Politics | The Atlantic

The White House’s MAHA Gatekeeper

2026-07-24T06:30:00-04:00

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The world’s most popular podcaster, Joe Rogan, reached out privately in April to the world’s most powerful man, Donald Trump, to discuss the healing power of ibogaine, a psychedelic made from the root bark of a Central African shrub that researchers are studying as a treatment for addiction and trauma. Trump responded by text, “‘Sounds great. Do you want FDA approval? Let’s do it,’” Rogan announced weeks later, when he stood behind the president in the Oval Office for the signing of an executive order on psychedelic therapies. “It was literally that quick.”

But it wasn’t that simple. After hearing from Rogan, the president told his team at the Department of Health and Human Services to change the policy, and the team sent a draft executive order to the White House Domestic Policy Council. That’s when things got messy. In the days that followed, Rogan’s allies engaged in battle with a mid-level White House health adviser, Dr. Heidi Overton. As a deputy assistant to the president who focuses on health policy, Overton ran a process to revise the draft in coordination with other stakeholders, including the Departments of Justice and Veterans Affairs.

Members of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement were furious, convinced that Overton, not for the first time, had undermined Trump’s own desires. The friction, which has not been previously reported, became so intense that Rogan and W. Bryan Hubbard, the CEO of Americans for Ibogaine, a nonprofit that champions the drug’s therapeutic benefits, threatened to pull out of the signing ceremony if they did not have a say in Overton’s final edits, according to three people familiar with the events.

Overton’s efforts on the Domestic Policy Council shrank the roughly 1,400-word HHS draft to about 900 words by the time Trump signed his name. Entire sections were removed, including those calling for a psychedelic-therapy czar and treatment-funding reforms, according to a draft we reviewed. A $250 million research fund became a $50 million partnership with states. In the end, the document accelerated review for some drugs and pushed the government to reschedule psychedelic substances that perform well in large clinical trials, enough to persuade Rogan and Hubbard to show for the signing.

Overton is one of the most powerful public-health officials in Trump’s orbit who has little public profile. Her job, as a senior health-policy official on the White House Domestic Policy Council, is to convert the president’s priorities into the scope and language of documents that will advance the White House’s agenda. But Overton’s detractors describe her as one of the biggest obstacles to MAHA actually realizing its priorities—“the controlled opposition,” one person who has worked with her told us. They accuse her of slow-walking marijuana rescheduling, trying to limit MAHA changes to federal nutrition guidelines, and delaying or weakening several other initiatives. “As an unelected bureaucrat, Heidi Overton sought to use her pen to override the intended exercise of presidential power,” one person outside of government who was familiar with the psychedelic-executive-order process told us. “It was a derogation of representative democracy.”

Leaders of the West Wing and HHS, by contrast, say the 37-year-old physician represents democracy at work. They have rushed to her defense, describing her as a star scientific wonk with a medical degree and a doctorate in clinical investigation who knows how to balance competing interests to achieve Trump’s goals. “The president adores her,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told us. Since the start of Trump’s second term, the White House has trusted Overton to coordinate nearly all of its major health policies, including MAHA priorities such as revisions to childhood-vaccine recommendations and the redesign of the food pyramid.

“In President Trump’s administration, the Domestic Policy Council is the White House office that is and should be depended on to make sure things are correct, legally durable, done with policy consistency, and, in this case, medically sound,” White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles told us. “Any suggestion that Heidi Overton or the Domestic Policy Council is slowing things down is being made by an uninformed person. Things move at a light speed in this administration.” The White House has been sufficiently impressed by Overton’s work that she has been named as one of three finalists to become the next Food and Drug Administration commissioner, a promotion that would give her direct power over the pharmaceutical industry, medical devices, tobacco products, and most of the nation’s food.

The fight over Overton’s role in the first 18 months of Trump’s second term is certain to become more public if she faces Senate confirmation later this year. It has already revealed a growing rift between the White House and a group of MAHA policy makers over the pace and limits of reforming federal health policy.

[Read: Why is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. so convinced he’s right?]

Sky-high expectations for radical change at the start of the administration yielded some dramatic shifts on vaccine recommendations, nutrition guidelines, pharmaceutical regulation, and agricultural policy. But the team that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. built has faced pushback on pesticide regulation and other areas where they sought to disrupt decades of federal policy making. Overton, as the traffic cop of health policy at the White House, has found herself at the center of those fights. This story is based on interviews with 17 people with direct knowledge of Overton’s work. Nearly all of them requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly or feared retribution from the White House if they publicly criticized her. Overton declined to comment for this story.

Kennedy, the founder and public face of the Make America Healthy Again movement, who has from the start of the administration found himself limited by the interagency process that Overton runs, is nevertheless one of her most vocal defenders. At the signing ceremony for the psychedelics executive order, he thanked Overton while acknowledging the behind-closed- doors fights that had taken place. “It was often frustrating but always right,” he said of her advice. “She brings exceptional dedication, meticulous attention to detail, and strategic leadership to every policy she touches, turning our vision into meaningful results for the American people,” Kennedy told us in a statement.

But supporters of Kennedy’s MAHA ambitions say that he has been frustrated at times with the limits that Overton and the White House have put on him. “Time after time her views were to dig in and resist the president’s agenda until his friends called him directly and overrode her,” another person familiar with her work told us, pointing to issues such as psychedelic treatments for veterans and marijuana rescheduling.

At the HHS headquarters building last year, a joke began circulating about all of the policies that Kennedy advisers believed Overton was holding up, according to three sources: Policy proposals that go to the White House fall into what they call the “Overton window” of inaction—a play on the social-science term named after an unrelated researcher that describes the range of acceptable change in a political system.

Overton began working for Trump in 2019 while doing a surgical residency at Johns Hopkins University, where she became an ally of the last FDA commissioner, Marty Makary. She joined the White House at a time of crisis, serving on the front lines of the nation’s COVID response. Allies say that the experience left her skeptical of the established public-health infrastructure, pushing her to finish her doctorate in clinical investigation at Hopkins and perhaps making her receptive to the reforms called for by the MAHA movement. After Trump’s defeat in 2020, she joined Brooke Rollins, her former boss at the White House Domestic Policy Council, at America First Policy Institute, a think tank that doubled as a Cabinet-in-waiting for a second Trump term.

Rollins became agriculture secretary when Trump returned to the White House. Overton helped Kennedy put together his team for HHS, people involved told us. She supported Trump’s embrace of the MAHA agenda, people who interacted with her at the time told us. Top Trump advisers trusted her to support the cause while running the scientific traps, keeping an eye on the political risks, and managing the contentious inter-department fights that Kennedy’s proposals would inevitably create.

One of Kennedy’s first major MAHA drives was to replace what he called the “unreadable” scientific groundwork by the Biden administration to revise federal nutrition guidelines. He launched a new push for “gold standard science,” prompting a monthslong rush to develop new evidence reviews to back up the guidelines that Kennedy wanted to issue. Those effectively flipped the 1990s USDA “food pyramid” to prioritize the consumption of proteins, healthy fats, and fibrous vegetables—what Kennedy considers real food—over refined grains and ultra-processed foods. Rollins, at USDA, and Kennedy, at HHS, made a show of working closely together. But behind the scenes, their departments engaged in sometimes acrimonious battle, and Overton was in the center, mediating the back-and-forth.

HHS officials became convinced that Overton was siding with USDA. Wary of a legal deadline to produce the new recommendations, she chafed at Kennedy’s idea of throwing out all of the Biden administration’s work. She wanted to keep the parts that the Trump administration had no qualms about, such as research done on saturated fats. And some HHS officials viewed her as sympathetic to USDA concerns about a lack of consultation with the new scientific advisory panel that HHS had appointed, two people said.

“At one point, her recommendation was Can we just use the old science?” one person involved in the process told us. “Long story short, she did everything she could to prevent the real-food thing from being a success.” HHS officials became so concerned that Overton was favoring USDA and undermining their efforts that they created a binder, documenting every communication among her and USDA officials in a bid to better counter her arguments, according to two people familiar with the effort.

Overton’s allies say that to suggest that she did not want a major remake of nutrition guidelines is just wrong. They point to the end result as evidence. Overton also subsequently led the policy process that resulted in USDA committing $700 million to a regenerative-farming program, championed by Kennedy, that seeks to avoid heavy dependence on chemical fertilizer and pesticides. She also helped write the first MAHA executive order last February, which reframed the government’s health priorities around countering chronic diseases, reversing declining life expectancy, and reducing supposed overreliance on medication.

But other changes came more slowly, to the frustration of MAHA advocates. Recently, Overton has been involved in drafting new policies for the use of peptides, short chains of amino acids that are available on the gray market but that, in many cases, have scant scientific evidence to support their safety or efficacy. An FDA advisory board is meeting this week to consider whether to recommend easing regulations on seven popular peptides, allowing them to be made by compounding pharmacies, which prepare custom medications that in many cases aren’t available from traditional pharmacies.

MAHA advocates support greater peptide availability, often portraying them as preferable to conventional pharmaceuticals. Kennedy himself has acknowledged using peptides. Overton, however, is viewed by some as wary of the lack of scientific research into some of the compounds. For her supporters, this is proof that she is doing her job. For her opponents, it is evidence that she is a bureaucratic institutionalist representing the kind of inaction that MAHA had hoped to break. “Heidi is a skeptic of anything that is not pharma, and that would include peptides,” a person familiar with the matter told us.

Overton was also in the middle of a fierce internal debate over marijuana regulation. Trump made a 2024 campaign promise to reclassify the drug from Schedule I (a criminal designation that highlights abuse potential for substances without medical value) to Schedule III (lower abuse risk and an allowance for medical prescription and study). Law-enforcement agencies and conservatives were wary of marijuana’s harms, and the Trump administration stalled on the initiative for almost all of last year.

Marijuana entrepreneurs and one of the president’s wealthy friends, Howard Kessler, eventually triumphed with direct appeals to the president, creating a playbook that Rogan followed in his outreach on loosening the regulation of psychedelics. Those direct appeals were designed, to some degree, to bypass the interagency process, people familiar with the matter told us. Once Trump decided to move, he relied on Overton to make the change happen. “I’ve never been inundated by so many people as I have about this particular reclassification,” Trump said at a December signing of an executive order that finally directed the marijuana-classification change. Kessler developed a direct relationship with Overton during the process and has since been working with her on other health issues.

In late December, Trump pushed for another MAHA health initiative to be codified in short order, calling for a new childhood-vaccination schedule to be in place by the end of the year. Once again, Overton was in the middle of wrangling between the White House and HHS. She and department officials created an initial draft, but HHS lawyers initially rejected the proposal as lacking enough scientific backing and therefore vulnerable to legal challenge. At a meeting that month in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House, Overton dressed down HHS officials for not presenting a document that would pass legal review, according to a person who attended. “I think she felt blindsided,” the person said.

HHS staff worked through Christmas and New Year’s to footnote the document, recruiting Martin Kulldorff, a former Harvard biostatistician who now works in Kennedy’s office, to help. The new rules were introduced in January. A federal judge blocked them in March, ruling that the agency had not done a proper scientific review even after the later revisions.

Kennedy suggested last year that Overton take the job overseeing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, an offer that she declined, according to two people familiar with the situation. But in recent weeks, Overton has made clear that she is open to running the FDA, a larger and more powerful agency. White House officials are also considering two others: Jeff Vacirca, a cancer physician serving as the CEO and chairman of the board of New York Cancer & Blood Specialists, and the senior Pentagon health official Stephen Ferrara. A decision is expected soon.

Trump’s psychedelic order came together in weeks. Shortly after Rogan reached out to Trump, they saw each other at an Ultimate Fighting Championship event in Miami. “He came to me and said, It’s done. We’re going to take care of it. It’s a good thing for the soldiers. It’s a good thing for everybody,” Rogan later recounted on his podcast.

[Read: How to have a ‘don’t-know mind’]

Some in the White House were caught off guard and questioned the wisdom of unleashing psychedelic mental-health treatments that had not yet been studied like other approved pharmaceuticals. Officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs were concerned about patients suddenly demanding treatments that the department was not ready to provide. Overton once again stepped in. “She wanted to make sure it was being done the right way,” Chris Klomp, a senior adviser to Kennedy, told us. “What I observed with the psychedelics is that Heidi ran a process to try to align all these different pieces.”

But Klomp said that he was not surprised that the process ended with some people unhappy. “The Domestic Policy Council is in no small part a quarterback aligning all those different parties,” Klomp said. “If you don’t understand that process, you can at times feel pretty frustrated.”

MAHA activists, who view Trump’s presidency and Kennedy as a rare opportunity for major change, see Overton’s more cautious, deliberate approach as anathema. Overton’s allies say that this is a misreading of her role, which is to build consensus and deliver a lasting outcome. Now, as Trump considers moving her to a much larger position, the debate may soon find a wider audience.

The Trump Family Sparks a Revolution in Albania

2026-07-23T16:40:00-04:00

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In the summer of 2021, Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, were cruising the Mediterranean by yacht when they stopped for a swim off the Adriatic coast. They splashed over to an island and hiked, barefoot, across its hilly, rugged terrain. “Effectively that’s how we found it,” the president’s eldest daughter would later recount.

The Albanian island that the Trump heirs stumbled on, Robinson Crusoe–like, is called Sazan, once the site of a top-secret military base. Sazan is not undiscovered territory to Albanians; it’s their country’s largest island. Because it was uninhabited for many years, vegetation and wildlife flourished, making it a cherished nature preserve. Luckily for the Trump couple, Albania’s prime minister, Edi Rama, was a guest on the same yacht one of the nights they were on board.

Three years later—and about two months after Donald Trump’s reelection in 2024—an investment committee led by Rama gave preliminary approval to the couple’s plans to develop the island into an opulent resort. The venture extends to nearby land next to a coastal lagoon, which serves as a crucial habitat for flamingos, sea turtles, and other species. The couple’s partners in the project include a pair of Qatari brothers who have financed ultra-luxury developments across the Middle East and South Asia and an Albanian conglomerate with holdings in energy, construction, infrastructure, insurance, and tourism. In a recent podcast interview, Ivanka Trump described the project as “the culmination of all of my experience in real estate, all of my travel, a lot of reflection on how I want to live, how I think people increasingly are wanting to live.”

Many Albanians see matters differently. Hundreds of thousands have joined daily protests against the plans, in one of the country’s largest social mobilizations since the end of Communist rule 35 years ago. The uprising, called the Flamingo Revolution, takes its name from the wild birds that breed in the wetland habitat. Protesters have carried inflatable flamingos and placards with drawings.

The unrest has it all: accusations of organized crime and drug trafficking, competing claims of foreign influence, a cameo by Kanye West. For the participants I spoke with, the demonstrations are about accumulated frustration with Albanian politicians who have failed to give the country a solid economic foundation. “You can interpret it as an anti-Trump demonstration in the sense that it’s opposed to a Trump-like system we see here,” Fatos Lubonja, a writer and dissident who was imprisoned during Albania’s Communist dictatorship, told me: “government decisions made in secret, for the benefit of the few, motivated by money linked to oligarchs.”

The beauty of the landscape discovered by the American president’s daughter “belongs to all Albanians,” Lubonja said. He paraphrased Dostoyevsky: “And beauty will save the world.” But Rama, a former professional artist, won’t hear it. “I can be lectured about many things—about economy, about legal affairs, about agriculture, about health care,” he said in a recent interview. “But there is one thing that nobody can lecture me, which is beauty.”

The Flamingo Revolution seems, at first glance, the unlikeliest of anti-Trump protests. Albania, a nation of fewer than 3 million people, is one of the most pro-American countries in the world, and has been since the United States opposed Albanian partition all the way back in 1920. More recently, Washington backed Albania’s entry into NATO, in 2009, and has upheld its security in a historically volatile region that’s sometimes called the powder keg of Europe.

In the 18 months since Trump returned to power, I have traveled extensively in European countries with some of the strongest postwar ties to the U.S., including Britain, Germany, and Denmark. One of the questions I hear most often is why the Americans opposed to Trump aren’t mounting larger and more sustained demonstrations against him. The question arises especially when I ask European diplomats why the leaders of their countries don’t stand up more forcefully to an American president who insults them and entertains annexing their territory. They turn the inquiry back on me, asking, Why aren’t Americans standing up? Millions have marched in “No Kings” protests; the mobilization in the spring was one of the largest single-day protests in American history. Still, the point remains. Trump made at least $2.2 billion during his first year back in office, as wage growth slowed. He is pursuing an unpopular war, unauthorized by Congress and unsanctioned by international law. Even pro-American Europeans want to know: Why aren’t people in the streets every day?

[Read: Trump is learning that bullying has consequences]

In Albania, a small country on Europe’s Balkan Peninsula, they are. Today marks the 54th consecutive day of protests triggered by the Trump-family development project. Few would have pegged Albania as the center of the international anti-Trump opposition. But a tour through the country’s recent history suggests that it isn’t as unlikely as it appears.

Albania was once one of the most isolated countries in Europe. It was ruled, from the end of World War II until 1985, by a ruthless and paranoid Communist dictator, Enver Hoxha, whose fear of foreign invasion spawned the construction of an estimated 173,000 bunkers. Albania earned the nickname “Europe’s North Korea.” The Communist state was abolished in 1991, and the anti-Communist opposition swept to power in parliamentary elections a year later. But the transition to a market economy wasn’t easy. Breakneck privatization under a system known as “shock therapy” devastated local industries and drove mass unemployment. In 1997, the collapse of massive, state-sanctioned pyramid schemes wiped out the life savings of about two-thirds of Albanians. A small cadre of politicians has competed for control of the country ever since. Because of its recent experience, the population is highly attuned to signs of autocracy, Dana Fisher, a sociologist at American University who has studied the demographics of the No Kings protests in the U.S., told me. Familiarity can breed complacency. But in this case, it’s inspiring fierce resistance.

The Trump family triggered the uprising, but the target of the protests is Rama. The leader of his country’s Socialist Party, Rama came to power in 2013, as Albania was still sloughing off its insular identity. Albania became a candidate for European Union accession the following year. Rama was once a vehement Trump critic who greeted the prospect of the mogul’s nomination in 2016 by remarking, “God forbid!” He foresaw harm not just to the United States but to the “democratic world.”

Rama is now much more supportive. He hailed Trump’s “remarkable victory” in 2024 and, a year later, echoed the president’s assertions of divine providence, adding, “When Trump says that God saved him to Make America Great Again, he tells only half of the story. The other half is that he saved Trump also to make Europe wake up and get its act together.” Rama is one of the only European leaders to accept an invitation to the Trump-chaired Board of Peace. Domestically, he has sought to improve the Albanian economy by upgrading the hospitality industry. He told The Guardian last year: “We need luxury tourism like a desert needs water.”

That’s in line with Kushner’s ambitions. “I was very, very impressed with his vision for what he wanted to do with Albania,” Trump’s son-in-law told an investment conference. Kushner continued: “I really didn’t know anything about the country. I didn’t understand the history, and the darkness of the history with the Communism, and the terrible leadership actually led to it being fully undeveloped as a nation.”

It’s not Kushner’s first attempt at high-end development in the Balkans. Last December, he pulled out of plans to build a Trump Tower in Belgrade, at the site of the former Yugoslav defense ministry, which was bombed by NATO in 1999. His investment firm withdrew from the project hours after the country’s organized-crime prosecutors indicted the culture minister for allegedly forging documents as part of the process to remove the building’s cultural-heritage status. The company issued a statement saying the plans would not proceed, because “meaningful projects should unite rather than divide.”

In Albania, people involved in the resort project maintain that construction isn’t yet under way, even though environmental activists say fencing has gone up, trees have been removed, and sand dunes have been flattened. The country amended its environmental regulations in 2024, cutting a path for the development by lifting construction bans in protected ecological zones. The move drew a warning from the European Parliament about compliance with environmental standards as part of Albania’s bid to join the bloc. Rama’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment, but Asher Abehsera, one of the Trump couple’s partners in the endeavor, told me in a statement, “Our goal is simple: celebrate Albania’s natural beauty, create jobs, and build something future generations can be proud of.”

He added: “Its future will ultimately be determined by Albania and the Albanian people.”

Large-scale demonstrations began in Albania at the end of May, after video circulated of private security guards punching and dragging a protester along a beach in Zvërnec, the coastal enclave where part of the Trump-family project is planned. “This was the tipping point,” Ditmir Bushati, a former Albanian foreign minister, told me. “It started as a dispute over access to the sea and access to nature, and it was transformed in a couple of days into a protest about who should decide the future of the country.”

Thousands mobilized in Tirana, the capital, with signs proclaiming that the nation was not for sale and declaring, I don’t want Albania like Dubai. Rama also dug in his heels, issuing a statement saying, “There is absolutely no chance that the investment will stop as long as I am here.” As the protests grew, they became a platform for frenzied speculation and conspiracy theories. Some protesters saw parallels to Kushner’s support for a proposed “Gaza Riviera,” fearing that Albanian land would be used to resettle Palestinians. Further afield, online commenters called the development “another Epstein island,” a reference to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s hideouts in the U.S. Virgin Islands. A separate controversy, over government-backed plans for a Kanye West concert outside Tirana, added to the grievances. Attention came from all ideological corners. Senator Bernie Sanders welcomed the protests as a dissent against “global oligarchy.” Alex Jones, the right-wing conspiracy theorist, enthused about an impending “civil war.”

Vlasov Sulaj / NurPhoto / Getty

The prime minister argued that the protests had been hijacked by foreign actors, blaming “Trump haters” as well as “enemies of Israel and Albania.” Albania, where about half of the population is Muslim, has strong ties to Israel rooted in historical goodwill. During the Second World War, Albanians motivated by an ancient honor code called besa, literally “to keep the promise,” hid thousands of Jewish refugees; it was the only European country with more Jewish residents after the Holocaust than before. In this century, Albania made itself a target of the Iranian regime when it agreed, at the request of the United States and the United Nations in 2013, to host exiled members of the dissident group Mujahedin-e-Khalq, or MEK. In 2022, Albania expelled Iranian diplomats after concluding that Tehran was behind a wave of cyberattacks aimed at government institutions and critical infrastructure. In recent weeks, Rama has accused Iran of waging a “hybrid war” by spreading disinformation about the development and inflaming opposition to his government’s plans. Iran has denied the accusations.

[Read: War by any other name]

Protesters appear intent on proving that the uprising is authentic and homegrown. Bushati, the former foreign minister, has celebrated the protests as “the best investment in our image as a people and in our path towards the European Union.” He said as many as 200,000 people mobilized over the July 4 weekend and dismissed claims of foreign interference. “Iran has zero influence in Albania,” he said. “This is a country living happily in the U.S. orbit.”

Iranian influence hardly seems necessary to destabilize the resort plans. The land on which part of the project is planned is contested. Sazan, the island, is owned by the state, so a lease would ultimately be necessary; the Trump-linked consortium currently has what’s called “strategic investor” status, which helps accelerate permitting and negotiations for a long-term agreement. The coastal land in Zvërnec, however, is private. Entities linked to the Trump couple purchased it from a Miami-based businessman, Artur Shehu, who insists that his family’s claim on the land dates to Ottoman times. Locals in Zvërnec argue that they are the rightful owners. It’s a messy picture because land was requisitioned by the state during the Communist period; when properties returned to private hands in the 1990s, ownership was often disputed.

The saga became considerably more dramatic this summer, when an Albanian agency devoted to countering financial crimes, the Special Structure Against Corruption and Organized Crime, said it was investigating whether Shehu had forged deeds to the property. Finding out whether he has lawful title to the land is just one part of a broader probe by the agency into allegations that Shehu and his associates had trafficked cocaine into European ports and then laundered the money for real-estate projects. A message sent to a number associated with Shehu went unanswered; his attorney denied the allegations to Reuters. The Trump couple and their partners in the venture are not accused of wrongdoing. A spokesperson for the venture said, “The Albanian legal system is the appropriate venue for resolving questions about land ownership and the integrity of prior transactions. We respect that process, and as always, we will cooperate with any lawful process as required.”

The Flamingo Revolution reflects dissatisfaction with Albania’s democratic institutions 35 years after the fall of Communism. Yet the popular mobilization, combined with the anti-corruption inquiry that seeks to validate some of its core claims, is evidence of democratic maturity. Albanian society has developed antibodies to signs of state capture. The irony is that an initiative emanating from the American president’s family would trigger such a powerful immune response.

One Morning of Controlled Chaos in Maine

2026-07-22T06:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Cassandra Klos

Kathie Purdy doesn’t mind the phone calls. And there have been a lot of them—producing a sustained buzzing from her iPhone throughout the nearly two weeks since Graham Platner announced that he would drop out of the Maine Senate race. At one point, Purdy’s device grew so hot that she had to take it out of its case to let it breathe. But that was okay, she told me. As chair of the York County Democratic Committee, it was her job to help guide Mainers through this confusing moment.

What Purdy did not appreciate was the insinuation—from other Democrats, from members of the media, from online trolls—that the process to replace Platner was somehow undemocratic. “This is what I’m talking about,” Purdy told me on Sunday, showing me a text from a voter asking whom “leadership had picked” for the nomination. It was early afternoon in the Sanford Performing Arts Center, and we were sitting side by side on the stage, looking out over the democratic process in action. Purdy rolled her eyes, exasperated. “Actually, right now we are conducting the caucus-type meeting in Sanford where the participants vote for a group of delegates,” she replied, using voice-to-text. “That’s the folks who’ll be voting for your Senate candidate.”

Choosing those delegates was not a tidy affair. All morning, the room had been crowded, even though the state party had urged people to please consider voting from home. Mainers who wanted to be delegates and Mainers who came to meet delegate candidates and campaign volunteers proffering lists of allied delegates wove in between the aisles of red-upholstered chairs, shaking hands and arguing and complaining about various parts of the process in which they were taking part. Some struggled with the Wi-Fi. Occasionally, Purdy took the stage to make an announcement: We found a pair of car keys. Please come to the stage if they’re yours!

Looking around, I imagined that, somewhere a few hours north, Susan Collins was rubbing her hands together with delight. Maine Democrats have failed to unseat her for nearly three decades, and there’s plenty of reason to believe that in three months they’ll come up short again. Zoomed out, the situation is, objectively, ridiculous. Maine Democrats nominated Platner despite a bouquet of red flags, including a Nazi tattoo and allegations of volatile behavior from past girlfriends. Now that an accusation of rape has toppled Platner’s candidacy, the Democrats who selected him are desperately trying to pick up the pieces of a race that might be their party’s best shot to take back the Senate.

[Read: Platner just made things harder for Democrats]

Cassandra Klos for The Atlantic

Kathie Purdy, chair of the York County Democratic committee, organizes the vote for delegates.

Cassandra Klos for The Atlantic

A list of progressive delegates

Yet the predictable conclusion—that the Democrats are once again in disarray—could not be drawn, at least not fully. Because ultimately, after all the hemming and hawing and arguing and complaining, the Democrats of York County sat down and voted. Totals were reached surprisingly quickly. Only a few hours after most attendees had arrived, Purdy was reading out the names of the 84 delegates and 17 alternates who would go to the party’s nominating convention in Bangor.

