to serve as mentors and examples. “They look up and nobody in the room looks like them—that has a huge impact on your morale,” McMillian told me. “If Black officers don’t get mentors, it can kill their careers pretty early.”

But that, he thinks, is exactly what the defense secretary and his ilk want. “If Pete Hegseth and the current administration had their way, you wouldn’t see any of us in key leadership positions,” he said. “I think the whole idea is to eliminate as many of us as they can, take us back as far as they can.”

Essentially, “we’re talking about an administration that says, When people of color succeed, they took that opportunity out of the hands of a qualified white man,” Marc Brooks, a retired master sergeant in the Air Force, told me. (Parnell, the Pentagon spokesperson, said in his statement that “all personnel changes by the Secretary of War’s office are based on merit and job performance.”)

McMillian, who retired in 2012, knows firsthand about overt racism in the military. When he was a major and a commander in the 1990s, someone wrote GO HOME, NIGGER on one of the police vehicles under his purview. (An investigation failed to identify the person responsible for the vandalism.) He also knows that racism can manifest in more subtle ways. Throughout his 30 years in the Air Force, he worked to mentor Black officers, and particularly Black female officers, whom he thought had been systematically overlooked and might need extra support to remain in the service. “I was criticized for that early on in my career,” he told me—other male officers warned him that he might be perceived as showing favoritism to Black women—but he kept doing it anyway.

McMillian had grown up in rural North Carolina, where he attended segregated schools and was raised by a single mother with an elementary-school education. “She always would tell us, ‘You got to do better than me,’ ” McMillian said. At North Carolina A&T State University, a historically Black university in Greensboro, he joined ROTC. He eventually became the director of the Air Force’s Security Forces, in charge of some 40,000 people around the world. He was the first Black person to hold the position.

The longer McMillian spent in the military, the more he understood that success was not simply a matter of doing your job well. A Black service member had to learn to navigate tacit social and political norms—it was important to spend evenings at the officers’ club, for instance, even if you didn’t drink or would rather be with your family. He advised young Black officers not to have facial hair. He told them to consider themselves on duty at all times; even if they were just going to the convenience store, they should wear khakis and a nice shirt, not flip-flops and shorts. If their music was too loud when they drove around on base, he would tell them they needed to turn it down, not because it bothered him, but because there were people looking for reasons not to promote them. He had benefited from other Black officers having frank conversations with him about these dynamics, and so, as he advanced in his career, he tried to share this knowledge with younger Black members of the Air Force. “You don’t know what you don’t know,” he said.

Nate Langston Palmer for The Atlantic

Marc Brooks’s medals on display at his home in Maryland

He finds it ironic that Hegseth has put so much emphasis on the idea of unearned “affirmative action” promotions when McMillian believes that Hegseth himself—a former Fox News host who retired from the military as a low-ranking senior officer—is unqualified for the job of secretary. McMillian cited, as an example of what he sees as the secretary’s politicized agenda, the speech that Hegseth gave in Quantico, Virginia, in September 2025, for which he’d made the unusual decision to require 800 generals and admirals to travel in from their posts around the world. In the speech, Hegseth told military leaders that it was okay to use profanity with subordinates or even to “put hands” on them—seeming to suggest that he would condone physical assault. If they faced complaints of unfair treatment or discrimination, Hegseth said, the Pentagon would make sure that their records remained clean.

[Tom Nichols: Pete Hegseth needs to go—now]

Some Black service members told me that they interpreted this as a license for white officers to treat their Black subordinates poorly, without fear of repercussion. “It’s setting up a climate that perpetuates and protects wrongdoing,” Brooks told me. The tone of the speech was Get on board or get out. Listening to it, he said, “sent shock waves to those of us that spent a career in our beloved military.”

Robert Cook, who joined the Army out of Hampton University’s ROTC program, agreed with this assessment. Cook believes that the speech could, for instance, empower a white sergeant to overlook the work of his Black private, or a white captain to disregard the contributions of his Black lieutenant. “Under a good set of leaders, no white person wants to be accused of being a racist,” Cook told me. “Under this leadership, it could be seen as a badge of honor.”

