Politics | The Atlantic

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.

The Liberal District That Could Oust a Trump-Defying Democrat

2026-06-07T08:11:02-04:00

As Democratic heretics go, Representative Dan Goldman isn’t guilty of many crimes against his party. He initially won election to the House after prosecuting the first impeachment of President Trump (whom he now calls a “fascist”), and during two terms, he has voted overwhelmingly with Democratic leaders—even swinging to their left by backing Medicare for All and the abolition of ICE. Goldman isn’t tainted by scandal, nor is he on death’s doorstep; at 50, he’s pretty young for Congress.

Yet if the polls in New York’s Tenth Congressional District are anywhere near correct, Goldman will lose his bid for reelection in a primary later this month to another middle-aged Jewish guy aligned with progressive causes. Brad Lander, a former New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate, is challenging Goldman from the left, seeking to parlay an endorsement from the city’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, into a House seat.

Lander’s case against Goldman spans from the parochial to the global. Goldman refused to endorse Mamdani’s mayoral bid last year even after the former state legislator captured the Democratic nomination, and he was slow to turn against Israel’s war in Gaza, which Lander (like Mamdani) calls a genocide. “He’s fundamentally out of step with the core progressive values of the district,” Lander told me.

Goldman says Lander is exaggerating the gulf between them. “I am a progressive, I have a very progressive agenda, and I am very aligned with the district,” he told me. “I think 95 percent of the time we would vote the same way.” A few Goldman allies I interviewed seemed perplexed that the liberal wing of the party would want to defeat him. After all, he’s no Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema, the centrist Democrats who stood in the way of some of former President Biden’s top priorities. Nor is he like John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania Democrat and onetime darling of the left who has become the party’s most ardent defender of Israel. “I don’t think he’s done anything wrong,” Mario Cilento, a New York State labor leader backing Goldman, told me. “Every Congress member gets one vote. If that individual votes the right way, I’m really not sure what else they can do.” To mock attacks on his record, Goldman is running a commercial designed as a scare ad that points out all the “radical progressives” who are supporting him, including Planned Parenthood, teachers’ unions, and public-housing advocates.

Goldman’s progressive critics acknowledge that he’s given them few bad votes to attack. But they have used the race to argue for raising the bar for a Democratic member of Congress, demanding more visibility—and more activism—rather than mere party loyalty. Lander’s backers are also challenging a system in which a safe House seat can easily become a sinecure, so long as the incumbent avoids either prison or an ideological betrayal. “Someone who’s gonna just take votes and follow the status quo of being a mainstream Democrat is not what this district deserves or needs,” Jasmine Gripper, a co-director of the New York Working Families Party, which is supporting Lander, told me.

New York City has been a staging ground for progressive primary challenges in recent years. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s stunning 2018 defeat of Representative Joe Crowley, a Queens party boss and member of the Democratic House leadership, catapulted her to international fame. Two years later, another senior House Democrat, Representative Eliot Engel, lost in a primary to a left-wing challenger. This year, Mamdani is backing another like-minded democratic socialist, Darializa Avila Chevalier, who is running against Representative Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

Those races all featured sharp divides—ideological, generational, racial—between the candidates. The dynamics of the Goldman-Lander matchup, by contrast, are more complicated.

New York’s Tenth District is split between Manhattan and Brooklyn, and it encompasses some of the city’s wealthiest and most recognizable neighborhoods, including Wall Street, Greenwich Village, SoHo, and the stately brownstones of Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope. By that metric, Goldman is a perfect fit for the district. He is one of the richest members of Congress and has contributed millions to his campaigns; earlier this spring he announced that he would match every additional donation with funds of his own. (Goldman’s middle name is Sachs, and he has up to a $50 million line of credit with Goldman Sachs, according to a 2022 financial disclosure, but his family money comes from the Levi Strauss fortune.)

Goldman’s wealth is a liability in the race—“He bought the seat” is a common refrain from the Lander side—but perhaps not as much in a city that thrice elected Mike Bloomberg mayor as it would be elsewhere. Goldman won his first primary in 2022 by just over 1,300 votes, aided by his considerable financial advantage, the fame he’d earned as an impeachment star and talking head on MSNBC, and—perhaps most consequentially—divisions within the district’s progressive base that split its votes among several other candidates. “The only reason he won—let’s be absolutely clear—is that the left was divided,” Gripper said. “Our side didn’t get their act together.”

[Read: California Democrats avoided a worst-case scenario]

Since taking office, Goldman has focused his attention less on his district’s ritzier, progressive neighborhoods than on the working-class, immigrant-populated enclaves that he says local politicians have neglected. On a recent Tuesday I found him stumping in Manhattan’s Chinatown, where he spoke to about 100 constituents inside a small shopping mall that had seen better days. Goldman campaign signs covered up makeshift wooden walls, and wiring hung down from a partially intact ceiling. Residents told me that the mall had once been full of stalls leased by local merchants but that it had emptied out during the pandemic and, unlike many other areas of New York, struggled to recover. Few in the audience were conversing in English, and they listened quietly as they waited for Goldman’s remarks to be translated.

He explained that he’d opened a satellite office in the neighborhood that has served more than 1,000 people, and he touted his work fighting against cuts to SNAP, anti-Asian hate crimes, and the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Toward the end of his speech, Goldman finally got to the rub: “One of the reasons why Chinatown is often underserved and overlooked,” he said, “is because voter turnout is pretty low, and what happens is many elected officials, including my opponent, only focus on the areas that have high voter turnout.

“I didn’t do that,” Goldman continued, “because I knew that you all needed more help than you were getting.” “But,” he said: “now I need your help.”

Goldman’s direct appeal was at once the kind of ask that urban politicians have been making of their constituents for generations—and a telling indication of why he’s in so much electoral trouble. While Goldman is hunting for votes in places that don’t ordinarily turn out in large numbers, Lander seems to have the advantage in the neighborhoods that do. He represented Park Slope and its surroundings on the city council for 12 years. Lander’s ads depict him as a Mister Rogers–like figure who will “make every day a beautiful day in our neighborhood” (one ad mentions a “fascist president” and “rogue ICE agents” as animated birds tweet by). Polls have shown that he has better name recognition in the district than Goldman, the incumbent. The disparity has forced Goldman into the awkward position of defending a seat he’s held for two terms by running, at least in part, as the outsider. “He has a much longer history in the district,” Goldman told me of Lander. “And I bring a new and different energy to this job.”

Goldman’s problem, his critics say, is that he has avoided the district’s more liberal neighborhoods and refused to engage with its influential activist community. Those tensions were magnified after Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, when progressives in New York began demonstrating against Israel’s retaliatory war in Gaza. Robert Carroll, a Democrat who represents Park Slope in the state assembly, endorsed Goldman during his first race but told me he soon realized he had made a mistake. He accused Goldman of displaying an “arrogance” toward activists that Carroll found off-putting. “New York 10 is a progressive bastion,” Carroll said. “There are not many in the United States, and the idea that we have a representative who refuses to meaningfully interact with, represent, and work with the progressive voters and residents of his district is disqualifying.”

I sat down with Goldman for an interview in a diner in Chinatown he’d picked, not far from where he had held his event the week before. He expressed few regrets, other than wishing that more people knew about the record he had built in Congress. “If I were to do something different, it would have been to more aggressively publicize a lot of the work that I have done,” Goldman said.

From the moment he narrowly won his primary in 2022, progressives seemed to have marked Goldman for future defeat. But if there was a threat, he appears not to have picked up on it. I asked Goldman whether, knowing that he had captured just over a quarter of the party vote in that first election, he had developed a plan for beating back the kind of challenge that had toppled much more established New York City Democrats in recent years. “I didn’t really think about it that much,” Goldman replied. “I mostly really focused on doing the work.”

Goldman’s path to reelection might have been smoother had Lander gotten either of the municipal posts he sought last year. He finished third in the Democratic primary for mayor after locking arms with Mamdani in a cross-endorsement facilitated by the city’s ranked-choice voting system. After Mamdani captured the nomination last summer, Lander was reportedly angling to become first deputy mayor—in essence, chief lieutenant—in the new administration. But Mamdani picked someone else and instead gave Lander his enthusiastic endorsement to challenge Goldman. “He needed a job,” Goldman told me, “and I think the mayor wanted to give him an off-ramp to save face a little bit.”

For his part, the 56-year-old Lander told me that some of his supporters began urging him to run for Congress as soon as he lost the mayoral primary. “I’m grateful for his support,” Lander said of Mamdani. “A seat in Congress is no one’s consolation prize, especially at a moment when your democracy is on the line.” (A Mamdani spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.)

[Read: Where Mamdani has refused to moderate]

The mayor’s endorsement of Lander has set up something of a proxy battle with other Democratic power brokers, such as New York Governor Kathy Hochul and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who are backing Goldman. But Mamdani is clearly the most popular of the three in the district, and Lander mentions him nearly as often as a Trump-backed Republican name-drops the president in MAGA territory. “We don’t agree on every single thing, but I want the mayor to have an ally in Washington instead of an adversary in his own backyard,” Lander said during a local radio forum last month.

Goldman was far from the only prominent Democrat to withhold support from Mamdani during his general-election campaign. Jeffries didn’t endorse Mamdani until late October, and Senator Chuck Schumer (a constituent of Goldman’s in Park Slope) never backed him at all. But Goldman appears to be the first to pay a price for his neutrality. In my interviews with voters, Goldman’s refusal to get behind Mamdani was one of two main complaints they had about his record.

The other was Goldman’s support for Israel, which has come to dominate the race, crowding out discussions about Trump, immigration, and affordability. (The issue took up the first quarter of an hourlong debate he and Lander held earlier this week.) Lander has assailed Goldman for accepting AIPAC’s endorsement and for voting to send military aid to Israel, which Lander has vowed to oppose. Lander has also criticized Goldman for voting alongside Republicans to censure Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat and the only Palestinian American serving in Congress, over her use of the phrase from the river to the sea in the immediate aftermath of October 7. Goldman recently suggested that he regretted the vote, citing the emotions of the moment—he and his family were in Israel when the attack occurred—but at the time he said Tlaib had used “a hurtful antisemitic trope.”

Goldman has loudly opposed Trump’s war in Iran; he begins one TV ad with the words “No more wars,” a line he delivers morosely and directly to the camera. He told me that “the devastation in Gaza is horrific, unnecessary, and excessive.” But Lander has gone much further in his denunciations of Israel, particularly in the past year. During his mayoral campaign, he did not use the word genocide to describe Israel’s war in Gaza. By the fall, however, he had begun accusing Israel of genocide—a shift that coincided with his preparations to challenge Goldman. Lander told me that he’d changed his mind after conversations with his daughter, a 23-year-old University of Chicago graduate who talked to him about her studies of Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer from Poland who is credited with coining the term genocide after the Holocaust.

Goldman has tried to minimize his and Lander’s differences on Israel, noting that in a district in which nearly a quarter of the electorate is Jewish, both Democratic candidates identify as “liberal Zionists,” have condemned Israel’s tactics in Gaza, and support the creation of a Palestinian state. Lander and Goldman each opposed a vote by the Park Slope Food Co-op to boycott Israeli products.

Goldman’s critics and, privately, a few of his allies, believe he did not appreciate the shakiness of his standing within his district, or the threat that even a few political missteps might pose to his future. He may not have broken with his party—or even his district’s progressive base—all that much, but his margin of error was thin to begin with. “Dan Goldman has been doing his best to fight Donald Trump, which is all we can expect from him,” a Lander supporter, Steve Flack, told me. But to Flack and, it seems, many of Goldman’s constituents, that is not sufficient to win another term. Goldman, he said, “really just thought he could slide as an incumbent.”

If Goldman once thought the seat he won in 2022 was securely his own, he knows now that is not the case. He’s spent months reintroducing himself to voters, touting his record, and trying to rebut Lander’s claim that he’s too closely aligned with the corporate establishment. But in the coming weeks, Goldman may discover that in this district, at this fraught moment, Democratic voters just want more.

*Illustration sources: The New York Historical / Getty; Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc / Getty; Michael Nagle / Bloomberg / Getty.

The World Cup of Ugh

2026-06-04T16:42:00-04:00

Updated at 4:10 p.m. ET on June 5, 2026

The World Cup is nearly here! But so far, at least, no one seems all that excited.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The biggest sporting event in the world is on the verge of returning to the United States for the first time in more than 30 years. Starting next week, teams from 48 nations will play 104 matches in 16 cities across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Some of the most famous people on Earth will be playing, each recognizable by a single name: Messi, Mbappé, Ronaldo, Salah. After years of buildup, soccer lovers were convinced that Americans were finally—finally!—ready to fully embrace the sport played and watched by far more people than any other around the globe.

Yet a tournament that should be hotly anticipated—providing a joyful backdrop to America’s 250th-birthday celebrations—is instead surrounded by angst and even dread. Ticket prices are astronomical, demand for them has slumped, and hotels are half-booked. There is little buzz. The New York City area, which will be home to the World Cup Final next month, is far more focused on the Knicks. There is anxiety about fans traveling from the Democratic Republic of the Congo in light of the Ebola outbreak there. Some international visitors are barred by travel bans, and others are nervous about making the trip. Fans are anxious about the potential for ICE raids outside stadiums or terror attacks targeting gatherings of supporters. Hopes for a strong showing for the U.S. team have mostly faded. President Trump has, to the shock of no one, inserted himself into the proceedings. Hanging over it all is the war in Iran, particularly because it was started by the guy to whom the tournament’s organizers recently awarded a peace prize. The United States’ relations with its co-host countries have grown strained—as have its relations with just about every country that is slated to participate.

Perhaps the situation can still be salvaged. Ahead of the previous World Cup, four years ago, there was extraordinary consternation about that tournament’s host, Qatar. Migrant laborers had died in building the nation’s stadiums and infrastructure. Accusations of corruption were rampant. The host country seemed to be an unlikely choice, and its summers were so hot that the tournament had to move to the fall. Plus, the Qataris didn’t even serve beer. All of those concerns were largely forgotten after the transcendent final, when Lionel Messi, of Argentina, triumphed over Kylian Mbappé, of France, in a match considered one of the greatest ever. Can that happen again?