Plenty of people were frustrated with the results, which, across Maine, were very good for Troy Jackson, a progressive former state legislator. Others had issues with the process itself. But “that’s democracy,” Purdy told me. So far, in Maine, it’s going pretty well.

In the days after Platner announced that he was dropping out of the race, there was much consternation about how the Democrats would replace him. The party wouldn’t have time to conduct another primary. But if state Democratic leaders simply chose a new nominee on their own, voters might be indignant. Much of Platner’s support, after all, had come from people exhausted with the so-called establishment.

The Maine Democrats had settled on a compromise: They would hold a convention on July 25, where 601 delegates would choose Platner’s replacement. Before that, each county would have an election to choose its portion of delegates. People were not exactly pleased about this. Whereas independent Mainers had been able to participate in the June primary, only registered Democrats were allowed to select the replacement nominee. “As an independent you’re saying my vote doesn’t count now,” one commenter on the York County Democratic Committee Facebook page wrote. (Much of the debate has played out on Facebook.) Another self-proclaimed former Democrat weighed in: “If you believe primary voters should choose nominees, not party insiders, consider whether your party registration still reflects your values.”

Meanwhile, the county committee chairs—who, as volunteers, are paid precisely zero dollars for their work—were under a lot of stress. No one from the Maine Democrats returned any of my calls or emails. Purdy was begging people to be kind. “I would really appreciate some respect,” she wrote on Facebook. “Please stop the snark.” Joseph Zamboni, the chair of the Cumberland County Democratic Committee, seemed on the verge of tears when I spoke with him on the phone about where and when the nominating meeting would take place. In one of his many lengthy social-media updates, Zamboni tried to shed some light on the stressful decision-making process. “Nobel Prize–winning scholar Herbert Simon, whose work transformed the fields of economics, psychology, and administration, argued that people rarely make perfectly informed or ‘optimal’ decisions because none of us has unlimited time, information, or mental capacity,” he wrote.

Cassandra Klos for The Atlantic

Voters confer over delegate slates.

Cassandra Klos for The Atlantic

Voters wore stickers and T-shirts representing their Senate candidate of choice.

Cassandra Klos for The Atlantic

An attendee waits in Sanford, Maine.

So I did not know what I would find on Sunday. But when I arrived at the auditorium in Sanford at 9 a.m. sharp, I was greeted with a dozen volunteers and a box of donut holes. In the parking lot outside, supporters held a rally for Jackson while, inside, dozens of people were already circulating. “Usually, when we hold a convention, we have to go begging” for delegates, one county committee chair told me, “Right now we’re fighting ’em off.” (In York County, more than 400 people had applied to fill 101 positions.)

For two hours before voting began, people made the case for their candidates. Most were either supporting Jackson, a logger and former state-Senate president, or Nirav Shah, the former leader of the Maine CDC, who has since dropped out of the race. Jackson’s supporters said they liked him because his positions are most closely aligned with those of Platner, and he could, they believe, more easily inherit Platner’s movement. “We’ve lost a lot of momentum, and he has the best chance of keeping them engaged,” Reed Gordon, a 29-year-old delegate candidate, told me. The case for Shah was that he is slightly more moderate and might, therefore, be an easier sell for independent and moderate Mainers. Platner was too aggressive, Paula Busby, a 62-year-old from the town of Lebanon, told me. “We need to stand up against” President Trump, she said, “but we have to be measured.”

Because the Democrats at these county meetings were choosing delegates rather than voting directly for candidates themselves, campaigns had made lists of allied delegates ahead of time and passed them out. Delegate selection was, basically, a proxy election: If you wanted Jackson to win, you’d vote for Jackson’s slate. This was upsetting to the Mainers who’d hoped that the people sent to the convention would be impartial. “This isn’t the way I’d have done it,” Julian Rogers, the former vice chair of the Maine Democrats and a delegate candidate himself, told me. “Rather than sort of coronating one person, I think we need to hear from these other people and have a little more balance.”

Leah Macomber, a game developer from Saco, was also on the ballot to be a delegate, but she didn’t know anything about the slates until Sunday morning. “I was so pissed off,” she told me. “I’m a Mainer, and I don’t like being told what to do, or especially who to vote for.” So she made a T-shirt reading Vote Independent Thinker and wore it to the event. She also handed out lollipops labeled Susan sucks to try to stand out to voters. Neither she nor Rogers were selected as delegates.

[Read: Can Democrats salvage their chances in Maine? ]

Cassandra Klos for The Atlantic

The scene at the Sanford Performing Arts Center

Still, even they were impressed at how quickly the process had been put into place, and how clear the communication had been from the state and county parties. It was preferable, some Mainers told me, to the 2024 process to replace Joe Biden, which was ultimately an anointing of Kamala Harris. And it was obviously better than powering through with a toxic nominee.

The Democrats got a redo, a freebie, to try again and get someone better. “I was so disappointed when Platner dropped out,” Diana Garry, a retired nurse from Shapleigh, told me. “I was so discouraged. But now I’m thinking it’s a blessing.”

By 11:15 a.m., people were in their seats, with their phones and iPads open, ready to vote. “It’ll all be electronic, so it’ll be fast,” Purdy said from the stage. I wondered whether she was tempting fate. The Democrats, after all, do not have the best track record when it comes to using technology to facilitate important elections. And when Purdy began reading out instructions for voting through the link sent via email—“To edit your submission, hit ‘Continue,’ then ‘Edit,’ then ‘Continue’ again”—a feeling of dread came over me. It was not assuaged by the line for technical support that quickly formed down the center aisle of the auditorium.

But my concerns proved unfounded. The vote was going smoothly. An hour in, all of the people in line had been helped. Some Mainers had left; they’d see the results posted online. Soon, Purdy was onstage giving a 10-minute warning. “Can I get a ‘yay’?” she asked the now-dwindling crowd. “Yay!” people replied, more enthusiastically than I’d expected.

She sat back down next to me. “I’m proud of what we’ve done,” she said, looking relieved. “We had a very short time to do something herculean.” Thanks to Sunday’s elections, next weekend’s convention will be pretty straightforward. The question now is whether Purdy and all the rest of Maine’s Democrats can pull off something similarly herculean in November.

The Secretary of Homeland

2026-07-21T10:00:00-04:00

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The most important policy decision made by Markwayne Mullin in his short tenure atop the Department of Homeland Security stood for barely a day. ICE officers had just killed two people: a Mexican construction worker with three American sons in Texas, and a Colombian delivery driver whose 3-year-old daughter saw him lying dead in the street in Maine. In each case, the officers had been looking for men other than the ones they killed. DHS officials claimed that the officers had fired defensively during chaotic vehicle stops, but they offered no body-camera footage to back those claims. After phone calls with Maine’s senators, including Susan Collins, the secretary ordered an emergency halt to most traffic stops. But the decision surprised many in the White House, including President Trump, who reversed the order in a social-media post the next morning. Mullin wasn’t fired, but his authority was undercut, to the delight of the online MAGA mob that had been hammering the former Oklahoma senator as a wuss.

Mullin declared on social media that he and Trump were “on the same page” on ICE enforcement tactics and priorities. But for a secretary whose views on the department he leads are still vague, the phrasing posed a question: What page are they on, exactly?

Trump seeks the removal of millions of immigrants from U.S. cities and communities, and Mullin was brought in to do that more quietly and cheerfully than his predecessor. Kristi Noem was ousted after the killings in January of two U.S. citizens protesting ICE in Minneapolis. But Mullin, who started in March, is already being squeezed by the same forces that led to her removal. Trump’s supporters want to see the record-breaking deportation campaign that Trump promised them. But when DHS dials up the intensity of ICE enforcement, the broader public recoils from the violence it generates.

Mullin, who dropped out of college to run his father’s plumbing business in eastern Oklahoma, took an unusual path to leading the most important domestic-policy initiative of Trump’s second term. He came to the job as somewhat of a blank slate, lacking both the ideological zeal of Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration-policy chief, and the icy resolve of Noem, who pressed Trump’s mass-deportation campaign with a ruthless determination.

Mullin was an improbable choice in other ways. He is not from a border state and did not arrive with deep knowledge of immigration policy or a background in counterterrorism. He never served in the military or in law enforcement, and he didn’t work on the congressional committees that directly oversee DHS and immigration. A former wrestler and mixed-martial-arts fighter, Mullin was known for organizing vigorous bipartisan workout sessions on the Hill, where he served for a decade in the House and for three years in the Senate. What was never in doubt were Mullin’s qualifications as a combatant for Trump. The president liked that Mullin was someone, he said, who “truly gets along well with people” but is also a “MAGA Warrior,” ready to brawl in congressional hearings and cable-news hits on the president’s behalf.

Mullin spent his career running businesses he owns, rarely having to follow a chain of command. Some of the DHS officials I’ve spoken with, who are generally supportive of Mullin, say that he’s not used to getting permission from superiors and lacks the experience on immigration issues to understand the implications of policy decisions such as halting vehicle stops. “He wasn’t brought in because of his command of CBP and ICE issues,” one DHS official told me. “He was brought in to restore normalcy.” But normalcy is not what MAGA hard-liners want to see. When Mullin demonstrates the slightest unease with the human cost of enforcement operations, right-wing critics pounce, taunting him as “Markwayne Muslim” and the “Kung Fu Plumber.”

Mullin does bring to DHS the one quality valued above any other in this administration: an imperturbable loyalty to Trump. The question hanging over him, as the pressure to ramp up deportations collides with the messy realities of carrying them out, is whether that loyalty has any limit.

Created in the aftermath of the September 11 attack, the Department of Homeland Security is a buttoned-up place with leaders who generally try to project steady resolve. Mullin brings more emotion to the job. Despite his tough-guy image, he struggles to hold back tears when he talks about his family. He got choked up during his confirmation hearing in March talking about his father’s work ethic and the devotion of his wife, Christie, whom he “fell in love with in third grade.” His eyes welled up during a budget hearing last month when he talked about sex-trafficking victims and confronting “evil in the world.” And he breaks down when talking about the brain injury his son survived in 2020, a story that also explains his personal devotion to Trump.

Mullin’s son Jim was 15 years old when he took a blow to the head during a wrestling match and collapsed. The boy’s pulse dropped, and his lips turned blue. When Jim woke up in the hospital 26 hours later, he didn’t recognize his parents and had the motor skills of a toddler. “He’s a totally different kid,” Mullin later recalled. “We almost lost him.” But when the teenager was asked who the president was, his father says, he knew. Trump was delighted when he heard this. The president offered his plane to fly Jim to a rehab clinic in California and showed deep concern for the boy’s condition, visiting him and calling every week to check on his “buddy” for a year and a half. It was Trump’s affection, Mullin said, that helped Jim reclaim his memories and stay motivated. “We were acquaintances before that,” Mullin told a Senate panel earlier this year. “We’ve been friends ever since.”

Mullin declared that he would follow Trump “into any situation”—and he has. Not long after Jim’s injury, Mullin joined the president in falsely claiming that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen, a position he stuck to even after he directly confronted rioters as they tried to break into the House chamber on January 6. As a senator, Mullin championed the president’s massive spending bill last year, even though he’d first run for office as a fiscal hawk. And in March, when Trump asked Mullin to replace the scandal-ridden Noem at DHS, Mullin gave up what could have been a long congressional career for a job often described as one of the worst in Washington: a political hot seat with grave security responsibilities, atop a bureaucratic mash-up of 22 agencies and subagencies, and 275,000 employees. Mullin, who said he was surprised by Trump’s request, didn’t think twice.“It’s hard to say no to someone you have that kind of connection with,” Jason Owens, a former Border Patrol chief who is also Mullin’s cousin, told me.

Jim Watson / AFP / Getty

President Trump shakes hands with the newly sworn-in secretary of homeland security on March 24, 2026.

The department has become far more partisan under Trump, and Mullin has done nothing to indicate that he’s likely to impose boundaries. Two days after the public reversal on vehicle stops, Mullin held a media briefing next door to the White House to push Trump’s favorite issue, echoing thin claims about election fraud while issuing threats—idle ones, legal experts say—to state officials who refuse to hand over voter data. When a reporter asked Mullin whether Trump had known in advance about the order halting ICE vehicle stops, Mullin dissembled, insisting that there was “no daylight” between them. “I’ve turned down the temperature of the stove, to try to get it correct, without boiling over,” Mullin said, touting record numbers of immigration arrests in recent weeks. Asked to clarify what he meant by “temperature,” Mullin said that he wanted less intense media coverage, not less aggressive ICE operations. “We’re turning up the heat on the streets,” he said.

Mullin is 48, compact and powerful, with a thick neck and tight-fitting suits that look as if they’re about to burst. His front teeth are fake, he says; the original ones were knocked out at a rodeo by a “horn to the mouth.” Bull riding, wrestling, and MMA fighting all involve short, performative bursts of action, not unlike partisan combat. Mullin shares his boss’s urge to lunge at any slight but also to befriend former enemies if they decide to embrace him. Sean O’Brien—the burly Teamsters boss whom Mullin told to “stand your butt up” and fight him during a 2023 Senate hearing—ended up endorsing Mullin’s nomination to lead DHS after the president encouraged the two to make peace. During the confirmation hearing, O’Brien sat just over his shoulder, next to Mullin’s wife, Christie.

Miller remains the driving force behind Trump’s immigration agenda, even though his influence over day-to-day DHS operations has diminished somewhat since the Minneapolis shootings. Mullin, like Miller, delights in hyperbolic attacks on Democrats, but the two men are in many ways stylistic opposites: Mullin is earnest and unpretentious; emotional, not cerebral. It’s almost impossible to imagine Miller crying in public.

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

Mullin has been a vocal supporter of ICE officers and Trump’s border wall, but he has also spoken sympathetically about hard-working immigrants who stay out of trouble, sounding more like a conventional pro-business Republican than a closed-borders ideologue. Some Republicans facing difficult midterm races hoped that Mullin would defuse some of the backlash to Trump’s heavy-handed tactics, while hard-liners have been wary of Mullin’s statements in support of legal immigration (they want none) and his emphasis on deporting dangerous criminals (they want more deportations than that).

Others have even loftier dreams for Mullin. I was surprised when a conservative former DHS official told me that he expected Trump to seek a major immigration compromise before the end of his term, as a legacy-building project and a bid to bring Latino voters back to the Republican Party. Mullin, who has impeccable MAGA credentials and improbably friendly relations with key Democrats, would be the ideal person to make such a deal, he told me.

Mullin’s desire to keep DHS out of the headlines was wishful thinking, if not naive. After a few weeks on the job, he threatened to curb international flights to U.S. airports that serve “sanctuary” jurisdictions that won’t help ICE, then backed off that idea after it was panned by business groups, members of both parties, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. Although there are no longer sweeping crackdowns on major cities for the time being, ICE arrests are ramping up again to roughly 2,000 a day nationwide, nearly double the pace since spring.

Andres Kudacki / Getty

ICE agents arrive to clear protesters from a gate outside the Delaney Hall Detention Facility in Newark, New Jersey.

Mullin has been trying to turn temperatures down in other ways. He has eased off warrantless searches and enforcement around sensitive locations such as courthouses and schools. ICE recruits are no longer being fast-tracked through the training academy, and Mullin has halted plans to house tens of thousands of detainees in retrofitted warehouses. But Mullin gets prickly when Democrats claim a victory that could make him look weak. When New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, boasted on social media last month that DHS had “backed down” from its plan to open an ICE jail in her state, Mullin reversed course. “DHS will NEVER back down,” he declared. “We will be keeping this site for a detention center.”

Mullin says that his personal mantra is “Love the people, love the call,” and he has applied that as a management approach at DHS. Employee morale suffered during Noem’s tenure, and Mullin has devoted time to rallying the workforce, earning the nickname “MAGA Mayorkas.” It’s meant as a favorable comparison to Joe Biden’s DHS secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, who was known within DHS for being kind to his staff even though Republicans treated him like the boogeyman.

In Mullin’s office at DHS headquarters, located in the former Saint Elizabeths psychiatric-hospital complex in Southeast Washington, the secretary carries around a little squishy pink ball. Since middle school, he has used it as a stress-relief device and fidget tool—he calls it his “pacifier”—and he’ll bounce it to center himself when he wants to make a point. He grew up with a “bad speech impediment,” he says, and the alphabet soup of agencies and subagencies at DHS tripped him up at first. Mullin has since learned to carefully enunciate initialisms such as “CBP” in the correct order but has a curious habit of referring to DHS simply as “Homeland,” like the TV show, and his role as the “secretary of Homeland.” It makes the job sound warmer—like heartland—while also subtly reinforcing the view, popular with Trump appointees at DHS, that the nation’s top immigration-enforcement official should be a kind of cultural and demographic policeman as well as a real one.

Michael M. Santiago / Getty

Mullin speaks during a July press conference in New York City.

[Read: ‘Maybe DHS was a bad idea’]

Mullin is only the second Native American to lead a Cabinet agency, but for much of his political career, he treated his Cherokee identity as more of a biographical footnote than a central feature. “I never knew I was special for being Cherokee until I came to D.C.,” Mullin said during a Senate hearing last year. “Where I’m from, everybody’s Indian, or wants to be.”

When Democrats pressed Mullin last month during a DHS budget hearing to address questions about discrimination and racial profiling by immigration-enforcement officers, Mullin used his Cherokee identity as a shield. Representative Lou Correa of California, a Democrat, asked Mullin whether his constituents needed to carry their U.S. passport to protect themselves from ICE. “I’m from Indian Country, and we got a lot of brown people around there too,” Mullin fired back. After Representative Al Green of Texas, another Democrat, accused Mullin of defending racism, Mullin interrupted: “Are you calling me racist?” Green, incensed, shouted at him to “shut up,” but Mullin kept on swinging. “No one will call me a racist. I’m Cherokee,” he said.

Mullin flies home to his family in Oklahoma most weekends on the same executive jet that Noem controversially purchased for the department, one of several missteps that led to her ouster. DHS told me that Mullin pays for his trips, but the department did not respond to follow-up questions about how his share of the cost is calculated. The Mullins—who married when they were teenagers—live in a large house in the Tulsa suburb of Bixby, where they moved a few years ago when their kids’ beloved wrestling coach took a job there. Mullin’s convoy of black SUVs has been spotted rolling around Bixby when he’s home. The couple have six children, three of whom are adopted. “I am proud to be pro-life,” Mullin has said of his large family.

I went to northeast Oklahoma, where Mullin grew up, to gain a better understanding of his origins and his divided life between home and Washington, D.C. Although much of the state is flat, and rich in oil and gas, the 14 counties that compose the Cherokee Nation are a gentle landscape of forests, rivers, and cattle pastures in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains.

Mullin was dragged on social media after asserting his Cherokee identity during the hearing, because he appears white. He is one of more than 460,000 enrolled members of the country’s largest federally recognized tribe. Eligibility is based on genealogical lineage, not on physical appearance or a minimum “blood quantum.” Members must trace direct lineage to a Cherokee ancestor inscribed in the Dawes Rolls, a federal registry of tribal members in Oklahoma kept from 1898 to 1914. Chuck Hoskin Jr., the chief of the Cherokee Nation, told me that he estimates that the majority of enrolled members have one-eighth or less Cherokee DNA. People who see Mullin “may say, ‘That doesn’t fit my perception of what a Native American should be,’” Hoskin said. “But it’s very much statistically who we are.”

Other Cherokee members I met described their tribal heritage as Mullin does, as a source of pride but not necessarily the defining feature of their life. It’s also a source of social-welfare benefits. Cherokee identity has long been bound up in the tribe’s relationship to the federal government; enrollments surged during the creation of the Dawes Rolls, Julie L. Reed, a historian at the University of Tulsa, told me. In the mid-20th century, more white-passing members were eager to assimilate and downplay their heritage. Things have come full circle in recent decades, Reed said, the result of government benefits, federal-contracting advantages, and a resurgent pride in Cherokee identity. “People whose families had distanced themselves from the Cherokee Nation for all sorts of reasons over the course of the 20th century found their way back once the Nation really started to have real economic, political, and social impacts on the surrounding area,” Reed said.

The Cherokee Nation, whose chief is an elected official, is an economic juggernaut with annual revenues of more than $3 billion from casinos, federal contracts, and an array of tribe-owned businesses. One of the region’s largest employers, the Nation has invested more than $1.2 billion into capital projects in recent years, according to Hoskin. Tahlequah, the Cherokee capital, is a thriving midsize town, with chain stores along the highways and a welcoming, well-maintained historic district. There’s a new medical complex, along with new community centers, senior care, playgrounds, and schools, some offering Cherokee-language immersion programs.

Oklahoma was solidly Democratic for decades after it became the 46th state, in 1907, especially after the New Deal brought federal jobs and benefits to counties that were among the nation’s poorest. Benny Denton, an 85-year-old rancher who lives near the Mullin-family homestead, told me that when he was growing up, “I didn’t know of anybody who actually starved to death. But there wasn’t a rabbit in the field or a fish in the river.” The Cherokee Nation, whose government is nonpartisan, has spent the past several decades building the kind of cradle-to-grave welfare state once contemplated in the New Deal, even as Democrats have virtually disappeared from Oklahoma public office.

The ranch where Mullin grew up is less than a mile from the Arkansas state line, outside the tiny town of Westville, at the end of a narrow road winding past battered houses and trailers. A tall metal fence surrounds the 1,600-acre property, its gates engraved with the large M of the family logo. Mullin is the youngest of seven children, and friends and neighbors of the family spoke highly of his parents as hardworking, devout, and down-to-earth. Mullin’s father has a reputation for being somewhat stern, and he disciplined his kids with a belt; his mother is known for being warm, chatty, and a prodigious baker of cookies. Mullin was named after her brothers, Mark and Wayne. John Garrett, the 84-year-old chief justice of the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court, has known the family for decades and remembers Mullin accompanying his father to plumbing calls as a teenager. He was ambitious, a “go-getter,” Garrett told me. “He just had a lot of energy.”

Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call / Getty

Mullin, then a member of the House, gives a tour of the Capitol Rotunda to friends in 2016.

[Read: High stakes, and a low bar, for Markwayne Mullin at DHS]

The state’s shift to the Republican Party happened during those teen years, and the party’s attacks on “big government” found traction in a region with a fraught relationship to federal agencies that many Cherokee both depended on and resented. Mullin’s father embodied the change. He was a small-business owner who didn’t hide his frustrations with the IRS. Mullin was a devoted son who ran errands for his father. “You wouldn’t want to get in his father’s way,” said Denton, who owned the hardware store in town.

Mullin enrolled in college on a wrestling scholarship but left to help run the family plumbing business. Over the years, he grew the company—known for its signature red vans and its slogan, “The Red Rooter”—and became its pitchman in commercials. Working around construction sites in the Tulsa metro area was probably when Mullin first had experience with immigrant laborers, people I spoke with there told me; eastern Oklahoma was not a destination for immigrants when Mullin was growing up. Records show that Mullin Plumbing has earned more than $520,000 in federal contracts since 2010, mostly through the Indian Health Service. Mullin Plumbing was listed as minority-owned, Native American–owned, American Indian–owned, and a “small disadvantaged business,” but according to contracting records, those categories were not a factor in the awards.

In 2011, before he entered politics, Mullin began hosting a weekly radio show, House Talk, modeled in part after NPR’s Car Talk, to dispense advice on home improvement and repairs. Friends of the family told me that they think Mullin’s father pushed him to run for Congress around the same time to deploy his combativeness against environmental regulators and tax collectors. Mullin railed against the Affordable Care Act, opposing mandates that would require him to offer coverage to his employees despite having access himself to free health care as a tribal member. Mullin’s 2012 campaign slogan was “A rancher. A businessman. Not a politician.” When he arrived in Washington, he said, he didn’t know how to put on a tie.

Mullin positioned himself firmly among the most conservative members of Congress, proposing, for example, a total abortion ban, even when a mother’s life is in danger. When he first took office, he pledged to serve a maximum of three terms, then broke the promise in 2018. Mullin explained the decision in a video, seated with Christie, saying that he “didn’t understand politics” when he got to Washington. With Trump in office, Mullin said, he could have a bigger impact if he stayed on the job. It turned out to be the most pivotal moment of his career, consolidating his transition from D.C. outsider to MAGA insider. “The first lesson I learned up there is, you gotta build relationships,” Mullin said.

A private-equity company acquired Mullin Plumbing in 2021 for an undisclosed sum, estimated in the tens of millions of dollars’ worth of shares on the same day of the sale. The next year, Mullin won a special election for an open Senate seat. In both chambers, he was one of the few lawmakers without a four-year college degree, but his recent financial disclosures show an estimated net worth somewhere from $29 million to $97 million.

John Bankel, a GOP activist in the area who knows the family, told me that he doubts that DHS will be Mullin’s last job in politics. Christie Mullin believes deeply in her husband’s political talents and “is the one who pushes Markwayne to the next level,” he said. Bankel told me that he thinks Mullin could run for president someday.

Anna Moneymaker / Getty

Mullin walks through the Capitol in 2025.

Friends of the family told me that Mullin has sometimes regretted not serving in the military or law enforcement. The DHS-secretary job gives him a chance to be a man of action, with a lead role in national security and law enforcement. Mullin’s grandfather, who was Cherokee and a competitive bull rider, served in World War II, and last year, Mullin cited his role in liberating Nazi concentration camps when condemning a group of young Republicans who’d made racist and anti-Semitic statements in group chats.

Mullin has tried to burnish his own reputation for daring, though in a cryptic way. He has told interviewers that he performed “special assignments” outside of the U.S. military. After the Taliban took Kabul in 2021, Mullin asked the U.S. ambassador to Tajikistan to help him bring in a large amount of cash so he could rent a helicopter and lead a dangerous mission into Afghan territory to rescue a mother and her four children, all U.S. citizens. Mullin threatened U.S.-embassy staff when they turned him down. After Trump nominated him for the DHS job, Mullin told senators that the “smell” of war was something he would “never forget.” When Democrats asked what he meant, Mullin said that he’d taken a classified trip in 2016 as a member of Congress that required specialized conflict-zone training. But he refused to provide more details. “There’s another side of my bio that I don’t talk about, nor will I,” Mullin previously said on a podcast, in no great hurry to dispel the intrigue.

Soon, it came out that Mullin had told Senate colleagues during a 2023 closed-door meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah II that he and other Americans were once rescued when the king sent his personal helicopter, because they could not get help from the U.S. military, according to The New York Times. Mullin described blood all over the helicopter. Had Mullin made a top-secret trip into war-torn Syria? Mullin has refused to say, and no one from the administration has cleared up the mystery.

Not far from Mullin’s old high school, in Stilwell, is a cemetery with a historic marker that commemorates the end of the Trail of Tears, the 1,000-mile journey made by thousands of Cherokee who were forced out of their ancestral homes in southeastern Appalachia under the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The ordeal remains central to Cherokee identity—it’s the foundational story of the Cherokee Nation as well as its greatest tragedy. From 1838 to 1839, more than 3,500 Cherokee arrived at the site in Stilwell, an official “disbandment depot” just outside the borders of the settled United States. The deported families waited in lines to receive government provisions and were sent off into the forest to rebuild their lives. Most of them spent the winter in tents around the edges of the depot site. Some of the more than 1,000 Cherokee who died making the journey are buried in the Stilwell cemetery, according to the National Park Service.