In 2022, Joe Biden named Cook principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army for financial management and comptroller. Not long after, he became the Army’s acting chief of financial operations, responsible for a $188 billion budget and 15,000 employees. He worked closely with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Brown as well as Secretary of Defense Austin, whom he’d known since the mid-’90s. Because Cook was a political appointee, he knew he would be leaving the Pentagon in early 2025. But although he says he had never had any trouble working with Republicans, many of whom he considered friends, he grew concerned about Trump’s intentions for the Pentagon even before the president returned to office. “Everybody knew that they were coming in to just gut the place and put their sycophants in,” Cook said.

During his first meetings with members of Trump’s DOD transition team, Cook was asked to single out the funds that had been appropriated for DEI initiatives. Cook, who had championed many of these programs, wasn’t going to make this task easier for the new administration. “When you get into the office,” he said, “you can look that up yourself.”

Other officers I spoke with expressed concern that both the new political appointees and some officers put in place by the administration might be dangerously underqualified for the jobs they were filling. Dan Caine, who replaced Brown as chairman, was considered an especially unorthodox pick. Caine had not attained the rank of four-star general, and had never led a joint military command.

Ultimately, having people like Hegseth in senior leadership, Cook thinks, has enabled immoral and even unconstitutional behavior in the military. Cook, who is now retired and works in the private sector, became particularly incensed when the military began bombing boats in the Caribbean in September. “I can’t shoot you because I suspect you’re a drug dealer,” Cook said, and yet that was exactly what seemed to be happening. Hegseth had already taken the highly atypical action of removing the judge advocates general of the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force, who were responsible for making sure that military actions were legal and authorized. He replaced them with people of his own choosing, saying that the administration wanted lawyers who “don’t exist to be roadblocks to anything.” (The Pentagon spokesperson said that all military operations in the Caribbean have been conducted “in complete compliance with the law of armed conflict.”)

Nate Langston Palmer for The Atlantic

Robert Cook looks through photographs from early in his military career.

In October, Admiral Alvin Holsey, who had been the head of the U.S. military’s Southern Command, which oversees Central America, South America, and the Caribbean, abruptly announced his retirement. Holsey, who is Black, didn’t give a reason for his retirement, but The New York Times reported that he “had raised concerns about the mission and the attacks on the alleged drug boats.”

Cook is worried about the implications of these sorts of actions for American service members in enemy territory. Since the war in Iran began, he has become even more concerned about the possibility of retribution. “You want to bomb kids in a school and not apologize for it,” he said, of Pentagon leadership. “What do you think they’re gonna do with us?”

One Army officer I spoke with, whom I’ll call Reginald, joined Junior ROTC in high school. His father was absent, and Reginald said that the Black Vietnam veterans who were in charge of the program were the first examples he’d encountered of “responsible Black men.” Much like Gerald Curry, Reginald was drawn to the military for the reliability it promised: “What I saw was stability, discipline, and financial security.”

After graduating from college, Reginald joined the Army and was deployed for multiple tours, including to both Iraq and Afghanistan. Over time, he realized that many of his fellow soldiers had learned more about the cultural and ethnic dynamics of these foreign nations than about those of their own country. “I found it very ironic, and almost hypocritical,” Reginald said. “We put so much emphasis on understanding the tribal history of these places, and yet we put almost no emphasis on understanding how we came to be. We just assume that we put on a uniform and all of our disparities melt away.”

Reginald’s desire to help add context to American history in military education led him to teach at West Point. As a Black American, he said, “if you’re not careful, you’re going to lose yourself in this thing and forget who you really are.”

He brought up a talk that the writer Ta‑Nehisi Coates gave at West Point in 2017, in which Coates encouraged the room of more than 800 students, faculty, and staff to reflect on the Cadet Honor Code: “A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.” The intolerance of lies, Coates argued, should not apply only to individuals, but also to the country and its military more broadly. “If you’re going to be intolerant about the deceptions amongst each other,” he told the cadets, “there’s nothing wrong with being equally intolerant about the deceptions people ask you to submit to.” When Reginald and I spoke, the speech had recently been deleted from a West Point YouTube page.