The only other time the World Cup was held in the United States, in 1994, it was treated as a bit of a novelty. Back then, the sport was viewed by Americans as something that the rest of the world loved but that we mostly ignored. We wouldn’t even use their name for it, insisting on soccer rather than football. Sure, little kids play it, but then they move on to American sports such as baseball, basketball, and the other football (the one with helmets). During World War II, my grandfather’s skill at baseball got him designated as the grenade thrower for his unit as he and his comrades fought their way across Europe. Years later, he used to joke that only “a communist sport” wouldn’t let you use your hands.

[Read: When soccer was an American afterthought]

The 1994 World Cup ended when Italy’s Roberto Baggio sent his penalty kick sailing high over the net and doomed his side’s chances. Since then, there has been no question that soccer (we’ll stick to calling it that) has grown far more popular in the United States. Youth participation continues to grow. Major League Soccer, launched after the 1994 tournament, has finally come into its own. No, it can’t compete with the English Premier League or Spain’s La Liga or Germany’s Bundesliga, and it is not on the same footing as the NFL, MLB, NHL, or NBA. But it is healthy, being played in new soccer-only stadiums and having a slick Apple TV contract, and it’s become a popular spot for aging international players to make a final run. (Pink-and-black Messi Inter Miami CF jerseys have become a must-have for many kids.) The U.S. men’s team has made surprisingly strong showings in a few World Cups, the most notable a run to the quarterfinals in 2002 and to the final 16 in 2010, 2014, and 2022. The National Women’s Soccer League is rapidly expanding, and the U.S. team has been the most dominant in the Women’s World Cup, winning in 1991, 1999, 2015, and 2019. Both of my sons play soccer, and we’ve become ardent Liverpool supporters—though we live nowhere near the west of England. For the soccer enthusiasts among us, 2026 was primed to be “The Year.”

But that’s not how it’s shaping up. MetLife Stadium is a personality-less concrete behemoth in the swamps of New Jersey, about eight traffic-clogged miles from Midtown Manhattan. So naturally enough, it was picked to host the World Cup final. Last summer, it hosted the finals of the FIFA Club World Cup, a new tournament of elite clubs meant to stir interest in the real World Cup a year later. But several top teams were absent, and attendance was generally light. A fairly healthy crowd assembled for the last match, though, to see Chelsea capture the title—but lose the trophy. Trump celebrated as though he, too, had just defeated Paris Saint-Germain 3–0, and then he snagged the trophy for himself, later displaying it in the Oval Office. (The team subsequently received its own trophy.)

FIFA President Gianni Infantino indulged Trump’s trophy-grab as part of his ongoing effort to keep the mercurial U.S. president happy through a tournament that is expected to generate about $9 billion. Infantino then unleashed a hat trick of over-the-top flattery. First, the FIFA World Cup draw was held at the Kennedy Center, to which Trump was about to attach his name. Second, he had the president help draw teams to select the tournament’s groups. And third, Infantino created the FIFA Peace Prize and presented it to Trump, who had been grousing for months that he had not received a Nobel Peace Prize. Why, you might sensibly ask, is a soccer organization giving out such awards? Trump didn’t seem to care, and beamed as he wore the medal around his neck—and further celebrated peace by commissioning a military operation in Venezuela, and then launching a war on Iran.

That war will be a storyline at the tournament; there was some debate as to whether the Iranian team would participate at all. (It will, but it has moved its tournament training from Arizona to Mexico.) Other countries touched by the conflict (Iraq, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, among others) will also be playing. Security officials have warned about possible terror attacks, and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin likened the challenges of safeguarding the tournament to protecting “78 Super Bowls.” Some experts are worried that fan gatherings are potential targets that are even more difficult to protect.

[Read: Here’s another way America will choke at the World Cup]

FIFA, of course, is no stranger to awarding hosting of its prized tournament to nations with complicated relationships with the rest of the world. Four years before Qatar, the tournament was in Russia, giving Vladimir Putin a turn on the global stage despite his incursions into Ukraine and Georgia. (No peace prize for him, at least.) And there is precedent for a World Cup being split among rival nations; the 2002 tournament was shared between Japan and South Korea and was marked by some mild diplomatic spats. But the leader of Japan didn’t take to social media less than two weeks before the tournament began to muse about annexing South Korea, as Trump did with Canada on Monday, writing: “51st State!”

Against this backdrop, it’s perhaps not surprising that 54 percent of Americans surveyed in a poll released last week said that they were not at all interested in the World Cup. Even those who are interested likely can’t afford to attend a game. Outside of a limited number of affordable tickets, the face-value price for even nosebleed seats currently stands at $400 to $600. Ticket lotteries seemed impossible to win, and then some fans accused FIFA of assigning them worse seats than they’d purchased. The secondary-ticket market right now is so outrageous that the cheapest option on StubHub for the World Cup final is $8,000 (and continuing to climb), and the most expensive is more than $84,000. (To be fair, the top price to a potential NBA Finals–clinching Game 6 at Madison Square Garden is currently listed for more than that.) New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was able to secure a limited number of $50 tickets to earlier games for city residents, but only after he complained that World Cup prices were so high that “you’d have to mortgage your house to be able to afford that.”

[Read: The unhappy hosts of the World Cup]

Yet the games will go on. And for significant swaths of the country—and, of course, much of the world—that’s all that matters. The kickoff pits Mexico versus South Africa in Mexico City next Thursday afternoon, and the U.S. team opens up the next day playing against Paraguay in Los Angeles. TV ratings are expected to be huge. (An estimated 1.4 billion people worldwide watched at least a portion of the 2022 final.) And even though the U.S. team enters the tournament with modest expectations, host teams sometimes make unexpected runs. South Korea, hardly a soccer powerhouse, went all the way to the semifinals when the World Cup was on its turf. Roger Bennett, one of the great soccer evangelists, told me that he agrees that the tournament will be massive, irrespective of how far the U.S. men’s team goes.

“Americans will reconnect with their generational roots, as they did in 1994 at the Meadowlands when Italy played Ireland, and the whole of New Jersey was there, half the stadium like The Sopranos, the other half Angela’s Ashes,” Bennett, the author of We Are the World (Cup), said. “That is this tournament’s magic.”

He spoke of the tournament’s potential with bright-eyed optimism, promising me that it could provide “pure moments which can drive out darkness and let in light.” I hope he’s correct that the game itself will indeed be beautiful, the stars transcendent. Perhaps England will collapse again in heartbreaking fashion, and we will witness matches that we’ll all remember for a lifetime. The hope is that all of the ugliness and worry will be forgotten during next month’s final, when the winning team hoists the World Cup trophy. Unless, of course, Trump takes that one too.

This article originally identified pink-and-black Messi jerseys as belonging to Miami FC. In fact, they belong to Inter Miami CF.

California Democrats Avoided the Worst-Case Scenario

2026-06-04T16:35:00-04:00

As with pretty much everything involving California governance, discerning the state’s election results can devolve into a big, unruly mess. To wit, Tuesday’s primary—particularly the free-for-all campaign for governor to succeed Gavin Newsom—remains too muddled to call, with millions of outstanding ballots likely yet to be counted.

At minimum, though, we can speak with some preliminary clarity, let’s call it, on the contest. California elections are consolidated via a “jungle primary” system, in which the top-two finishers, regardless of party, advance to November. As of today, the Trump-endorsed Republican Steve Hilton, a British transplant and former Fox News host, is the leading vote-getter. Two Democrats—the former California attorney general and Joe Biden Cabinet secretary Xavier Becerra and the billionaire climate activist Tom Steyer—are currently sitting in second and third place, respectively. And there’s still a chance both could come from behind to squeeze out Hilton.

Democrats appear to have skirted a dreaded “Blue Armageddon” scenario in which their crowded field of middling-or-worse candidates cancel one another out, while the two middling-or-worse Republicans (Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco) advance to the final two. “Bullet dodged” seems to be the prevailing takeaway among Democrats. If Becerra or Steyer winds up facing Hilton, they will clearly be favored to win, given the state’s heavily Democratic makeup and what looks to be an overwhelmingly Democratic-friendly electoral environment across the country.

Still, even if Team Blue will likely win in the end, the California governor’s race has been a fiasco for Democrats from the start—and in ways that reflect an ongoing dysfunction that has become a feature of the party in recent years. Even worse, California in 2026 could portend a larger and more destructive performance from the party in 2028.

[Mark Leibovich: California’s Blue Armageddon]

For starters, Democrats won’t have Donald Trump to save them in the future, as he seems to be doing this year. The president’s unhinged behavior, bungled policies, cartoonish overreach, and GOP-undermining impulses have pretty much been the single best asset that Democrats have had going for them since the end of 2024—rather than them having any actual popularity of their own. For all the hand-wringing, blame-tossing, and “autopsy” reports that followed their 2024 election disaster, the Democratic Party remains a deeply broken brand, lacking in ideological coherence, unifying figures, and a compelling message beyond “Billionaires are bad” and “Trump is terrible.”

It’s also worth pointing out that Trump might have sabotaged his own party in the California governor’s race by supporting Hilton. After Trump offered his “COMPLETE & TOTAL ENDORSEMENT” of Hilton in April, Bianco’s ranking in the polls began dropping. As of today, he is running a distant fourth in the votes tallied so far.

Otherwise, the Democrats’ showing in the campaign has amounted to a pileup of debacles. For starters, none of the preferred candidates that Democratic voters might have rallied to—Kamala Harris, Senator Alex Padilla—opted to run. The ones who did—including the former House members Katie Porter and Eric Swalwell—were deeply flawed, self-destructive, or both, while a host of other unknowns and has-beens—including San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa—went nowhere. One of the debates, a March forum at the University of Southern California, was abruptly canceled because of its exclusion of nonwhite candidates.

Through it all, Democrats showed no collective ability to recruit other, better contenders into the race, winnow the field, or even produce one or two candidates that voters were genuinely excited about. Steyer was a top contender in the race only because of his willingness to spend about $200 million of his own money on pervasive TV and digital ads. Becerra, meanwhile, is the leading Democrat right now because he is the best-known, least offensive member of his party still standing. He is also prone to prickliness and has received underwhelming reviews from some of his former colleagues in the Biden administration. And although he boasts a deep and varied résumé, little in Becerra’s background indicates that he’s up to the job of leading the biggest, most complex, and most unpredictable state in the nation.

An added wrinkle, based on Newsom’s experience, is that Trump will almost certainly target California and its next governor with all manner of abuse and provocation. Newsom, it turned out, possessed the instincts and personality to be a worthy foil to Trump and a defender of left-leaning California values. Does Becerra? Or, for that matter, does the great liberal avenger Steyer the Barbarian?

[Marc Novicoff: L.A.’s lose-lose-lose primary]

Because this is California—and Hilton is no Ronald Reagan—Becerra (or possibly Steyer) looks like a good bet to extend the Democratic dynasty in Sacramento. The state has not elected a Republican governor since Arnold Schwarzenegger won his second term, two decades ago.

Yet the race for the White House in 2028 will be far less forgiving for Democrats. It will be refreshing to have new candidates in the field, no Bidens or Clintons on the ballot, and debates about ideas without the specter of “Trump is bad” overshadowing everything else. But if, to this point, the California governor’s race offers any lesson for Democrats, it’s that it is hard to run a wide-open primary without established leaders, a strong party structure, or agreed-upon rules and referees to keep things on track.

Come 2028, the Democrats (and Republicans) will have another free-for-all on their hands, and with higher stakes. God willing, the candidate field will be more appealing than it has been in the California primary. Thankfully, it’s over, or will be eventually.

Maine Has a Graham Platner Problem

2026-06-04T09:57:15-04:00

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We don’t know what Graham Platner, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Maine, wrote in his sexually explicit texts with women other than his wife—six, according to his campaign; a dozen, according to an ex-aide—but do we need to? The glaring question that the texts pose to voters about the presumptive Democratic nominee at this point in a pivotal midterm race is: Are we really going to do this again?

In 2016, voters were asked to choose between a populist candidate dogged by questions about his integrity, judgment, decency, civility, empathy, and respect for everyone from complete strangers to his own wife, and an overqualified, glass-ceiling-smashing woman. When voters opted for Donald Trump, Democrats were outraged. Now, faced with the choice between Platner and Governor Janet Mills, Maine Democrats have largely backed the populist themselves.

Mills suspended her primary bid in April amid a cash shortfall and concerns that she’s too old and old-school to win. At age 78, she understandably gives pause to many Democrats still suffering from Joe Biden–related PTSD. But she’s also one of the few political leaders who have stood up to Trump. A former state attorney general and district attorney, she did it to defend the rule of law.

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

Mills, though, is an endangered species of American politician—one whose playbook the Democrats ought to be following, instead of the one they seem to have stolen from the GOP. In her first term as Maine’s first woman governor, she made a succession of unpopular decisions as she led the state through COVID. “It takes real guts to make decisions that have an overt negative political implication on the abstract proposition that it will save lives,” Angus King, Maine’s independent U.S. Senator and a former governor, told me in 2023. (I wrote a book that year about Mills and her COVID correspondence with a constituent, who sent her a weekly letter of support throughout the first year of the pandemic.) The governor’s tough choices paid off, and Maine emerged with some of the most successful health and economic metrics in the country. Mills won reelection by a historic margin.

I was astonished that she allowed me to incorporate her unedited and candid journals from that time into my narrative. She is unusually at ease with herself in public and private, and has cultivated a relatable image, memorably wearing L.L. Bean duck boots to her second inauguration.

Platner, by comparison, has no experience in elected office. He has already asked his state to forgive and forget a list of lapses, including an incendiary tattoo he claims he didn’t know was a Nazi symbol when he got it, and a slew of angry, misogynistic, or otherwise offensive Reddit posts he’s disavowed.

Add to that the revelation that in late 2023, his wife, Amy Gertner, caught him sexting with multiple other women. Notably, it was she who disclosed this to his campaign, not the candidate. Now Gertner is defending her husband in part by pointing out that he sent the texts “in the early days of our marriage,” as if that is somehow a mitigating, not an aggravating, factor.