Removal remains an official government term, though today it’s used primarily at DHS to tally ICE deportations. There is no comparison, of course, between the removal of immigrants who enter the United States illegally and the relocation of the Cherokee and other tribes. That doesn’t make deportation less fraught or painful for those who develop deep ties to the United States or have children here. Taking people from their home and separating families are grave and consequential acts.

Mullin so far has engaged little with these messy realities, at least publicly. Mostly, he has echoed the rhetoric of Trump officials who prefer to depict ICE enforcement as a matter of public safety focused on the removal of dangerous criminals. (ICE data show that only a small percentage of deportees—ranging from about 5 to 15 percent—have violent felony convictions.) Like Tom Homan, the White House “border czar,” Mullin has seemed most animated when talking about the trafficking and abuse of underage migrants who arrived in record numbers during the Biden administration, an issue that lacks the moral complexity of much of ICE’s other work.

Republican lawmakers used the reconciliation process last month to score $70 billion in additional funding for Trump’s immigration crackdown over the next three years, adding to the $170 billion they’d obtained in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last summer without a single Democratic vote. Trump has nominated a Mullin loyalist, the former Oklahoma state trooper Lance Schroyer, to be the next ICE director.

The flood of congressional funding and recent Supreme Court rulings in favor of tougher enforcement have positioned Trump’s mass-deportation plan for takeoff. That leaves Mullin, who launched his political career attacking big government, as the face of one of the largest-ever law-enforcement operations in U.S. history. Mullin’s “Homeland” department will soon have twice as many ICE officers on the streets, and all of the money it needs to round up and deport 1 million people a year. Mullin would like that to happen quietly, but it will likely trigger new pushback and protest, testing just how far he’s willing to go for Trump.

Marie-Rose Sheinerman and Isabel Ruehl contributed to this report.

*Illustration sources: Jim Watson / Getty; Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis / Getty; Elizabeth Fernandez / Getty; Chip Somodevilla / Getty.

The Wingman

2026-07-20T09:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Philip Cheung

Read more about the Democrats who might run for president in 2028 here.

“My wife, Gabby, was shot in the head.”

Obviously, I knew this. Senator Mark Kelly’s wife, the former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, was shot in the head and grievously wounded in a mass shooting outside a Tucson Safeway in 2011. It was one of the most notorious acts of political violence in America.

In several recent conversations with Kelly, however, I was struck by how often and how bluntly he repeated these exact words. Kelly, a retired Navy pilot and former NASA astronaut, seems to appreciate the curt repetition of the statement: My wife was shot in the head. It captures how stark and defining this incident was, and continues to be, in his life.

The near-assassination ended Giffords’s career in Congress and his in space. She was left with acute damage to the area of her brain that controls speech. Kelly was compelled by circumstance to create a new course for himself as a caregiver to his wife, Democratic senator, possible candidate for president, and severe critic of President Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth.

Fifteen years after the shooting, Kelly and Giffords remain a singular entity in American public life. I went to Arizona to join them at a series of events around Phoenix. We met at a coffee shop. It was a Friday afternoon, with triple-digit heat, and had already been a grind of a day for both of them. From our meeting, they would go to a reception, followed by a dinner, and then Giffords would fly to Louisiana, where she would attend a memorial service for eight children who’d been slaughtered in a mass shooting a few weeks earlier.

Interviewing Giffords and Kelly was like nothing I’ve ever experienced in 25 years of reporting on politics. In our time together, I kept snagging on the same inescapable question: How would their unparalleled dynamic play within the merciless spectacle of a presidential campaign?

“I’m Gabby.”

She says this by way of introduction, and as a wistful acknowledgment of her name’s cruel irony. Even by politician standards, Giffords was quite the chatterbox. In their joint memoir, Gabby: A Story of Courage, Love, and Resilience, Kelly estimates that before she was shot, Giffords did about 60 or 70 percent of the talking between them. Kelly was the reticent one in the couple, happy to let his wife gobble up the silences. The massacre left Giffords with a condition known as “non-fluent aphasia.” It does not affect intelligence, or ability to comprehend events or remember stories—only to relay them. After Tucson, Kelly says, he started carrying 95 percent of their conversations.

During my visit, Kelly often finished Giffords’s sentences and elaborated on what she was trying to say. She speaks in bursts of words and short fragments. It’s evident when she is trying to express something but her voice is not cooperating. She shakes her head, moves her mouth, rocks back and forth.

When we were first getting settled at the café, Kelly walked over with a blueberry muffin and a large cup of ice water.

“Drink your water!” Giffords declared. “China. Drink more water.”

What did this mean?

“You know what people say in China when you sneeze?” Kelly explained. “Drink more water.”

Giffords chuckled—which she does a lot. Kelly often joins her. They share a dry, absurdist, and understandably dark sense of humor. It’s a bit of a platitude to say this about political couples, but Kelly really does project as a different person around his spouse. His usual solo mode is quiet intensity. With Giffords present, he becomes much more engaged, as if he’s trying to draw out whatever he can of his wife’s former extroversion.

Mark Wilson / Getty

Gabby Giffords and Mark Kelly appear at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about gun control in 2013.

“They’re very symbiotic,” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a close friend of the couple who was elected to Congress with Giffords in 2006, told me. As an example, Gillibrand said that Giffords might throw out a single word to prompt Kelly to tell a whole story.

I watched this pattern several times. At one point, Kelly mentioned a trip that he and Giffords had taken to Western China early in their relationship.

“China,” Giffords said. “Gorilla. Monkey.”

“Oh, panda,” Kelly said, and took it from there. They had visited a panda preserve. For $80, visitors could be photographed holding a newborn.

“Then Gabby’s like, ‘I want to hold the baby panda,’” Kelly told me. A woman at the preserve told Kelly that for $35, she could offer a photograph with a less adorable panda. Kelly referred to it as a “raccoon,” but it was in fact a scruffy little red panda. Or “Budget Panda,” as Giffords called it.

“Danger, danger,” Giffords said.

“Oh yes, it’s endangered,” Kelly said. They still have the photo of Giffords holding Budget Panda.

“She has a smile on her face,” he said of Giffords. “But you know what she’s really thinking?”

“Fuck!” Giffords said, and they laughed again.

Giffords can be mischievous in what she encourages Kelly to say, sometimes leading him into impolitic stories. At one point, I asked Kelly whether he gets more questions about what it’s like to be a fighter pilot, an astronaut, or a senator.

“Oh, diapers,” Giffords interjected.

Kelly translated: “How do you go to the bathroom in space? I get a lot of those questions.”

“Skull,” Giffords said at another point.

“Yeah, we still got Gabby’s skull,” Kelly explained. “Like, her real skull.”

After she was shot, doctors performed an emergency craniectomy on Giffords, removing a large portion of her skull to reduce pressure on her swelling brain. Kelly asked the doctor what would happen to the original chunk of bone. “It will go in the incinerator,” the doctor told him. “And I was like, Gabby’s in a coma right now. I think she might want it.”

“We stuck it in the freezer,” Kelly told me—in a Tupperware container. They still have it too. “Next to the turkey,” Kelly said.

I thought this might be a joke, but it was not. Kelly seemed to notice me looking perhaps slightly taken aback. “It’s not in the freezer we use every day,” he clarified. “It’s a separate freezer.”

Here are some things that Mark Kelly has survived: a turbulent and sometimes violent childhood, 39 combat missions in Desert Storm, a missile blowing up just above his plane, and four space-shuttle voyages (two as mission commander). He has also braved the near-murder of the person he loves most and watched her get deluged with death threats for years afterward.

It is fair to observe that Pete Hegseth cannot scare him.

Kelly, who is 62, presents as a somewhat reserved, even sheepish, figure, which can belie the crowded and suspenseful life he has led—and the chilling conflict he now finds himself in with his own government. He also has a knack for understatement.

“I mean, it’s not great to wake up one morning and to find out the president wants you hanged,” Kelly said.

He was referring to a series of Truth Social posts from Trump last November. Kelly and five of his Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate had made a video reminding U.S. service members of their duty not to obey illegal orders. Trump responded by accusing the lawmakers of sedition and threatening to seek their execution. When I asked Kelly how he first learned of the president’s foreboding pronouncement, Kelly conceded that he did not in fact “wake up” to the news. He had been sitting next to another one of the video participants, his Senate colleague Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, during a mid-morning briefing on Venezuela. A security officer walked over and passed Slotkin a note from an aide.

“It says something like, ‘President called for your arrest,’” Kelly told me.

Slotkin left the room, came back a few minutes later, and informed Kelly that Trump had called for his arrest too. Slotkin confirmed this account to me. “I just slid the note over to him,” she said. “And we just had a whole conversation with our eyes.”

In addition to the president issuing a “punishable by DEATH!” decree via Truth Social, he also called for the video participants to be “ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL.” Hegseth followed up with a letter of censure to Kelly, seeking to reduce his military rank and pension, and threatening “criminal prosecution.” (Of the lawmakers involved, only Kelly served more than 20 years in the armed forces, and thus has retired-military status and a continuing relationship with the Department of Defense.)

On a cloudy morning in early May, I sat with Kelly and Giffords in the back of a sedan headed to a federal courthouse in Washington. Kelly would be appearing before a panel of appeals-court judges in connection to a lawsuit he had filed against Hegseth to block his intended punishments.

“I think this is the first time in our country’s history that a president has ordered, or has called for, the execution of members of Congress,” Kelly told me.

This is the kind of historical distinction that you’d think would shake even the most jaded naval aviator. Yet during the short ride to the courthouse, he and Giffords appeared quite unbothered by any of this. Kelly spent much of the drive talking about how people often ask him his view on whether Pluto meets the criteria for being a full-size planet. The topic then shifted (as topics do) to the cryonically frozen head of the baseball legend Ted Williams, which is currently housed at the Alcor life-extension facility in Scottsdale, Arizona. “I’m Ted Williams’s head’s senator,” Kelly pointed out.

[Missy Ryan: The Mark Kelly case is bigger than it seems]

Kelly started reading headlines from his phone about an old controversy involving the allegedly shoddy treatment of the Splendid Splinter’s remains: “Williams’ Head Abused at Facility,” he declared merrily.

“It’s hard to get me nervous,” Kelly said as we arrived at the courthouse. “You think about, like, Trump saying he wants me hanged,” he told me later—“all right, I’ll deal with it.”

This was the inescapable subtext of pretty much everything we discussed over several hours of interviews: Adversity is extremely relative to Kelly. It is a notion that he internalized a long time ago, but especially after Giffords was shot.

If anything, being targeted by Trump and Hegseth appears more invigorating than ominous to Kelly. Not to be crass, but if you’re a Democrat, having Trump call for your execution can be excellent for business. Especially so if you are a Democrat who, like Kelly, is “seriously considering” a presidential run.

Since arriving to the Senate in 2020, Kelly’s storybook résumé and the goodwill he’s accrued as Giffords’s spouse have granted him a high level of admiration that has yet to translate to a high level of excitement for him as a potential standard-bearer. He was a finalist to be Kamala Harris’s running mate in 2024, but was passed over. He is seen as a serious and respected lawmaker, steeped in such matters as national defense and border security. But in his relatively brief time in Washington, he has struggled to acquire main-character status or a readily identifiable fight that could burnish the profile of an ascendant national candidate.

Ting Shen / Bloomberg / Getty

Kelly was elected to the Senate in a special election in 2020, filling the seat that had been held by John McCain.

He sounds eager to be viewed as a cause célèbre. “This is not about me,” Kelly often insists, as politicians are wont to do (usually at events featuring themselves, and devoted to their career advancement).

At his May 7 court hearing, Kelly was trailed by about a dozen reporters and cameras, and a campaign-worthy entourage. After the session, which lasted about 90 minutes, he delivered a brief, ostentatiously defiant speech in front of the courthouse entrance on Constitution Avenue. “The secretary of defense picked the wrong guy,” Kelly said.

He was flanked by Giffords; his younger daughter, Claire (one of two grown kids from his first marriage); a former Navy colleague; and several other veterans and retired service members. The courthouse loomed directly behind him, and American flags flew overhead while, at the next building over, a massive likeness of Trump’s face dominated the front of the Labor Department’s headquarters.

“They’re trying to send a message to other retired veterans, and really to all of us,” Kelly said. “If you say something that the president, or this administration, does not like, they’re going to come after you.”

As much as Kelly might be milking this attention, being subjected to such a high-level threat can arouse serious menace from the acolyte mobs. After Trump’s posts about the lawmakers in the video, Slotkin told me that her father, in the last weeks of his life, was swatted in the middle of the night. Kelly said he received more death threats in a single day than he would typically get in several months. (For what it’s worth, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt later insisted that Trump in fact did not want the lawmakers to be executed.)

Kelly told me that he tries not to worry, because he is oriented to probabilities. “I’m a believer in math,” Kelly said. “So, when you look at Desert Storm, you look at all the combat missions flown, and the number of people killed—flying on the space shuttle is probably 10 times more dangerous.” And both, certainly, are much more dangerous than his current profession, he said. Statistically speaking, the universe of contemporary U.S. politicians who have actually taken a bullet is minuscule.

“But not in my family,” Kelly noted. “I thought I had the risky job—until January 8th of 2011.”

Giffords was scheduled to hold one of her regular “Congress on Your Corner” meetings with constituents in front of a Tucson Safeway that day. She had just been elected to her third term, even as Republicans had retaken control of the House in a torrent of Tea Party–driven anger over the Affordable Care Act. At about 10:10 a.m., a few minutes into the event, a gunman named Jared Lee Loughner opened fire.

Kelly was in Houston, training for a space-shuttle mission. He learned of the shooting in a call from one of Giffords’s staffers. As he flew to Tucson with his mother and his two teenage daughters, NPR reported that Giffords had died. Kelly, typically a non-demonstrative engineer, retreated to the airplane bathroom and sobbed. When he emerged 20 minutes later, he called the hospital and learned that Giffords was in fact still clutching to life. University Medical Center in Tucson corrected the media reports.

Giffords woke from a medically induced coma about a week later. Loughner’s bullet had ripped through the left hemisphere of her brain, entering over her left eye and exiting out the back of her skull. She could barely move, and could speak only a few words at a time, though it was clear that her brain worked well enough to know that something unimaginable had occurred. “What is happening to me?” she kept saying.

Kelly was diligent in documenting this period in which it all changed, taking video of her ordeal from close in. Giffords was hooked up to tubes and monitors, and her head was shaved. Some of the footage appears in the 2022 documentary Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down. The video shows, more than anything visible today, Giffords’s despair. As happens with aphasia, she perseverates on random words. “Chicken, chicken, chicken” keeps tumbling out. At one point, she puts her head down and just cries.

The shooting scrambled each of their plans entirely. Although Kelly had already traveled multiple times into space and seemingly reached the pinnacle of his career, Giffords had very much been rising in hers. She was hailed as a natural politician, a performer from a young age who had starred in music and theater productions. (Gwyneth Paltrow is her second cousin.) She grew up in the Tanque Verde Valley, northeast of Tucson, and after college in California and a stint in New York, returned home to run her family business, El Campo Tire. She built her local celebrity as a motormouthed pitchwoman, appearing in TV ads in which she would order viewers to “Race into the El Campo Service Center today, before the offer is gone!” Giffords launched her first campaign in 2000, for the Arizona House of Representatives. Six years later, at 36, she won her U.S. House seat and was immediately touted as a future senator. She was a vibrant speaker, hawkish on border security, and, yes, a proud gun owner.

Kelly and Giffords met in 2003, on a trip to China for an international conference of young leaders. She was a state legislator, and he was at NASA. They reconnected at another conference, this one in Arizona, a year later, by which point Kelly was divorced and Giffords was single. In November 2004, Giffords was doing research for death-penalty-related legislation and invited Kelly to join her on a tour of an Arizona state prison in Florence. “We went to death row on our first date,” Kelly says. He recalls at one point stepping into the actual gas chamber.

Before long, Giffords started showing up to Kelly’s rocket launches in Houston. Kelly came to Giffords’s campaign events in Tucson. As political sidekicks went, Kelly jumped straight out of the catalog: the sturdy astronaut, content to toil in the wings with his intricate machinery. He sent her emails from space. “Tell my wife I love her very much; she knows,” Kelly said, quoting David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” while appearing via video at a U2 concert, from the International Space Station.

Philip Cheung for The Atlantic

“Certainly, if I was not married to Gabby, I would not be sitting here,” Kelly said of his role in the Senate.

Beyond the storybook optics, Giffords and Kelly were also well-matched workaholics with high-velocity careers. It was a commuter arrangement: After they were married, Kelly continued to live in Houston, while Giffords split time between Washington and Arizona. “We did not live together until the day she got shot,” Kelly told me.

Before the shooting, the couple had been trying to have children. Giffords, then 40, desperately wanted to become a mother and was undergoing fertility treatments at Bethesda Naval Hospital. She’d had an appointment to have an embryo implanted on Monday, January 10. After the shooting, that dream, too, quickly faded. She embarked instead on a prolonged and agonizing rehabilitation.

In addition to her difficulty speaking, Giffords was left with severely limited peripheral vision in one eye, and suffered partial paralysis and motor impairment on the right side of her body. She uses a walking stick, sometimes a wheelchair for longer distances. Flights can be difficult. She travels with a full-time health aide. Yet Giffords keeps a punishing schedule, much of it connected to her anti-gun-violence organization. She meets with victims and families, attends vigils and funerals, and spends more than half of her time on the road.

Periodically, Giffords breaks into song. Although the speech part of her brain was ravaged, the music area remains intact, Kelly told me. Lyrics flow more easily for her than words.

“The sun will come out tomorrow,” she sang on the topic of the Democrats’ prospects in the midterms this fall. “Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, come what may!” On other occasions, when I referred to something that had occurred the day before, Giffords would chime in with, “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away.”

“Yesterday” and “Tomorrow” are Giffords’s go-to refrains. Her life with Kelly carries a hard line of demarcation between the before and the after.

Kelly grew up in West Orange, New Jersey, in an Irish Catholic household of little outward affection and high tumult. Richard and Patricia Kelly—both police officers—were at constant odds. “One of the worst feelings in the world is, you’re in a deep sleep and then you slowly wake up to your parents screaming at one another and throwing things,” Scott Kelly, Mark’s identical twin brother, told me. “We were raised in that environment of, you know, a lot of cops, alcohol, some violence, definitely a lot of drunkenness.” The twins’ general approach, for much of their youth, was to try to protect their mother as best they could and stay occupied outside the house. After getting their driver’s licenses, the Kelly boys worked as EMTs, rushing in ambulances to the scenes of shootings, stabbings, and car crashes.

Mark said he never realized there was anything unusual about his upbringing. “When you’re a kid, that’s your experience,” he told me. “So, you’re not so sure, like, Is this normal or not normal? And you realize later it’s not normal.”

Kelly described his father as an alcoholic, but one who did not drink every day and rarely at home: “It was, like, a Friday, Saturday-night thing at the bar with his cop friends.” In some ways, Kelly added, he looked up to his father. Richard Kelly coached his sons’ Little League teams, worked as a detective, and “was putting bad guys in jail.” He also investigated mobsters, Mark told me. (New Jersey in the ’70s and ’80s, go figure.) With some pride, Kelly noted that in The Sopranos, Tony went to West Orange High School.

In his memoir with Giffords, Kelly writes that he and Scott were “borderline juvenile delinquents” growing up, always getting into trouble, accidents, and fights. They were late academic bloomers. Mark was the first to become captivated by a career in outer space; his twin, younger by six minutes, became an astronaut as well. Mark had no interest in politics, let alone a career in it. He wanted to pursue the moon, not the swamp.

But after the horror of January 2011 and Giffords’s forced retirement, Kelly began to get mentioned as a potential political candidate himself. He first ran for Senate in 2020 to fill the seat vacated by John McCain’s death in 2018; he defeated Republican Martha McSally, and was reelected to a full six-year term in 2022. I asked Kelly what had made him decide to run for office. First off, he said, he was concerned about “the trajectory of our country with Donald Trump in the White House.” This did not exactly make him a brave and lonely voice in the Democratic wilderness. But Kelly traces his particular aha moment to a get-out-the-vote rally that he attended in Phoenix before the 2018 midterms. A woman, probably in her 30s, approached him.

“She just stands next to me and says, ‘Hey, my son has Down Syndrome. And I’m terrified he’s going to lose his health insurance. Would you please consider running for the U.S. Senate?’” Kelly told the woman he would think about it.

As political origin stories go, this one feels quite labored. It seemed dubious to me, given that Kelly’s name had come up in the past, that it had never occurred to him to run for something until a woman he met at a GOTV rally brought it up. “I don’t know if I wanted to be in the Senate badly enough,” he told me. “But when I focus on something, I work really hard at it.”

Kelly makes frequent cracks about the astonishing sequence of events that landed him in his current peacocking profession. Before a taped interview at a Phoenix TV studio, he pulled out a makeup brush and applied foundation to dull the shine of his bald head. “I used to be the commander of the space shuttle,” he said, shaking his head. “Now I carry my own makeup.”

After the interview, Kelly headed off on a visit to the John S. McCain III VFW Post 7401, a half hour away in Chandler. When we arrived, he spent about 10 minutes serviceably glad-handing his way through a front bar area, dressed in an old flight jacket and camouflage cap with NAVY in big print across the front. At least two of the people Kelly met urged him to run for president. He said he’d not yet decided, though he is taking many of the so-called necessary steps, including traveling to South Carolina, Nevada, and New Hampshire in recent months.

Rebecca Noble / Getty

Kelly speaks at John S. McCain III VFW Post 7401 on May 8 in Chandler, Arizona.

His speeches need work. Kelly’s voice is more conversational than booming. His words sync awkwardly with robotic hand motions. When Kelly tries to amplify, it sounds like he’s straining. He’s used to working in tight places rather than big rooms.

At the VFW, Cindy McCain, the widow of the late senator, introduced Kelly. He moved quickly to his skirmish with the administration. “I said something the president didn’t like,” he said. “Anybody see this?” Nods and scattered applause across the room. “And the president said I should be hanged, executed, prosecuted,” Kelly said. He paused for effect. “The guy couldn’t even get the order right!”

Kelly’s main message was grounded in the old soldiers’ credo: that “to fight for a cause larger than yourself,” as McCain used to say, was its own reward. It was a friendly audience. He took questions, and came well briefed and well versed in legislative detail.

One question, however, exposed a weakness. A woman named Jennifer Worthy told a gutting story about her husband, Marine Sergeant Joseph Worthy, who was battling Stage 4 colon cancer. He had fought in Desert Storm, where he was almost certainly exposed to lethal toxins from burning oil fields. At the end of her question, Jennifer choked up. Her husband, she said, was getting chemotherapy treatment right at that hour. She asked Kelly if he would take a picture with her that she could bring back. He nodded yes, and the crowd broke into applause as Jennifer wiped away more tears.

For a politician, the instinctive move in this situation is easy: hug the woman. She was standing about 10 feet away and clearly in crisis. It should not take an elite pain-feeler like Bill Clinton to recognize this. But Kelly came off oddly oblivious. He stood in place and kept glancing around the room. He retreated into his sound bites and talked about himself: how treacherous it was for him to fly missions during the Gulf War after Saddam Hussein’s forces set fire to the oil fields. “I was there on an aircraft carrier, the USS Midway,” he said. “I’m flying around there, and the sky is black.” (Kelly did pose for a photo with Worthy and had a brief visit with her after his remarks.)

When we spoke later, Kelly acknowledged that his political personality is a work in progress. His background, he says, sets him apart from that of most other senators. In a body dominated by lawyers and debate-team types, he “brings the training of an engineer, the clarity of a tactician from his time as a naval aviator, and the cool-under-pressure of an astronaut,” his Democratic colleague Jon Ossoff, of Georgia, told me. Kelly excels in quiet, stressful, and often collaborative environments—like a spacecraft or, as Ossoff said, the Senate Intelligence Committee, where he and Kelly serve together.

[Helen Lewis: The front-runner]

Still, it’s hard to imagine a successful presidential candidate that doesn’t possess at least some knack for the performative conviviality required of big-ticket politicians.

“In my defense,” Kelly told me, “if you look at people that are, like, the normal stereotypical engineers on, like, a spectrum”—he made a hand motion, presumably to convey a spectrum of personality types—he grades himself as more gregarious than most. “I’m much more comfortable now giving random people hugs,” Kelly said.

By contrast, Kelly told me at the coffee shop in Phoenix, Giffords is always giving random people hugs—whether or not they want to be hugged.

“Airport,” Giffords said.

“She gives a lot of hugs at the airport,” Kelly confirmed. He turned to her.

“Well, I mean, you just kissed a dude on his face, like, an hour ago,” he said. “Who was that guy?”

He nudged his wife and shook his head. She smiled.

The three of us spoke for a while about the brutality of politics these days. How do they tolerate it?

“Servant, servant, servant,” Giffords said.

“You can’t live your life paranoid,” Kelly added.

I took this to mean, basically, that they are servants to a cause greater than themselves. And it comes with occupational hazards they both know too well.

“Gabby, do you worry about somebody else coming up to you and shooting you?” Kelly asked her. She shook her head.

“I mean, if somebody decided to walk up to me and shoot me, not much I can do about it,” Kelly said. “Space shuttle blows up? Not much I can do about it.”

“So sad,” Giffords said.

It’s easy to sense an undercurrent of Kelly wanting to excel in politics in order to realize the full ambitions of his wife. He talks a lot these days about how he will not be “silenced” by Hegseth, and how he is standing up for others in doing so. (“There are 2 million retired service members like me that they want to silence,” he says repeatedly.) One parallel Kelly does not draw explicitly, but that is evident to anyone who is familiar with Giffords’s story, is that he will not be silenced by the defense secretary just as his wife would not be silenced by her would-be assassin. “Mr. Loughner, you may have put a bullet through her head, but you haven’t put a dent in her spirit,” Kelly told the gunman in 2012 at his sentencing hearing. (Loughner is serving seven consecutive life terms in prison, plus an additional 140 years tacked on for the victims he injured and maimed.)

Listening to Kelly and Giffords, I was periodically struck by how their endeavors have been interwoven. “Certainly, if I was not married to Gabby, I would not be sitting here,” Kelly told me during one of our conversations in his Senate office. “And if she wasn’t shot, I mean, I wouldn’t be here, right?”

I wasn’t entirely sure at first what point Kelly was making. That if he hadn’t ever been attached to Giffords, he would not have been elected on his own? Or that most people know him only as a grieving spouse, and he was elected out of sympathy? When I asked Kelly to elaborate, he explained that if not for the shooting, he thinks his wife would have eventually been elected to the Senate. But because that was not possible for her, being Giffords’s husband had afforded him the statewide name recognition and political organization to do it himself.