Many such challenges to a narrow conception of patriotism are now being deliberately excluded from military education. Another person I interviewed, whom I’ll call Sarah, develops training materials for the military. After Trump issued his executive orders targeting DEI in January 2025, Sarah said, her commanders told her team to manually strike out certain language in dozens of commercial texts—those not created by the military—that their division loans to trainees. They were also told to remove whole sections about accomplished Black service members from educational materials produced by the military.

Sarah had been deeply involved in a Black affinity group within her branch of the military, which she said helped her feel supported and motivated. This group, along with a number of others dedicated to examining and addressing inequities in the military, has been disbanded. In an Orwellian statement, a spokesperson for Sarah’s branch said that the “disestablishment” of these groups had been carried out “in compliance with executive orders Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing, and Initial Rescissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions.” Valdez, the acting Pentagon press secretary, put the administration’s ideological aims more bluntly in an email: “We are proud to declare DEI is dead in the Department of War.”

Sarah’s original plan was to work for at least 20 years before retiring so that she could qualify for a full pension, but she now plans on leaving the military before the end of the year. “I can’t ethically and morally continue down this road,” she said.

Reginald described the experience of being Black in the military as akin to being in a pool that’s filling up slowly, drip by drip. “As the pool fills up with little drops of water, the weight of that over time just gets heavier and heavier and heavier. And then you look up and you’re like, Man, I’m drowning.”

For his part, Reginald has decided that instead of getting out of the pool, he is going to swim harder. “Hegseth and all of his bravado ain’t a strong enough person to get me to step aside from 20 years of something that I feel connected to,” he told me. “Because this is mine; this isn’t yours. You’re paying rent here.” He took a deep breath. “I’ve got too much invested in this thing.”

As the descendant of enslaved people, Reginald is sustained by his sense of history. He is operating in the tradition of Chappie James; of Hazel Johnson-Brown, the first Black woman to become a general in the military; of Charles Young, a man born into slavery who became the first Black person to achieve the rank of colonel in the Army; of Lewis and Charles Douglass, sons of Frederick Douglass, who were among the first Black Americans to volunteer for the Union Army; and of James Gratz Thompson, a 26-year-old Black cafeteria worker from Wichita, who asked in a letter to The Pittsburgh Courier shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, “ Should I sacrifice my life to live half American? ”

“Will things be better for the next generation in the peace to follow?” “Would it be demanding too much to demand full citizenship rights in exchange for the sacrificing of my life?” “Is the kind of America I know worth defending?”

Thompson would go on to serve as a corporal in the Army during World War II. His letter to the Courier, a prominent Black newspaper in the early to mid-20th century, is credited with catalyzing its “Double V” campaign, which urged Black Americans to use the war as an opportunity to fight both fascism abroad and racism at home.

Some Black Americans were compelled by the idea, while others rejected the notion that they should fight for a country that was still hanging them from trees. Black service members have wrestled with the complexities of patriotism for centuries, from the Revolution to the current war in Iran. Reginald said that, for him—in the tradition of the Double V campaign—service feels worthwhile as a way to continue fighting for the country he thinks America can be.

“I swear an oath to the Constitution. And I remember that the idea to form a more perfect union would suggest that we will never be perfect,” he said. “But we’ve got to try to strive to be. And I’m okay with doing that work of trying.”

In May, I drove to Arlington National Cemetery, where I stood in front of Chappie James’s tombstone. He died of a heart attack just three weeks after retiring from the Air Force. He was 58 years old.

In March 2025, Arlington was embroiled in controversy when it began scrubbing its website of links and references to Black, Latino, and women veterans—among them James, Johnson-Brown, and Colin Powell—to comply with the anti-DEI executive orders. Following public outcry, the cemetery republished the names but said that, in keeping with Trump’s directives and the Pentagon’s instructions, “individuals from the previously listed categories ‘African American History,’ ‘Hispanic American History’ and ‘Women’s History’” could now be found under more general labels, such as, “Science, Technology and Engineering.”