Unlike some politicians who have been rejected by voters for their past indiscretions, or gotten reelected despite them, Platner has apologized and shown promising awareness of his own human fallibility. He has also offered voters some compelling ideas, and inspired people hungering for leadership to remember their own agency. That has been enough, so far, for his supporters to overlook his inexperience and accept each new apology. Platner’s campaign events have attracted swarms of Maine voters, and he’s won endorsements from a cadre of Democratic Party leaders drawn to his charisma and candor, who seem to have mistaken him for the next John F. Kennedy.

[Tyler Austin Harper: How ‘big tent’ are Democrats willing to go?]

Democratic leaders seem determined not to allow anything to get in the way of winning Maine’s Senate seat, even if that requires willful blindness toward Platner’s lengthening record of indiscretions. In response to questions about Platner’s extramarital sexting, Senator Bernie Sanders said, “I think it might be a good idea if we focused on the important issues facing the working families of Maine” such as gas prices, health care, and groceries. Senator Elizabeth Warren similarly told reporters she preferred to focus on the “price of gasoline.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who had previously supported Mills, met with Platner in the thick of the sexting fallout, and remained focused on defeating the incumbent Republican senator in November. “We’re going to beat Susan Collins and take back the Senate,” he said. And Republicans are clearly worried that he’s right, already spending twice as much on the race as Democrats have.

But Democrats don’t need to repeat the mistakes made by Republicans. There is an alternative, at least for Mainers: As Mills reminded them last Sunday, her name is still on the ballot. The primary election takes place on Tuesday. And so Maine voters still have a chance to send a message to the party brass continuing to coalesce around candidates who are not merely imperfect but entitled or unfit. We don’t have to do this again.

We’re About to Hear a Lot More About Iowa

2026-06-03T18:36:34-04:00

You could be forgiven for ignoring the recent political goings-on in Iowa. The state, which was once a violet-hued hub of unpredictability, has lately elected and reelected Republicans.

In last night’s primaries, though, Iowa Democrats nominated the kind of candidates the national party has struggled to find. Josh Turek, a two-time Paralympic gold medalist with a record of winning red areas, is the party’s nominee for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat. And Rob Sand, the affably idiosyncratic state auditor who didn’t have a challenger, is officially up for governor. Which means that national Democrats and Republicans are now wrestling with a development that, until this week, had registered as little more than a quiet observation in the broadcast-standard English of farm country: Iowa is competitive again.

Let’s start with Turek, whose primary, in the end, wasn’t even close: He beat Zach Wahls, a 34-year-old Democratic state legislator, by more than 25 points. This isn’t because Turek is better-known or more beloved. It’s because he was perceived by Iowa Democrats as more electable. And the perception of electability is everything to Iowa Democrats right now, as they sense victory like sharks smell blood in the water.

Turek was the Senate candidate that Iowa Republicans did not want, which is, of course, exactly why Democrats had to have him. Turek describes himself as a “poor, disabled kid from Council Bluffs,” a reliably red part of the state. He has previously run against and beaten Republicans in a state House district that also supports Trump. He’s also got a compelling backstory: The 47-year-old was born with spina bifida, caused by his father’s exposure to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, and has said he underwent 21 surgeries as a child. Before entering politics, Turek was a wheelchair-basketball player, played in four Paralympic games, and worked at a mobility-technology company. During a visit to Iowa in March, I watched as he dragged his chair up hills and stairs to introduce himself to Iowans. “There’s something compelling about a man in a wheelchair making his way up a staircase,” Kurt Meyer, a state Democratic activist, told me. “It’s a visceral positive reaction when you see somebody that’s just that dog-determined.”

The money helped: Even though Turek hasn’t served in the military, VoteVets, an organization that supports veterans, poured several million dollars into his campaign. Given the group’s alignment with Senate Democrats, Wahls attempted to frame Turek as a Chuck Schumer–backed establishment type. Among primary voters, this argument appeared to amount to very little. Turek has a history of winning, one prominent Iowa Democrat told me last month—“and he wins hard, hard places.”

[Read: The Democrats might actually win Iowa]

Democrats will have to hope so. In November, Turek will be up against Representative Ashley Hinson, the polished former TV journalist who will likely be the best-known and most popular Iowa Republican on the ballot. Hinson, who secured Trump’s early endorsement, once pledged to be Trump’s “top ally” in the Senate, a promise that will continue to feature prominently in Democratic ads. But Hinson doesn’t register as MAGA or far right in the way that many other Trump-endorsed candidates do, and Republicans are hopeful that her presence at the top of the ticket will help pull her downballot colleagues through.

Unlike Turek, Rob Sand has had the Democratic Party’s nomination locked down for a while, even though he seems generally averse to the label. The 43-year-old former prosecutor has positioned himself as a public servant who is frustrated with both parties, an independent who just so happens to have a D next to his name. His strategy to win statewide relies on persuasion and good, old-fashioned Iowan open-mindedness—if such a thing still exists.

But now, in an unexpected twist, Sand will face an opponent that virtually no one was expecting. The GOP front-runner, Representative Randy Feenstra, had been endorsed by Trump but was sideswiped on Election Day by Zach Lahn, a conservative activist and private-school co-founder whose candidacy only recently gained traction. Lahn won, strategists told me, because he took advantage of the fact that Feenstra wasn’t actually showing up: “He had name ID, a ruby-red district in his hands, and a lot of money, but the campaign for some reason chose to keep him under wraps,” David Oman, a state Republican strategist, told me.

Feenstra might have been a more welcome opponent for Sand, given how little excitement he generated among the GOP base. Lahn seems to energize them: He’s the preferred candidate of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement and has pledged to “take on the big ag cartels” as well as Big Pharma.

But Lahn has his own weaknesses. The most obvious is that the “Iowa First” candidate, who was born and attended high school in the state, spent many years living in Kansas and has said he moved back to Iowa only in 2023; he still maintains a Kansas home and flies there regularly. Lahn is also a conservative culture warrior whose ads about resisting “Marxist ideology” and defending the “Western tradition” probably helped earn him the endorsement of former Representative Steve King, who was unseated by Feenstra in 2020 after years of making racist remarks. But the biggest complication for Lahn, who vowed last night in his victory speech to fight “the establishment” at every turn, is that in Iowa Republicans are the establishment.

Iowa has been a red state for a while. And basic math, in politics as in life, so often serves as the great crusher of dreams. So it goes for Democrats in Iowa, who are outnumbered by registered Republican voters by a margin of nearly 200,000.

But Republicans are up against their own set of unfortunate circumstances: Gas prices are high. So is the cost of fertilizer. Trump’s war with Iran isn’t popular, and neither is he. When you add Turek and Sand to the mix, things start to look sunnier for Democrats. The Cook Political Report has recently reassessed both of their races, deeming the Republicans only slightly favored to hold their Senate seat, and the governor’s race a toss-up. Three of Iowa’s four House races might also be in play. “We’re going to see two incredibly colorful and interesting general-election campaigns—and maybe three good House races,” Oman, the GOP strategist, told me. “It’ll be a red-letter political year in Iowa.” He paused, then added, “Maybe I shouldn’t say red.”

[Read: ‘We have not seen ugly yet’]

Iowa will now join Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, and Alaska on the list of states that Democrats are desperate to flip and Republicans will have to scramble to protect in order to keep their Senate majority. Campaign ads will clog the airwaves. Out-of-state money will flood the zone. The national Democrats prepared to invest hundreds of millions backing James Talarico in Texas might even reconsider. Why not spend a sliver of a fraction of that amount for a possibly better result?

Going forward, not much is certain except for this: We’re about to hear a lot more about Iowa.

The White House Is the New Green Zone

2026-06-01T08:30:00-04:00

Across from the White House sits a museum called The People’s House: A White House Experience. Inside is a replica of the Oval Office, and interactive exhibits on what it’s like to attend a State Dinner or sit in on a Cabinet meeting. It’s about as close to the White House as you can get without actually being there, a wholesome reminder of how democracy is supposed to work.

But early last Saturday evening, two bullets shattered the glass between displays of Christmas ornaments and dining plates. A 21-year-old gunman had opened fire on Secret Service agents who then returned fire, killing him.

It was the latest reminder of how our democracy is actually working, how omnipresent political violence can feel, how inaccessible public buildings are becoming to the public. Three times in four weeks, gunfire has broken out as federal agents were protecting the president and vice president in the vicinity of the White House. Three months ago, a man was shot and killed after entering the Mar-a-Lago security perimeter with a shotgun and fuel can. Three months before that, two National Guard members were shot just blocks from the White House. The Secret Service, which says it has protections all around the building—some visible, some not—has a division that over the past year has been studying the rise in violent rhetoric and action to get at the question: What is driving the attacks—and can they be headed off in advance?

The Secret Service has investigated 40 percent more cases this year than it did during the comparable period in 2025, the agency told me. It’s had seven times more cases involving people with mental-health issues over that same time period. The surge is putting the Secret Service in what longtime agents say is an unprecedented threat environment.

“In the past, there have been some peak periods where we had maybe a really large uptick for a month or two,” Matthew Quinn, the deputy director of the Secret Service, told me. “But for us right now, it’s not a linear increase anymore. It’s really gone exponential.”

With the growing threat has come greater fortification—so much so that the White House complex can be thought of as the new Green Zone. The 18-acre site is laced with fencing, sensors, jammers, cameras, armed guards, bunkers, drone interceptors, and surface-to-air missiles—all of which speak to how we now protect, and isolate, our leaders. Tourists can no longer approach the 13-foot fence that rings the compound. Additional fencing went up in January around Lafayette Square, which remains under construction, and prevents access from the north. The perimeter to the south extends near Independence Avenue; the area around the Ellipse was closed last month. It’s impossible to enter from the east, through the barriers and construction where the East Wing once stood. And a battery of security vehicles, police on bikes, and Secret Service agents stand guard from the west.

[Read: A shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner]

Quinn was recently delivering a graduation speech, reflecting on some of the shifts he’s seen during his time at the Secret Service. Twenty years ago, he said, the questions he’d get were about how he stayed vigilant given that agents rarely had to draw their weapons. “Well,” he said, “we don’t have to explain it to anybody anymore.”

In 1801, Thomas Jefferson built the first fence around the White House, a wooden structure that was designed to keep animals away from the gardens. As for the people, they were largely able to roam freely on a property that had little security. “Early presidents would have had, more or less, their household staff doubling as their security force,” Matthew Costello, the chief education officer of the White House Historical Association, told me.

Franklin Pierce was the first president to have a full-time bodyguard. Abraham Lincoln posted guards outside, but inside they were dressed in civilian clothes and hid their firearms. In 1893, the grounds were closed to try to protect Grover Cleveland’s young daughter after tourists tried to cut off some of her hair. In the early 1900s, after the assassination of William McKinley, the Secret Service was tasked with presidential protection and two men were assigned to a full-time detail for Theodore Roosevelt. “The secret service men are a very small but very necessary thorn in the flesh,” Roosevelt wrote in 1906, reflecting the centuries-long struggle between presidential protection and public accessibility.

During World War I, the White House grounds were closed. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, security was enhanced once more: Bulletproof glass was added to the Oval Office windows and air-raid shelters were installed belowground. (Franklin D. Roosevelt rejected proposals from the Secret Service to line the property with 15-foot-high piles of sandbags and to repaint the White House in camouflage.) After the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the section of Pennsylvania Avenue that goes by the White House was closed to vehicles. At the time, it seemed like a significant infringement on traditional American freedoms.

“Pennsylvania Avenue has been routinely open to traffic for the entire history of our Republic,” Bill Clinton said in his weekly radio address announcing the decision. “Through four Presidential assassinations and eight unsuccessful attempts on the lives of Presidents, it’s been open. Through a civil war, two world wars, and the Gulf war, it was open. But now it must be closed.”

After the September 11 attacks, the perimeter was widened again; vehicular traffic was shut down along E Street, on the south side. Airspace was more tightly restricted. To push the security perimeter any farther, the government would need to take over the Hay-Adams hotel or occupy the coffee shops (Peet’s, Starbucks, Swing’s) that sit on the blocks nearest the West Wing entrance and help fuel the staffers who enter it. Without the ability to go farther out, the security barriers must go higher up.

Former Secret Service agent Keith Wojcieszek told me that during his 16 years on the job, people routinely climbed over the 6-foot-6-inch perimeter fence. In one particularly embarrassing incident for the agency, a man not only jumped the fence but got to the front door of the White House and entered before being apprehended. Seven years ago, work began on a new fence—long requested by the Secret Service—of nearly double the height. But it is still not impenetrable: At least twice, toddlers have slipped through the fence, only to be retrieved by agents and returned to their parents.

Now, under protocols implemented this year, neither toddlers nor anyone else can get that close. Meanwhile, the park across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, Lafayette Square, is closed for renovations that the National Park Service told me it wants to complete before July 4. After the park reopens, the Secret Service wants to install a gating system to quickly secure the area if needed. The area in and around the park was for many years the scene of protests, demonstrators’ chants echoing within the halls of the White House. But not now. Among the protests was an anti-war vigil that had been continuously operating since 1981. It was partially dismantled earlier this year, after Donald Trump deemed it an eyesore.

In wartime Baghdad and Kabul, 30-foot-high blast walls shielded sensitive government sites. The White House still has a modicum of openness. But that’s possible only because of all the security protections that a visiting tourist can’t necessarily see.

Beyond the perimeter, plainclothes and uniformed officers roam the streets. Snipers patrol the roof. Drones hover nearby. K9 attack dogs are ready to pounce. The system operates in layers, with different agents monitoring different distances and threat levels. “It’s the Secret Service’s protective methodology,” the former agent Donald Mihalek, who retired in 2019 after 21 years, told me. “If you don’t catch it in the outer ring, you catch it in the inner ring. You want those overlapping rings of protection.”

The weaponry has been upgraded over time, to rifles that can easily cover the 290 yards from the White House to the fence line on the southern side. The White House snipers on the roof can see 1,000 yards in every direction. “It really is not just 360 degrees of a linear circle,” the retired Secret Service agent Jeffrey James, who served 22 years, told me. “It’s almost a sphere around them by the time you add the people on the ground, the assets above us.”