Our last stop of the day in Arizona was a fundraising dinner for the state Democratic Party, officially christened the “Gabby Giffords Gala.” Kelly and Giffords headlined the program, which included a procession of local elected officials in front of about 1,000 party activists and appendages. In keeping with their professions, Kelly and Giffords have to do a lot of these banquets. They usually stand onstage together, and Kelly does most of the talking. Giffords might say a few words at the end, usually halting phrases:

“I chose to make a new start—to move ahead.”

“Do not look back.”

“Setbacks are hard.”

“I tell myself, move ahead.”

Giffords received her customary standing ovation at the banquet, along with chants of “Gabby, Gabby, Gabby.” Kelly then helped her down from the podium.

Kelly and Giffords are an inspiring couple to be around, and also not an easy one. A special kind of burden goes with being the surviving protagonists of a national tragedy. In general, when you say you’re running for president, the feel-good story ends. If we’ve learned anything over the past 10 years, it is the extraordinary capacity of people to be cruel in politics.

Kelly told me that he goes onto social media sometimes. He forces himself to read comment sections. “It thickens your skin a little bit,” he explained. “I see what they say.” I wondered how he would handle a political adversary going after his wife—calling her names, saying heartless things about her disability, deploying the kind of hateful language that Trump has empowered many of his supporters to use. It’s easy to imagine.

I asked Kelly, straight up, if he thought America was ready to have a disabled first lady.

“Hey,” he said, “in my opinion, we have a disabled president right now.”

He pivoted back to Giffords: how much of a role model she is, with all she has overcome. “The way she connects with people is unlike anybody else I’ve ever known,” Kelly said. “Before she was injured, people used to compare her with Bill Clinton.” His wife, he told me, can handle herself. “She’s been in this business,” he said. “And she had, you know, like the worst thing that any politician could have happen, right? She gets shot in the head.”

Kelly keeps his official letter of censure from Hegseth taped to the door of his Senate office. I hadn’t noticed it until he mentioned it to me. The document—dated January 5, 2026—is addressed to “Captain Kelly” and printed on “Department of War” stationery. It is three pages long, one of them crooked. Kelly told me that he hung the missive sloppily on purpose, to reflect his lack of respect for its contents and sender. Perhaps, he said, he should smear it with ketchup.

I asked Kelly why he displays the letter on his door.

“I think that, you know, the seriousness of this whole thing,” he said. “It’s good for me to be reminded of what’s at stake, and who these people are.”

Politically at least, it also can be good to remind as many people as possible that the Trump administration is targeting Mark Kelly. Kelly raised $12.5 million in the last quarter of 2025, much of it after November 24, when the Defense Department announced that it was investigating “serious allegations of misconduct” by the lawmakers in the “illegal orders” video. Kelly brought up his lawsuit against the defense secretary at every public event of his that I attended. (The panel of three D.C. judges has yet to announce a decision, although two of them signaled strong opposition to punishing Kelly at the May 7 hearing.) He always took care to identify the case by its docket name, Kelly v. Hegseth. I once referred to the litigants in the wrong order—Hegseth v. Kelly—and Kelly immediately corrected me.

In Phoenix, I asked Giffords the obligatory question: Does she want Kelly to run for president?

“All of it,” she said. “Yeah, go for it.”

“We’re a team” is another mantra of hers.

Philip Cheung for The Atlantic

Giffords and Kelly at their home in Tucson

Scott Kelly told me that he also wants his brother to run in 2028—and not just because then Mark could become the first identical-twin astronaut ever to reach the White House (unless I’m overlooking someone). “I’ve known him my whole life,” Scott said. “He doesn’t have the type of ego that he would think he can fix every problem and would be the savior to this country.” On the contrary, his brother is low-key, collaborative, and analytical. This might be precisely what the country is primed for after the Trump experience, Scott said.

During an office interview with Kelly in June, I asked him for an update on his thinking about running for president. His official position remained “considering it.” But he also made the point, in a variety of ways, that once he gets locked into an idea, he tends to go ahead and launch it. I took this to mean he is more likely than not to run.

As we were discussing this decision, Kelly talked about the experience of getting close to being Harris’s running mate in 2024. He clearly wanted it, more so than passed-over running mates usually admit. He was one of two runners-up—along with Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro—for the job that eventually went to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

[Tim Alberta: The operator]

In her campaign memoir, 107 Days, Harris lists a few concerns that she had about Kelly. One was that he had never experienced an “oh shit moment” in his political career. This is quite a remarkable statement. Harris added that she “couldn’t afford to test Mark Kelly in that ugly grinder” of a national campaign.

Kelly told me that he’d only “read parts” of Harris’s memoir. Presumably, these were the parts that corresponded to mentions of “Kelly, Mark.” He smiled when I suggested this and did not deny it. When I brought up that Harris said she was concerned that he wasn’t tested as a national candidate, Kelly grew more openly annoyed than I might have expected, given how beside the point the topic is now.

“What does that mean?” Kelly said. “I ran one of the most competitive Senate races in the country, in a swing state,” he continued. “My Senate races were harder than her Senate races.”

He also noted, sarcastically, that some people apparently found it charming that Walz asked for Diet Mountain Dew to drink during his VP interview. “Shapiro and I asked for water,” he said, smirking.

As I spent time around Kelly, I concluded that he would have been a good choice for Harris—and not just because he’d probably have done less harm than Walz did. Kelly struck me as having an ideal vice-presidential temperament. My question, then, is whether he could plausibly sell himself as the ringmaster in the chaotic circus of a modern presidency. In this age of infinite spotlights, people are obsessed with finding “alphas.” It helps to be a showman, and not to be boring. Trump is proof of how far that can get a person—and also where it can lead the country.

One last note on Harris’s running-mate decision: The former vice president wrote that another concern she had was that she did not want to subject Kelly’s military record to the kind of scrutiny, or smears, that presidential campaigns can invite. This packed a certain richness, given how Walz’s military record—or his overstatement of it—created its own recurring migraine for Harris. But when I asked about this, Kelly shifted to his current predicament. “I would be ecstatic if Pete Hegseth managed to get all of my military records and stick it online,” he told me.

He would go further. “Mark has made it clear to me that he is willing to be in prison to defend the Constitution,” Ossoff told me.

Kelly made this clear to me too. If “they actually sent me to prison, I’ll be fine,” he told me. “I’ll continue to fight back against these people.”

I mentioned that it would seem unlikely at this point that Kelly would be sent to jail over the “illegal orders” video. The government, after all, already failed once to win an indictment against the lawmakers. Kelly agreed, but then went on to describe scenarios in which it could happen: If, Kelly suggested, his lawsuit against Hegseth goes to the Supreme Court and they rule against him, the Pentagon could then have other punishment options. “I could wind up in a nonjudicial punishment process in the Navy,” he said. “And you know, that’s a big pain in the ass.”

“I tell you what they could do; they could try to indict us again,” Kelly continued. “Then, maybe do it in a place where maybe they get enough grand jurors. And then I wind up getting charged with seditious conspiracy.”

I joked that if Kelly did wind up in prison, he would probably raise $50 million within a week. He reiterated that he was not scared of imprisonment. His wife is not worried about it either, he said.

“We’ve been through a lot,” Kelly told me. “And you know, if they lock me up, I’m sure she’d come visit me.”

J. D. Vance’s New Book Wasn’t Meant to Be Read

2026-07-20T07:30:00-04:00

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J. D. Vance’s new book, Communion, answers a question no one had thought to ask: What would Augustine’s Confessions have looked like if the saint’s greatest literary influence had been Hillary Clinton’s immortal classic, Hard Choices?

One of the best-selling nonfiction titles of 2014, Hard Choices runs to more than 600 pages, many of which consist of factoids copied and pasted from Clinton’s old speeches. It is possibly the least introspective book ever written. Her ghostwriters’ modus operandi was to take a bunch of platitudinous abstractions from her time at the State Department (“The strategic fundamentals of our relationship—shared democratic values, economic imperatives and diplomatic priorities—are moving us closer to an understanding and a trust that reflects the convergence of values and interests”) and switch the tenses (“The strategic fundamentals of our relationship with India—shared democratic values, economic imperatives, and diplomatic priorities—were pushing both countries’ interests into closer convergence”).

Vance’s book never quite sinks to this level, but it does make me wonder why it was published, and for whose edification. Even by the standards of faith-driven airport nonfiction, Communion is not very interesting. Despite what the jacket copy suggests, the book is not “the story” of Vance’s conversion to Roman Catholicism, which had already been recounted in an essay published six years ago in the journal I edit, The Lamp. (Unaltered passages from it appear in the present volume without acknowledgment.) If anything, the book, from its Methodist-church-emblazoned cover on, seems oddly squeamish about the Catholic Church, couching most of its arguments concerning religious questions in a generically Christian register. When Vance does address specifically Catholic subject matter, his language is in some cases awkward and in almost all curiously unidiomatic. At one point, he describes himself attending “a Mass mourning Christ’s passion,” a phrase so theologically defective that it could be the subject of an entire ecumenical council.

Like Hard Choices, Communion is full of what might loosely be described as anecdotes. Take the one about Vance’s future wife, Usha, recommending Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking while they were students at Yale Law School. Usha said she found it “cathartic,” prompting Vance to look up this unknown word in the Oxford English Dictionary. As one does? Until I stumbled onto this passage, I would have guessed that the middle of the Venn diagram of “people who use the paywalled OED rather than Dictionary.com” and “people who don’t know what cathartic means” is empty, like the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. I’m not saying that Vance’s story is impossible. I’m just saying that if it did happen as described, it would be like somebody discovering this Beethoven character in his well-thumbed set of the multivolume New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

[Read: Who made the Oxford English Dictionary?]

If random disclosure of common-sense-defying detail is your idea of a searing, poignant journey into the light of faith, there’s more where that came from. Communion includes what is almost certainly the ne plus ultra of a new rhetorical trope—the posthumous invocation of Charlie Kirk to justify whatever the author or speaker wants you to believe or do. You know what I mean: the thing where a conservative podcast host assures his audience that a week or a few days or possibly just minutes before the man’s death, Kirk shared the secret gnosis about Israel, which is inevitably followed by a riposte from a Mar-a-Lago influencer insisting with equal stridency that milliseconds before (or perhaps even after) the shooting, she received private confirmation via text message of Kirk’s established public position. In this case, however, the spirit is summoned to explain why Usha had become pregnant again; specifically, we learn that Kirk’s widow, Erika, told Vance’s wife that she regrets not having more kids with Charlie, and that this moved Usha deeply and—Marvin Gaye needle drop.

People decide to have children for every possible reason or none. But until recently, the actual circumstances leading up to their conception were generally a private matter. If a dead friend inspired me and my wife to renew our acquaintance with the facts of life, I would probably not feel comfortable immortalizing his influence in my spiritual memoir slash campaign manifesto. But over and over again in these pages, Vance gives the impression that his book is meant to provide some kind of quasi-evangelical impetus to aspiring parents. If the right-wing dads of America start using “Let’s do it—for Charlie!” as a come-on, the U.S. birth rate is going to drop below that of Vatican City.

This oversharing of small details exists uneasily alongside a surprising lack of reflection on the book’s ostensible themes. A memoir that begins with criticism of anhedonic ambition becomes the chronicle of a man who, in less than a decade, is elected to the Senate and becomes vice president of the United States. Does everything that Vance says about the perfunctory pursuit of empty honors (he gives the example of Supreme Court clerkships) apply to his own rapid ascent to the office memorably described by John Nance Garner, one of its former holders, as “not worth a bucket of warm piss”? If not, why? Vance skates around this question—not, I think, because he is actively trying to do so, but because it actually seems not to have occurred to him.

[From the July 2025 issue: The talented Mr. Vance]

There is one interesting exception here to Vance’s lack of reflection on his political career: a two-page apology for his remarks about “childless cat ladies.” For what it’s worth, I think he is protesting too much. When these comments came up again during the 2024 presidential campaign, my sister was a childless cat lady, a fan of Vance’s writing, and a Trump voter; she joked about his remarks with her husband, a naturalized citizen born in Mexico, and voted for Donald Trump again. Now the two of them are the proud parents of a beautiful baby boy. Only in America! At any rate, for me, this pang (OED : “a sudden sharp feeling of mental anguish or intense emotional pain”) of conscience was oddly precise in its calibration. If Vance now recognizes his comments as churlish, lacking in charity, and utterly unlikely to persuade voters, much less witness to the sublime truths of the Christian religion, good for him. But what about those Haitians in Ohio who, it turned out, were not barbecuing Lassie? Does he consider those dog whistles at least equally ill-conceived? Or was the issue simply that dunking on DINKs is a riskier gambit for graduates of Yale Law School than race-baiting?

I could go on. But to what end? I have said that after reading Communion, I was left wondering why it had been published. This is not as cutting a remark as it might sound. Even less interesting than a deeply mediocre book is a reviewer taking such a book too seriously. There is not a single person in the United States whose desire to read (or purchase) it will be affected by my opinions.

Could Vance have written a better book? Could Hard Choices have been better? Come on. When I say that Communion is a complete waste (of time, paper, the resources of the vice presidency, etc.), I really mean it, but I would say the same if I had been asked to review, say, Kamala Harris’s 107 Days. Here is a sample from what her ghostwriter expects us to believe is an actual conversation:

“I’m fully behind you, Joe,” I told him. “But if you decide not to run, I’m ready. And I would give it all I’ve got, because Trump has to be beaten.”

Dialogue is always stilted in these books. But for every ludicrous snippet of fanfic like this, there is at least an equal number of conversations so boring that they must be true. Early on in Jill Biden’s View From the East Wing, the former first lady recounts a conversation that begins “Let’s have lunch,” to which her husband replies, “Okay.” A few sentences later, the repartee continues, with the couple addressing a perhaps invisible server whose existence we are simply meant to infer (unless, of course, the Bidens were talking to themselves).

“Chardonnay, please,” I said.

Joe said, “I’ll have a Diet Coke.”

Before we’d even looked at the menu, I said:

“This is it, Joe. You have to make up your mind. Are you going to run or not?”

“Yes, I want to run,” he told me, matter-of-factly.

At last, clarity.

“Okay,” I said.

Okay. On what possible scale involving literary merit, human interest, or historical value is it even possible to evaluate a text containing these sentences?

At times the book reads like a bold linguistic experiment, an attempt to discover the absolute minimum level of evocation that can be achieved by what are technically grammatical English sentences. Don’t get me wrong, though. View From the East Wing would not have been improved if it had been more lyrical. The single worst thing about the book is that every few pages, we get a high-toned quotation, or at least an attempt at one: “The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said, ‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.’ ” He didn’t.

The only thing harder than envisioning the end of capitalism is trying to imagine a readable book written by (or attributed to) a contemporary American political figure. These books are not meant to be seriously reviewed, for the very simple reason that they are not meant to be seriously read. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that they are not meant to be read at all. They exist to be announced breathlessly, advertised, embargoed, analyzed via leaks and scooplets, discussed on podcasts—but their final end is to collect dust in the free pile outside used-book stores. For a laugh, go to the books section of a Salvation Army or a Goodwill and see how many copies of Bill Clinton’s My Life you can find. My personal record is 43, sitting side by side in their glorious order and array, like the blessed angels in heaven.

The problem here extends beyond books by politicians (and their wives). Already so much of what publishers find room for is “current affairs” slop that is basically indistinguishable from the kind of bad writing I am talking about, save for the fact that the authors are television stars or podcasters or—(shudders)—political reporters rather than elected officials. Only readers can stop this madness, by turning their attention elsewhere. Read about the past. Read about faraway places. Read Macaulay or Sylvia Townsend Warner or Santayana’s letters. Read a real book.

This article appears in the September 2026 print edition with the headline “A Book That Wasn’t Meant to Be Read.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Pete Hegseth, You Call That a Pull-Up?

2026-07-20T07:00:00-04:00

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Pete Hegseth wants us to watch him sweat. Videos of the secretary of defense in a T-shirt and shorts working out alongside military personnel have become a trademark of his tenure. He has been filmed running on Omaha Beach, swinging a kettlebell on a university campus, and doing jumping jacks on an amphibious assault ship. In one clip, Hegseth pumps iron with troops at the Guantánamo Bay naval base—or, as a Defense Department X account put it, “America’s @SECWAR CRUSHED 44 reps on the bench after a morning run.”

But did he really crush those reps? Each time a new episode of Boot Camp Pete drops, critics skewer his form and mock his endurance. They insist that he’s all flex and no fundamentals. In that bench-press clip, for example, he doesn’t fully extend his arms, making the exercise far easier and inflating his total. A few seconds into the clip, you can hear someone yell, “All the way down, all the way up!” Hegseth fails to heed that helpful cue.

Such nitpicking would be uncharitable if Hegseth were just another 40-something dad getting a lift in at Planet Fitness. But these are highlight reels, posted by the Pentagon. Plus, the former Fox News host isn’t exactly known for withholding judgment himself: Recall how, last September, he gathered the nation’s generals and admirals together so that he could upbraid them for being overweight. He told them that leaders set the standard and that when “you let the small stuff go, the big stuff eventually goes.”

With Hegseth’s wisdom in mind, let’s examine what the United States military’s training manuals have to say about proper exercise form. Short answer: a lot. You’ll find hundreds of pages spelling out precisely how to perform all manner of movements, including how to stretch your thighs (“grasp the left ankle and pull toward the left buttock”), how to plank (“forearms flat on the ground, forming a triangle”), and how to throw a four-pound ball from a seated position (“do not throw the medicine ball like shooting a basketball”). These manuals are replete with charts, bullet points, and illustrations. The Army’s Holistic Health and Fitness Testing manual provides detailed instructions, accompanied by photographs, on the bench press, warning that you must not “jerk or shrug the shoulders, arch the back, or allow the hips to rise off the bench” (note to Secretary Hegseth: p. 65, Appendix B).

Standards vary across branches, even for basic exercises. Take the push-up. For the Army’s fitness test, soldiers must do what’s known as a hand-release push-up, requiring them to stick their arms straight out to the side after each repetition. The Marine guide devotes several hundred words to describing how to do a traditional push-up, specifying that the chest may not rest on the deck “except as required to ensure that the upper arms are at least parallel to the deck.” In the Air Force, your feet cannot be more than 12 inches apart, and you must maintain a “rigid head to heel form.” These are directives rather than suggestions. Failure to meet the standard results in a “no-go,” in military parlance, meaning you haven’t passed that portion of the test.

Hegseth’s push-ups wouldn’t pass muster in any branch. Last summer, Hegseth and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. kicked off the “Pete & Bobby Challenge,” in which participants attempt to do 50 pull-ups and 100 push-ups in less than 10 minutes. Hegseth’s push-ups are more like half-ups: In the ones captured on video, he doesn’t go through the full range of motion. His substandard technique is ironic because he’s on record ridiculing others for their lack of push-up prowess. In his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, Hegseth mocks women soldiers who can do only “ten push-ups at a pop” and refers to a transgender woman as a “ten-push-up kind of guy.”

To be fair, Hegseth’s pull-up form, at times, is more or less textbook. The issue is consistency: Hegseth can’t seem to maintain the standard for the duration of the competition, and raises his knees to his chest to give himself additional oomph. This is known as “kipping” and is forbidden in an eight-page pull-up guide published by the Marines. In one clip, Hegseth kips while using an underhand grip, which technically makes what he’s doing a chin-up—an exercise often considered less challenging than a pull-up. (The Marine guide permits both, though kipping is always forbidden.) According to the guide: “Poor quality work will prevent you from getting the most from your workout and can lead to injury.” Hegseth’s work is, by Marine standards, poor.

Illustration by Simon Bailly / Sepia. Sources: U.S. Marine Corps; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

Top: Proper pull-up form, as demonstrated by a Marine Corps officer. Bottom: Secretary Hegseth’s form is inconsistent. In one clip from the “Pete & Bobby Challenge,” he does a chin-up and raises his knees to give himself additional oomph—a technique known as “kipping” that is forbidden by the Marines.

Hegseth claims at the end of the video that he finished in less than six minutes, which would be impressive if he weren’t flouting the rules and sacrificing form for speed. What’s more, he’s doing these exercises incorrectly during a challenge that bears his name. Given all of this, it’s impossible to have confidence in the validity of Hegseth’s self-reported feat.

Granted, I am not a trained grader of military exercises. Prior to perusing these manuals, I wasn’t aware that your arms need to be at a 45-degree angle in relation to your trunk for the modified bent-leg body twist, or that it is imperative to point your toes to the rear for the prone row. I was entirely unfamiliar with the squat bender and the quadraplex. Nor did I know, before watching an Army instructional video, how to swing a kettlebell.

As it happens, neither does Hegseth, who, in January, was filmed swinging a kettlebell with recruits at UCLA. You’re supposed to keep the kettlebell near your body and generate momentum with your legs and hips. Instead, Hegseth squats, as if doing deep knee bends, and brings the weight far too close to the ground, putting strain on his shoulders and back. This is wrong, according to Joel Del Rosario, a retired Marine and a kettlebell coach. Del Rosario told me he’s glad to see Hegseth encouraging better fitness in the military, and he noted that, in his experience, pretty much everyone who gives the kettlebell a whirl fails at first. He said he’d be honored if asked to show Hegseth how to do the exercise properly.

I consulted other military exercise experts too. Among them was Stew Smith, a former Navy SEAL and the author of a series of books about prepping to qualify for the Special Forces, including one on the Ranger Physical Assessment. A former Army National Guard infantry officer, Hegseth has bemoaned slipping standards across the military, including at the Ranger School—even though he never completed the famously grueling 61-day leadership and fitness course. Smith said he doesn’t evaluate the performance of people unless they ask, and so wouldn’t comment specifically on Hegseth’s approach and abilities. But he said he stresses to his students the importance of going all the way up and all the way down, whether it’s a pull-up, push-up, or bench press.

I also asked Maureen LeBoeuf what she made of the “Pete & Bobby Challenge” video. LeBoeuf is a retired brigadier general and the first and only woman to head the physical-education department at West Point, a position known as “master of the sword.” She said that nothing she saw from the defense secretary in that video would have counted if she had been the grader, and she has graded thousands of such tests. “His pull-ups or chin-ups and the kicking that he does—you would never allow that. You’d stop somebody; you’d say, ‘Okay, you’re done,’ ” LeBoeuf said. “He just keeps kicking, and it’s not a good look.” She allowed that he might have been exhausted in those clips, but the Army doesn’t usually recognize fatigue as an excuse. And it’s hard to forgive such lapses and corner-cutting from someone who, as LeBoeuf put it, is “real big on standards.”

In response to an inquiry about the criticism of Hegseth’s workouts, Joel Valdez, the acting Pentagon press secretary, insisted that Hegseth was being unfairly singled out. “Have you ever seen Lloyd Austin’s form? Did the Atlantic ever ask about it?” he wrote. “The answer to both of those questions is no.” That’s true, but Austin, the previous secretary of defense, was not known for posting self-promotional exercise content on social media. He did, however, complete Ranger School and Airborne School, command the 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan, lead the fight against the Islamic State, and earn a Silver Star.

This article appears in the September 2026 print edition with the headline “You Call That a Pull-Up?”

The Canoeist Accused of Destroying the Reflecting Pool

2026-07-20T06:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Carolyn Van Houten

The summer after the country celebrated its 200th birthday, David Hearn paddled a canoe nicknamed the Queen Mary around the Reflecting Pool as part of an event intended to draw attention to a sport that would later lead him to Olympic glory. Nearly half a century later, as the country approached its 250th birthday, Hearn was back. On June 19, the 67-year-old stopped by the pool at the tail end of a long bike ride to look at the floating flakes of sealant that had come untethered following a rushed renovation ordered by President Trump. Hearn says he snapped some photos and dipped his hand into the water. Then he was arrested. Officers put him in handcuffs and detained him for hours.

Federal prosecutors have accused Hearn of “forcefully and violently” ripping up the sealant, causing damage to federal property that should be punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Hearn’s lawyers argue that these are ridiculous and frivolous charges—and in a motion to dismiss the case said they could present photographic evidence proving he didn’t cause major damage. Hearn, who for many years sold waterproofing materials for boats and canoes, has suggested that he was trying to figure out why the pool’s lining was falling apart, not damage it.

If last year’s emblem of prosecutorial overreach was the Sandwich Guy, this year’s has become the Canoe Guy.

Abbie Endicott, who helped organize the canoe event 49 years ago, told me that the Reflecting Pool holds special meaning to her, Hearn, and the others who paddled the shallow water that day. “The idea that any of us would want to damage something that’s meant to be so beautiful—and is, when it’s clean,” said Endicott, whose husband, Bill, was a longtime head coach of the U.S. canoeing team. “It’s meant to reflect everything that’s around it.”

Carolyn Van Houten for The Atlantic

The drained Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is blocked off by fencing on July 18.

With so many headlines to choose from, it’s a little strange that the Reflecting Pool has become the political scandal of the summer. But it has a dash of everything that Trump’s critics loathe about this presidency: a vanity project driven by Trump’s desire to accomplish what his predecessors couldn’t; a no-bid contract for a straight-from-central-casting Trump donor; incompetence leading to a botched repair; refusals to acknowledge reality; and, finally, the scapegoating of perceived enemies. Along the way, algae bloomed, chemicals were dumped, and ducks turned up dead. The banks of the pool—at its best a scene of unparalleled American majesty—took on a sort of circus atmosphere as locals and tourists alike stopped by to see the disaster for themselves. Some took a small souvenir to commemorate the moment.

The day after Hearn’s arrest, law enforcement from around the country, who had just arrived to help with the July 4 celebrations, swarmed the area. Some were assigned foot patrols near the Reflecting Pool and in quick succession, court records show, arrested several other visitors for allegedly reaching into the pool and pulling up pieces of sealant. On June 20 around 12:30 p.m., 47-year-old Justin Carreno was detained by a police officer from Oklahoma City. A little after 2 p.m., officers from Texas, Oklahoma, and California took into custody 26-year-old Cameron Thiers. An hour and a half later, a correctional officer from Montana nabbed 49-year-old Sophie Dennison-Gibby. All were charged with destruction of property valued at less than $1,000, a misdemeanor punishable of up to 180 days in jail. All have pleaded not guilty, and their attorneys declined to comment. A judge has ordered each of them to stay away from the Reflecting Pool; court appearances are scheduled for August.

Hearn’s case is the most serious: He faces felony charges for damages that exceed $1,000. At a press conference on July 2 to announce Hearn’s indictment, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro called Reflecting Pool prosecutions a presidential priority, and said that Hearn could serve a sentence of a decade in prison for what she called “a violent effort to rip up the sealant from the bottom of the pool.” She stated that witnesses reported that he used both hands to pull up the liner, damaging about two square feet, but she declined to reveal any other evidence and urged reporters to attend the trial. (Court documents filed late Friday afternoon indicated that prosecutors had made dozens of items available to Hearn’s attorneys, including body-camera video, images, and a witness statement.)

To many of Hearn’s friends and supporters, the charges seem just as ridiculous as Trump’s fumbling of the renovation. But when I spoke with Hearn at length last week, he used the same word a few times: unsettling. He said the prosecution has cut into his ability to sleep at night. The man who once carried the Olympic torch for his country said he now worries about being a focal point in a divisive political moment. “It’s unsettling,” Hearn told me, “to feel like I’m being targeted by my government.”