In Arlington, the sky was blue and the breeze was cool. I walked to the other side of James’s tombstone and found, engraved there, words he’d written in 1967 and later delivered as part of a speech to a group of Air Force officers after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. In his remarks, James said that despite the way America had continued to fail Black Americans, he was still compelled to fight for it: “This is my country and I believe in her,” he said. “And I’ll serve her, and I’ll contribute to her welfare whenever and however I can. If she has any ills, I’ll stand by her until in God’s given time, through her wisdom and her consideration for the welfare of the entire nation, she will put them right.”

James’s portrait may have been taken down at the Pentagon, but his service to the United States cannot so easily be discarded.

This article appears in the July 2026 print edition with the headline “The Betrayal of Black Patriots.”

How America Gave Up on Its Own History

2026-06-08T05:55:00-04:00

Illustrations by Tyler Comrie

Updated at 10:08 a.m. ET on June 10, 2026

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On a July afternoon in 2019, I found myself in a large, sun-dappled room within one of America’s great estates. An assemblage of distinguished jurists, Ivy League professors, nonprofit leaders, journalists, and theologians sat around me in a half circle. I was trying to be on my best behavior, but I blurted out a word dirty enough to make them blanch.

In my defense, I thought it was what I had been summoned there to do. An independent commission had spent the previous year contemplating the dismal state of American democracy. In dozens of focus groups that it had convened around the country, participants from across the political spectrum had been quick to identify sources of division—but requests to name the things that united them as Americans were generally met with nervous laughter. The commissioners themselves were convinced that the country needed a shared narrative, but were at odds with one another as to what it should be. And so they called in a handful of outsiders, myself among them, to help inject some fresh thinking into how to find one. The topic was so fraught that we all agreed, before attending, not to be quoted by name.

Our first exercise, the facilitator explained, was intended to build trust—listing words or concepts that all Americans could endorse, even if our definitions might vary. He uncapped his marker and looked around expectantly. I sat there, surrounded by an uncomfortable silence, searching for a word so anodyne that no one could possibly object. I thought about the acute improbability of my own existence. One of my grandfathers was born to Greek immigrants from a village in the mountains above Sparta, the other to Jewish immigrants from what is now Belarus. Other ancestors had fled aboard the Mayflower from the persecution of Puritans in England, aboard a steamship from pogroms in Ukraine, aboard a schooner from Spanish repression in Cuba. Where else would a life like mine even be possible?

[America at 250: The unfinished revolution]

But my loyalty to this country is not merely biographical. I’ve traveled widely enough abroad to acquire real gratitude for the liberties that Americans enjoy, and for what its ideals have meant to those in other lands. I’ve also seen enough of the United States to be painfully aware of how often we fail to live up to those ideals at home. I knew that we were there to figure out how to reconcile those realities, but our common love for this country seemed like the right place to start.

“Patriotism,” I volunteered.

I had rolled a live grenade into the center of the room. One participant flinched, as if struck. Suddenly, everyone was talking at once, voices and tempers rising. One woman said the word made her feel excluded. Another said it connoted violence and racism. Still another participant was offended that anyone could be offended by the word. The facilitator declined to write patriotism on the easel. As the quarreling continued, I sat back, stunned. All of the people in the room had come here for the specific purpose of finding a common narrative. What hope did that project have if they could not even agree—each in their own way—on loving the country they were trying to save?

Americans, of course, have never exactly agreed on why this country was founded or what it stands for. Fierce arguments over those questions have long divided families and roiled politics, and even once produced a bloody civil war. But throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th, a simplistic patriotic narrative prevailed. “Providence designed that on this continent should be seen an example of democratic government,” a textbook explained to young students in 1872, “which means government ‘of the people, for the people, by the people.’ ”

Americans defined their nation in this way, by their commitment to a common creed—of equality, rights, and opportunity—and to a corresponding set of democratic ideals that they were modeling for the world. In practice, they generally fell short of those principles, sometimes seeming to pursue their abnegation more than their fulfillment. But the white men who built their fledgling republic around an idea, instead of around a common ancestry, opened the possibility that any who subscribed to its creed could become a citizen. Over time, other Americans demanded that the nation live up to its ideals and recognize their equality. For more than two centuries, our creedal nationalism has been a source of strength, binding together Americans of diverse faiths and backgrounds.