One of the trickiest parts for the Secret Service is trying to anticipate the lone wolf who might suddenly show up at an event, or approach the White House gates. Cole Tomas Allen was a 31-year-old mechanical engineer from Torrance, California, who traveled to Washington, wrote a manifesto, and bolted through security at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Michael Marx was a 45-year-old from Midland, Texas, who allegedly shot at Secret Service agents as they approached him near the Washington Monument around the time that Vice President Vance’s motorcade was passing nearby. Nasire Best was a 21-year-old from Dundalk, Maryland, who had previously been arrested for claiming that he was Jesus Christ and trying to gain access to the White House; he was fatally shot last weekend after firing at a security checkpoint.

[Read: The era of normie extremism is here]

About a year ago, the Secret Service launched what it calls the Advanced Threat Interdiction Unit, which is designed to stop threats before someone shows up at an event or at the White House. “We don’t want to have a shootout on 15th Street,” Quinn told me. “If we know of a known-threat case and they’re on a record with us, we want to be able to intercept them, say, at Key Bridge or on 395 and not at the White House.” Quinn and others told me it's difficult to pinpoint any one cause for the rise in threats, but they named a few factors, including the proliferation of social media, a polarized political climate, and global unrest.

The president is not the only one who’s been targeted with violence. Governors, members of Congress, state legislators, and municipal judges have all been victims—or intended victims—of attacks. The U.S. Capitol Police, which protects members of Congress and their families and staff, investigated nearly 15,000 threats and actions in 2025, an increase of almost 60 percent over the previous year. Josh Shapiro’s family was asleep in the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion last year when the house was set ablaze by an arsonist, and Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman, who led the House Democratic caucus, was shot and killed in her home. At least a half dozen members of Trump’s Cabinet and White House staff have moved into military housing, spaces that help shield them from political violence, as well as protest.

One of the criticisms of the Green Zone in Iraq was that it created a false sense of tranquility. The Americans, protected by their security—not to mention the air-conditioned facilities, swimming pools, and buffet-style dining—were detached from the realities of war taking place on the other side of the gate. The zone was derisively nicknamed “the Bubble.”

The White House has long risked being its own kind of bubble. Harry Truman called it the “great white jail.” Joe Biden described it as a “gilded cage” and spent many of his weekends in Wilmington, Delaware. Barack Obama made a habit of reading 10 letters selected from the thousands sent to the White House each day. Trump uses his phone to reach those beyond his bubble, but his response to growing threats has been to try to further fortify the White House; at the same time, he’s cut back on travel, except to his golf clubs. Although his aides insist that he can maintain a connection with ordinary Americans, he has dismissed the economic hardships that many are facing as prices have risen since the start of the Iran war. Rather than talk about bringing down costs, he often focuses on his pet projects: the large cage going up on the White House lawn for a UFC fight that will be staged on his 80th birthday, for instance, or the ballroom he is determined to build.

[Read: Trump might already be a lame duck]

When in mid-May he invited a group of reporters to tour the construction site where the East Wing once stood, he spoke of the ballroom in militaristic terms. The roof, he said, will not only have a “barrier” and a “shield” so strong that “if a drone hits it, it bounces off,” but it will also contain a drone base of sorts. (He’s described it as a “drone empire,” a “drone gallery,” and a “drone port” that will house “unlimited drones” to protect all of Washington.) The side walls will contain “impenetrable steel” and the windows will be “four inches thick.” He bragged about the previously installed fencing surrounding the complex—made of titanium (“the strongest of all the metals”)—and said it goes deep into the ground and can’t be toppled by a tractor or a bulldozer.

His response in the immediate aftermath of the attempted assasination at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was to call for the ballroom construction to go ahead. The day after the shooting at the White House gates last weekend, his lawyers submitted a new filing in the lawsuit that has blocked him from continuing. “When completed, this highly knitted, integrated, and unified Project, which is a singular and vital National Security facility, will provide a ‘SAFE HAVEN’ from attackers such as the one last night, and on April 25th,” it read.

Inside the Cabinet Room on Wednesday, Trump was asked about the Saturday-night incident, when he was at the White House working as shots rang out nearby. Trump said he pushes such thoughts from his mind. “If I thought about it a lot, you know, I wouldn’t be a very good president. I wouldn’t be here, probably. I’d be up in some room with a locked door,” he said. Outside, the ceaseless roar of jackhammering and bulldozing went on as the ballroom, challenged by lawsuits and protected by that titanium fencing, took shape.

Use It or Lose It

2026-06-01T07:00:00-04:00

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

Even in an age of unintended metaphors, few can compare to the scene that unfolded one winter morning five years ago on a street corner in downtown Washington, D.C.

A group of men gathered in front of the seven-story building at Pennsylvania Avenue and Sixth Street Northwest, just a short walk from the Capitol, and prepared for an act of careful destruction. Their task was to do away with the colossal facade overhead. Slab by slab, they removed the Tennessee pink marble. The 45 words of the First Amendment had been there for years, giant letters carved in stone. Now that message was gone.

Although the symbolism was impossible to ignore, the backstory bordered on mundane: The Newseum, a museum devoted to the history of journalism, had run out of money and closed. So down went the tribute to the First Amendment, sent in pieces to Philadelphia. The marble was reconfigured by the National Constitution Center, which is all well and good for those who want to pay $24.95 to bask in freedom’s most glorious words. But those words are no longer displayed on Pennsylvania Avenue, where anyone traversing the street that connects Congress to the White House would once have seen them.

The facade was only ever a blip on the radar screen—installed in 2007, dismantled in 2021. And if you’re looking for razed history, there’s plenty more at that exact intersection. A century before the First Amendment (briefly) towered over passersby, two rival hotels stood at the corner of Pennsylvania and Sixth. One had a tavern that held the distinction of being the first public place in Washington where “The Star-Spangled Banner” was sung, in 1814. The other, the National Hotel, was where John Wilkes Booth slept the night before he assassinated Abraham Lincoln, in 1865.

miralex / Getty

From 2007 to 2021, the facade of the Newseum reminded passersby in downtown Washington of their First Amendment freedoms.

My point is: America is in a constant state of change. Anything that persists for a time does so only through a combination of fortune and choice. Our core freedoms may be enshrined in our founding documents, but they are guaranteed to us only in principle. Advancing the cause of freedom in practice is another matter.

Americans must try to better understand what freedom demands of them. One requirement of self-governance is the relentless pursuit of truth, which necessarily involves questioning people in positions of power in order to prevent tyranny. Yet misconceptions about what free speech and free press actually mean are everywhere. Too many people assume that freedom of speech means freedom from consequences—whether reputational, social, or professional—for what they say. (It does not.) Others conflate the role of privately run companies with that of the government, arguing, for example, that a social-media company’s moderation decisions amount to state censorship. (They do not, and in fact the individuals who run social platforms have their own First Amendment rights as publishers—even if they don’t like to concede that they themselves are publishers.)

Far too many people behave as though freedom of the press refers only to freedom for professional journalists. But journalists are not in some special category. The right to free press is, like free speech, a basic freedom that applies to all Americans who choose to exercise it. The First Amendment tells the government that it cannot encroach on any American’s right to speak and publish. Freedom of the press is not about the press; it’s about the freedom.

So when you encounter an American cheering on the notion that the “fake-news media” should be jailed, or punished, or destroyed, what you’re actually seeing is someone cheering for the government to trample on their own First Amendment rights. And if you’re the one excoriating “the media” for their failings, consider not just complaining but competing: Exercise your own right to free press. The barriers to distributing information have never been lower. What once required an expensive printing press can now be done with a smartphone—paper, a pen, and a copy machine still work in a pinch too.

It is no coincidence that President Trump has conditioned his followers to attack their fellow citizens as enemies of America for questioning him. He makes himself available to the public far more readily than other modern presidents have, a quality that offers a simulacrum of transparency—until you observe how he interacts with people who dare speak words that upset him. He kicked the Associated Press out of the White House for not calling the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” His administration replaced the Pentagon press corps with MAGA lapdogs, influencers, and a disgraced former congressman turned podcaster. All the while, Trump routinely lashes out at citizens for posing basic questions that the American people deserve answers to. When one woman asked him when the Iran war would end, he called her a “disgrace.” When another woman asked him why he’s focused on beautifying the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial during wartime, especially as gas prices soar, he snapped that it was a “stupid question.” When a woman asked the president about his administration’s handling of Afghan refugees, he interrupted her, saying, “Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person?” To yet another woman, who’d asked him about Jeffrey Epstein, the president responded, “Quiet! Quiet, piggy.” He has told other Americans that they are “horrible,” “obnoxious,” “terrible,” “stupid and nasty,” simply for asking him serious questions on behalf of the public.

Trump, gifted showman that he is, understands that insulting citizens on camera is a tactic that serves his interests. It distracts people from the fact that he hasn’t answered the question. And it is chum for his propagandists, who eat up this debasement of American freedom and share clips with breathless commentary such as “Trump absolutely bodies a CNN reporter” and “annoying anti-MAGA brat gets HUMILIATED LIVE.” Trump has effectively cast journalists as a separate special-interest group—apart from ordinary American citizens. But this is a lie.

The tech barons who run the platforms where these indecent clips proliferate are pliant cogs in Trump’s machine. So it’s not entirely surprising how many of them share his disdain for Americans who happen to work as journalists. Nevertheless, it is alarming that Silicon Valley is now emulating the president and establishing its own “editorial” teams that please and flatter tech leaders, who in turn refuse to subject themselves to serious questioning.

Power doesn’t like to be checked. Peter Thiel has declared anyone who criticizes his vision of AI “the anti-Christ.” The venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz—co-founded by Marc Andreessen, a man who infamously blocks every journalist he can find on social media—has an “editor in chief” for one of its funds and an in-house media team designed to bypass independent outlets. Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into a right-wing propaganda network. Anthropic has an “editorial team.” So does Apple. Meta has an “editorial” leader, whom it hired away from The New York Times. At OpenAI, which also has an “editorial lead,” Sam Altman claims that TBPN, the podcast he recently acquired, will be fully editorially independent. (As of this writing, Altman has refused to speak with any journalist at The Atlantic for years despite our many, many, many requests. We will keep asking.) Like Trump, the tech industry’s most powerful and illiberal figures want to replace those who seek truth in the public interest with sycophants who cheer on their consolidation of power and self-enrichment. They believe that the American people won’t notice, or don’t care, and in plenty of cases they are right.

[From the March 2024 issue: Adrienne LaFrance on the rise of techno-authoritarianism]

I should note that every last one of these people is exercising their own First Amendment rights. If someone wants to do “editorial” work for a tech company that involves publishing only stories advancing the mission of the company and the worldview of its owner, that’s their right. Corporate public relations and marketing are, like any other form of publishing, protected under the First Amendment from government interference, as they should be, even if they aren’t guided by the same values and standards as journalism.

I should also note that working journalists bear an awesome responsibility. Anyone who is charged with seeking the truth and reporting it, and is lucky enough to spend their days asking questions of powerful people, should remember that journalism is first and foremost a public service, and that it is a privilege to serve. Journalists are not above reproach. Americans have a civic obligation to demand the highest standards from anyone who promises to represent their interests—regardless of whether that person is an elected official or simply a fellow citizen. Journalists should receive good-faith criticism with humility and appreciation.

Although every American is entitled to exercise the right to free press, no one is entitled to be trusted or believed—that, you have to earn. The nosedive in trust in journalism is multifactorial, and journalists themselves are not without blame. All journalists make mistakes. And those mistakes are never acceptable. But pay close attention to the difference between how a reputable news organization acknowledges its mistakes—namely, by transparently correcting them—and how Trump or Musk reacts to being called out for getting something wrong.

In the United States, we like to tell ourselves that freedom is as natural as sunshine and as American as bubble gum. But American freedom has always been simultaneously conditional and aspirational—available to some and not to others, and at times diminished for all.

The cause of freedom has advanced only because of those who have been willing to stand up against government overreach. On September 25, 1690, in Boston, Benjamin Harris published colonial America’s first newspaper, Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick. Harris was a refugee from England, where he’d faced harsh government censorship in his failed attempts to establish a free press. The first issue of Publick Occurrences contained a few items of local news and, notably, one salacious sentence speculating that King Louis XIV of France was sleeping with his son’s wife. Colonial authorities shut down the newspaper immediately—citing the fact that Harris, along with the printer, Richard Pierce, had disseminated information without first seeking government approval. They ordered Harris not to publish another edition and destroyed all remaining copies of the paper. (A single copy is known to have survived, and it is now in London, of all places.) Harris and Pierce had no constitutional protection of their right to free press; the government believed that it had total discretion over what information was allowed to reach the public. Publick Occurrences existed for exactly one issue. The next newspaper would not be printed in the colonies for 14 long years.

The paper often credited with being the first true daily in America, The Pennsylvania Evening Post, was founded generations later, in the months leading up to the American Revolution. (The Post was the first to publish the text of the Declaration of Independence, on July 6, 1776.) And although the Bill of Rights came soon after, ever since the First Amendment was ratified, Americans have had to continually, sometimes aggressively, insist on their right to free expression in the face of political pressure.

[From the May 2025 issue: Adrienne LaFrance on how capitulation is contagious]

Alexander Manly did so when he continued to publish his newspaper, The Daily Record, in Wilmington, North Carolina, after racist backlash to an anti-lynching editorial. A former congressman led a mob in burning the Record ’s office to the ground in 1898. Manly was just one target in the wave of post-Reconstruction violence that erased hard-won freedoms. Ida Tarbell and Ida B. Wells pushed for freedom through their relentless reporting, exposing the predatory practices of the oil baron John D. Rockefeller and the horrors of white mobs lynching Black Americans across the South. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. defended free expression when he argued for a competitive marketplace of ideas. Lenny Bruce did it from the stage in a comedy club. And Fannie Lou Hamer did it when she refused to be silenced by presidential intimidation and described the brutality she’d faced for simply trying to vote.

Every human deserves the five basic freedoms protected by the First Amendment: religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition. But freedom is not promised to any of us, not really. American freedom is a continual achievement that is secured by those willing to defend and perpetuate it. And it is a choice we must make, again and again and again, knowing that the forces aligned against the pursuit of truth are inherently working against the cause of liberty too.

This article appears in the July 2026 print edition with the headline “Use It or Lose It.”

Trump’s 250th Celebration Is a Fiasco

2026-05-31T11:09:33-04:00

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

“You talk too damn much, and it’s too damn much about you.”