[Read: The capital is a mess]

Hearn’s life has revolved around water. He grew up in the Washington area, and his family spent summers in Montana, where he developed his love for paddling. He and his siblings were members of canoeing clubs and went paddling with friends nearly every day after school. As a 16-year-old, he began keeping training logs of his sleep patterns and workouts, a practice he kept up for more than 25 years as he rose to become one of the most decorated white-water canoe athletes in U.S. history. In college, he installed a slalom gate—poles that hang from overhead and set the course—in his dorm room so he could practice being near them without touching them. His older sister was also a U.S. team member, and his younger brother raced. His wife, Jennifer, was also a competitive canoeist and assistant coach of the Olympic national team. Hearn competed in three Summer Olympics—1992, 1996, and 2000—and was a torchbearer in the 1996 Olympics, carrying the flame into Washington, D.C. He won eight world championships, competing in single and team events, and in 2005 was one of the inaugural inductees into the International Whitewater Hall of Fame.

After retiring from active competition in 2002, Hearn worked as a coach and continued to maintain his business selling boats and paddles. In 2005, he and his wife took over a company that distributed epoxy, waterproofing, and other materials used primarily for building and repairing watercraft. They sold the business last year, but some of that experience gave him an additional interest in what was happening at the Reflecting Pool. “I’ve always been curious about science in general, and how materials work,” he told me. “It’s the kind of thing that really makes me curious.”

Carolyn Van Houten for The Atlantic

Hearn checks for damage to the surface of his canoe.

Dozens of people gathered outside the Superior Court of the District of Columbia for Hearn’s first hearing on July 9. Some dressed as canoeists. One wore an inflatable pink frog costume with AMPHIFA painted on the tummy. Posters read The Deflecting Pool and Davey’s a champ, not a scamp! Several signs featured dead ducks. And the crowd chanted: Free Davey Hearn! He is a hero! Inside, the court staff reserved two overflow rooms. The courtroom itself was so packed that journalists were invited to sit in the jury box. I was in the seat normally saved for juror No. 1, giving me a direct view of Hearn as he sat at the defense table. The man arrested in spandex and helmet during his visit to the Reflecting Pool was now in coat and tie, with an Olympic pin affixed to his navy jacket. He stood as the judge entered the room.

“This is the United States v. David Hearn.”

It was all over within eight minutes. Hearn pleaded not guilty. His attorneys asked for a speedy trial. The federal prosecutor warned, “There’s going to be a lot of discovery in this case.” Hearn was released without restrictions. But then government prosecutors approached Hearn and his legal team with a warrant for his cellphone. Their affidavit, a portion of which is quoted in subsequent court filings, suggested that they were looking for photos or proof that he “engaged in research” about how to cause damage to the Reflecting Pool.

Hearn’s attorneys argue that the photos on his phone will prove that he did not damage the pool. A photo that Hearn says he took just before placing his hand in the water—one that he later provided to The Washington Post and the BBC—shows the same damage to the sealant as the photo that National Park Service workers took after they arrested him. (In the affidavit, which has remained sealed, prosecutors used a different “before” photo that Hearn’s lawyers say in court filings has no date and could have been taken days or weeks beforehand.) The U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment. Hearn’s attorneys on Friday filed a lengthy motion to dismiss the case on the grounds that the government has drained and altered the Reflecting Pool, essentially tampering with the evidence without allowing the defense to examine it.

When Hearn emerged from the courthouse without his phone, his supporters chanted and cheered. He looked out to cyclists who had ridden with him, canoeists who had paddled with him, people who had been rescued by him, and musicians who had jammed with him in impromptu sessions. (Hearn plays harmonica; his wife, ukulele.) One of Hearn’s lawyers—Norm Eisen, who was head of White House ethics and ambassador to the Czech Republic under President Obama—told the crowd that evidence will show that Hearn is innocent. Eisen then declared: “It is not a crime to touch water in the Reflecting Pool.”

[Read: The anti-Trump strategy that’s actually working]

I counted 15 professional video cameras recording the event and talked with numerous outraged Hearn fans. “Of course he’s interested in a $14 million botched job. What went wrong? Feel the texture of it. Was it cured? Was it brittle?” Paul Flack, dressed in a kayaker’s helmet and a Team USA shirt, told me. Gary Roush, a retiree who knows Hearn from concerts they attend, added: “This is so clearly a case of the government seeking scapegoats. They’re trying to blame their failure on ordinary, innocent Americans.”

Trump has claimed that the damage was caused by vandals who cut a gash into the pool that he has described of varying lengths, from 250 feet to 300 yards. Eight days after Hearn’s court appearance, the president seemed to refer to him in a social-media post: “The Scum in Court will hopefully be prosecuted to the MAX.” But when the pool was fully drained last week, no such gashes were visible on the surface. A detailed visual analysis by The Washington Post last week found seven locations where the lining had separated at seams that were created when material was applied at different times—a pattern that experts said strongly suggested errors in the application process. I was down at the Reflecting Pool the day before Hearn was arrested, and large chunks of sealant were clearly already coming loose and floating in the water.

Carolyn Van Houten for The Atlantic

Newspaper clippings that others gathered for Hearn

Adam Van Grack—a former chair of the U.S. Olympic governing body for canoe and kayak sports who has known Hearn for decades and is now a city-council member in Rockville, Maryland—told me that “the U.S. government could not have picked a worse person to be the headliner felony defendant in this trial.” Hearn and his wife are active volunteers who organize cleanups of the Potomac River and help maintain a historic lockhouse along a Washington-area canal. And the alleged offense? “Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but I put my hand in the Reflecting Pool,” Van Grack admitted to me. “It’s been the people’s pool, as opposed to this idea that if you touch the water or touch the bottom of the pool, you’ve committed a felony.”

What people can do at the pool—and whether government prosecutors can deliver proof that Hearn caused damage—will be determined in court over the coming months, including a status hearing scheduled for this morning. Meanwhile, work continues at the drained and dry Reflecting Pool, which is now surrounded by fences.

Trump Still Hasn’t Found What He’s Looking For

2026-07-17T00:02:48-04:00

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Since President Trump returned to office a year and a half ago, he has dispatched investigators and analysts from across the U.S. intelligence community to search for evidence of foreign interference in an election that he lost but claims he won. In an address from the White House tonight, the president sought to reveal proof for his baseless assertions of a 2020 vote marred by fraud. But once again, he came up empty.

The president spoke for nearly half an hour, tendentiously connecting reports of stolen voter records to software vulnerabilities in voting machines to fake voter-registration drives. But he never claimed that a foreign power had actually changed any votes, and all signs indicate that it didn’t happen. Earlier in the day, a White House official told us that after an exhaustive examination of “millions” of documents that had been collected, a team of investigators had found no evidence to support such claims.

Former intelligence officials expressed bewilderment at the president’s characterizations of what’s in those documents. “I have never seen raw, unverified reporting pushed out this way: harvested for the pieces that fit, fashioned into a weapon against American elections,” Julia Curlee, a former intelligence officer who was among those who provided Trump’s daily briefing in his first term, told us.

Toward the end of a speech laden with more innuendo than fact, Trump insisted, “We can never watch a stolen election again.” But he announced no steps that his administration would take to prevent further meddling, other than sharing more information with state governments, something that the United States used to do routinely before Trump gutted election-security initiatives at the start of his second term. Trump also announced no plans to try to commandeer the authority to run elections that are, under the Constitution, overseen by the states. Many of the election deniers who have fueled Trump’s false claims had hoped he would declare a national emergency to somehow seize control.

Trump made clear that he believes the U.S. voting system is insecure. The president’s core claim rests on what he says is newly revealed reporting by U.S. intelligence agencies, which have found that China has obtained more than 200 million Americans’ voter records in 18 states. Those are startling numbers. But they are hardly news.

During Trump’s first term, U.S. intelligence analysts reported that Chinese intelligence had analyzed “election voter registration data ” from multiple states. Former U.S. officials told us that they were aware that China was stealing or otherwise acquiring voter-registration data, which might include a person’s name, address, and political party. Those kinds of data are often publicly available online.

China’s harvesting of voter-registration information is not news. It was spelled out in an intelligence assessment of the 2020 election and presented to Trump and his senior advisers, then declassified and released publicly after he left office.

[Listen: The election deniers are in charge now]

That assessment was unequivocal on the consequences of foreign interventions, including by Russia and Iran: “We have no indications that any foreign actor attempted to interfere in the 2020 US elections by altering any technical aspect of the voting process, including voter registration, ballot casting, vote tabulation, or reporting results.”

This is not to say that China’s harvesting of American voter data is benign. As U.S. officials reported in 2020, it was part of an effort by China to “predict electoral outcomes and to inform its efforts to influence US policy toward China under either election outcome.” U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence officials and cybersecurity experts have acknowledged for years that China has pursued aggressive and wide-ranging efforts over several decades to collect personally identifying information and other data about American citizens. The goal, officials say, is to strengthen China’s geopolitical position by collecting as much data as possible that can be used for espionage purposes. Current and former officials have spoken openly about their assessments that the Chinese government has obtained data on almost every American. But that does not mean the data were used to subvert the election.

It was only after he lost that Trump appeared to have become convinced that the 2020 election was insecure. In February 2020, for instance, senior intelligence officials briefed him on efforts to protect elections from foreign interference and ensure that voting machines were trustworthy. According to a person familiar with that briefing, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share a private interaction, the president was so pleased that he wanted to call a press conference and tell the American people that their elections would be secure. The event never took place. In his White House address tonight, Trump adopted a mocking tone as he parroted what officials had told him and have said publicly—that the 2020 election was well protected.

[Read: Trump is getting tired of losing election cases]

Former officials also told us that if Trump was not told every detail about stolen voter rolls, that was because such activity was just one component of China’s broader efforts to influence politics in the United States. Trump now appears to claim that because he wasn’t informed of every piece of intelligence, biased officials were trying to hide the truth from him. But it’s routine practice to inform the president of the top-level findings of intelligence analysis and spare him many of the details.

Some of what Trump claimed was at odds with the documents that he had declassified. He said that U.S. intelligence uncovered a plot “to do a big number in favor of the corrupt Maduro regime in Venezuela” and had conspired “to digitally rig their own country’s elections in 2020.” But the declassified CIA report he referenced, dated June 29, 2026, said that while Maduro’s regime did develop techniques to electronically manipulate vote totals, U.S. intelligence “did not definitively confirm that large-scale electronic fraud was successfully executed in specific Venezuelan elections.”

In fact, the CIA cited a redacted source who “judged the regime did not need to resort to gross fraud to win the December 2020 National Assembly elections, given that virtually the entire opposition boycotted and the regime had already co-opted opposition party leadership.”

Trump’s history of false election-related statements prompted ABC and NBC to decide not to broadcast his speech live, despite the White House’s requests to do so. The president suggested that that editorial choice amounted to a crime by the broadcasters. “Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses,” he said. “All we want is honesty in our elections and honesty in reporting.”

In the lead-up to Trump’s remarks, his online allies had primed their audiences for seismic news, setting expectations that he would fundamentally upend the way elections are conducted. Mike Lindell, the pillow-company executive who has long espoused election falsehoods, told us this week that he expected Trump to announce evidence of foreign manipulation of election equipment used to run American elections. “The voting-machine world is crumbling,” he said. “Won’t that be something? Are you going to write a big article that ‘Mike Lindell Was Right?’”

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

Seth Keshel, a former Army intelligence captain, wrote on social media that “all hell is going to break loose” after Trump’s remarks, which he hoped would create pressure for Congress to pass Trump’s long-touted SAVE America Act. The bill, among other things, would require people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and photo identification when casting their ballot. Trump called on lawmakers tonight to pass it—saying, “the only reason you wouldn’t do it is you want to cheat”—though the prospects of success appear dim. Election experts say the bill will make it harder for people to vote and do little to curb fraudulent ballots that they say are already extremely rare.

Cisco Aguilar, Nevada’s secretary of state and the chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, summed up his reaction to the president’s remarks in four words: “That was some bullshit.”

The reception around Trump was markedly different. After he finished his speech, those in attendance—which included senior members of his administration and the intelligence community—burst into applause.

Inside Trump’s Reversal on ICE

2026-07-15T17:57:42-04:00

President Trump woke up this morning with an urgent message for Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers deployed on U.S. streets: They were to pay no mind to the internal memo, issued barely a day earlier, telling them to suspend vehicle stops amid a public outcry over two fatal shootings by ICE officers in less than a week. Trump was issuing his own orders.

“We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!,” the president wrote on his Truth Social network. “Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands.”

The president overruled his own administration after getting furious pushback from his MAGA base over the ICE order suspending most vehicle stops. White House officials told us that Trump had heard a litany of complaints from hard-line allies over the past day. The final straw, one official and one outside adviser told us, was the cable-news segments that Trump watched this morning. The negative coverage from right-wing media was accompanied by a torrent of public and private criticism from figures including the MAGA influencer Tomi Lahren, former Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino, and the War Room podcaster Steve Bannon. Trump, one official told us, ultimately concluded that ICE abandoning traffic stops now would “make them all look weak.”

The freeze on vehicle stops came late Monday on orders from Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who had spoken with Senator Susan Collins of Maine after an ICE officer fatally shot 26-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a delivery driver from Colombia, in the town of Biddeford. The officer who shot Guerrero in the head was a new recruit who had joined ICE earlier this year after working as a police officer at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Senior officials at ICE have told us that officers aren’t getting enough training in how to conduct vehicle stops and safely de-escalate confrontations when drivers don’t obey commands.

Collins, a Republican running for reelection, said yesterday that the Department of Homeland Security had agreed to halt nonurgent stops, and she urged DHS to expedite the delivery of body-worn cameras to ICE officers. Six days earlier, an ICE officer in Texas had killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a construction contractor from Mexico who’d been living in the United States for 35 years. Neither Salgado Araujo nor Guerrero had criminal records, according to publicly available sources, and neither was the target of the stop that led to their death.

[Read: Another fatal ICE shooting]

Today’s reversal marked an embarrassing turnabout for Mullin, who took over DHS in March, two months after a pair of U.S. citizens were killed by immigration officers in Minneapolis. Officials we spoke with at DHS and ICE told us that it was highly unlikely that Mullin would have allowed the initial order halting vehicle stops to be sent without getting approval from the White House. “Not a chance,” one DHS official told us. “Someone got into the big boss’s ear. Three-ring circus.” But a senior administration official denied that anyone at the White House had signed off on the pause in advance and told us that Trump hadn’t known about it.

The backlash over the pause on traffic stops caught some in the White House off guard. Trump himself was spared a large portion of the blame from the right, and MAGA critics instead blamed others in the administration for supposedly failing to serve him properly. Mullin received much of the anger, picking up the nickname “Kung Fu Plumber” in influential MAGA text chains and some corners of social media, two outside Trump advisers told us. (Mullin owns a plumbing-and-HVAC business and is a former mixed-martial-arts fighter.) One outside adviser told us that key voices in Trump’s orbit attacked Mullin as “soft” and an “appeaser” of ICE opponents.

After Trump’s Truth Social post, Mullin posted a statement to social media that lacked any instruction and did not directly address Trump’s countermand. Mullin’s statement said that the department’s top goal “is to keep our officers safe and get criminals OFF our streets.” He added that “we remind illegal aliens attempting to evade arrest is dangerous.” As of this afternoon, ICE had not formally issued new orders reversing the vehicle-stop memo, according to officials we spoke with.

“President Trump and I are on the same page,” Mullin said in a statement sent to us by DHS in response to our questions. “We want our ICE officers to have all options available to keep them safe while executing our mission of deporting as many illegal alien criminals from our country as possible.”

The 1985 Supreme Court decision in Tennessee v. Garner established that police officers cannot use lethal force on a suspect for disobeying commands or attempting to flee. An officer must be able to articulate a well-reasoned fear of imminent harm to police or the public to justify opening fire. A driver who accelerates aggressively toward an officer would present a threat, but one trying to swerve around officers to escape would not alone meet that threshold.

In Trump’s first term, he was often susceptible to criticism from the right. More than once—and most famously during the 2018 budget standoff—he backed away from a deal after being attacked by Republicans on Fox News. In his second term, Trump has more often than not given the right what it wants, allowing himself fewer opportunities to be outflanked. But after riding high during Trump’s first months of this term, some in the MAGA base have grown frustrated by the president’s inability to make good on campaign promises—and by his decision to launch a war in Iran that has turned into a quagmire.

Ever since the administration pulled back on its most aggressive immigration-enforcement actions following the January killings in Minneapolis, key MAGA voices have urged a return to more forceful tactics as a way to restore the base’s faith. Some officials, including the “border czar” Tom Homan, have lately promoted an intensifying deportation push, even as some in the West Wing have privately worried about the potential for violent incidents that could be politically damaging. The new deaths have revived those fears.

In recent weeks, the administration ramped up ICE arrests to nearly 2,000 a day, doubling the pace of this spring. ICE officers have come to rely on traffic stops to grab people as they leave for work in the morning, because unlike with arrests that are carried out inside homes, they don’t need a warrant from a judge. Now they’ll be able to resume those stops—which will likely allow the arrest numbers to continue to climb but also risk more killings like the ones in Texas and Maine.

The Shooter in Maine Was a New ICE Recruit

2026-07-14T13:59:03-04:00

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Late last night, at the end of a day that started with the killing of a 26-year-old Colombian man in Maine, the second fatal shooting involving a vehicle stop in a week, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement official Liana Castano sent out an email to top ICE supervisors around the country. “Effective immediately,” Castano wrote, “vehicle stops are suspended until further notice.”

It was an extraordinary directive to ICE officers on the street, essentially telling them to no longer attempt to pull over suspects in cars. ICE has been ramping up immigration arrests across the country in recent weeks to roughly 2,000 a day, nearly doubling the number of people it takes into custody compared with the spring. Many of those arrests have occurred during stops by ICE officers traveling in unmarked cars. Castano’s email said exceptions would be made in instances when ICE pursues criminal suspects in cooperation with other police agencies. But ICE officers, operating on their own, were told to stand down.

“All personnel are instructed to prioritize other existing operational methods, outside of vehicle stops, to conduct immigration enforcement activities,” Castano instructed, according to a copy of the email I obtained. The existence of the order was first reported by The Daily Wire.

The decision to suspend vehicle stops was made by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, with backing from the acting director of ICE, David Venturella, according to a senior administration official who was not authorized to discuss internal deliberations. During his confirmation hearing in March for the top DHS job, Mullin said he didn’t want the department to generate as much controversy as it had during the ICE crackdown in Minneapolis that left two U.S. citizens dead. Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican who is running for reelection, said on social media that she spoke with Mullin last night and asked him to halt all nonurgent vehicle stops by ICE. When asked about the halt on vehicle stops, DHS said in a statement: “We are always evaluating our procedures to keep our officers safe and criminals off our streets. We will not disclose or discuss law enforcement tactics.”

The officer involved in the fatal shooting in Maine was hired by ICE this year from the Department of Veterans Affairs Police, according to the senior official. The officer has worked in federal law enforcement since 2017, the official said. Neither detail has been previously reported. The shooter in Maine has not been publicly identified; neither has the shooter in Houston, where the earlier fatal ICE shooting occurred.

[Read: Another fatal ICE shooting]

President Trump’s immigration crackdown has put unrelenting pressure on ICE officers to increase their arrest numbers and deliver on Trump’s promise of the largest mass-deportation campaign in U.S. history. ICE officers have historically tried to make arrests by apprehending their targets at home, but word has gotten out—through social media and legal clinics—that officers can’t enter homes without a search warrant from a judge.

That has left ICE more dependent on vehicle stops, as officers try to catch people getting into their cars as they head to work in the morning. Officers have received relatively little training in how to conduct vehicle stops safely, veteran officials told me. And the Trump administration has fast-tracked new recruits through ICE’s training academy or sent other new hires with previous law-enforcement experience onto the streets after online courses.

Last Tuesday, after the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by an ICE officer in Houston, seasoned officials at the agency told me they were concerned about insufficient training and the lack of a vehicle-pursuit policy setting limits on the use of force during traffic stops. Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old construction contractor who came from Mexico as a teenager and sent his three sons to college, had “weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer,” according to DHS. The officers involved in Salgado Araujo’s killing had been in the neighborhood looking for another man.

The shooting in Biddeford, Maine, yesterday morning also took the life of an immigrant father who was not ICE’s target. The 26-year-old, identified as Joan Sebastian Guerrero, was shot through his windshield by an officer “fearing for public safety” when Guerrero tried to drive away, according to DHS.

No videos of the shootings have emerged to substantiate DHS’s claims, and the officers involved were not wearing body cameras, according to the department. But there were widely circulated bystander videos and security-camera footage depicting the scene after the shooting in Maine. One ICE official who watched a video of the lead-up to the shooting told me he was troubled to see officers standing in one another’s “field of fire” and failing to give clear commands. But the exact sequence of events preceding the shooting remains unclear.

The FBI and DHS’s internal-affairs division are investigating both killings, which appear to involve victims who disobeyed officer commands and attempted to flee. Those actions, on their own, would not authorize officers to use lethal force, according to attorneys and ICE officials I spoke with. Officers must be able to demonstrate that they fired because of a well-reasoned fear of imminent harm.

[Read: ICE after Minneapolis]

There was growing unease among senior officials at ICE about traffic stops well before yesterday’s shooting. ICE has added nearly 8,000 new officers over the past nine months as part of a hiring spree, the goal of which is to more than double the size of the workforce. Many of the new hires were sent through a fast-track course that cut the amount of training time they spent at the academy to just 42 days, less than half of a standard course. Officials at DHS reversed themselves this spring and returned to the longer training regimen, amid backlash to the ICE crackdown in Minneapolis. But veteran ICE officials I’ve spoken with say that officers receive less training in vehicle stops than most police departments do, and the branch of ICE that handles detention and deportation, Enforcement and Removal Operations, lacks clear guidelines on the use of force involving vehicles.

ICE’s undercover tactics create an elevated risk, they warn, because officers using unmarked cars are more likely to cause a driver to panic than a police in a car with sirens and flashing lights. Videos of ICE officers drawing their weapons during traffic stops have circulated online since last year. Officers are trained to view vehicles as deadly weapons. That does not mean they can open fire when someone is attempting to drive away. Most immigration violations are civil offenses, not criminal ones, and ICE officers were traditionally instructed to avoid vehicle chases or confrontations with fleeing suspects that could create unnecessary risks. Now, following two deadly shootings, that’s become official policy.

What Lindsey Graham Wanted

2026-07-12T16:13:00-04:00

Senator Lindsey Graham, who died unexpectedly last night, was a pivotal citizen of the Washington conversation. He loved being in the mix, slapping bipartisan backs off camera, and then, when the lights came on, cracking wise, weighing in, and, yes, currying favor with a certain Audience of One.

What could be more fitting, then, for Graham—unable to be a participant on this fateful Sunday morning—to actually become the only thing better: the main topic of the news. He died as he lived.

Graham was a complex character—his private life, sudden death, public morality, the whole messy peach of him. Put that aside, though. Or I will (happily), because that will all be covered and uncovered and debated. Already has been.

It is perfectly on the nose that Graham’s departure would occur just a few hours before he was supposed to appear on Meet the Press. It would have been his 64th appearance on America’s longest-running public-affairs program. In the Meet the Press greenroom there used to be a prominent photo of Graham yapping away alongside his Senate sidekick, John McCain. McCain, for his part, appeared 73 times on Meet the Press, more than any other guest in history—something McCain was especially proud of.

In early 2019, a few months after McCain died, Graham joked to me that his main goal in his remaining time on God’s green Earth (or God’s greenroom) was to beat McCain’s record. He never will.

Among active players, Graham was the ultimate “Sabbath gasbag”—the term the writer Calvin Trillin coined to describe the revolving cast of pundits and moralizers who haunted the Meet the Presses, This Weeks, and Face the Nations of our (or our parents’) pixelated lives.

Granted, Trillin came up with that coinage when a lot more people watched these Sunday interviews and roundtables. They used to be a lot more relevant, to deploy what was perhaps Graham’s favorite word in the horde—and pretty much his overriding mission as a United States senator.

“Try to be relevant,” Graham told me in that same 2019 conversation when I asked how he became such a relentless and essential lapdog to Trump (okay, I didn’t use quite those words). This was an ongoing mystery around Washington, especially given how critical of Trump Graham had been when he (briefly) ran for president against him in 2016.

In Graham’s worldview, “legacy media” remained extremely relevant. This old-timey, perhaps musty conviction served him well in recent years, because Trump, Graham’s lodestar, was the ultimate consumer of “the shows,” as he calls them. No one understood better than Graham that Sunday-morning television could be a fruitful place to “manage the relationship” with the White House.

“Lindsey was really good at this game,” one senior White House official told me during Trump’s first term.

When I asked Graham about his keys to manipulating Trump, he was remarkably transparent about some of his go-to formulas. I was struck by how, in Graham’s telling, Trump was a big, fat mark.

“If you flatter him all the time, he’ll lose respect for you,” Graham told me of the president. If he had a goal of getting Trump to do something, especially if it involved foreign affairs, Graham would just tell the president that his then-predecessor, Barack Obama, would do something that was 180 degrees different.

This method “can be very effective,” Graham told me. “Obama drives him nuts.”

Graham was always a first-class political shape-shifter, easily darting between the smarty-pants of Official Washington and the bare-knuckled MAGA populists of South Carolina. This dynamic extended to the on- and off-camera Lindseys: One minute, he would be chumming it up with a Democratic colleague before their “hit,” and then, when the lights came on, he would be breathing partisan fire on behalf of the White House or Trump’s supporters back home.

Graham grew up in the rural town of Central, South Carolina, where his parents ran a divey saloon called the Sanitary Café. It was frequented by small-town eccentrics, good old boys, and other raucous characters. Nicknamed “Stinkball” around the bar, little Lindsey was always the kid-mascot type, tagging along with his father. That became a lasting part of his persona. Graham always sought out powerful, larger-the-life figures to tie himself to: “alpha dogs,” he called them. They would serve as both his protectors and tickets to relevance. They included the likes of his father, McCain, and, in his last public chapter, Donald Trump.

No doubt Graham would have been thrilled that the president took it upon himself to be one of the first to announce his passing. Graham was “one of the greatest people and Senators I have ever known,” Trump wrote on Truth Social at 3:21 a.m.

Later in the morning, Trump would go one to call Graham “a great politician, actually.”

Even better, actually, was where Trump said this: Meet the Press.

Trump Loses His Wingman

2026-07-12T14:24:18-04:00

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Lindsey Graham had just returned from a trip to Ukraine last night when he called President Trump to talk with him—about the trip, about one of the president’s key legislative priorities, about the days ahead. The two spoke often on their cellphones, a reminder of how their relationship had warmed in the decade since Trump, in a fit of pique after Graham called him a “jackass,” read the South Carolina senator’s personal cellphone number aloud at a campaign event.