[From the October 2018 issue: Yoni Appelbaum on how Americans aren’t practicing democracy anymore]

But lately, we have discovered that it is also a vulnerability. A nation defined by blood and soil—built around a shared religion or ethnicity—can survive divergent narratives. To a country built on an idea, though, and bound together by a shared understanding of our history, the inability to tell a common story might well prove fatal.

In recent decades, the traditional American story has come under sustained attack from both flanks. On the left, scholars and activists suspicious of nationalism have pushed to redefine the United States as a country exceptional mostly for its flaws and crimes. On the right, politicians and commentators hostile to diversity have sought to gloss over those sins and, more recently, lay claim to the nation on behalf of “heritage Americans.” Unable to agree on how to tell our story, we have swiftly abandoned efforts to tell it at all. The hours devoted to social studies in schools are shrinking, and survey courses in American history are vanishing from college campuses. The signature event of the nation’s 250th birthday might prove to be not a keynote speech or a patriotic pageant, but a no-holds-barred UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House.

Most Americans are still proud of their country—although the percentage has been declining with each successive generation, and the decline is particularly steep among young progressives. If patriotism is going to be a word that can be used in polite company, then we will need to figure out how to tell the story of ourselves. Because without a coherent national story, we will fail to be a coherent nation.

Our present disagreements would have astonished the historians of the mid-20th century, who found America more remarkable for its consensus than for its conflicts. Americans, the historian Louis Hartz argued, embraced a common liberal tradition, built around a respect for democracy, property, and individual liberty. Many of the scholars in this Cold War–era consensus school were, like Hartz, the children of Jewish immigrants who had found in America a vital refuge, and they wanted to explain its exceptionality. They held a flattering mirror up to the country. Their books became best sellers, they wrote for popular magazines, and they advised prominent politicians.

But theirs was hardly the whole story. In the 1960s, as women and people of color entered the academy in larger numbers, they set about telling the stories that the consensus school had glossed over or ignored. The explosion of scholarship they produced was a tremendous boon for history, the Harvard historian Jill Lepore told me, widening our understanding of our past. The focus of academics swung to class, race, and gender, to giving voice to the voiceless and documenting injustices. No single national story seemed capable of capturing the full diversity of America, and it seemed wrong to even try. “People were suspicious of any national story as the handmaiden of ethnic nationalism, or white nationalism,” Lepore explained. Patriotic histories, after all, had long been used to buttress the oppressive systems that these scholars now sought to unmask.

[From the October 2025 issue: Jill Lepore on how originalism killed the Constitution]

As professors pursued the separate histories of various groups, uncovering neglected stories and challenging facile assumptions, they made comparatively little effort to assemble the pieces into a comprehensible narrative. Scholars largely stopped writing single-volume histories of the United States.

The new histories disagreed with the mid-century consensus school less over the facts than over which ones to emphasize, and how to string them together into a story. Take the simple question of democracy. In Revolutionary America, the franchise was extraordinarily widespread; more than half of adult white men could vote, while in England only about one in seven could do the same. And in the young republic, enfranchisement quickly expanded further, with perhaps 80 percent of adult white men—90 percent in some states—coming to hold the right to vote. This was truly an unprecedentedly broad form of democracy. It was also one that almost entirely excluded women, who, under the doctrine of coverture, had their legal personhood merged into that of their husbands; Black Americans, most of whom were enslaved; and Native Americans, denied citizenship in their own land. The fight to expand the franchise produced a long, at times blood-drenched struggle that has not yet ended. Previous historians had tended to highlight the breadth of the franchise. Now a new generation instead tallied the damage of disenfranchisement, and told the stories of the individuals and groups fighting to secure the right to vote.

The history wars soon spilled beyond college campuses, spreading to high schools and even grade schools. In 1991, the George H. W. Bush administration set out to develop common history standards, and the chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lynne Cheney, asked a center at UCLA to produce them. But when conservatives reviewed the guidelines, which reflected the latest scholarship, they did not like what they found. Cheney denounced the standards for emphasizing America’s failings over its achievements, and Rush Limbaugh said that they aimed to teach students “that America is a rotten place.” The Senate voted to reject the standards, 99–1.