That quote from Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye is a good summary of the fiasco that Donald Trump has made of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

You might have thought that presiding over such a celebration would be an easy success for Trump. He is a showman, after all. He loves parades and extravaganzas. It was all an easy layup, a gimme, a chance for a now-unpopular second-term president to reinvent himself as the leader of all of the American people. The only thing he had to do was—for once in his life—not act like an insane egomaniac.

He couldn’t do it.

As things are developing, we’ll remember the story of America’s grandest commemorations as follows:

One hundredth: a giant industrial exposition in Philadelphia.
Two hundredth: a tall-ships regatta in New York harbor.
Two hundred and fiftieth: a Trump flop in Washington, D.C.

Trump knows he has botched the anniversary. He says so himself. Last night, he posted the following indictment of his own program on his Truth Social platform:

We should have a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250, instead of having overpriced singers, who nobody wants to hear, whose music is boring, and yet who do nothing but complain. Cancel it, just like I canceled my involvement with the failing and unsafe to be in Kennedy Center, because a Highly Conflicted, Crooked Federal Judge, said that I should not be allowed to spend my time and money in order to MAKE THE CENTER GREAT AGAIN, actually, far greater than it ever was before! It would have also been nice to see a Republican/Democrat union bring it back to life. The Kennedy Center is broken, unsafe, and $busted, and has been for many years! Judge Cooper also stated that the highly prestigious Board of the Center was not authorized to add on the name “TRUMP” despite the fact that hundreds of millions of dollars of my time and money will be necessary for its successful reincarnation. So now, the Kennedy Center will collapse, both structurally and financially. Judge Cooper and his wife, Amy Jeffress (obfuscation anyone?), should be ashamed of themselves. Judge Cooper, like numerous other Crooked Judges on my cases, should be IMPEACHED. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! President DONALD J. TRUMP

Translated into plain English, the president was complaining that seven of the nine acts scheduled to headline the July 4 weekend musical program canceled within 48 hours of one another because they realized that the event was degenerating into a hyperpartisan salute to Trump personally. His proposed solution? Replace the canceled acts with a Trump rally speech! A speech that will focus on Trump’s outrage that a judge blocked him from renaming the Kennedy Center after himself!

On July 4, 1776, Congress declared not only the severance of the political tie between 13 British colonies and their former homeland but also the end of monarchical government in the United States. For 150 years before 1776, the American colonies were ruled by a sequence of queens and kings. The names of those monarchs were inscribed on the American map: Virginia, Jamestown, Charleston, Annapolis, Georgia, and in innumerable King Streets and Queen Streets. Then, on one parchment, the new nation repudiated its political origin, and declared that “all men are created equal.” Whatever those words meant, however much slaveholder hypocrisy attended them, they promised a republican future for the people of the land.

The man who assumed responsibility for organizing the 250th commemoration of those words instead decided to make the day a royalist celebration of himself: seeking to emblazon his face on coinage and currency, displaying his image on banners in downtown Washington, and scheduling the central event of the celebration—a televised cage fight—for his own birthday on June 14. A cage fight may seem to some a barbarous way to honor Thomas Jefferson’s great manifesto. But many Americans will enjoy it, and on an occasion such as this, there’s room for a wide range of activities. There’s no room, however, to elevate the presidency created by the revolution of 1776 into a gaudy cult of personality. Trump’s drive to transform July 4, 2026, into a colossal national Day of Trump instead has triggered a rebellious update of the “Spirit of ’76.”

The Americans alive in 1776 shared and read Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.” That pamphlet denounced, 250 years before the event, the pretensions of Trump’s version of America 250: Government by kings, Paine wrote, “was the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry. The Heathens paid divine honours to their deceased kings, and the Christian World hath improved on the plan by doing the same to their living ones.”

Trump’s effort to rebrand the semiquincentennial as the Day of Trump left no time, budget, or effort available for the true purpose of the anniversary. As his own self-celebration has fizzled, a void has opened between the scheduled roster of events and the true purpose and meaning of the solemnity of July 4, 2026. This powerful date will go unmarked by any act of memory worthy of the nation. The Reflecting Pool will be repainted too blue by an overpaid no-bid contractor. The statues on the Memorial Bridge will be gilded too brightly by another overpaid no-bid contractor. There’s a project to erect an Albert Speer–style triumphal arch overlooking the Potomac. But Trump has failed to deliver the victories that the arch might have memorialized—and as the war in Iran has stalemated, so the plans for the arch have stalled. Most symbolic of all, the White House is flanked by a stop-start construction site where the East Wing used to stand. Trump shook down government favor-seekers for enough money to begin work on a presidential ballroom complex, but he did not shake enough to finish it. Now the taxpayer is being asked to pay the balance. A federal judge has ordered work paused pending a vote in Congress, and Trump has whittled down his majorities in the House and Senate to the point where he apparently cannot pass a funding bill. If he loses control of either house in November, construction is unlikely to resume. Instead of a Trump Ballroom, the most conspicuous feature of the Trump White House in 2026 is a gaping Trump Hole.

The greatest of all Fourth of July orations was delivered in 1852, on the 76th anniversary of American independence, by Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York. In the opening passages of that speech, Douglass observed ominously: “The eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes, portending disastrous times.” Yet even as Douglass foresaw the coming Civil War and lamented the nation’s flaws, he still expressed hope that “high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny.” Trump has made a pitiful shambles of what should have been a glorious moment. But the nation honored by the glorious moment still retains the power of recovery and renewal praised by Douglass. As we contemplate the farce of Trump Day, we can turn our imaginations to what yet might be for America at 300.

We as individuals may or may not live to see it, but we can believe in it all the same. We can believe in it all the more fervently for this experience of living through a chapter of American history that so flagrantly betrays the Founders’ hopes and so arduously tests the Founders’ legacy.

L.A.’s Lose-Lose-Lose Primary

2026-05-31T07:30:00-04:00

It’s happening again. In a big American city, a young Indian American democratic socialist is trying to unseat an unpopular Black incumbent on a platform of housing affordability. This time, the arena is not New York City but Los Angeles. Nithya Raman, the insurgent, has fashioned herself as a Zohran Mamdani of the West. Karen Bass, the embattled incumbent, is fighting to stay in office and make sure that lightning doesn’t strike on opposite coasts.

But the similarities mostly end there. In New York, an inspiring young leftist competed against a boorish, but experienced, former governor to replace a corrupt mayor. In Los Angeles, the leftist insurgent isn’t inspiring, and the boorish challenger—the former reality-TV villain Spencer Pratt—is inexperienced. The incumbent isn’t corrupt, just feckless. Despite their overwhelming weaknesses, two of these candidates will advance from Tuesday’s nonpartisan primary, and one will win in the November general election. Los Angeles is unlikely to be better off.

On paper, Raman seems like a natural heir to Mamdanism. In 2020, she became the first member of the Democratic Socialists of America to be elected to L.A.’s city council and the first challenger to unseat an incumbent there in 17 years. Now she’s running as a housing wonk who knows what it takes to deliver affordability.

Unfortunately for Raman, she appears to have neither Mamdani’s charisma nor his mastery of modern campaigning. She has few social-media followers and none of the sleek vertical videos that made Mamdani famous before he was polling well. (Instead, she has posted strange scripted Instagram videos with such captions as “Hayley’s landlord gave her an impossible ultimatum, but Nithya Raman said ‘NOT TODAY! Now she still has her apartment… and a new boyfriend?”) Her website’s homepage features a video of her reading a speech off her phone. Her performance in a televised debate a few weeks ago was widely panned after she gave word-salad answers to yes-or-no questions such as whether noncitizens should vote in local elections. She was “not ready for prime time and certainly not ready to step up and be mayor of the second biggest city in the U.S.,” Garry South, a longtime L.A. political consultant, told me. Her odds of becoming mayor on the prediction site Kalshi went from 51 percent to 18 percent in the two days that followed.

When I spoke with Raman a few weeks ago over Zoom, I asked for her elevator pitch on why she deserved to be mayor. Here is how her reply began: “You know, I’m an urban planner; I’m a mom; I’m a politician.” Later, after we went back and forth for several minutes discussing the issue of street homelessness, she asked me, “Is this all you wanted to talk about?” It was not, but homelessness consistently polls as a top issue in the race, so it seemed worth covering.

Raman does have certain advantages that Mamdani did not. She came much earlier than he did to YIMBYism—the movement that advocates for removing barriers to building more housing. This fact has activated the salivary glands of L.A. policy wonks. Scott Epstein, the policy and research director of Abundant Housing LA, told me that Raman, who has a master’s degree in urban planning, is “a dream candidate for us.”

[Mark Leibovich: California’s blue Armageddon]

But Raman’s more left-wing views threaten to scare away the same coalition that might be interested in building. She has been a vociferous advocate of tenants’ rights, to the point of trying to extend the pandemic-era eviction moratorium into February 2023. In her 2020 run, she called to “defund the police” and specified that the police department should be made “much smaller.” She has since recanted, but on the somewhat narrow grounds that the city doesn’t yet have “an unarmed responder” for 911 calls. “Unless we can, materially, take call load off of LAPD, we do have to be able to have a system that is responsive to people’s needs,” she told me.

Her biggest liabilities might arise from her attitude toward homelessness, the issue dominating the election. Los Angeles has a much worse street-homelessness problem than most cities do, creating a widespread feeling of public disorder even as the violent-crime rate falls. Thousands of homeless people die on the streets of L.A. every year, and it is a political liability to suggest that nothing can be done about this until some future date when housing is cheap. In 2022, during a city-council vote on a law to restrict tents within 500 feet of schools and day-care centers, Raman voted against the measure and then, a year later, memorably rolled her eyes at people who were upset with her about it. She continues to dismiss tent sweeps as a “politically-motivated game of sidewalk shuffle.”

Despite her commitment to progressive policies, Raman has failed to consolidate the support of the Los Angeles left. The three other DSA members of the city council have all endorsed Bass. So has almost every union that has made an endorsement, including the über-influential L.A. County Federation of Labor, which has close to a million members. The Los Angeles DSA chapter gave Raman a tepid recommendation that it specified “is not an endorsement.” In a party straw poll, 42 percent of local members preferred another candidate: the pastor and community organizer Rae Huang, who told me that her ideology is shaped by “Marxism and the gospel.”

Catching fire as a socialist is harder in L.A. than in New York. The local DSA chapter, which draws from all of Los Angeles County, has only about 5,000 members, compared with roughly 14,000 in New York City (which is slightly less populous). “L.A. isn’t like New York or Chicago, where people live and breathe politics,” South said. “Mayors here come and go without leaving much of an impression.”

Few big-city mayors make less of an impression than Karen Bass has. Los Angeles mayor is an inherently weaker position than its counterpart in New York City or Chicago. City-council members can veto development in their districts, social services are handled at the county level, and schools are handled by a separately elected school board. But Bass seems to have gone out of her way to exercise as little power as possible.

In 2023, six months into the job, she said her goal was to eliminate unsheltered homelessness by the end of her first term. More recently, she has taken to boasting about a 17 percent drop in two years. Her signature program, Inside Safe, offers free, temporary housing—mostly motel rooms—to the homeless for three to six months, before moving them into permanent housing.

It barely works. The program has cost about $400 million and served just under 6,000 people— 14 percent of the homeless population—in the three and a half years since it began. Only a quarter of those people are now in permanent housing. Another quarter are still in the motels, where the average stay has turned out to be a year. The other half have exited the program, overwhelmingly to return to life on the streets. The program has cost $254,653 for every homeless person who is now permanently housed. (In an email, a Bass campaign spokesperson pointed out that the county pays some of the cost.) At the current pace of housing 1,500 people every three years, Inside Safe is on track to solve L.A.’s homelessness problem in the year 2108.

Bass has also done very little to address Los Angeles’s housing crisis. Bass’s main housing policy is an executive order she signed during her first week in office to streamline affordable-housing development. The policy immediately appeared to be a modest success. Seven months later, under pressure from homeowners, Bass excluded single-family-home neighborhoods from the order, which make up most of the residential land in L.A. A year after that, she issued a revision that added several more development-killing loopholes to the order. (One of those changes excluded all historical-preservation zones, which appeared to be in response to complaints over a 70-unit building proposed on a “historically preserved” vacant lot.)

In 2022, about 23,400 housing units were permitted in Los Angeles. Bass took office in December that year. In 2023, the number fell to about 18,600, and then to 17,200 in 2024. Meanwhile, Los Angeles is home to roughly 100,000 fewer people than it was in 2019.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Spencer Pratt and the temptations of populism]

Politically, this strategy of watering down her own initiatives to avoid alienating interest groups might have worked, if not for the fires. Bass was at a cocktail party as part of a delegation to Ghana when Los Angeles went up in flames last January, breaking a campaign promise to never leave the country during her mayoralty. Her approval ratings have been abysmal ever since, currently sitting at about 35 percent approval and 57 percent disapproval. “In the entire era of modern L.A. politics—where we have polling, et cetera—no incumbent mayor running for reelection is as low in the polls and as high in disapproval as Karen Bass,” Fernando Guerra, a political scientist at Loyola Marymount University, told me. In a poll he conducted in October, he said, more than two-thirds of respondents said that they wouldn’t vote for her. (In response to interview requests, Bass’s campaign told me that the mayor would speak with me, but never actually made her available.)

Bass has secured every important endorsement, including from Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, and the California Democratic Party, but her unpopularity with voters puts her in a weak position. Polls have her leading the pack, but with only about 25 percent support. If she were to face Raman head-to-head, she could lose. But she might not have to. Thanks to Spencer Pratt.

Spencer Pratt does not have the background of a conventional political candidate. He originally became famous for being an entertaining jerk on the reality show The Hills in his 20s. After his career being a heel on camera ended, he took the proceeds and blew them all on fancy suits, ammunition, and healing crystals. According to a 2013 interview with OK! magazine, he rationalized this spending by telling himself that the world was going to end in 2012 anyway, at the conclusion of the 13th Mayan baktun. He was set to carry on as many ex-celebrities do, slowly running out of money and then occasionally appearing on TV to get paid for activating the audience’s nostalgia for the time when they were famous.