“He was full of vim and vigor,” Trump recalled on CNN this morning. “He was tired. He said, ‘I’m tired because it’s a long trip.’ But other than that, he was fine.” Not long after the call, as a result of what his office said was “a brief and sudden illness,” Graham was dead.

Trump at 3:21 a.m. posted on social media that Graham was “one of the greatest people and Senators I have ever known.” By morning, the flags were lowered to half-staff at the White House, the political jockeying for his replacement had begun in South Carolina, and Trump and his aides were openly mourning the loss of a close personal friend and ardent political ally.

Graham had told Trump last night that in the morning he was going to appear on NBC’s Meet the Press for what would have been his 64th time. Trump joined instead. “He’s a tough one to lose. He was great. He was unique in every way, actually,” he said. Trump recounted his reaction when a Graham staffer passed along the news at about one in the morning: “I said, ‘I just can’t believe it. He was like a member of the family to me.’ It’s very tough, actually.”

Graham’s death has thrown into question the path forward on a number of Trump priorities, including a new reconciliation bill—which could contain portions of his SAVE America Act on voting—as well as the looming confirmation battle over attorney-general nominee Todd Blanche. Trump’s relations with GOP senators have been rocky, to say the least, and Graham was a crucial conciliator who often mediated between the White House and Capitol Hill. The absence of Senator Mitch McConnell, who was hospitalized last month with no indication of when he might return, further narrows the margins for Senate Republicans.

McConnell’s illness and Graham’s death represent twin blows for the pro-Ukrainian wing of the party, which had been heartened by Trump’s recent show of support for President Volodymyr Zelensky and sees Russia as being on its back foot in the war. Graham had been a reliable supporter of Ukraine—one of his last public appearances was a meeting with Zelensky on Friday—and he said from Kyiv that Trump had been persuaded to bless his long-stalled Russian sanctions bill.

Graham’s death was another shock to a West Wing that has grown accustomed to brushes with mortality. Aides were not as close to Graham as they were to the slain right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, but the senator had become a familiar, affable presence in Trump’s orbit and many had grown fond of him. “America has lost a Statesman. President Trump and the White House have lost a friend,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote. Vice President Vance recalled getting into a shouting match with him over Ukraine funding one day, then trying to align with him on rail legislation the next: “He fought like hell for the things he believed in, and he was just as willing to go to bat for you when it counted.”

[Read: The funereal White House]

“Meetings with Graham at the White House were filled with camaraderie, kinship and uproarious laughter,” Stephen Miller wrote in a lengthy social-media post. “In many respects, Lindsey was the last of a breed of American Senator whose like we may not yet see again for a long time. He lived every minute in the arena, a political gladiator to the very last.”

There was also immediate concern as to who might follow Graham into the South Carolina Senate seat; the appointment of any House Republican would further erode the party’s slim advantage in the lower chamber, and the White House in particular opposes Nancy Mace, the once–close ally turned frequent Trump critic who performed poorly in her recent run for governor. (Mace has reportedly expressed interest in the seat.)

Governor Henry McMaster, a staunch Trump ally, will appoint someone to fill the seat until January, and a special Republican primary election will be held next month to pick a nominee. (Graham, who was up for reelection, won his primary last month.) “I have somebody that I think would be great, but I don’t want to say it now because it’s just, you know, it’s too soon with Lindsey,” Trump said on Meet the Press.

Graham did some remarkable shape-shifting to stay close to power, journeying from being one of John McCain’s best friends to one of Trump’s most reflexive advocates. He also forged a close bond with Joe Biden during trips to war zones, and he worked with John Kerry on climate-change legislation. The one consistency was his hawkish view of foreign policy. Even after he cozied up to Trump, he remained tough on Russia and a vocal supporter of Ukraine despite the president’s deference to Vladimir Putin. And, of course, Graham had long advocated attacking Iran and was one of the loudest voices in Washington urging Trump to launch a war that has since turned into a quagmire for the White House.

The veteran senator’s relationship with Trump has been a journey. A decade ago, after years of traveling the world with McCain and Joe Lieberman as the so-called three amigos, Graham opted to make a run for the White House. Always a long shot, his campaign never took off. But Graham was unsparing in his assessment that Trump was unfit for office, tweeting in May 2016 that the party would “get destroyed” if it nominated the first-time candidate, adding that “we will deserve it.” But Graham soon worked to fix his relationship with Trump.

Long a fixture on the cable-news and Washington-talk-show circuit, Graham used his many appearances to defend the president during his first term. Much to the dismay of McCain, who never softened his caustic assessment of Trump, Graham began to frequently golf with the president and boast about his ability to get him on the phone. Though Graham disagreed with Trump on Putin, he more than made up for it in the eyes of Trump’s inner circle with his red-faced, angry defense of Brett Kavanaugh, which many believe helped save the pick during his Supreme Court–nomination hearings. (Trump today said that Graham’s defense of Kavanaugh may be his biggest legacy, and one of the finest moments in the history of the Senate.)

[Read: The quintessential politician of this era]

Graham famously broke with Trump after the January 6 attack—using a floor speech late that night to announce that he was done with Trump and that “enough is enough”—but he got back on board once it became clear that Trump was still the dominant figure in Republican politics. Graham worked tirelessly for Trump during his comeback, and frequently helped rally the GOP caucus to support Trump positions during his second term.

One of the last speeches Graham made on the floor of the Senate came a month ago, when he urged his colleagues to pass the SAVE America Act. The legislation, which he and others were attempting to add as an amendment to an immigration-funding package, includes a crackdown on mail-in balloting as well as bans on transgender athletes in women’s sports. “If you don’t want a photo ID, you are probably into cheating. There is no other reason to say you don’t have to have an ID,” Graham said. “It just makes cheating easier. Who wants a noncitizen voting in our elections? If you are against that, that makes me wonder.”

Graham knew that the measure, which elections experts say is unnecessary and will make it harder for legally registered voters to cast their ballots, would fail. “We will talk about this in November during the election,” he said.

“This is a big blow to the SAVE America Act, let me tell you,” Trump said this morning. It’s unclear what new strategy Graham may have had to push the legislation forward. But Trump several times mentioned that Graham wanted the bill to pass, as if determined to tie his effort to secure the legislation to Graham’s memory.

The Return of the Democratic Manly Man

2026-07-12T07:00:00-04:00

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Brian Poindexter had just finished wolfing down a Reuben sandwich in a deli outside Cleveland when he delivered a message that, coming from a Democratic House candidate in the year 2026, sounded almost provocative. “There’s nothing wrong with being masculine,” Poindexter told me. It’s okay, he said, to be “a manly man.”

Poindexter’s own manliness credentials are fully in order. The 46-year-old started working in a machine shop as a teenager and spent years hauling furniture across the country before finding stability as a union ironworker. He drives a Ram Big Horn pickup truck and built, with his buddy turned campaign manager, a shed in his backyard. Now Poindexter is running for Congress, trying to flip a Republican-held seat in Ohio with a pitch aimed at a constituency that has abandoned the Democratic Party over the past two decades: men.

In 2024, Kamala Harris won just 43 percent of the male vote against President Trump and an even lower portion—39 percent—of white men, according to exit polls. A Democratic presidential nominee hasn’t captured a plurality of men since Barack Obama in 2008, and even then, Obama edged out John McCain among men by only a single point. The party-wide reckoning that Trump’s win spawned has centered in part on why Democrats lost working-class men whose life experiences resemble Poindexter’s—and how the party can win them back. In Poindexter’s view, Democrats’ struggles with men like him owe less to policy than to culture. “It’s all vibes,” he said. “The Democrats have catered too much to, you know, the softer side,” he said. “We should be well-rounded people. We should be tough when we need to be. We should be soft when we need to be.”

Critiques such as Poindexter’s have gelled into a consensus over the past two years, repeated ad nauseam by starchy senators and governors with an eye toward running for president in 2028. Closing the gender gap now seems to be an official electoral strategy for Democrats. A couple of months ago, I got a call from a party operative who pitched a story on the Democrats’ effort to “win back the manosphere.” The operative ran through a list of a half dozen candidates in key House districts who “are engaging culturally in male spaces”—a bit of gobbledygook that I took to mean “manly men,” or perhaps “guy’s guys,” but that also reflects the sort of anthropological distance that points to the depth of the party’s problem. After all, an ironworker probably wouldn’t describe himself as “engaging culturally in male spaces.”

In addition to Poindexter, the list included Bob Brooks, a retired firefighter and union leader running in Allentown, Pennsylvania; Chaz Molder, a Tennessee mayor who’s an avid turkey and duck hunter; and Jamie Ager, a lifelong farmer in North Carolina. One of the Democrats running to unseat a first-term Republican in Michigan is Matt Maasdam, a Navy SEAL who carried the nuclear football as Obama’s military aide.

Running capital-M men has yielded mixed results for Democrats in the past, particularly in Rust Belt states. And this week, the party’s quest for so-called authenticity backfired spectacularly in one of its highest-profile, must-win Senate races. Graham Platner, a Maine oyster farmer who shot to the top of the polls with an Everyman appeal and a staunchly progressive agenda, dropped out amid allegations of rape and mistreatment of women. (He has denied the accusations.) Infuriated Democrats directed their anger at both Platner and the left-wing consultants who had recruited him, faulting their failure to fully vet a candidate who had never before endured the public scrutiny that comes with running for office.

[Read: Platner just made things harder for Democrats]

Amy Lynn Powell for The Atlantic

Brian Poindexter meets with community members after a town-hall event in Brook Park, Ohio, on July 1, 2026.

Centering a campaign on authenticity can fall flat in other ways. There’s nothing more cringey than a candidate trying too hard to be a man (or woman) of the people. “You really can’t fake it,” Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, a former Army Ranger who helped lead recruitment for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told me. He said that people can tell a lot about a candidate just by shaking their hand—“Do they have calluses?”—and mocked politicians who send staffers out to buy them Carhartt jackets as a sort of blue-collar costume. “It’s brand-new with no creases, and everybody in the world knows they’ve never worn that, never worked a day in their life,” Crow said. “Voters see right through it.”

The battle over what it means to be a man is a major campaign theme in Texas, where Republicans have made emasculation their central campaign strategy in the state’s marquee Senate race. The GOP nominee Ken Paxton, who was impeached by Republicans in the state legislature and divorced “on biblical grounds” by his wife, has called his Democratic opponent, James Talarico, “Six-Gender Jimmy” and “Low-T Talarico.”

[Read: Ken Paxton is actually doing this ]

In a pair of competitive House races, Democrats believe that the candidates they’ve chosen won’t face such attacks. Bobby Pulido, the nominee in the Fifteenth District, is a Tejano music star who named his son Remington after his favorite gun. Johnny Garcia, the Democratic pick in the Thirty-Fifth District, spent years as a hostage negotiator in the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office. Both are running for GOP-leaning seats that Republicans redrew to bolster their party’s advantage, and both need to attract support from Latino voters—particularly men—who have drifted right during the Trump era.

Garcia describes himself as “an old-school Democrat,” distancing himself from the party’s contemporary brand. “The Biden administration got it wrong on the border,” Garcia told me, citing one issue on which he hopes to appeal to independent and Republican voters in the district. When Garcia campaigned in a Christmas parade last December, he recalled, he chafed at a decision by organizers to place a large Democratic Party flag on the truck he was walking alongside. “I was just like, Damn, man, we’re gonna have a pretty tough time walking this parade,” Garcia said.

He described getting into a debate with a self-described MAGA Republican who had worked as a police officer and previously been a Democrat. The man told him that the Democratic Party had left him behind, accusing Democrats of being anti–law enforcement (among other complaints). By his own recollection, Garcia calmly but directly parried the man’s critiques; his experience as a hostage negotiator and then a public information officer came in handy. The man did not promise him his vote, but Garcia felt that he had won him over. “I think we got one,” he said to the people who were watching the interaction. More than any specific policy conversion, Garcia told me later, he believed that he had made a human connection with a voter who related to his outlook and experience. “It’s just being able to communicate in plain language,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of sounding like pundits. You have one shot to win somebody over.”

The emergence of candidates like Poindexter and Garcia is not, for the most part, the result of a top-down recruitment strategy by Democrats. On the whole, the party is running its usual diverse slate of candidates across the country, and its nominees in several high-priority races are women. In Wisconsin, Rebecca Cooke secured the Democrats’ early backing for her second bid against Representative Derrick Van Orden, as did Janelle Stelson, a former local-TV anchor, for her repeat run against GOP Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania. In the New York City suburbs, Cait Conley, a decorated Iraq and Afghanistan combat veteran whose campaign-launch video shows her doing pull-ups and flipping a tire at the gym, is challenging Representative Mike Lawler.

But senior Democrats are clearly pleased that at a moment when voters are recoiling from establishment figures, the party is fielding candidates with nontraditional political backstories. “The point here is that this isn’t contrived or formulaic,” Crow told me. “We’re just looking for good people who are looking to serve their country and to do the right thing—who have not been clamoring for the last 20 years just waiting for a congressional seat to open up.”

Some of those campaigns, including that of Josh Turek, a two-time Paralympic gold medalist who is running for Senate in Iowa and calls himself a “poor, disabled kid,” highlight the stubbornness of the gender gap in today’s polarized politics. Recent polling showed that Turek was winning over women and that the female GOP nominee, Representative Ashley Hinson, was easily carrying men. Before Platner ended his campaign in Maine, a June poll—taken after he was accused of mistreating women but before the campaign-ending allegations of rape—showed the Democrat winning a majority of women voters while 51 percent of men backed the 73-year-old Republican incumbent, Susan Collins.

[Read: We’re about to hear a lot more about Iowa ]

As we sat in the deli, I asked Poindexter what he made of that gender divide and how he thought he could break through it. He did not have a ready answer. “I’m not an expert on the human psyche,” he replied. “All I can do is what my life experience has shown me, just getting out and talking with folks—shaking a man’s hand, looking him in the eyes, and saying, ‘Hey, I want to fight for you. I don’t care if you’re Republican; I want to make sure you put food on the table for your family too.’”

“And,” Poindexter concluded, “I hope I can get through to enough of them to win.”

Amy Lynn Powell for The Atlantic

An electronic campaign sign outside Poindexter’s headquarters.

Poindexter is not entirely a political novice, having served for the past several years on the city council of Brook Park, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb. He grew up in Cleveland, not far from where he lives now. He describes his upbringing as “a Brady Bunch situation”; he was one of six kids in a blended family, and his father worked as a union machinist. Poindexter told me that he got into trouble as a teenager—he was once caught with a bag of marijuana, and at 18, he was charged with assault after a neighborhood fight. “I was rough and rowdy, and it took a long time to grow out of that,” he said. Records show that Poindexter was also charged with disorderly conduct in 2002 and aggravated disorderly conduct in 2003, when he was in his early 20s. (Poindexter told me that both charges stemmed from drunken tussles at Cleveland Browns games.)

More recently, and while he was serving on the city council, he pleaded not guilty to misdemeanor charges of illegally setting off fireworks in Brook Park, where they are banned. Poindexter told me that he’s prepared for his opponent to attack his criminal record. “I don’t blame others for the mistakes I made,” he said. “I owned it; I took care of it; I grew from it. I didn’t sue my accusers into silence. I didn’t say it was the policeman’s fault. I didn’t blame the courts.”

Poindexter’s political journey is unusual for a Democratic congressional candidate. He voted Republican as a young adult, supporting both of George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns and then McCain’s in 2008. He traces what he calls his “great awakening” to the financial stability he found as an ironworker, when he saw firsthand the bump in salary and benefits that a union job could provide. He started organizing in 2012 and voted for Obama’s reelection that same year. “I’ve been a solid Democrat pretty much ever since,” he said.

Bernie Sanders’s candidacy in 2016 inspired Poindexter to run for city council the following year, and he remains a huge fan of the Vermont senator. When Sanders held a rally for him in May, the event drew an overflow crowd of more than 1,500 people, Poindexter told me. “It was like Santa Claus coming to your house for Christmas dinner,” he gushed to a crowd earlier this month. (Presuming, apparently, that Santa was an 84-year-old Jewish man from Vermont.)

Poindexter is running in a district that voted for Trump by more than 10 points. He won a crowded Democratic primary in May with help from a coalition that spanned the party’s ideological spectrum, including Sanders and super PACs tied to the AI industry and the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrats. His opponent is the Republican incumbent Max Miller, a Trump loyalist who is in his second term. A big reason why the race is competitive is that Miller has been accused of domestic abuse by his ex-wife, Emily Moreno, who alleges that Miller threw boiling water at her in front of their young child. (He has denied the allegations and is suing her for defamation.) The scandal has played out in the media, and Miller last month shared “secret recordings” of Moreno with the New York Post in an effort to rebut the allegations. Moreno is the daughter of Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio, another Trump-backed Republican, who, Miller says, is aiding her “malicious campaign to ruin my life.”

Poindexter lacks the polish of more experienced politicians, occasionally struggling to find the right word or phrase. It’s something that the campaign hopes can be a strength with voters who are tired of candidates who seem like they were born in a suit and tie. “I don’t know a whole lot about how AI works,” Poindexter admitted to voters at a town hall last week. “I’d be the first to say that I am not a tech guy.” He did not mention the support he has received from the AI industry and has adopted a fairly middle-of-the-road position on the question of data centers and AI regulations. “There should be a balance,” Poindexter said during the town hall. “We should not hinder technology advancements, but we should also put protections in place, making sure that we’re taking care of the people that are displaced from their jobs.”

The Cook Political Report and other election forecasters give Miller an advantage in the race, but they have moved it into competitive territory. Last month, an internal poll conducted for Poindexter’s campaign showed him within a point of Miller. Poindexter is content to let outside groups attack Miller’s personal life, and when I asked him whether the allegations were disqualifying, his answer was one of the few he gave me that sounded workshopped. “The accusations should be investigated thoroughly,” he said. “But I didn’t get in this race because he was a monster in his personal life. I got into this race because the policies that he supports are monstrous for working people.” In response, Miller spokesperson Clayton Henson didn’t address Emily Moreno’s allegations but touted Miller’s record and attacked the support Poindexter has received from the AI industry. “The people of the 7th District deserve a congressman who answers to them, not to the special interests that bought his primary or the far-left agenda championed by Bernie Sanders,” Henson told me in a written statement. “Congressman Miller will always fight for Ohio families, while Brian Poindexter will always be indebted to the special interests that put him on the ballot.”

Poindexter hardly talked about Miller at the town hall that I attended, but he praised his opponent’s former father-in-law, saying that he agreed with a bipartisan proposal from Senator Moreno and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to raise Social Security taxes on high earners to extend the lifespan of the program.

Amy Lynn Powell for The Atlantic

Poindexter, a union ironworker, wore his hard hat while visiting a construction site in Cleveland.

Poindexter seems to understand that although his GOP-leaning district might like making high earners chip in more for Social Security, its voters might not be all in for Sanders’s agenda. He says he wants to “work toward” Medicare for All, for example, but he does not support adopting a single-payer health-care system immediately. Poindexter has also tacked away from the left on a few other flash-point issues. “I am not a democratic socialist,” he said at the town hall, although he welcomed the Democratic Socialists of America as “part of our party” and said “they have some ideas that I like.” He’s also not for abolishing ICE. “I do think we need a secure border,” he said at the event, although he added that he opposes “blanket raids” and “terrorizing communities” in search of undocumented immigrants to deport.

[Read: ‘Abolish ICE’ is back]

The small town-hall crowd—about 30 people in total—was friendly to Poindexter, and attendees told me afterward that they found him straightforward and appealing. The closest thing to a confrontational question came from an older woman who seemed to see, in his male-centered platform, a glaring omission. “I want to know where you stand on women’s rights,” she told him. Poindexter appeared briefly taken aback. “I am running on a campaign of workers first,” he replied. “I took for granted when I got in the race that people would see the workers and understand that that meant all workers.” He noted that he is the father of two daughters and also highlighted his support for equal pay and for restoring a national right to abortion after the fall of Roe. “I’m a fierce advocate for women,” he said.

Poindexter’s campaign remains modest. His campaign manager is a buddy and a fellow member of the Brook Park City Council, Thomas Dufour, who typically rides shotgun while Poindexter drives them around to campaign events in his truck. The two built a wooden lectern to use at the campaign launch and the Sanders rally. (Poindexter proudly showed me the autograph Sanders affixed to the bottom of the lectern.) Poindexter wore his old hard hat—covered with stickers representing the many job sites he’s worked at—during the rally he held with Sanders, and again when he visited construction workers just outside his district last week.

The DIY nature of Poindexter’s operation both suits his message to voters—here is a man who builds things with his hands—and reflects the real challenges faced by candidates who aren’t rich and aren’t connected to the political-donor class. At the end of the first quarter, Poindexter had just over $90,000 in his campaign account, compared with more than $1.1 million for Miller, according to Federal Election Commission filings. He’s trying to get on the DCCC’s “Red-to-Blue” list, a designation reserved for the party’s most promising House challengers that would unlock additional money and campaign-infrastructure support. Late last month, Poindexter teamed up with other labor-backed Democrats, including Brooks in Pennsylvania and Sam Forstag, a former smoke jumper in Montana, to form a joint fundraising committee they’re calling the “Blue-Collar Brigade.”

For the most part, Poindexter and the other men Democrats are running this year aren’t offering up any new male-centric ideas. That’s not what’s needed, Poindexter told me. Within the party’s agenda, he said, “I can’t think of a single piece of legislation that’s bad for men.” But, he argued, Democrats have hemorrhaged support from men like him—the ones who sweat more than type for a living—because the party has relegated them to the periphery. If nothing else, Democrats are embracing their masculinity again, and they’ll soon find out whether that’s enough to win men back.

The MIA Caucus

2026-07-09T18:00:00-04:00

Mitch McConnell has not been seen in public in almost a month. The senator from Kentucky and former majority leader was hospitalized on June 14, and his staff has declined to elaborate, instead recycling the same statement: “The Senator continues to improve, and is working closely with his staff on Kentucky and Senate matters while the Senate is out of session.” Speculation, theories, and questions have filled the void this week, prompting McConnell’s allies to share that they had recently spoken with him. But they’ve faced a deluge of doubts themselves. Yesterday, the Kentucky governor sent a formal letter requesting a health update from the senator, while President Trump told reporters he had “no idea” how McConnell was doing.

McConnell is hardly the first member of Congress to go MIA. Representative Tom Kean Jr. of New Jersey, a Republican running for reelection in a highly competitive district, disappeared for nearly four months this year and missed 142 House roll-call votes before resurfacing in late June. Kean explained that he had been receiving treatment for depression. In 2024, then-Representative Kay Granger of Texas, a Republican and former chair of the House Appropriations Committee, was absent from Congress for months before The Dallas Express reported that she was living in “a local memory care and assisted living home for some time after having been found wandering lost and confused.” Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who died in 2023, remained in office as her health rapidly deteriorated and her staff downplayed her condition.

Although a seat in Congress comes with baseline expectations of being on the job when the House or Senate is in session, there are no formal rules governing disclosure of medical conditions for lawmakers and no official procedures for declaring a member medically incapacitated and removing them. The norm on the Hill is to fiercely shield and protect the private lives of legislators—especially on matters as sensitive as mental or physical health. But in recent years, with Congress ruled by shifting and often thin majorities, it quickly becomes obvious when someone is missing, especially for key votes. And then the theories spread on social media.

[Read: Mitch McConnell and the president he calls ‘despicable’]

McConnell’s absence has prompted a flood of memes, some involving Ouija boards, AI-generated Mitch-zombies, Weekend at Bernie’s–inspired scenes, and reports of the kid from The Sixth Sense having reached the senator. The leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker challenged McConnell to publicly deny that the two are engaged in a romantic tryst. Scott Jennings, a Republican pundit, attempted to combat the speculation by sharing that he had spoken with McConnell “for just shy of 20 minutes” about a range of issues including Iran and Ukraine—only to spawn a new type of meme in which others used his post as a Mad Libs–style template for reporting fake conversations with the senator. Representative Thomas Massie, a fellow Republican Kentuckian who recently lost his primary to a Trump-backed opponent, sarcastically wrote that he spoke with McConnell for “about 20 minutes” about how he’s “really sorry about how my primary turned out.” CNN mistakenly ran a screenshot of a parody account claiming to have spoken with the senator.

In November 1980, Maryland voters elected Gladys Spellman to a fourth term in the House. Days before Election Day, she had suffered a heart attack; she survived but fell into a coma and never regained consciousness. Through a first-of-its-kind House resolution, passed in February 1981, her seat was declared vacant. That April, in a special primary for the Democratic nomination, Spellman’s husband, Reuben, finished second to Steny Hoyer, then a 41-year-old lawyer and former Maryland state senator. Gladys Spellman died seven years later. Hoyer climbed the ranks and spent two decades in top House Democratic leadership. Now in his 23rd term, he announced earlier this year he would not seek a 24th.

That resolution remains the lone example in modern memory of House members taking action to formally remove and replace a colleague who is unable to perform the job as a result of a medical crisis. To longtime observers, McConnell’s and Kean’s recent absences are not unprecedented or even that unusual; they’re par for the course. There is a long history of staff members attempting to shield ailing legislators from the prying eyes of journalists and political opponents, even if it comes at the expense of transparency with constituents. “This is a story as old as Congress itself,” Jim Manley, a longtime aide to Harry Reid who spent more than two decades on the Hill, told me.

Senator Carter Glass of Virginia spent his last four years in office, in the 1940s, absent from public view due to illness before dying in 1946; he did not answer a single Senate roll call after 1942. Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota suffered a stroke in 1969 and did not appear on the Senate floor for almost three years before deciding not to seek reelection in 1972. When John F. Kennedy served in the House and the Senate, as well as during his campaign for president, he hid his diagnosis of Addison’s disease—an adrenal insufficiency—from voters.

Numerous lawmakers in more recent years have stuck to their offices even as they grew visibly frail or as their mental capacity was called into question—and as their staff members demurred or outright denied that anything was amiss. Aides around Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia—who died in 2010 at age 92 and was the longest-serving senator in history—were especially tight-lipped as the lawmaker’s health declined. Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran’s frailness and disorientation were an open secret before he decided to step down in 2018, a year before his death.

[Read: A different kind of fading president ]

There’s always the possibility that these recent headline-grabbing cases of mysterious disappearances might mark a turning point toward reform. Congress returns from recess on Monday, and if McConnell’s absence continues, it could complicate the Senate’s business—particularly attempts to meet the late-September deadline to fund the government for the next fiscal year. McConnell sits on the powerful Appropriations Committee and leads the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, which is responsible for military spending. Steven Smith, a social-sciences professor at Arizona State University who studies Congress, told me there should be a rule obligating members’ chiefs of staff or others to report their bosses’ absences, given that they are employees of taxpayers: “It could still be vague, but there ought to be some requirement to indicate that so-and-so is literally not on the job.” Scott Tillman of U.S. Term Limits, a group pushing for putting constraints on the number of times an incumbent can hold a seat, told me that the recent cases involving McConnell and Kean have made their case more salient. “People are really being deprived of representation—they elected someone to be there, and they’re not being represented,” he said.