By 2001, when Bush’s son and Cheney’s husband came into office, they were painfully aware of just how contentious a topic history could be. So as their administration worked with Congress to create the tough accountability framework of No Child Left Behind, they delicately set the question of how to teach history to the side. NCLB held schools responsible for their students’ performance on standardized tests, but only in English and math. There was no such exam for history—less because reformers cared too little about it than because, ironically, everyone cared too much to agree on what should be tested.

Illustration by Tyler Comrie

That’s been bad for American education, and worse for America. Schools that struggled to make the grade on math and English swiftly cut back on other subjects to compensate. At the elementary level, the largest decreases came in the time devoted to social studies, which within a few years dropped by a third, or 76 minutes each week. The high-school history classroom, meanwhile, became the safest place to park the football coach, so that he could earn a full-time salary safely removed from the subjects tested under NCLB. Within a decade, more than a third of social-studies educators were coaching sports or teaching phys ed. They had fewer years of experience and were far more reliant on textbooks and worksheets than their less athletic colleagues, who leaned more heavily on primary sources. Students joked that all of their history teachers had the same first name: Coach. States have since haltingly rolled out standards for history education, but after 30 years of reform, students’ performance on history exams has slightly declined—just 14 percent are rated proficient.

[Read: How to teach American history in a divided country]

The abandonment of the effort to tell the American story is hardly limited to high schools or universities. Nowhere is it more evident, in fact, than in the preparations for America’s 250th birthday. When the Biden administration took over the nascent project, it simply punted on the question of how to create something unifying. The federal Semiquincentennial Commission instead invited people to record their personal history, on the theory that “your story is America’s story.” Local institutions were encouraged to plan events that would speak to their particular communities.

Donald Trump returned to office in 2025 excited to put his own stamp on the occasion. But he appears to have little notion of precisely what we should be honoring. It is hard to discern any message, beyond the president’s love of spectacle and celebrity, from a mixed-martial-arts bout on the South Lawn; or an IndyCar race in Washington, D.C.; or a colossal archway near the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery. Trump’s proposal for a National Garden of American Heroes, where visitors could commune with statues of 250 historic figures, is simply bewildering. The list of honorees bears less resemblance to a pantheon collectively embodying the American idea than to the setup of a bad joke: Davy Crockett, Julia Child, and Kobe Bryant walk into a bar …

It’s our 250th birthday, and no one seems to know what we’re celebrating.

Johann Neem was not quite 3 years old when his parents left Mumbai for San Francisco in 1976. He landed in a world of tantalizing possibility—that people could become better, freer, more prosperous. And as he grew up, eating masala dosas and also Thanksgiving turkey, he understood that he was at once an Indian immigrant and fully American. “Pretty astounding, right?” he told me. “A claim that someone from South Asia can come to this country and become American.”

That claim has astounded new arrivals from the start. President John Quincy Adams, a popular anecdote relates, once asked an Irishman how he liked the United States. “Indeed, sir,” he replied, “I like it very much. I like it so much, that I intend soon, to become a native!” The story was retold in jest, but it contained a deep truth. You had to be born an Irishman, but, as President Ronald Reagan put it, “anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”

Neem is now a historian at Western Washington University, where he has watched the erosion of that promise in dismay. Last year, he delivered the annual lecture on the state of the discipline to the American Historical Association, lamenting the loss of a common and inclusive narrative. (It drew furious responses, including from one leftist scholar who accused him of “retreat, if not outright capitulation” to the fell logic of nationalism.) In recent decades, Neem told me, there have been three competing versions of the American story. The first is grounded in the notion that the United States is a work in progress. This approach mixes the self-flattery of some older histories with frank acknowledgment of the many ways in which America has fallen short of its ideals, incorporating the critical scholarship of recent decades. It approaches the American story as an ongoing struggle between our best impulses and our worst. Neem calls this approach the mainstream school, because it is how most Americans still think about their country, even though it has fallen from favor on campus.