Everything changed after his house burned down in the Palisades Fire. His parents’ house burned down, too. Twelve of their neighbors died. Pratt became enraged at the city’s leadership, accusing Bass of negligence. On the one-year anniversary of the fires, he channeled that anger into a long-shot bid for mayor. Since then, he has run a surprisingly formidable campaign.

Of the three major candidates in the race, Pratt has been the most digitally adept. He posts short, well-produced videos that get across his simple and darkly attractive message: L.A. is a hellscape, and its political class, including Bass and Raman, is to blame. Just as Mamdani answers every question with some version of “affordability,” Pratt turns every conversation back to his assertion that L.A. is a “zombie”-infested wasteland that he could easily fix. His housing affordability plan is to clear Skid Row and build multifamily developments there.

Pratt’s digital savvy and populist politics have created a nationwide media storm around his campaign. Fans have made AI-generated ads that depict Pratt as a hero who finally cleans up the city. The videos can be hilarious despite their messages. One such video parodies the Lego Movie song “Everything Is Awesome” with the hook “Everything Is Awful.” Pratt himself reposts his favorites—he seems to like the ones in which he is Batman. (Pratt’s representatives declined to make him available for this article.)

Although he is a registered Republican, Pratt has made genuine efforts to depict himself as the real liberal of the race. He compares himself to Barack Obama; insists that his friends, family, and supporters are Democrats; and told CBS that “Mayor Bass loves ICE.” He has fashioned himself as a lifelong animal lover, showing off his softer side in videos of him feeding hummingbirds with his children, and allying with animal advocates in their outrage over the treatment of dogs on Skid Row. When asked by CNN why he was a Republican at all, he offered a single reason: He believes in the right of a well-trained gun owner to carry a concealed firearm. Still, Pratt has little chance of becoming mayor. The homicide rate in the city is at a 66-year low, a problem for his apocalyptic message. (Pratt claims that “crime isn’t down,” just going unreported). His biggest obstacle is that he is a registered Republican, and that Donald Trump said on camera that he’s heard Pratt is “a big MAGA person.” (Pratt wisely appeared not to accept the semi-endorsement, but still.) L.A. voted 70–27 for Harris over Trump in 2024, and 2026 is shaping up to be an especially bad year for Republicans.

[Meghan Daum: What Los Angeles has become]

In a reality-TV-worthy twist, however, he might help Bass keep her job. The latest poll shows all three candidates within the margin of error, but most prior polls showed Bass and Pratt finishing first and second. Polls of that head-to-head matchup show Bass winning by 14 to 32 percentage points. Raman might well beat either in a head-to-head race, according to polls, but only if she can make it out of the primary. (Technically, if a candidate wins 51 percent of the primary vote, no general election will happen. But that is extraordinarily unlikely.)

This is all quite bleak for my hometown of L.A. The city is an eye-wateringly beautiful place, with perfect weather and the country’s best food scene. Its mayoral race, however, has become a staging ground for three of the most unfortunate tendencies in contemporary American politics: Nithya Raman’s Millennial socialism, freed from the troublesome belief that eviction and policing are worthwhile; Karen Bass’s milquetoast establishment-ism that avoids making the choices necessary to solve hard problems; and Pratt’s carnage-populism that tells Americans they live in something other than the greatest place that’s ever existed. Whichever of the three candidates wins, Los Angeles will most likely lose.

*Sources: Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times / Getty; Getty; Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times / Getty; Roy Rochlin / Getty; Sarah Reingewirtz / MediaNews Group / Los Angeles Daily News / Getty.

The Arc of the Voting Rights Act

2026-05-31T07:00:00-04:00

THe morning after Louisiana’s House primaries were scheduled to take place, worshippers at Mount Zion First Baptist Church in Baton Rouge were on their feet, swaying to the gospel music that vibrated through the wooden pews. Just days earlier, the vote had been abruptly postponed as Republicans scrambled to redraw congressional boundaries in a way that would erase one of the state’s two majority-Black congressional districts and dilute the political influence that many in the congregation had fought for. From the pulpit, Reverend Renè Brown said that all of this was on his mind. “The pastor,” he declared after reading a passage from the Book of Numbers about the allotment of land, “wants to talk about biblical redistricting.”

Two giant television screens had just displayed the U.S., Confederate, and Christian flags and the words BIBLICAL REDISTRICTING. Churchgoers gasped and glanced at their neighbors; some burst out laughing. “Oh Lordy,” one man said under his breath, his eyebrows arching nearly up to his hairline as he braced for an intense sermon. Some might wonder why the debate over representation is being framed in racial terms, Brown told his congregants. “The reason many people ask that question is because it doesn’t affect their race,” he said. “It is about race. People make race-based decisions regardless of what they are and what they know.”

In the weeks since the Supreme Court hollowed out the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the past has felt especially present to many at Mount Zion. Over the arc of their lives, the elders gathered inside the sanctuary had experienced the promise of the law, its reality, and, now, its narrowing. The Court’s 6–3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais could return the country to an earlier era of weakened Black voting power, and comes amid a partisan gerrymandering battle mounted by President Trump. The Court’s ruling has supercharged Republican efforts across the South—in states including Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia—to redraw congressional districts in a way that benefits white citizens at the expense of nonwhite voters who primarily cast ballots for Democrats. In Louisiana, where about one-third of the state’s residents are Black, the state legislature on Friday redrew a majority-Black district held by Representative Cleo Fields, a Democrat, making it far more Republican-rich. The map with the redrawn district, which includes Mount Zion, is expected to be signed into law by Governor Jeff Landry, a Republican. The GOP would then be favored to claim five of six congressional seats in a state that Trump won in 2024 by 22 points.

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

Louisiana Republicans have said that race was not a factor as they quickly redrew the maps. But Democrats told me they regard the swift attempt to consolidate power ahead of the November midterm elections as a betrayal of Black Americans and the democratic process. Before stepping into a Legislative Black Caucus meeting in the basement of the state capital, State Representative Edmond Jordan, who chairs the caucus, detailed his concern that the ruling could shrink minority representation nationwide. “We’re in a bad spot right now,” he told me.

L. Kasimu Harris for The Atlantic

An abandoned church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Many at Mount Zion agreed. Brown closed the service by asking congregants to support a petition to recall Landry. The idea is far-fetched in a state where Republicans are so dominant, but when church ended, the lines for signatures crept up the aisles and jammed the floral-scented foyer.

Mount Zion was once led by T. J. Jemison, who in 1953 led a boycott of segregated buses in Baton Rouge, which became a model for the Montgomery bus boycott two years later. Church members told me that the America they remembered as children—one that legally enforced segregation at schools and swimming pools, and imposed literacy tests to vote—had come rushing back. They described despair and disappointment and pain, along with an overwhelming sense that the diminishment of their influence was both un-American—and precisely what they have always known their country to be.

Laura Bradley remembers being forced as a child to enter a malt shop through the back door because the front was reserved for white people. “It feels like we’re in James Crow Jr.,” the 72-year-old told me after signing her name to the recall petition. “All these feelings that you thought you had allayed and set aside, now they are back in the forefront again.” The gains from decades of struggle for equal representation had been wiped out. “It’s almost starting again from ground zero,” she said. She was angry, but also had hope that aggressive gerrymandering could backfire against Republicans by galvanizing minority voters to turn out, both in 2026 and in 2028.

[Read: Out of the gerrymandering darkness, a new hope for reform]

L. Kasimu Harris for The Atlantic

Laura Bradley attends Mount Zion First Baptist Church.

Across the South, Black pastors, civil-rights organizations, and lawmakers are working to make that happen. They are registering new voters, and urging Black athletes and fans to boycott public universities in states that are weakening the influence of Black voters. “If you’ve got somebody in your house and they ain’t registered to vote,” Brown told his congregation, “put them out.” At nearby Mount Pilgrim Baptist Church, guest pastor Melvin Ivan Britten IV had the congregation on its feet as he asked them to hold on to their faith during a moment of darkness. “The same God that helped us through Jim Crow,” Britten said, “is the same God that will help us right now!” From a pew in the back, a tired-looking Fields nodded his head and clapped his hands in praise.

Sitting in his pastor’s office later, a heaviness seemed to hang over the congressman as he spoke of the history of the Supreme Court’s ruling. “It pushes us back to 60 years ago,” he said. “We thought we had fought these battles.” He described the gutting of the Voting Rights Act as the culmination of a yearslong erosion of Black political power, first by conservative court decisions and, more recently, by the Trump administration’s war against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. “You know, I can play football on a Saturday and have a whole stadium cheering for me,” he said quietly, his hands clasped together. “But I can’t go govern on Monday?” Fields told me shortly after the map won legislative approval on Friday that he will not run against Troy Carter, the Democrat who represents the state’s other majority-Black district. When I asked what the new map means for his future, he told me he was figuring it out. “Within the next week or two, everybody’s going to know what I’m doing.”

Earlier, Fields recalled for me a conversation he had with Jesse Jackson during his 1988 presidential campaign, during which Fields bemoaned political disengagement. “There are no apathetic people,” Jackson told him. “There are only uninspired people.” Perhaps, Fields told me, this moment will inspire the uninspired. But across the Mississippi River, in West Baton Rouge Parish, Black and white residents said there was little to be inspired about. The area voted for Trump in 2024. But over the past year, residents told me, the price of gas has nearly doubled, their credit-card debt is piling up, their rents are rising, and they feel like they are sliding backwards.

“I stopped paying attention,” Joseph Hopkins, a 42-year-old manager at a local fast-food restaurant who used to vote as a Democrat, told me while he watched the price tick up as he fueled his SUV. “There’s a lot of things they say but never follow through on. I don’t trust no man.” Outside a nearby auto-parts shop, a man in camouflage pants and Crocs peered at his truck’s engine. “These people swing the vote however they want,” he told me when I asked about the legislature’s gerrymandering push. Whether he votes or not, he said, “ain’t gonna make much of a difference.” In rural Ascension Parish, 25 miles southeast of Baton Rouge, a half dozen people told me they don’t pay any attention to their government. “I don’t know nothing about it,” one woman shopping for Sunday dinner told me. “And I’d be lying if I said I did.”

More than 42,000 voters had already cast ballots for the May 16 primary when Landry postponed the House elections. (ANY VOTES CAST WILL NOT BE COUNTED in the congressional race, read a sign at the West Baton Rouge Parish Registrar of Voters office.) Many people thought the election had been canceled, and even election officials admitted they were confused. With other votes going ahead, all five proposed amendments to the state constitution—four of which were backed by Landry—went down to defeat. Some voters said they were trying to send a message to Republicans. “If you have to go in and redraw lines to get the upper hand,” Michael, a 39-year-old Democrat who spoke on the condition that his full name not be used, told me an hour after polls closed, “that’s a person that’s afraid.” He likened the state’s redistricting push to the 1997 WBA Heavyweight Championship fight, when Mike Tyson bit off part of Evander Holyfield’s ear. “He was getting beat,” he said of Tyson. “He had to do something drastic—they’re biting our ear off!”

L. Kasimu Harris for The Atlantic

Homes in Baton Rouge’s Beauregard Town.

Most Americans oppose drawing congressional boundaries in ways that deliberately favor one party over another, according to an Economist/YouGov poll from late April. (Just 7 percent said partisan gerrymandering should be allowed, whereas 22 percent were unsure.) A separate survey from earlier this month, after the Callais decision, found that just a quarter of Americans think states should be allowed to draw congressional maps in a way that helps minority candidates get elected; half of Democrats said yes, whereas only 9 percent of Republicans agreed.

Republicans I spoke with said it was only fair that House boundaries reflect the GOP’s dominance in their state. Several cited Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion, which argued that the nation had made “great strides in ending entrenched racial discrimination.” Cindy Norwood told me that the country’s “whole mentality has been trying to do more and bring up the minorities, which is a good thing to do.” But, the 72-year-old said, it’s not right to consider race when drawing congressional lines. Norwood said she didn’t understand why so many minority voters were complaining that a new map would likely lead to the election of someone who does not best represent their interests. “They will have representation, but we can’t make it happen—we can’t force it to happen because they want more,” she said.

At a restaurant in West Baton Rouge Parish, a trio of Trump supporters in their 70s—all of them white—celebrated the new maps. “They created a majority-Black district just for the sake of political reasons—I’m totally against that,” said Billy Bourgeois, who lives in Fields’s district. Bourgeois told me he hopes the new boundaries will yield a Republican lawmaker who better represents his interests—lower taxes and stricter policies against illegal immigration.

To the Democrats I spoke with, the situation looks inverted: Republicans are drawing district lines to keep Black voters from having a meaningful say. “It feels like they’re just trying to put you at the bottom of the totem pole,” Terry Jackson, a 55-year-old truck driver, said while picking up plates of BBQ at a popular Port Allen Cajun diner. Jackson, who is Black, told me he’s not ready to accept that. If anything, the GOP’s push to redraw the maps has reminded him how much power he really has. “They’re showing that, actually, your vote matters,” he said. “If it didn’t matter, they wouldn’t be trying so hard to keep you from being able to vote.”

A photo caption mistakenly identified an abandoned church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, as Mount Zion First Baptist Church.

Trump Might Already Be a Lame Duck

2026-05-29T05:00:00-04:00

President Trump has never really cared about the Republican Party per se. He basks in its adulation, and it’s beneficial to him when the GOP controls Congress. But he’s never adhered to its orthodoxies or honored its heroes. Neither has he been willing to brook internal dissent in the name of the party’s big tent. He demands absolute fealty but displays little loyalty. He can’t help obsessing over his personal priorities—such as his proposed ballroom or his retribution campaign against perceived tormentors—to the detriment of his party’s political interests. On ballots, Donald Trump (MAGA) would be more accurate than Donald Trump (R).

With little more than five months until the midterms, that divergence between what Trump thinks is good for Trump and what is good for the Republican Party has never been wider. Trump’s priorities appear in many ways to be hurting the GOP’s chances in November, when it already faces stiff odds of keeping control of Congress. The war he started with Iran put Americans’ economic struggles front and center when the price of gasoline jumped. Any semblance of a national legislative agenda has evaporated as he pushes long-shot bills that his own party declines to take forward. And his obsession with construction in and around Washington, D.C., it is safe to say, doesn’t suggest a chief executive focused on the problems of everyday citizens.