Others are less hopeful that any of this will change anytime soon. “Each seat is extraordinarily valuable, as is each vote in the House and Senate,” Julian Zelizer, a Princeton University historian of modern American politics, told me. “This leads to keeping these issues as secret as possible.” Plus, when it comes to protecting members’ privacy, staffers’ jobs are on the line. “As long as God created staff,” Manley said, “there’s always going to be folks that are going to try and do what they can to keep this stuff out of the media.”

Platner Just Made Things Harder for Democrats

2026-07-08T20:58:00-04:00

Updated on July 9 at 8:52 a.m. ET

The Nazi tattoo wasn’t bad enough to force Graham Platner to abandon his Senate bid, his defenders argued earlier this year. Any young Marine, under the powerful influence of alcohol and immaturity, might see a skull and crossbones and think: Badass. The now-deleted Reddit posts mocking rural white people, insulting cops, and making light of assault? Well, chalk that up to the same. Extramarital sexting is not ideal, of course, but then there was Platner’s wife assuring us that the couple had healed. And never mind the allegations of volatile behavior from a couple of past girlfriends; one of them is a Republican activist.

But when Politico reported on Monday that a woman had accused Platner of rape, even his most steadfast supporters began to call for his exit. And last night, the oysterman finally gave in: “For the movement to continue, it can’t be me. For that reason, we are suspending campaign operations,” he said in a video posted to social media. But Platner added to the problems facing Democrats as he exited the race. He fervently denied the sexual-assault allegations—and seemed to imply that the party establishment was somehow responsible. “We did it the right way. We did it the way that we were told we are supposed to make change,” he said. “And now they are not going to let us have it.”

Democrats were never going to win easily in Maine, where for nearly 30 years the electorally sturdy Susan Collins has hung on to her Senate seat. But pile up all of Platner’s baggage, and defeating her might have been an especially difficult project. Now Democrats have a chance to replace Platner with a new candidate—someone who is, perhaps, less encumbered—and redouble their efforts to flip Collins’s seat.

But each silver lining has its corresponding cumulonimbus, and in this case, it’s that Platner has assembled a powerful grassroots coalition in Maine that may or may not be transferable. It depends on whom the party replaces him with—and how. “They may get a mulligan,” the political analyst Charlie Cook, who lives in Maine, told us. “That doesn’t mean they’ll hit it well.”

The implosion of Platner’s candidacy—first bit by bit and then all at once—has Democrats nationwide throwing up their hands in exasperation. The party must flip at least four GOP-held Senate seats in November to capture the majority, and this particular seat has long been considered the party’s most important, and maybe most feasible, pickup opportunity: Maine is the only state that Kamala Harris won in 2024 where an incumbent Republican senator is now up for reelection. Collins, who is running for a sixth term, is something of a unicorn in these polarized times. In 2020, she defeated a well-funded Democrat, Sara Gideon, by nearly nine points even as Joe Biden carried the state by roughly the same amount. But Collins is now 73 years old, and lately, her approval ratings have slumped.

For months last year, Democrats in Maine and in Washington were waiting for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s preferred candidate, the two-term Governor Janet Mills, to decide whether she was going to run. Mills initially expressed ambivalence about the race and put off a decision until last fall. Other battle-tested Democrats were uninterested or opted for other races.

[Read: A 79-year-old freshman senator? ]

Into the void charged Platner, who emerged last fall seemingly out of nowhere but with a well-connected and well-choreographed campaign rollout managed by advisers who had worked with high-profile insurgent candidates: John Fetterman for Senate in Pennsylvania, in 2022 (before his more recent shift rightward), and Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York City in 2025. They saw Platner as a gruff but charismatic oyster farmer with a military-combat record who could channel both the left’s progressive energy and the electorate’s growing distaste for establishment politicians. By the time Mills finally declared her candidacy, in October, many of the voters she would have relied on in a primary had already decided to support Platner.

Platner led Mills in nearly all public polling, sometimes by wide margins and despite the revelations about his past. At the end of April, Mills, who is 78, suspended her campaign, essentially conceding the Democratic nomination to Platner.

Establishment Democrats were irritated, and not only because they found Platner’s behavior both personally offensive and politically damaging. They saw a campaign that seemed to make little effort to vet a first-time candidate, and a candidate who did not appear to have been honest with his own campaign. “If we’re going to start running people that are unconventional, we have to be even more strict in the way that they run their campaigns,” Yemisi Egbewole, a Democratic strategist who worked in the Biden White House, told us a few weeks ago. “We can pluck people out of obscurity, but it’s the responsibility of the candidates themselves and also the people that are running this candidate to frame an accurate narrative.”

Other Democrats questioned whether Platner was really the “authentic” working-class outsider he claimed to be. He had been educated at expensive private schools in New England and, like many future congressional candidates, had worked as a staffer on Capitol Hill. Possibly the biggest customer for his oyster business is a nearby restaurant owned by his mother. Matt Bennett, a co-founder of the moderate think tank Third Way, who’d backed Mills, told us in an interview last month that Platner “feels like a D.C. person’s idea of a working-class candidate.”

The crumbling of Platner’s campaign forced a reckoning for his most loyal backers. And reckon they did: Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, the leftist streamer Hasan Piker, and many other progressives who had stuck with Platner through the drip-drip-drip of allegations rescinded their support for him this week after Platner’s ex-girlfriend alleged that he had entered her home in 2021 and raped her. (Platner has called the allegation “categorically untrue.”)

“The bottom line is, there’s no secrets in politics,” Joseph Geevarghese, the executive director of Our Revolution, a Sanders-aligned group, told us this week. “Candidates should be transparent with the electorate. We grassroots organizers invest a lot of time and energy to advance a cause in this movement, and it’s disappointing when we are let down by our standard-bearers.” Did he feel betrayed by Platner? “It is a punch in the gut, given the level of energy and enthusiasm that he engendered,” Geevarghese said. “You feel deeply, deeply disappointed.”

The question now is how the party responds. “It is really important that Democrats act with confidence and with clarity in deciding on their strategy moving forward,” David Farmer, a Maine Democratic strategist, told us. “The longer this carries on, the weaker position we will be in come November.” Who will replace Platner as the party’s nominee—and can that candidate reassemble the coalition that, until recently, seemed at least fairly well positioned to give the Democrats a must-win Senate seat?

Perhaps just as important: How will that replacement be chosen? State law requires that a replacement candidate be named by July 27, so the state party must settle quickly on a process for selecting him or her. They seem to have done so: Last night, the Maine Democrats announced that they would hold a nominating convention with 600 delegates chosen by county committees to choose Platner’s successor. Expect the convention to be controversial, as it puts the decision of Platner’s successor squarely within the control of the so-called Democratic establishment, rather than with Maine voters directly, as a caucus or a mini-primary might have. Platner’s video last night, which was perhaps the antithesis of conciliatory, certainly won’t help to assuage his supporters’ frustrations about this.

Already, Democrats have picked their horses. Some of Platner’s supporters quickly endorsed Troy Jackson, the former state-Senate president who had earned Sanders’s endorsement in his bid for governor earlier this year. Jackson, who finished third in that race, filed papers to run for Senate this week and declared his candidacy shortly after Platner’s announcement. His backers included Our Revolution, which had endorsed Platner last fall and, in calling for his exit on Monday, warned the Democratic establishment against replacing him with “another status-quo candidate.”

Platner, too, was trying to influence whom the party might select to replace him before agreeing to bow out. “The ballot line belongs to the people of Maine,” he said in his statement last night. A few hours earlier, his campaign had been asking volunteers to weigh in on Platner’s next move, writing that the Democratic Party “must consult the feedback and proposals of the people who built” the movement. But some in the party worried that giving Platner a say in the decision would undercut the new nominee. Republicans clearly relish this prospect. “The Democrat candidate in Maine will either be an alleged rapist with a Nazi tattoo, or someone he selects with the same ‘values and vision,’” Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said in a statement.

Others suggest that perhaps this moment presents an opportunity for Democrats to move more toward the middle. Recent polling of the Maine Senate race showed Platner running behind a generic Democratic nominee. Although Platner “had consolidated the Democratic base, no question about it, his problem was reaching beyond it,” Cook said.

[Read: The Democratic base is angry]

Maybe, Cook and other analysts suggested, another candidate could better appeal to independents in Maine who are tired of Collins but aren’t particularly eager to embrace populism. Someone like the centrist Representative Jared Golden—who has recently taken himself out of contention for the job—or Mills. Or maybe that person is Nirav Shah, the former director of Maine’s CDC, who came in second in the nomination fight for governor and announced his Senate candidacy this morning.

Cook said that a generic Democrat could win in Maine. But especially these days, the Democratic base isn’t interested in generic—or safe or milquetoast or whatever synonym we’re using these days for moderate. The base wants fire and fury. And this puts Democrats in Maine somewhere between a rock and a cliff: Replace Platner with an ideologically adjacent progressive, and you’ve probably got the base, but you might not attract Maine independents. Replace him with a Mills-adjacent electability candidate, and many dejected base voters might stay home in November.

Platner’s resignation gives Democrats some relief—but also a brand-new problem.

Another Fatal ICE Shooting

2026-07-08T20:01:58-04:00

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old construction contractor and father of three, was a “man of routine,” according to his sons. He woke up at 5 a.m. every day, ate a big breakfast prepared by his wife, and left home at sunrise to build houses in the Houston area. Salgado Araujo came across the border from Mexico as a teenager and had been working without legal status for 35 years. Yesterday he left in his work van to pick up his brother and two other men en route to a job. A team of ICE officers, traveling in two unmarked SUVs, was looking for one of the men. Exactly what happened next is unclear.

As the officers attempted to stop the van, according to the Department of Homeland Security, Salgado Araujo ignored their commands and smashed into their vehicles. An officer drew his weapon and shot Salgado Araujo in the stomach. A video posted to social media showed a man face down in the street and moaning in pain, with his hands behind his back and two officers over him. Salgado Araujo died at a Houston hospital hours later.

DHS, in a brief statement, said that Salgado Araujo “rammed an ICE law enforcement vehicle, refused to follow multiple verbal commands, and weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer resulting in our officer firing his weapon in self-defense.”

The killing was the first fatal shooting by ICE officers since the death of Renee Good in Minneapolis on January 7. (Another protester, Alex Pretti, was killed by border agents two weeks later.) This time, Trump-administration officials did not rush to blame the dead for acts of “domestic terrorism,” as they did following the Good and Pretti shootings. They have announced an internal DHS investigation into the ICE officer’s actions, as well as an FBI probe to determine whether Salgado Araujo committed assault before he was shot.

Senior ICE officials I spoke with said they have received few details about what happened. The ICE officer who shot Salgado Araujo was a veteran with more than two decades’ experience, a senior ICE official told me. DHS did not respond to questions about the officer’s identity.

Immigration advocates and Democratic officials in Houston said today that they don’t believe DHS’s claims, and some groups are offering a cash reward for video footage. “Remember Minneapolis? Remember Renee Good? Has ICE learned nothing from that experience?” asked Sylvia Garcia, a Democrat who represents a Houston congressional district, during a press conference today with Salgado Araujo’s adult sons.

White House “Border Czar” Tom Homan, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, and the other administration officials leading President Trump’s mass-deportation campaign have insisted in recent months that they’ve shifted away from the kind of roving street patrols that triggered clashes in Minneapolis. ICE teams have returned to the “targeted enforcement” tactics the agency has traditionally used, they say. It’s a more deliberate approach in which officers plan their operations in advance and attempt to take suspects into custody as safely as possible.

What’s different about targeted operations now is that they’re more often aimed at people in vehicles, according to senior ICE officials I spoke with. Officers used to rely more on a tactic they called “knock and talk,” in which they would arrive at a suspect’s home and coax them to open the door. But word has gotten out—through legal clinics, advocacy organizations, and social media—that officers need a judicial warrant to force their way inside. Almost no one opens their door for ICE anymore.

[Read: How do you prove your citizenship?]

That has left ICE officers attempting to make more arrests by catching their targets leaving homes or heading to work, usually in cars. Some large police departments have vehicle-pursuit policies with guidelines for when deadly force is appropriate. Homeland Security Investigations, a division of ICE, trains its agents using an Emergency Driving Handbook. But ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations, the branch responsible for immigration arrests and deportations, doesn’t have a handbook, let alone a vehicle-pursuit policy, relying instead on broad use-of-force guidelines. ICE officers receive less training in conducting vehicle stops than most police officers, the officials told me. One senior ICE official—who, like others, wasn’t authorized to speak to reporters—acknowledged that it’s a problem.

“Our operations are not at residences any longer. They’re more out in the open,” he told me. “Our tactics and our training and our policies all have to be looked at because the majority of our operations used to be more controlled, at residences, and you had less of these issues to worry about.”

ICE’s street-level arrest operations have traditionally been handled by specialized teams. But the administration has been ramping up enforcement for the president’s mass-deportation campaign and sending far more officers into the streets. Last week, arrests averaged roughly 2,000 a day nationwide, nearly double the pace of this spring, ICE officials told me. Trump officials say they are prioritizing “the worst of the worst,” meaning those with violent criminal histories, but Homan said on Fox News on Monday that only about half of those taken into custody have criminal records. “ICE has broken historic records every single day,” he said. “We’re going to add more resources, and we’re going to add more targeting. We’ve got millions of people we need to find.”

[Read: The truth about ICE’s recruiting push]

After a hiring spree last fall, ICE has doubled its number of deportation officers, but they receive relatively little training in vehicle stops, two officials told me. They’re working in plainclothes and driving unmarked cars, and they’re authorized to shoot to kill if they think a suspect is driving in a way that poses a threat.

There have been at least 16 ICE shootings involving vehicles, four of them fatal, since Trump returned to office, according to records. In March 2025, an ICE officer killed 23-year-old Ruben Ray Martinez, a U.S. citizen, as he maneuvered aggressively through a late-night checkpoint on South Padre Island, in Texas. In September, as Trump sent border agents into Chicago, an ICE officer fatally shot a 38-year-old cook and father of two from Mexico, Silverio Villegas González, who tried to drive away during a traffic stop, dragging an officer. DHS officials said the officer was severely injured, but body-camera footage released later showed him telling colleagues that he was not seriously hurt.

In several of the other shooting incidents involving vehicles, not all of which resulted in injuries, the government has used similar language to justify officers’ use of force. DHS says that drivers “weaponize” vehicles by attempting to ram or run over federal law-enforcement officers. There have been several incidents similar to Good’s killing: a split-second encounter involving a vehicle moving at a low speed and a driver who appears to be trying to get away from officers, not run them down.

Customs and Border Protection officers and border agents have shot at five others while carrying out Trump’s crackdown in U.S. cities, including Marimar Martinez, the Chicago preschool worker who was shot five times by an agent who later bragged about it to his friends. The Trump administration accused her of trying to attack the agents, then dropped the charges when its case fell apart.

Paul Hunker, ICE’s former chief counsel in Dallas, told me that federal law affords broad protections to officers who can demonstrate they acted in self-defense. “Deadly force can be used when such force is necessary to protect the designated immigration officer or other persons from imminent danger of death or serious physical injuries,” he said. “That’s the standard.”

Many law-enforcement agencies have issued more specific use-of-force guidelines when vehicles are involved. Shooting at moving cars is considered especially risky because errant bullets can strike bystanders. CBP, whose border agents generally have broader latitude to use force to prevent potentially dangerous individuals from entering the country, issued new guidelines during the Biden administration discouraging dangerous high-speed pursuits. Trump rescinded the policies when he retook office.

The Supreme Court ruled in the landmark 1985 decision in Tennessee v. Garner that officers can shoot at a fleeing, unarmed suspect if they believe that their safety or public safety is at serious, imminent risk. “All of it hinges on whether the officer believes there is a danger to someone,” a senior ICE official told me. In 1989, the Court ruled in Graham v. Connor that officers’ actions—including the use of deadly force—must be evaluated on the basis of whether they are “objectively reasonable” given the full circumstances of an incident.

In a statement, ICE told me that its officers “are trained to use the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve dangerous situations” and that they are “highly trained in de-escalation tactics and regularly receive ongoing use of force training.”

[Read: ‘Maybe DHS was a bad idea’ ]

DHS has not said whether it possesses body-camera footage of Salgado Araujo’s killing. The department has not published photos of vehicles allegedly damaged by his attempt to flee, and videos posted to social media do not appear to show dents or major damage at the scene.

Ronaldo Salgado said he believes that his father panicked when two unmarked dark SUVs suddenly tried to box him in. Speaking to reporters in Houston this morning, he said neither his father nor his uncle had a criminal record, and his father had been instructed on how to comport himself during an encounter with ICE. “Had my father seen any emblems on those cars, he would have complied, he would have stopped,” Ronaldo said, referring to the agency’s use of unmarked cars. “He only wanted to get back to work, and back to us.”

Ronaldo said he thinks his father believed he was being assaulted by thieves. “He feared someone would take his tools,” Ronaldo said, because they were “how he made his livelihood.”

Ronaldo said that he and his brother Lorenzo Salgado Jr. are American citizens with college degrees, and their younger brother is now getting a degree. For the past year, they’d been trying to help their father obtain U.S. work authorization. He’d put them through college and built a large new family home, achieving his dream, they said, knowing it could be gone in a flash. They found out about their father’s death from social media, Ronaldo said—“not the hospital, not law enforcement.” The other men who were riding in the van with their father are now in ICE custody, he said, including their uncle.

Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed to this report.

Perhaps the Nazi Tattoo Was a Clue

2026-07-07T19:45:11-04:00

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The Senate race in Maine looks significantly different than it did 48 hours ago. Yesterday, Politico reported a credible allegation of sexual assault against the Democratic nominee, Graham Platner. In a video posted after the story broke, Platner denied the accusation but said that his campaign would explore the best way forward, opening the door to what seems like an inevitable withdrawal from the race.

Now the voices that had most vehemently defended Platner during previous scandals or vouched for the necessity of his folksy progressivism have withdrawn their endorsements, one after another, and called for him to drop out. Among those voices are Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Representative Ro Khanna, and Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau. No doubt, none of these Democratic politicians, party power brokers, or podcasters were aware of the alleged rape when they made and maintained their endorsements. Nearly everyone who previously supported Platner seems to have since reversed course. Credible allegations of sexual assault do, indeed, go too far.

But the question remains: Why was this horrific allegation the threshold when Platner had so obviously transgressed so many times before? Perhaps Platner’s Nazi tattoo should have been a sufficient indicator that he lacked the character to be a senator. Perhaps maintaining that SS logo for two decades, covering it up only when it became politically inconvenient, demonstrated that he lacked the judgment for national office. Perhaps a multiyear history of not just having abhorrent views about women and minorities, but feeling the need to post them for the world to see, could have told us that he is not the person to be Maine’s voice in Washington. Maybe a well-documented history of contemptible behavior in his personal life should have been enough, when taken with everything else, for Democrats to conclude that Platner was exactly the person he appeared to be.

[Jonathan Chait: With Graham Platner, Democrats got drunk on the beer test]

When Platner emerged last year as the Democrats’ shiny new object—DSA sensibilities with a gruff voice and working-class clothes—many who favored his brand of leftist populism rallied to help him defeat Democratic centrism. He managed to do so when his primary opponent, Governor Janet Mills, suspended her campaign before votes were cast. Platner’s backers hoped that he could do the same against Susan Collins this fall. But when a clear pattern of Platner’s bad behavior and bad judgment emerged, these Democrats held firm, using their positions of prominence to assure voters that what we all could see was somehow not as it seemed. This latest allegation was not a black-swan event—a shocking and unexpected revelation from an otherwise strong candidate. Rather, it was the most recent in a steady drumbeat of disqualifying revelations.

It’s good that those who have changed their mind about Platner are now telling the woman who spoke with Politico, Jenny Racicot, that they will not stand with her alleged victimizer. But why were the Jews who were targeted by the organization whose logo he bore not worthy of the same support? And was Lyndsey Fifield, a conservative woman who alleged that Platner had engaged in emotional and physical abuse (also denied by Platner), less worthy because of her politics? What does it say about Platner’s defenders that his other horrible behavior was within their range of acceptability?

Those who waited until this week to rescind their endorsements had all the indicators they needed to surmise that Platner was a problem. And pretending otherwise required a willful denial of the facts. For instance, they claimed that he hadn’t known the significance of his tattoo until recently, despite the fact that at least three people said they’d had conversations with Platner about the image prior to its public disclosure.

We have spent months listening to spin from Democrats arguing that what was clear about Platner’s character was somehow more nuanced and explainable, all because progressives had found a candidate in Carhartt. The idea that a candidate could have a Nazi tattoo and stay in the race sounds more like a subplot from Veep than the reality upon which several prominent Democrats staked their reputations.

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

When the Platner campaign comes to its ignominious end, as it almost certainly will whether he withdraws or not, the value of conducting a postmortem will not be about Platner himself, a deeply flawed person worthy of neither the office he sought nor the support he received. It will be about those who gave him that support. Not only did they stand by Platner; they expressed outrage toward those of us who said he was unfit. And contemptibly, they attacked one of Platner’s accusers, Fifield. “Believe women,” it seems, does not extend to victims who commit the unforgivable sin of having voted for Republicans.

Perhaps next time these officeholders, influencers, advocates, and organizations will think twice before throwing their full-throated support behind someone they do not actually know or, at a minimum, withhold support from those who are clearly unacceptable. They lied to voters, either by vouching for the virtue of a candidate about whom they did not have specific knowledge, or by claiming that someone they knew to be detestable was not. Perhaps now voters will think twice before heeding the advice of Sanders, Warren, Khanna, Favreau, and others, or of Veterans for Responsible Leadership, the advocacy organization that had endorsed Platner, who served in the Marines, and reiterated its support through the previous scandals.

The voters themselves should not be let off the hook; a republic’s survival requires the engagement of an educated electorate. Even though most of Platner’s behavior had been widely reported prior to the June 9 primary, an overwhelming majority of Democratic voters in Maine selected Platner. They either made no effort to inform themselves about the man for whom they cast their vote, did not believe the well-corroborated claims against him, or felt that Nazi iconography, alleged partner abuse, admitted substance abuse, and offensive Reddit posts were of less importance than defeating Mills. None of those justifications was ever sufficient.

It would be nice to believe that those who failed the test during the Platner campaign will learn from their mistake, but I am skeptical, particularly in today’s political environment. For those who apparently lacked the integrity to denounce contemptible candidates, the discernment to detect them, or the desire to do the right thing, might I offer a simple rule to assist—even just toward the pragmatic goal of selecting electable candidates. Prior to the Platner campaign, I would have thought this rule was common sense and easy to follow, but apparently it should be made explicit: Maybe, at a minimum, don’t support a candidate with a Nazi tattoo.

The Demon Next Door

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

Photographs by Houston Cofield

From the outside, the church looked like a plain brick storefront, the mirrored windows peeling, a sign above painted white with blue letters. THE WELL, it read, and underneath, REVIVAL HUB.

There were older and grander churches in Maryville, a college town in East Tennessee where you could barely drive a minute without passing a cross or a sign about Jesus. But when Mike and Andrea Brewer established the Well, in 2016, they understood themselves to be part of something more mystical and revolutionary than any existing denomination—a charismatic-Christian movement that has drawn millions of Americans with the promise of supernatural encounters with God and visions of cosmic battle.

By his own account, Mike had been an exhausted factory worker and a lapsed Pentecostal addicted to pornography when one night, at home and praying for a better life, he heard an unfamiliar voice calling out to him and believed that it was God. At church a few days later, he would write, he felt a “tangible explosion” in his chest, followed by “the purity and righteousness of God moving through me in waves.” He came to believe that a demon had exited his body and that the Holy Spirit had taken its place. He decided that God had chosen him for a divine assignment.

The Brewers began attending conferences with names such as “Voice of the Prophets” and “Voice of the Apostles” in places like Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Springfield, Missouri. At one gathering, Mike claimed to have seen an actual angel, and at another, a manifestation of the Holy Spirit that he described to me as “like five fog machines, like a cloud just rolling into the room.” He and Andrea came to believe that God was unleashing new signs and wonders and raising up modern-day apostles and prophets, including, it turned out, them.

Houston Cofield for The Atlantic

Andrea and Mike Brewer, the founders of the Well, consider themselves hardened spiritual warriors.

They went abroad as missionaries to India and Haiti, which only confirmed their emerging understanding of a universe with three distinct realms—the heavenly, the earthly, and the underworld, with the Earth being the realm of spiritual warfare. On one side, the Holy Spirit, angels, and believers comprised an army of God. On the other were the forces of Satan—legions of demons with names, ranks, and personalities that could inhabit people, geographical regions, and entire nations. In India, the Brewers claimed to have battled Shiva, Brahma, and Kali. In Haiti, Python and Mami Wata. There was Marduk, Osiris, Ra, Horus, Diana, Artemis, Shesha Naga, and so on—a whole pantheon of demons that represented ancient religions and civilizations, and whose earthly expressions were essential to understanding current events.

By the time the Brewers returned to Maryville, they saw themselves as hardened spiritual warriors. They founded the Well to continue the battle, joining an international network of churches and ministries called Global Awakening, which also had a seminary, where Andrea began studying demon history and hierarchies. When Mike asked God for their exact assignment, he told me when I visited in March, “the Lord spoke so clearly. He said, ‘I’m giving you and the Well a mandate for the full eradication of witchcraft and demonic activity in the region.’”

And that was what led the Brewers to look across the street one day a few years later and determine that the central hub for demonic activity in the region was roughly 100 yards away. It was a bookstore called Southland.

The owner was Lisa Misosky, and she was chatting with customers one afternoon when she found out that people in town were accusing her of demonic activity, and not in a metaphorical way.

Over the course of three decades in Maryville, Misosky had made Southland Books and Cafe into a local institution, a sprawling maze of old bookcases where people could find a leather-bound Mark Twain, a paperback Charles Bukowski, shelves of military history, and flyers for a local mah-jongg group. Misosky had a bar downstairs where she hosted trivia nights, readings, all-ages punk shows, and fundraisers that sometimes involved drag performances. She occasionally provided space to the local Democratic Party. But none of that had drawn public protest until a new church moved in across the street.

“You’re not gonna believe this shit,” a friend texted her, and then sent the first of several videos posted by a man who introduced himself as Mike Brewer, the leader of an “apostolic hub” called the Well. Sitting at a desk, he explained in a calm and methodical manner that the bookstore had been identified as a “regional demonic stronghold.” A high-ranking demon named Lilith was involved, Misosky would learn, and the bookstore was being targeted for something called “strategic-level spiritual warfare,” the goal of which was to “remove the enemy.”

Houston Cofield for The Atlantic

Lisa Misosky, the owner of Southland Books and Cafe

Misosky had been born and raised in Maryville. She was 58, Catholic, and gay, and told me she was used to living among conservative Christians. Still, demonic came as a surprise. “This is probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” she remembered thinking after seeing the first video, not yet realizing that the church was part of the fastest-growing segment of Christianity in the country, or that the language she was hearing in the fall of 2022 was spreading across the Christian right and the wider political landscape.