On the left, an approach that Neem terms post-American has taken root, pushing the arguments of the 1970s in an ever more emphatic direction. The United States was built on racism and genocide, it contends, a settler-colonial nation founded in white supremacy, irredeemably illiberal and oppressive. Many scholars who pursue this approach actively seek to decenter the nation in their narratives. They find no common inspiration to be taken from this history, only a litany of sins requiring atonement.

The right, meanwhile, is pursuing what Neem calls a hyper-American approach—fueled in part by opposition to the post-American turn on the left. In some ways, the histories of this school call back to those written in the 19th century, casting the country’s origin as providential—not quite an immaculate conception, but not far off—and emphasizing the morality and timelessness of America’s founding creed. Slavery, in their telling, was not a system on which the country was built, but a deviation from the immutable truths on which it was founded. To reckon too closely with the darker chapters of our past, they suggest, is to risk disenchanting the nation. Trump’s 1776 Commission, typically, called for approaching American history “with reverence and love.”

Last July, Vice President Vance joined the debate, attacking then–New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani for saying that he is “proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better.” To Vance, Mamdani’s words failed to display the gratitude and deference that he believes immigrants like Mamdani ought to show—not only to the American past but also to past Americans. “Who the hell do these people think they are?” he asked. Then he took things one step further. “America is not just an idea,” Vance declared, contending instead that “we’re a particular place, with a particular people.”

Neem discerns within all of this a strange convergence, as both the far right and the far left have come to agree that the history of the United States has been defined by whiteness. The left no longer believes that immigrants of diverse backgrounds should assimilate themselves into a national culture tainted by white supremacy, while the right views immigrants’ very presence in the country as a threat to that same national culture. Naturalized citizens have a particular commitment to the American project—they tend to be more patriotic than native-born Americans, more trusting in our institutions, and more likely to believe that the world would be better off if people elsewhere resembled Americans. But as our national story narrows, it has begun to exclude them. “I’ve seen a change on both ends that makes it harder for someone like me to be an American,” Neem said.

Amid all the fracture and contention, though, are some recent signs that Americans are again seeking a way to tell an inclusive national story. As progressives have begun to fear that the American system might in fact be lost, many have rediscovered its virtues. In 2016, as Trump barreled toward the White House, Khizr Khan brandished a pocket Constitution at the Democratic National Convention to raucous applause from Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters alike. During Trump’s first term, the Baby Boomers who once burned flags in youthful rebellion marched off to join the Resistance wrapped in the Stars and Stripes. In his second, the “No Kings” rallies have looked back to the founding era for inspiration.

Historians, many of whom had spent decades tearing apart patriotic myths and decentering the nation-state, awoke to discover that they had, in effect, ceded the task of telling the American story to the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Newt Gingrich. A few, perhaps emboldened by the growing popular hunger for a narrative, began to produce accounts grounded in the mainstream school, wrestling with America’s defects while still recognizing its ideals. In 2018, Jill Lepore published These Truths, the sort of sweeping single-volume history of the nation that no prominent scholar had attempted in generations. The following year, a Boston College history professor named Heather Cox Richardson launched a newsletter on the premise that “to understand the present, we have to understand how we got here,” and swiftly became the most successful author on Substack.

This is not to say that any agreement on the American project is about to be found. From the vantage point of some on the left, Trump has looked less like a threat to America’s virtues than a confirmation of its vices, decisive evidence that the United States has been a white-supremacist state all along. In The New York Times’ “The 1619 Project,” the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones argued that the American story began not in 1776 but in 1619, with the advent of slavery. The contributions of Black Americans and the consequences of slavery belong “at the very center of our national narrative,” she claimed.

Critics, some eminent historians among them, were swift to note that Hannah-Jones’s history was reductive and, in places, simply wrong. Trump found in “The 1619 Project” a useful foil, attacking it as “toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together.” But although her account of America’s origins was extremely gloomy, Hannah-Jones also offered a more optimistic view of the country’s progress through the ensuing centuries. The project chronicled “the struggle of Black Americans to perfect these ideals of liberty, freedom, equality in the law, equality in society,” she told me. “And that’s a redemptive, unifying narrative,” albeit not one that she is sure the nation is ready to accept. Notably, Hannah-Jones’s essay ends with her wish that she could tell her younger self to “boldly, proudly, draw the stars and those stripes of the American flag.”