Meanwhile, Trump has wielded his clout inside the party like a broadsword, endorsing primary opponents in races against incumbents who defy him. Trump has a perfect endorsement record this year: All 118 candidates—for House, Senate, and governors’ races—he has backed in primaries have won, according to a Fox News count (though many of these races were not really contested). Even though Trump’s power over his party appears at its pinnacle, many Republicans believe that the president has actually accelerated his own political decline. Many of those primary winners may struggle in November, darkening the GOP’s prospects for keeping control of Congress. And at least some of the defeated incumbents, who will serve on Capitol Hill until next January, now feel liberated to push back on what they dislike in Trump’s agenda. Others in the Senate who are not up for reelection are bitter about the president’s role in their colleagues’ defeat and have shown little interest in helping him pursue his personal-grievance campaign.

“The problem is he has nobody around him who is willing to tell him, ‘Sir, the stuff you are talking about is not possible, and you are shooting yourself in the foot every time,’” one Republican Senate adviser told us. “He essentially has lame-ducked himself in pursuit of retribution, and either the staff has failed to make a reasonable argument against these actions, or they have told him this and he is no longer listening.” Either way, the party loses.

Since Trump returned to the White House, very few Republicans have dared defy him. Most have set aside private reservations to embrace his push on tariffs and mass deportations while professing ignorance about Trump’s efforts to enrich himself and his family. (“I haven’t seen the story,” is a common refrain.) On those rare occasions when a lawmaker has resisted his will, Trump has paid attention and waited for his revenge. Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, as measured by his voting record, was a reliable conservative. But he also was a prominent Republican voice calling for the release of the Epstein files. Trump opposed the release (unusually, he didn’t get his way), slammed the Kentucky congressman, and supported his primary opponent. Massie lost. Seven Indiana state lawmakers broke with Trump’s effort to redistrict their state in favor of the GOP. Trump backed their primary challengers. Five of the incumbents lost; one other faces a recount.

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

The biggest ructions have been in the Senate. No modern president has endorsed challengers to two sitting senators from his own party. But Trump successfully backed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton against the four-term incumbent John Cornyn in Tuesday’s primary runoff, and also helped oust Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, meanwhile, got so fed up with Trump that he decided to retire. But scorned senators can be furious foes. The Republican majority of 53 already was a tad precarious because of occasional defections from two relative moderates, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Add in Tillis, Cornyn, Cassidy, and retiring former Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Trump’s grip on the chamber starts to look shaky.

The president’s purge of candidates who have shown they can win a general election in favor of newcomers who are focused on pleasing him means the party will now have to do more to have a shot at victory in November. Some strategists think that the Texas race for U.S. Senate with Paxton on the ticket could require as much as $100 million in additional Republican funding from out of state, both because Paxton is a less effective fundraiser than Cornyn and because his turbulent history leaves him more vulnerable to Democratic attacks. Although Democrats have often hyped but seldom delivered in the Lone Star State, they see Paxton as the weaker opponent for state lawmaker James Talarico. A Talarico win in Texas could hand the Senate to the Democrats; even if he loses, the diversion of GOP resources to Paxton could put other states in play.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune made no secret of his support for Cornyn. When Trump and Thune spoke on May 18, the call was so tense that Thune told his advisers afterward that he thought Trump would back Paxton. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who runs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, followed up with his own pitch for Cornyn in a less contentious conversation with the president, people briefed on the exchanges told us. Trump endorsed Paxton the next day. (Internal polls were already showing Paxton ahead, but the president’s endorsement turned the contest into a rout.)

Thune in particular has at times thrown up his hands in the face of the president’s obduracy. Trump, in turn, has been venting to other GOP senators that the upper chamber is ineffective and insufficiently loyal. “There are definitely frustrations there that are not going away,” one person familiar with the exchanges told us, “and there is no appetite from Thune to resolve it.”

Trump grew so frustrated over the Senate’s inability to pass the SAVE America Act—legislation designed to crack down on issues as disparate as immigrant voting rights and transgender surgeries—that he embraced the idea of a “talking filibuster,” based on the recommendation of Utah’s Mike Lee. (The talking filibuster is a rarely used tactic during which senators delay voting on a bill by refusing to yield the floor, thereby forcing very lengthy debate.)

Thune had the thankless task of explaining to Trump that such an approach would also empower Democrats to offer their own amendments. That could have forced floor votes on issues such as tariffs, the Iran war, and abortion rights, where Republicans would have to choose between defying the president and giving Democrats ammunition for the fall. The legislation remains stalled.

[Read: A serious Senate debate about an unserious bill]

Senate Republicans have shown other flashes of independence. Tillis held up Trump’s nominee for chair of the Federal Reserve until the Justice Department stopped pursuing Jerome Powell. Rand Paul, Murkowski, Collins, and Cassidy voted to advance a resolution that would require Trump to get congressional authorization to continue the war in Iran. (House Republicans canceled a vote on the measure out of fear that it might pass.) And early hopes that Congress might authorize $1 billion in security funding for the White House ballroom were dashed after pushback from some GOP lawmakers and a ruling from the Senate parliamentarian. Trump ordered Thune to fire the parliamentarian; the majority leader refused.

Last week, still smarting from the Paxton endorsement, the Senate went into recess rather than consider Trump’s plan to create a nearly $1.8 billion fund for alleged victims of government “weaponization.” The plan was widely and immediately panned on two grounds: the prospect of recompense for the rioters who attacked Congress on January 6, 2021, and protections that would forever shield Trump, his family, and businesses from IRS scrutiny. “So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong — Take your pick,” McConnell said in a statement. The fund’s fate is now unclear.

Over the weekend, Iran hawks in the Senate who are usually joined at the hip to Trump—Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Roger Wicker—fumed at the reported terms of an Iran peace deal that the president was touting as imminent. The White House tried to silence the objections, but the timetable for a deal notably decelerated, and nothing has been signed.

In the House, where the Republican majority is even more tenuous than in the Senate, Trump has also faced defiance. Massie, Kevin Kiley of California, and Don Bacon of Nebraska broke ranks to give Democrats a chance to oppose Trump’s tariffs on Canada. Bacon is retiring after criticizing Trump’s foreign policy. Kiley, meanwhile, found his congressional district eliminated as California leaders retaliated for GOP redistricting in Texas. Kiley declared that he would run for reelection in a new district—as an independent.

Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, downplayed the internal GOP strife. “President Trump is the unquestioned leader of the Republican Party,” he told us in a statement. “Look no further than his perfect and sterling record in the past year—a 100% success rate for his preferred candidates, proving his endorsement is the most powerful endorsement in history.”

For months now, Republicans have fervently hoped that Trump’s focus would shift to issues that could help the party in November. Instead, he has been consumed with an Iran peace agreement and with his projects: new paint for the Reflecting Pool, a triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery, the conversion of a Washington, D.C., public golf course into championship links, and, of course, the ballroom. The economy? Not so much.

A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 45 percent of voters said that affording gas is now somewhat or very difficult, up from 29 percent in December. The same poll found that 55 percent of voters, including 16 percent of Republicans, blamed Trump “a lot” for the rise in costs, and 56 percent of voters opposed the U.S. military action against Iran.

[Read: Trump voters are over it ]

Despite White House promises that the president would hold events across the country to promote economic fixes, Trump has largely stayed in Washington (or at Mar-a-Lago) and declared that the affordability crisis is a Democratic “hoax.” He seems uninterested in fulfilling his campaign promises to get prices down. Earlier this month, the president effectively gifted the Democrats a campaign ad by saying, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation,” when he was asked about the impact of the Iran war. On Wednesday, while insisting that domestic political considerations would not factor into his negotiations with Tehran, Trump declared, “I don’t care about the midterms.” Many Republicans likely nodded in resigned agreement.

The King of Queens

2026-05-28T12:00:00-04:00

President Trump delights in playing what he calls “the gay national anthem” whenever he wants to rev up a crowd. He’s obsessed with Elton John, was once friendly with Liza Minnelli, and has a Liberace-esque flair for gilded interiors. One of his favorite sports to watch—mixed martial arts—is basically sweaty, semi-naked dudes. And he is a deep and vocal admirer of the physique of fellow men, often announcing which ones he would cast in a movie: “They’re perfect specimens,” he said last year of the military pilots who had visited him in the Oval Office; “He looks like the Marlboro Man,” he cooed about a former Iowa state senator; “Young, handsome guy. It’s always nice to be young and handsome,” he complimented the president of Paraguay.

Some of Trump’s allies note that years before gay marriage was legalized, Trump had gay friends, took pro-gay stances, and allowed gay people to join his private club in Palm Beach starting in the mid-1990s. Ric Grenell became the first openly gay person to hold a Cabinet position when Trump appointed him acting director of national intelligence. Grenell, who is now the president’s envoy for special missions, once called Trump “the most pro-gay president in American history,” a title that Trump said he was honored to have.

To be clear: Trump says he is attracted only to women and, in fact, has been married to three of them. He once hosted the Miss Universe pageant, was caught on tape saying that he loves to grab women “by the pussy,” and was found civilly liable for sexually abusing a woman. Loads more have accused him of sexual misconduct. (Trump has denied the accusations.) “Women—I like. Men—no, I don’t have any interest,” Trump affirmed at a Board of Peace meeting earlier this year.

But there’s also little doubt that Trump has unabashedly embraced the aesthetic—the je ne sais quoi—of a certain kind of gay man. Some who are sympathetic to the president have gone even further. Blaze Media, a conservative outlet started by the talk-radio host Glenn Beck, ran a story in 2024 headlined “Donald Trump: Our First Gay President,” much in the way people talked about Bill Clinton as having been the first Black one. The story notes, in a section titled “Queen of Queens”: “He blows kisses to Hulk Hogan, weighs in on Fashion Week (‘used to be so glamorous and exciting! No stars, no fun—just boring’), and his rivalry with lesbian Rosie O’Donnell remains a gem of the catty naughties social feuds.” Pod Save America, a liberal podcast started by former aides to President Obama, declared that Trump would be a gay icon, if only he had “liberal social values.” The president, the episode’s title observes, “DEMANDS a Ballroom at the White House, Loves Musicals, & Wears Make-up.”

James Kirchick, the author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, told me that Trump’s personal story, a guy from Queens making it big in Manhattan, tracks with the “typical gay story” of men of his era. In another life, he continued, the 79-year-old could be a classic aging gay, “living in Wilton Manors, sitting at a bar, making bitchy comments to everyone who comes in.” (Of course, Trump’s perch from the Oval Office confers much more power than a bar stool does, and his comments have moved markets and sent allies reeling.) “It’s a gay man frozen in amber in the late 1970s and early 1980s, before AIDS,” Kirchick said, referring to the type of gay man he believes Trump would embody. “It’s a certain age and a certain era. It’s very campy.”

The comedian and podcaster Caleb Hearon deemed Trump to be of the “old-school-gay” era, “because, you know, gay guys used to be mean before media training,” he said in an interview with Ziwe Fumudoh on her YouTube comedy show. The president, Hearon continued, should have become “a red-carpet fashion adviser,” the sort who would say things like: “That dress, honey. I don’t think so!” “That would have been amazing. I would have watched every night,” he said. “Instead, he ran for office on a platform of mass deportation, so that’s where things got tricky, obviously.”

[Read: The surprising reason for the new homophobia]

People close to Trump say he has long been gay-friendly in his actions as a private citizen. In the early days of his career as a developer, Trump was mentored by Roy Cohn, the legendary and ruthless New York lawyer and political fixer, who was gay. During Studio 54’s heyday, Trump relished making cameos. In 2024, Trump quietly allowed a gay wedding at Mar-a-Lago, although he didn’t attend.

But Trump has also been willing to vilify transgender individuals, especially athletes, for political gain. The ACLU has issued a scathing assessment of Trump’s record on LGBTQ rights, and the Trevor Project, which supports LGBTQ youth, said that outreach to its crisis hotline skyrocketed—a 700 percent increase—the day after he was elected a second time. Jonathan Lovitz, a senior vice president at Human Rights Campaign, wrote to me in an email that LGBTQ+ people helped profoundly shape the culture that Trump experienced while coming of age in New York City. That’s why, he continued, many queer people are offended when Trump engages in certain forms of camp: “Not because it’s tacky (which it is), but because it underscores a deeper contradiction: he wants the benefits of a country and culture that queer people helped create, while advancing policies that make those same people less safe every day.”

Trump’s continued patter about men’s bodies has also drawn attention. As my colleague Marie-Rose Sheinerman and I dug into examples of these corporeal appraisals, we were surprised by their sheer quantity and just how much Trump seems to delight in complimenting other men. He has given the compliment of “handsome” at least 68 times so far in his second term—or 69 times, if we count the two Thanksgiving turkeys he also collectively described as such. He is unapologetic in his preference for Cabinet members and administration officials who seem to come out of “central casting”; he praised Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who is gay, for his Hollywood-worthy bona fides, before appreciatively noting that “under that beautiful exterior is a killer.”

He can almost never resist commenting on the physique of brawny men: “Look at the muscles on this guy!” he said, gazing upon a young cadet while delivering the commencement address at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy last week. Two days later, he took pains to praise the New York Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart, calling him a “beautiful guy” and waxing poetic about his “legs like tree trunks.” And speaking about the golfer Arnold Palmer in 2024, Trump managed to both reassert his preference for women while also remarking on the legend’s masculinity: “I love women, but this guy—this guy—this is a guy that was all man.” (He also noted Palmer’s powerful swing with “stiff-shafted clubs,” and his, um, alleged other assets: “When he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there—they said, Oh my God, that’s unbelievable.”)

[Read: The question that the lawyers representing trans athletes didn’t answer]

Unsurprisingly, late-night hosts and comedians have been eager to tango with Trump’s inner gay. Bransen Gates, an actor and a social-media personality, has become known for his Instagram videos in which he takes snippets of Trump’s speeches and vampishly lip-synchs them—mouth pursed, eyes wide yet coy, finger wagging—under archetypes such as “The straight man speaking at graduation who is ‘definitely not gay’” and “When you have a crush on a guy named Stephen” (Miller, in Trump’s case). In perhaps his best-known video, aptly titled “Tr*mp was born to be a gay man,” Gates reprises Trump’s comments at an October 2020 campaign rally. “I’ll kiss every guy—man and woman, man and woman,” Gates-as-Trump says, complete with sexually suggestive winks, eye rolls, and light shimmies. “Look at that guy, how handsome he is. I’ll kiss him, not—not with a lot of enjoyment, but that’s okay.”

In a March Fox News interview, Trump was asked about the sexuality of Iran’s leader, the sort of highly sensitive question that nearly any other president would have handled with utmost care. Instead, Trump somehow pivoted to how “the Palestinian regime” is bad for gays—“Who are the gays for Palestine?” he mused—and later laughingly noted that one of his rally songs, “Y.M.C.A.,” by the Village People, is considered “the gay national anthem.”

“I did very well with the gay vote, okay?” he told the hosts. (The “gay vote” is a difficult thing to measure, although a variety of polls found that in both the 2020 and 2024 elections, Trump did have some gay support. However, a majority of voters who identified as LGBT preferred his Democratic opponents.)

Paul Baker, the author of Camp!: The Story of the Attitude That Conquered the World, told me over email that when it comes to Trump, making the distinction between camp and campy is important. The latter is the more self-conscious, ironic adoption of camp. But Trump is “the original, pure form—it’s when someone’s behaviour is outrageous, excessive, subversive and unintentionally funny,” he said. “The person doesn’t realise they’re funny or that they’re camp. They’re just being themselves.”

The risk, he continued, is when camp becomes a distraction from the president’s actual policies, such as executive orders and actions that could negatively affect LGBTQ health. Upon returning to office, for instance, Trump rescinded nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ youth in school, which advocates say could worsen their mental health. “Laugh at him on Instagram all you like, but don’t let that take away oxygen from crucial topics like electoral reform, protecting democracy, gun control, immigration, healthcare and access to education in the US,” Baker concluded in his email to me.

[Read: The YOLO presidency]

Kirchick’s husband, Josef Palermo, was the Kennedy Center’s first curator of visual arts, until he was laid off after Trump took control of the cultural institution. (Palermo forwent a severance agreement to be able to publicly share—including in an essay for The Atlantic—his observations about the decimation of the Kennedy Center under Trump’s leadership.) Before Palermo lost his job last year, the two attended the Kennedy Center Honors, which Trump hosted, and Kirchick discovered that he prefers Trump more as a gala emcee than as a political leader. Kirchick said that Trump was “great” in the role, describing him as “a combination of Joan Rivers and Don Rickles.” He added wistfully: “I wish he could just do that.”

Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed to this report.

*Illustration sources: Roberto Schmidt / Getty; Christian Rose / Roger Viollet / Getty; Echoes / Redferns / Getty; Jack Robinsonv / Hulton Archive / Getty

Jill Biden Worried Her Husband Was Drugged on Debate Night

2026-05-28T07:56:39-04:00

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

As she watched President Biden stumble through the most cringeworthy portion of his disastrous June 2024 debate, First Lady Jill Biden wondered if her husband had unknowingly ingested drugs or was having a medical episode on live television. “Is he short-circuiting?” Jill Biden thought. “Is this a stroke? I felt like we were watching an AI hologram of the man we knew, and the hologram was glitching. Has he been drugged?”

Her mind then wandered to a more personal anxiety, considering how his nonsensical word salads—one of which ended with “we finally beat Medicare”—might implicate her as the person best positioned to know if the man who appeared to disassemble onstage was privately prone to incoherence. “Oh God—will people watching assume this is how he is all the time?” she writes in her new memoir, View From the East Wing, a copy of which The Atlantic obtained ahead of its June 2 release date.

Part of Jill Biden’s goal for writing a book about her four years as first lady, it seems, is to dispel bipartisan accusations that she was a hidden hand covering up her aging husband’s cognitive decline and nudging him to cling to power longer than his mind and body could sustain. As his closest confidant and the person who saw him even when his staff was not around, the former first lady has faced a deluge of conspiracy theories that place her at the center of what critics describe as a grand cover-up. A spokesperson for the Bidens declined to comment.

That Jill Biden felt compelled, in her words, to “set the record straight” highlights how much that presidential debate nearly two years ago—and the ensuing months of political turbulence that led to President Trump’s return to power—continues to reverberate within the Democratic Party. Even as its leaders struggle to find a potent counterattack to Trump’s presidency, this memoir, which resurfaces many moments the party would like to forget, showcases the difficulty Democrats face in closing an embarrassing chapter.

The story of how Biden’s presidency imploded, it seems, is destined to continuously be written and rewritten. View From the East Wing follows books by former Vice President Harris and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, each of which shed an unflattering light on the president’s condition as he sought reelection and the chaos that erupted after the debate. Last week, the Democratic National Committee released an autopsy report on the 2024 election, highlighting how Biden’s presidency paved the way to Harris’s doomed 107-day campaign and Trump’s resurgence. Trump seems determined to keep Biden in the news as well, mentioning his predecessor almost daily.

But Biden’s book may not deliver the kind of closure the party has been desperately, and repeatedly, seeking. Rather than offering an explosive political tell-all, the former first lady instead focuses on the nuances of navigating the politics of the White House’s East Wing. She describes struggling with the “catch-22” of being first lady, a position in which knowing too little can make you “an embarrassment” and knowing too much can make you seem power hungry. She largely holds back from lashing out against her foes—including those who abandoned Biden after the debate—though at one point she faults former Attorney General Merrick Garland for his handling of the case that resulted in Hunter Biden’s conviction on gun charges. (The president pardoned his son before leaving the White House.) While she writes that a “thought bubble above my head was full of expletives” after Harris attacked her husband over school busing during a June 2019 debate, by 2024, the first lady and vice president were professing their “love” for each other. The book does not dwell much on the current president, though it laments Trump’s destruction of the East Wing, likening it to the slaughter of a “rare and precious animal.”

Jill Biden concedes that her husband, who turned 80 shortly before announcing his reelection bid, “was definitely aging” in office, occasionally failing in his fight against fatigue and the physical demands of the presidency. He apparently battled “excruciating pain most days” from a November 2020 foot injury that never fully healed. She acknowledges that her husband had “privately floated the idea of voluntarily being a one-term, transitional president” during his 2020 campaign and, deep into his presidency, seriously considered whether pursuing a second term would be the right decision. At one point in January 2023, she writes, she “floated a hypothetical” and wondered if the Republicans would “continue to go after our family if you decided not to run?” (Hunter Biden’s struggle with drug addiction and the political liability it created for his father take up a considerable portion of the book.) But the president did not think that was a good reason to forgo a presidential race, she says.

And besides, the president’s political advisers—and his family members—insisted that he needed to run for reelection, pointing to polling showing him as the most formidable Democrat and laying out the stakes for what might happen if Republicans retook the White House.

But Jill Biden vehemently denies that her husband had been showing any signs of senility or dementia that would have foreshadowed such a painful-to-watch debate performance when he stood on the stage with Trump in Atlanta (“The truth was, Joe was not who he was on a day-to-day basis in that debate,” she writes). So what happened? Even nearly two years later, Jill Biden seems to have more questions than answers.

“Nothing explained what I was seeing,” she writes at one point about her husband’s “strangely monochromatic” visage and lackluster performance.

“To this day, I still don’t know what happened. Why wasn’t he making any sense? It was inexplicable to me,” she says elsewhere in the book. Maybe he had rehearsed too much? Maybe he had traveled too much that month? Or was he just ill? The president had seemed exhausted earlier in the day and had told her that he was not feeling too well. Later, after positing that he may have unwittingly taken codeine cough syrup or Ambien to fight off a cold or to help him sleep, Jill Biden seems to rhetorically throw her hands in the air: “I only wish I had the answer.” (You could forgive the reader for wondering, Well, did you ask him?) The first lady writes that she wished she had thought to ask for a blood test after the debate (and also says she suggested the president take a cognitive test to calm doubts, but was overruled by his advisers).

Jill Biden writes that on their bathroom mirror, she would at times leave inspirational messages like “You are my hero” or, on particularly tough days, “Get up, champ. Get up.” Sometimes, she would sneak in messages on policy, relying on her ability to be frank and open with the leader of the free world in ways that others could not. During Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, after an air strike killed seven people working for a humanitarian-aid group, she left a Post-it note on the mirror reading “Net has to stop,” a reference to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Knowing that Biden and Netanyahu would be speaking the following day, she left another note the next morning, which read: “Be strong. Don’t let BN use your goodness.”

That bluntness apparently resurfaced in the moments after the debate. As the president walked off the stage, he whispered to his wife, “I really f**ked up, didn’t I?” she writes. “‘Yes, you did,’ I whispered back.”

‘We Have Not Seen Ugly Yet’

2026-05-27T17:53:47-04:00

Two things are as certain as bluebonnets in spring now that Ken Paxton is the Republican nominee for the Senate in Texas: Democrats have a better-than-usual chance of winning statewide. And the next 23 weeks are going to be hideous.

Paxton’s big win comes days after President Trump stuck his finger into the wind, determined that the incumbent, John Cornyn, was toast, and gave the attorney general his last-minute support. Even though the nearly 28-point margin was surprising, it was probably always going to be Paxton. A runoff tends to attract the hardest of the hard-core—the kind of determined voter who is willing not only to show up to vote in March, but to show up and vote in March, sit through 12 weeks of brutal attack ads, then head back out to the polls in May. The kind of Republican who might argue, as one woman did in Dallas when I spoke with her last week, that Paxton and Trump are bringing masculinity back to the party like Bambi’s father “coming out of the forest with those huge antlers.”

Now that these dutiful Republicans have secured the animated stag of their dreams, they will turn their attention to his general-election opponent: James Talarico, the 37-year-old Democratic state lawmaker and aspiring Presbyterian minister. In some ways, the two men have become avatars for their respective parties, which will spend the next five months ruthlessly attacking each other.

Paxton, a MAGA folk hero, seems even more committed to the movement than Trump himself is. As attorney general, he filed dozens upon dozens of lawsuits against Presidents Obama and Biden, and sued to overturn the 2020 election results. Paxton and Trump happen to share a strikingly similar ethical and legal rap sheet: Both men have been indicted (Paxton’s charges involved securities fraud and were dismissed after he agreed to do community service and take an ethics class); both have been impeached (Paxton was suspended by the Texas House but later acquitted by the Senate); and both have been accused of—and deny—infidelity. (Angela Paxton is now divorcing Ken on “biblical grounds.”)

[Read: Ken Paxton is actually doing this]

Although Talarico doesn’t yet have Paxton’s name recognition, he does have strong youth-pastor energy and, at least for now, the moral high ground. As a faith-forward economic populist, Talarico has a core campaign message of love triumphing over hate, and little guys taking on the billionaires. Republicans know that they’ve got a tough race ahead of them, which is why they’ve already settled on a strategy: make Talarico seem like a weird dude.

Unfortunately for Democrats, Talarico has been more than a little helpful in this effort. In 2021, the state lawmaker said that “God is nonbinary,” a statement that is off-putting to some Christians, not because they believe that God is literally a man but because they can’t fathom why someone would drag God into the earthly debate over gender identity. Talarico has also said that there are six biological sexes and that he supports access to abortion, in part, because God asked for consent when he blessed Mary with the baby Jesus. As a candidate in 2022, he pledged to run a “non-meat campaign,” which was never going to play well in cattle country.

Lately, Talarico has been doing some backtracking. “I know there are two sexes, men and women. I also know there’s a very small percentage of people who have these chromosomal abnormalities, and I believe they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect,” he told CBS this week, adding that there are “some statements that I’ve made that I certainly regret.” Whenever Talarico is accused of being insufficiently pro-meat, his campaign circulates a photo of the candidate gnawing on a turkey leg at the state fair.

Still, both sides have heaps of material to work with. Which is why the next few months promise a total inundation of negative advertising online, and on the airwaves in Texas. Democrats will hammer into voters Paxton’s scandals—and the failures of Republican leadership. “Will Republicans get away with running a superficial attack campaign when Texans are really hurting?” Matt Angle, a state Democratic strategist, told me. “They’ve been in control for 30 years. If something’s broke, they broke it.” Meanwhile, Republicans are already parroting Paxton’s proposed “Tala-freako” and “Low-T Talarico” nicknames. This morning, the Trump adviser Stephen Miller wrote on X that Democrats have nominated their “first transgender senate candidate.” (Talarico is not transgender.) “We have not seen ugly yet,” Vinny Minchillo, a Texas Republican strategist, told me. They’re going to make Talarico “the woke DEI candidate of all woke DEI candidates. And pound him, pound him, pound him.”

The task ahead will be tough for Talarico, who will have to decide when to counter these attacks directly—Define thyself lest ye be defined, as the political maxim goes—and when to remain firmly astride his moral high horse. He will also have to fend off the unprecedented amounts of money that Republicans are pumping into the race in order to protect their fragile Senate majority. Already, Paxton has secured the backing of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which initially endorsed Cornyn and which, last night, dutifully scrubbed its website of all anti-Paxton press releases and ads.

Yet for Talarico, hope remains. No Texan needs reminding that inflation is high, or that the war in Iran has the whole world on edge and gas prices rising. Trump’s polling is bad, and among Texans, Talarico has higher favorability numbers than both Paxton and the president. In what might end up being a particularly good year for Democrats, victory is not only possible but achievable.

Still, if Democrats have done one thing well in Texas over the past 30 years, it’s dash hopes. The last time a Democrat came close to winning statewide in Texas was in 2018. Back then, Senator Ted Cruz beat Beto O’Rourke by roughly 215,000 votes. This time, the figure that Republicans have their eye on is 778,139, or the number of Texans who voted in the March GOP primary but who were not excited enough about either Republican candidate to vote in the runoff. A drop in turnout was expected. But a 36 percent decline “mirrors a lack of Republican enthusiasm we’ve seen in other states,” Minchillo said. For Texas Republicans, that number is “distressing.”

Last night on Truth Social, Trump congratulated Paxton and promised to hold a few rallies to help gin up some excitement. “Texas, this will be FUN!” the president teased. We’ll see.

Why Trump Lost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Out of the Gerrymandering Darkness, a New Hope for Reform

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: The fight-club rule on gerrymandering]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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