Conservatives frequently warn that the close study of the darkest chapters of our past will erode any sense of patriotism. In Hannah-Jones’s case, at least, it had the opposite effect. One question she’d sought to answer, as she researched her essay, was why newly emancipated slaves did not leave the country that had so wronged them, as she assumed they would have wanted to do. She read their accounts and saw them argue that, at the moment they had finally gained rights and citizenship, they could not abandon the only land they had ever known. They resolved to stay and to make the nation what it could and should have been. “I actually did find that really inspiring,” she told me. “And I think that’s the first time I ever felt I could see a path to patriotism.”

After Lepore published These Truths, she was astonished by the number of readers who reached out to tell her what the book meant to them. One woman wrote to say that she had bought it to study for her citizenship exam but, enthralled, kept reading. “I really feel like I belong here now,” she wrote, “because I understand the whole journey that is the story of this land and this people and these ideas and this country.” Most significantly, Lepore found that readers wanted to know the full story of their country—the progress and the revanchism, the beauty and the ugliness, the racial massacres and the Indian New Deal.

The Trump administration seems allergic to this kind of complexity. Last March, it issued an executive order on “restoring truth and sanity to American history.” Among other measures, it instructed the National Park Service to remove signs that “inappropriately disparage” historical figures instead of focusing on the “greatness” of American achievements. A display on George Washington’s slaves came down in Philadelphia; an exhibit at the Grand Canyon was stripped of a passage noting that federal officials had “pushed tribes off their land” to establish the park.

Deleting accounts of the past not because they are false but because they are true betrays a curious lack of confidence. Do the censors fear that Americans will cease to love their country once they know the full story?

The evidence suggests otherwise. Large majorities of Americans prefer history that challenges what they know over accounts that reinforce it. By an almost nine-to-one margin, they think it’s at least as important to learn about other racial and ethnic communities as about their own. And they overwhelmingly agree on the importance of learning about past harms, even when doing so makes them uncomfortable. “I’ve been on the road, literally, for seven years since the project came out, in every type of community,” Hannah-Jones told me. “And I’ve never had someone walk away and say they hate this country. They say they’re ashamed of things this country has done, that they’re deeply disappointed, and they want to see the country be better.” Americans appear aligned not with the unquestioning patriotism of the naval hero Stephen Decatur, who was said to have declared, “My country, right or wrong,” but with the deeper patriotism of the Reconstruction-era Senator Carl Schurz, who added: “If right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”

[From the November 2025 issue: George Packer on why we still need patriotism]

The American story—the whole American story—deserves to be told. People are hungry to hear it. History, Neem told me, shapes how we understand the moment we’re living in, and “makes it possible for us to see where we’re going.” As our understanding of the past constantly shifts, how we choose to retell our story matters. When the historical revolution of the 1960s and ’70s insisted that we contend with America’s bigotry and exclusion, Neem said, the mainstream narrative evolved to give us a story in which “overcoming racism was to become more American.” Our nation is still evolving; whether the story we tell ourselves can continue to evolve along with it remains to be seen.

I asked Lepore if the United States could cohere without a common narrative. “Everything ends,” she replied, “and this could be a part of what unravels it.” But Neem was more hopeful. “Realizing what we’re losing might enable us to remember the America we want,” he said.

Just down the street from where I live lies one of America’s smallest national cemeteries. On a bright July morning several years ago, I visited it with my daughter, on the anniversary of the Civil War battle it commemorates. Together with a handful of neighbors, we stuck small American flags by the marble headstones of 40 men and boys who, far from their homes, fought in defense of the idea that all are created equal, bound together in a common project. They won the battle but lost their lives. For us, the living, their unfinished work remains.

This article originally described an upcoming car race in Washington, D.C., as a Formula 1 race. In fact, it is an IndyCar race. The article appears in the July 2026 print edition with the headline “How to Tell the American Story.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.