[Molly Worthen: What the growth of charismatic Christianity reveals about America]

In the years ahead, Donald Trump would accuse the entire Democratic Party of being demonic. Tucker Carlson would claim that he had been mauled by a demon in his sleep. Steve Bannon would call Lutheran and Catholic activists who help immigrants demonic. A federal emergency-management official would speak of being teleported to a Waffle House 50 miles away, elaborating that he was not sure whether the transporting forces were “good” or “evil.” J. D. Vance would say of UFOs, “I don’t think they’re aliens. I think they’re demons.” And the same apostles and prophets who’d claimed that God had anointed Trump to be president would encourage him to see his war with Iran as a cosmic showdown with a demonic entity known as the Prince of Persia.

In that beginning moment, though, Misosky was simply wondering what the accusations meant for her bookstore and the people who went there. Why was she being targeted? What, precisely, was demonic about Southland? The mah-jongg? The romantasy section? A drag performer called Icky Stardust? Her? She wondered if she needed to worry about security.

She began searching for books on the subject, learning of an entire specialty called demonology. She found a manual written by an East Texas couple called Pigs in the Parlor: A Practical Guide to Deliverance, which had a chapter outlining 53 different demonic groupings.

From her front door, she kept an eye on what was happening across the street. A tobacco store blocked her full view of the church, but on Thursdays and Sundays, she could see cars and trucks wheeling into the craggy parking lot.

In one way, of course, none of this was new. Belief in satanic forces has been part of Christianity since the first century. What was relatively new was the rising movement that was supercharging these concepts, and that had first taken root in charismatic circles during the 1990s. Early leaders called their ideas the New Apostolic Reformation, claiming that a wave of Holy Spirit power was surging around the globe, heralding a “new apostolic age.” NAR leaders revised a common End Times narrative in a way that would prove revolutionary: Instead of retreating from the world and awaiting the return of Jesus Christ, they believed, Christians were supposed to establish God’s Kingdom, right now, on Earth.

[From the February 2025 issue: Stephanie McCrummen on the New Apostolic Reformation’s army of God]

Their version of the Kingdom mapped neatly onto the political goals of social conservatives, libertarians, and, more recently, the MAGA movement. The Kingdom would have limited government, free markets, two genders, one kind of marriage, and one kind of God. The “right now” part, meanwhile, offered an urgent paradigm for mobilizing grassroots believers out of the Church and into electoral politics, government, education, and all other realms of life where they were to assert God’s dominion. The new apostles and prophets of the NAR spread these ideas through decentralized networks of churches, international prayer ministries, schools, revivals, and prayer rallies, attracting followers who could find a sense of power and purpose in building the Kingdom. Leaders spoke of believers as “warriors” or “God’s army” or even “special forces,” and churches as “military bases,” and certain apostles as “generals.” They believed that being a Christian meant being in a constant state of spiritual warfare.

In its most basic form, this simply meant praying for God to eradicate evil. But NAR leaders pioneered a more radical version that they called “strategic spiritual warfare,” which entailed the idea that demons could take over cities and institutions, and that Christians could target and scatter them by their physical presence, intensive prayer, singing, marching, and other strategies.

One version of how this could look was when a team of NAR leaders in the ’90s climbed Mount Everest, where they spent weeks praying at various altitudes in an attempt to displace a high-ranking demon called the Queen of Heaven, whom they believed to be suppressing the spread of Christianity across the Middle East and Asia. Another version was the run-up to the January 6, 2021, insurrection, when prominent apostles and prophets held prayer rallies calling for “the minutemen of the Kingdom” to rise up against demonic forces that they believed had stolen the 2020 election, after which many of their followers were among those who stormed the U.S. Capitol. Another version was what happened after the Brewers returned to Maryville.

The first gatherings of the Well were held in the office of a former used-car dealership, just a few families praying for God to reveal the enemy. As more people joined, the group relocated to an office building, where one Sunday Mike decided that it was time to begin the first phase of strategic spiritual warfare, targeting what he considered to be ground-level demons. He invited anyone carrying “emotional pain or tormenting thoughts” to come to the front of the room. As he and Andrea tell the story, a young man recently released from prison stepped forward. Andrea put her hands on his shoulders, and as Mike ordered any demons to come to attention, the young man began shaking and crying, a catharsis that Mike declared to be God’s victory over a demon that they later identified as Odin, because of the man’s participation in a white-supremacist prison gang that embraced the Norse god. After that, more people began coming forward, and it was during this time that Mike received the mandate for the full eradication of witchcraft and demonic activity in the region.

Houston Cofield for The Atlantic

Services at the Well, in Maryville, Tennessee, are typical of those in charismatic churches—people dancing with prayer flags, pacing the room, lying prostrate on the floor. Thursday evenings are set aside for delivering people from demons.

The church moved in 2021 to the brick building, a former grocery store along a main thoroughfare in town, and set aside Thursday nights for delivering the people of Maryville. The sign went up. Into the sanctuary went 100 or so chairs arranged in a semicircle around a drum kit, guitars, and amplifiers. On one wall went a map of the area superimposed with what appeared to be a huge spiderweb that divided the region into prayer sectors. Where a church’s pulpit or a cross would usually be was an arrangement of amber-toned spotlights and glowing flameless candles. And when people came, they found the sort of free-form services common in the movement—people dancing with colored prayer flags, or pacing the room, or lying prostrate on the floor, the band playing one anthemic song after another.

A woman named Sasha, a driver for Uber Eats at the time, told me that on her first night at the Well, “this cry came out of me,” which she believed was a demon leaving her body, freeing her of the emotional and physical pain of a hysterectomy. A 62-year-old woman named Pam told me that a deliverance team conducted a “spiritual evaluation” to determine how demons might have entered her body, asking whether she’d had astral projections or tarot cards read, done meditation or yoga, or ever felt envious, angry, depressed, or insecure. The team then led her through an elaborate process of renouncing curses and revoking demonic rights, and when it was over, she said, “I really believed I was a child of God.” A young man suffering from severe anxiety and depression told me that after his cleansing, he felt “the most love I have ever felt.” A middle-aged woman who had struggled with drug and pornography addictions told me that after several sessions, she felt “euphoric—whole, complete, one, merged with the Trinity,” and that whatever God asks of her, “I will do, at all costs.”

People came from Alabama, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota. Mike said that a wealthy businessman from Indiana flew in for a private session. Deliverance leaders told me that they identified demons by the ways a person might be tormented. Feelings of worthlessness was Belial. Sexual confusion could be Jezebel. Anger could be Thor, who was under the command of Odin. The Brewers estimated that they’d delivered many hundreds of people, enough that they decided they were ready to move into the next phase of spiritual warfare. This meant identifying higher-ranking territorial demons, which involved a process that Andrea called determining the “narrative of hell” over the region.

She began gathering what she called “spiritual intelligence.” She kept track of what demons had been identified during deliverances at the Well. As she drove around the area, she told me, she made note of Masonic lodges, tarot-card readers, and anything else that made her feel uneasy. She paid attention to her dreams. Then came the day that Mike noticed an event posted on Facebook, an upcoming fundraiser for local foster kids that involved death-metal and drag performances. The Murvul Punk Toy Drive was being held at a bookstore right across the street.

The Brewers had not heard much about Southland, but scrolling through the shop’s Facebook page, they saw rainbow flags. They saw postings about local Democratic Party meetings and a drum circle, along with videos of past drag shows, including one in which Icky Stardust performed an elaborate routine to a blasting metal version of “White Wedding” and poured fake blood all over their dress. Mike thought that he saw a teenager in the audience.

“It was obvious,” Andrea said. The high-ranking demon influencing the region was Lilith, a Mesopotamian wind goddess who ruled over forbidden sexual desire, and Southland was the stronghold, which Mike defined as a place where certain thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors contrary to God were flourishing. Mike informed the church elders. “I said, ‘We cannot just let this stuff go,’” he told me. “I said, ‘This is evil.’”

After she watched the video, Misosky started asking around about the Brewers. She was a little bit older than Mike, but it only took a couple of phone calls to find out that he was from a nearby town called Townsend, known as a tourist gateway to the Great Smoky Mountains. Her sister and a friend had worked with his cousins; another friend who had worked at Southland had joined the Well, and Misosky had not seen her since. She realized that Andrea had worked at a local hardware store.

“Jackleg preacher,” Misosky would mutter when Mike’s name came up.

She had never wanted to be a political activist. But during the Trump era, Southland was becoming a social haven of the sort that can be found in many small southern towns. The campus of Maryville College was down the street, and students and faculty often hung out in the café. A professor sometimes gave lectures on the Constitution. Older gay couples met for beers. Misosky decided to host the county’s first Pride event in 2019, the same year that the Well received the mandate. She had thought that a dozen or so people would show up, but more than 700 did, which she found unexpectedly moving. She hosted more events after that, including drag-show fundraisers; minors could attend with a parent or a guardian, which was the case with the punk toy drive that was now drawing the attention of the Well.

Misosky flipped through Pigs in the Parlor. “This is the day of spiritual battle and spiritual-victory,” read a chapter titled “The Final Conflict.” “The warfare is on!”

She went online and looked up Lilith. “Primordial she-demon,” read one description. “Banished from the Garden of Eden for disobeying Adam,” read another.

“Every story needs a hero—a protagonist and an antagonist,” she remembered thinking. “So I guess I’m their antagonist, in collusion with Lilith.”

She wanted to blow it all off but couldn’t. She’d thought that the QAnon conspiracy was bonkers, and it had compelled a man to drive to Washington, D.C., with an AR‑15 and fire shots inside a pizza parlor. Nancy Pelosi, as speaker of the House, had been called demonic, and then her husband had been assaulted by a man who spoke of “evil” forces.

Across the street, the Brewers turned a conference room at the Well into what they called a “war room.” They put maps of all the surrounding counties on the walls, representing what they considered their spiritual theater of operation. Mike began posting about the fundraiser to his thousands of social-media followers, saying that it was from “the pits of hell.” At some point, he said, someone apparently upset by this sent him an envelope full of excrement; others sent checks and urged him to keep going. A few congregants started “prayer walking” near the bookstore, a tactic of spiritual warfare that had been deployed in the days and weeks before the January 6 insurrection, when people marched around the U.S. Supreme Court and state capitol buildings, calling the Holy Spirit into battle.

Meanwhile, Andrea began doing research into Tennessee laws and found an old statute banning cabaret performances within 1,000 feet of a church. The Brewers sent the information to the local district attorney, the police, the sheriff, and city and county commissioners. Soon, a wider circle of activists and pastors became involved in the cause, including one who had recently held a book burning in the town of Mt. Juliet, about three hours away—a huge bonfire that had drawn a crowd of cheering people who’d tossed copies of Harry Potter and other books deemed demonic into the flames.

At the Well, Mike showed images of the drag shows to his congregation. He kept streaming live videos describing what was happening at Southland as “wicked.” Then, a few days before the fundraiser, in November 2022, Mike and Misosky spoke by phone.

Her recollection is that she called Mike, and that he talked about doing spiritual warfare against voodoo chiefs in Haiti, and that she said, “That’s great, Mike. Why don’t you have a cup of coffee with me?”

Mike’s recollection is that he called Misosky. “I said, ‘I’m not calling to resolve differences. We’re not going to do that. I am calling to request that you go 18 and older for events,’” he said. “ ‘If you’re marketing to children of this area, we’re going to do everything within the law and the spirit to stop you. We will never harm you physically.’ I said, ‘I’m calling out of respect.’”

And that was the last time they spoke.

Soon after, Misosky got a call from the Anti-Defamation League. There had been some chatter about a protest at Southland on neo-Nazi forums that the group monitored. At the time, all kinds of LGBTQ events around the country were being targeted by extremist groups. A gunman had just killed five people and injured 19 at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado. Misosky called the police. She called some local pastors she knew and asked that they show up at the fundraiser wearing their collars. She posted on Facebook that “MAGA fascists” were threatening the toy drive.

The next evening, she stood with dozens of supporters in front of the bookstore, watching as a group of nine men, some with their faces covered with bandannas, marched down a side street and up to the sidewalk in front of the entrance, where police stopped them from going any farther. According to local press reports, the men held signs that read GROOMERS ARE PEDOPHILES and IT’S OK TO BE WHITE. At least one of them appeared to have a gun.

The Brewers said that they had no idea who the protesters were, and that they were at home at the time. On Facebook, Mike speculated that Misosky had organized a “false flag” operation to smear Christians. Later, the ADL and another watchdog group would identify the men as members of a neo-Nazi group called the Tennessee Active Club, part of a network of such clubs across the United States. Members of the group would show up the next year in the town of Franklin, about three and a half hours from Maryville, to provide security for a mayoral candidate named Gabrielle Hanson. During her campaign, Hanson spoke of battling vague forces threatening the nation and was anointed for office at a tent revival whose promotional posters declared WE ARE TAKING BACK THE LAND BY DISPLACING DEMONIC FORCES AND USHERING IN HIS GLORY. (Hanson said in a statement later that she had not hired the men who showed up, and denied being affiliated with “any white supremacy or Nazi-affiliated group.”)

In front of Southland, there was shouting back and forth between the protesters and Misosky’s supporters, and after a few hours, the masked men returned to their cars, which were parked several blocks away; some of them reported to the police that their tires had been slashed.

The fundraiser went on, but Misosky remained unsettled. She blamed the Well for “putting a target on our back” and providing “moral cover” for people who might want to justify violence. She spent the night of the protest and several nights after that camped out on the floor of Southland with a .38, a 9-mm, a shotgun, and a baseball bat.

Mike told me that he and Andrea were merely bringing the reality of demonic activities at Southland to light. “The truth hurts,” he said. “We won’t resolve our differences, our worldviews. I would never physically harm anyone, but I will bring an awareness.”

When I reached one of the protesters named in local press accounts, he told me that he had never heard of the Well but made clear his view of drag performances. “Influencing children to sexual activities isn’t demonic?” he wrote in a text message.

Not long after the fundraiser, Misosky received word from the county sheriff, through an intermediary, asking whether she wanted to sign her staff up for active-shooter training.

Andrea, meanwhile, received word from God. It came through one of her mentors, a prophet in Colorado, who trained people in spiritual warfare and told Andrea that she had gotten a prophecy that the Well was entering into a final battle with Lilith, which the Brewers understood less as a prediction than as an instruction.

Until recently, all of this might have been considered a dispatch from the fringes of American religion, except that the ideas taking hold in Maryville are becoming more and more mainstream.

While the Southern Baptists, United Methodists, and other denominations continue to decline, millions of Americans are finding their way to nondenominational churches with names such as Oasis, Elevation, and Harvest Rock, where they are learning about the intricacies of demons, spiritual warfare, and other NAR ideas. Some of the nation’s largest megachurches, such as El Rey Jesús in Florida and Free Chapel in Georgia, are led by apostles and prophets in the movement. One such apostle, Paula White-Cain, is President Trump’s spiritual adviser.

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

By 2024, roughly 61 percent of American Christians agreed with the statement that “there are modern-day apostles and prophets,” and roughly half agreed that “there are demonic ‘principalities’ and ‘powers’ who control physical territory,” according to a survey conducted by Paul Djupe, a Denison University political scientist who is among the few scholars attempting to track the ways that NAR ideas are transforming Christianity. By December 2025, roughly 59 percent of evangelical Christians and 22 percent of non-evangelicals agreed that “the church should organize campaigns of spiritual warfare and prayer to displace high-level demons,” Djupe found in a follow-up survey.

The same survey also indicated that more people are encountering these concepts on social media than in church, which speaks to how people are following apostles and prophets through online ministries and prayer networks, and to how influencers across the broader Christian right are leveraging these ideas to gain and possibly radicalize followers.

This was obvious at the memorial for Charlie Kirk following his assassination last year. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described the moment at hand as a “spiritual war.” The right-wing influencer Benny Johnson urged members of Trump’s Cabinet to “wield the sword for the terror of evil men in our nation.” The far-right activist Jack Posobiec told people to “put on the full armor of God and face the evil in high places and the spiritual warfare before us,” rhetoric that has only continued to escalate as the midterm elections approach.

[Read: Charlie Kirk and the ‘third Great Awakening’]

Speaking about the anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis earlier this year, the influential NAR strategist Lance Wallnau said that “the demons are manifesting.” More recently, the lieutenant governor of Indiana, Micah Beckwith, speaking about Democratic attempts to gerrymander congressional districts, said that the party was being led by “the minions and voices of darkness.”

“Wake up, Christians. They are coming for you,” he said on a show called FlashPoint, a kind of nightly news for the apostles-and-prophets crowd. “You can’t pet a demon. I know people like to say, ‘Hey, demons, stay over there. Just don’t hurt us, and we won’t hurt you.’ It doesn’t work that way. Evil will find you. Until strong men stand up and do something and fight fire with fire, then we will continue to lose ground, our children will be warped, the curse will be over the land.”

As the MAGA coalition has fractured, some of Trump’s former supporters have been turning this language against him. Among others, Tucker Carlson has questioned whether Trump could be the anti-Christ, while Carlson’s critics have suggested that Carlson himself might be under demonic influence. The conservative writer Rod Dreher, seeking to explain his former friend’s growing anti-Semitism, recently wrote that he wondered whether there was “some demonic force in the New England wood where Tucker lives, and if it has been working on his mind.”

Dreher, a friend of Vance’s who identifies as Eastern Orthodox, has been writing a lot about demons lately and told me that he believes something larger is going on in American culture. “I think the whole materialist paradigm we’ve lived by is breaking down,” he said. “The world is becoming re-enchanted, whether people want it to be or not. It’s all very real. People—the overclass, the professional class—just don’t see it and don’t want to see it.” In books and interviews, Dreher has been promoting parable-like stories about demons that seem designed to reach those people, or perhaps shift some spiritual Overton window. One involves a haunted McMansion in Louisiana. Another is about a wealthy New York City woman whose husband placed her under an exorcist’s care. Yet another is about a Chicago lawyer terrorized by alien visitations that turned out to be demons.

[From the March 2026 issue: Rod Dreher thinks the Enlightenment was a mistake]

In a more immediate sense, invoking demons can be a means of dehumanizing and delegitimizing political enemies, which has often been a precursor to actual warfare and political violence. “It’s a very useful way to get around the Christian imperative to love your enemy,” Matthew Taylor, a visiting scholar at the Center on Faith and Justice at Georgetown University, told me. “For the most part, that is the ironclad command. So how do you get Christians to hate their enemies? Or to hate them even if they love them? Demons are easy to hate. They are irredeemable objects of hatred.”

Houston Cofield for The Atlantic

In 2021, the Well moved into an abandoned grocery store across the street from Southland.

Which Misosky understood as she told the sheriff’s office that, yes, she would like to sign up for active-shooter training.

And so, three years into a campaign of spiritual warfare against demonic forces in Maryville, she and her staff learned how long it would take for police to arrive should she call 911, and what to do in those minutes. They learned how to duck and cover, and run for the exits. The trainer suggested that Misosky arm each door with something to spray in the eyes of a possible shooter. She bought some cans of wasp spray and placed them strategically near the two entrances, behind several bookcases, by the door to the downstairs space, and under the bar.

Upstairs, she kept the baseball bat and a gun under her desk, which she adjusted so that she could face the front door and scan each person who came in. Sitting there, she sometimes found herself thinking, “I know they would shoot me first.”

Across the street, the Brewers were feeling more and more triumphant. In 2023, Tennessee’s state legislature passed the nation’s first law banning drag performances in public spaces or where minors could view them. Arizona, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Idaho, among other states, then passed laws similar to Tennessee’s, which is being challenged in court, but which still felt to them like a victory for the Kingdom of God.

In accordance with the prophecy that Andrea had received from Colorado, the Well entered the final phase of spiritual warfare against Lilith in the spring of 2024, which involved 40 days of continuous prayer asking for God to liberate Maryville. The Brewers said that people showed up every day and sometimes stayed into the night. “We just left the doors open, and people came,” Mike said, describing how he believed those prayers were answered when the state legislature passed a resolution declaring July of that year to be a month of prayer and fasting for the entire state.

That summer, a Republican state representative coordinated prayer rallies for all 95 counties across Tennessee, and Andrea was asked to speak at one in Maryville, along with state and local officials. As the Brewers saw it, the law, the government, and the whole state were coming into alignment to fulfill the mandate that God had given them.

The rally was on the steps of the county courthouse. The day was a bit cloudy, and several hundred people came, including many from the Well, some of whom had American flags in their pockets, and many of whom kneeled, then bowed, pressing their forehead to the warm concrete. When it was Andrea’s turn to speak, she felt full of God’s authority. She commanded that Lilith leave the region in the name of Jesus, at which point, she said, she heard sirens going off. When she looked up into the sky, she said, she saw something like clouds parting, and what she discerned to be a “halo” of colors in the sky.

“Something shifted,” she said. “Something changed. There was a moment where God said, ‘I am breaking through this situation.’ And everybody present—you just felt it.”

And now it was a spring Sunday at the Well, one like so many other Sundays in a church where spiritual warfare never really ends, and several dozen people filed into the sanctuary to hear what God might want them to do next.

A member of the congregation gave a message about grief, but mostly there was praying as the band played, drums pounding, building and building, amber spotlights glowing. Two women danced around the room with prayer flags, and others lay on the floor. After 45 minutes of this, someone declared, “Right there, I felt like we pushed through the atmosphere,” and someone else said, “Something is breaking right now in this room, and it’s going to break through this city, and break through this region,” and someone else said, “In the name of Jesus, every demon out!”

During the two weeks I spent at the Well, prayer teams performed deliverances almost every day. Some of them involved newcomers, but many were a kind of spiritual maintenance for long-standing congregants who kept returning for more—more purification, more power, more of this version of freedom and purpose. People told me that during their deliverances, they had visions of snakes and soldiers, doors and colors.

Sasha, the woman who’d worked for Uber Eats, told me that she had struggled with childhood trauma, homosexual feelings, and drug addiction, and that she was on her fifth or sixth deliverance to rid herself of those and other things that she did not consider God. The sessions could be emotionally exhausting, and she said that her deliverance leader had explained that she should space them out for her own safety: “She told me, ‘Honey, you’ve been through so much, your frame could not contain it.’” By that point, Sasha had been liberated from Python, Osiris, Apollo, Lilith, and other demons, and she suspected that more were still in there.

At the same time, she and others said that their deliverances were not only about their own purification. The experience had also changed how they saw the world and their role in it. “It’s like being a warrior—there’s no rest,” Sasha said. “Things are changing in the spirit realm, and people are not ready for what’s to come.”

She and others told me about all the ways they now saw Satan working in the world. It was Jeffrey Epstein, and child trafficking, and underground tunnels. It was Iran, and Muslims whose goal is “to outpopulate us all and take over,” in Sasha’s words. It was Pride Month, and transgenderism. It was churches that were stifling the Holy Spirit. It was not just separation of Church and state that was the problem in this country, but a far more profound separation of humanity from what they understood to be the one true God.

“If we keep everything separate, no one will ever see the big picture,” Sasha said, and she explained how she starts her days.

“I wake up in the morning, and I anoint myself,” she began. She said that she asks God to open her senses to the supernatural, because at times she can smell demons. She puts her hand on her head and asks God to “silence the voice of the accuser in Jesus’s name” and to “silence the voice of my own thoughts in Jesus’s name.” She asks to “have the helmet of salvation and the very mind of Christ” and to “bring every thought into submission.” And then she heads into the world, a spiritual warrior.

Across the street, Lisa Misosky started her day with the wasp spray still by the doors, and the baseball bat and gun still under her desk, and a worn copy of Pigs in the Parlor on a shelf.

The Brewers, meanwhile, had decided that their work in Maryville was done. “A beachhead has been established,” Mike said. The Well would continue. But he and Andrea were moving on to the next front, relocating to a town north of Palm Beach, Florida, where Mike was starting a ministry to train businesspeople and other leaders in “Kingdom warfare.” Andrea was developing the narrative of hell in their new neighborhood, where many streets were named for Greek gods.

“The Well has been in war for almost 10 years to deliver this territory,” Andrea said just before they left Maryville. “Now it’s a calmer season. But there will be another wave.”

This article appears in the August 2026 print edition with the headline “The Demons of Maryville.”

The Other Celebration of America

2026-07-06T20:16:00-04:00

The celebrations of America’s 250th birthday, though they offered many wonderful moments, did not provide the sweeping sense of national unity for which some people had hoped. Some Americans found the July 4 weekend too political, too polarizing, and offering too much President Trump.

But another event this summer has proved to be a source of infectious patriotism: the World Cup. A tournament that started with so much angst—so much “ugh,” some might say—has turned into a joyful celebration of America. A nation that, by reputation, doesn’t even like soccer is now rallying around its upstart team. TV ratings are at an all-time high, attendance records are being set, and the American squad can advance to the quarterfinals if it triumphs in tonight’s game against Belgium. Politics have mostly been irrelevant (well, until yesterday’s red-card controversy), and many Americans have briefly set aside their red-versus-blue differences to rally together in the nation’s swirly red, white, and blue soccer kits.

Something else has happened over the past four weeks of this tournament: People from around the world came to our shores and fell in love with our country. The United States’ international standing has been badly damaged in the Trump era—alliances have been strained, bombs have been dropped, foreign aid has been cut—yet waves of foreign visitors have been moved by what they have found. There have been exceptions, and some of the good vibes are surely online fabrications, but for many, the geopolitical tensions have been temporarily set aside. Thousands of Norwegians marveled at the lights of Times Square. Algerians were delighted by the warm welcome they received in Lawrence, Kansas. The Scots drank Boston out of beer. A supposed German tourist went viral for a chain-restaurant tour of the South. The America on display was the land of plenty: full supermarkets, air-conditioning that actually works in a heat wave, endless appetizers and breadsticks. The United States’ soft power now relies less on USAID than on Applebee’s.

The respite may be brief. Right around when tonight’s U.S. match wraps up, Trump will depart Washington and head to a NATO summit in Turkey, where, if past is prologue, he could clash with world leaders over defense spending, the war in Ukraine, and who knows what else. A high-stakes midterm election is coming, and there is little expectation that the good feelings created by the American squad’s run will last. But right now, let’s enjoy this summer party—even if it’s not the one we expected.

For a time, organizers and others thought America 250 might be that galvanizing, flag-waving force. And there was precedent. The nation’s bicentennial, in 1976, also arrived at a fraught moment, just two years after the resignation of President Richard Nixon. There was a fuel crisis, skyrocketing inflation, high unemployment, the recent trauma of Vietnam, plus the Cold War. Yet the nation’s 200th birthday largely was a triumph. President Gerald Ford, knowing that the country needed to heal after Watergate, tried to make it a bipartisan celebration. He allowed the nation’s history, good and bad, to take center stage. He acknowledged that much work needed to be done to make it a safer, more equitable nation. For many, the parade of tall ships through New York Harbor and the massive fireworks display was a moment of renewed optimism.

Our politics have grown only more partisan in the past 50 years, and Trump has never pretended to be interested in governing all of his nation’s people. He took office promising retribution, and he’s shown a keen interest in remaking the nation, especially its capital, in his image. The Kennedy Center. The East Wing. A triumphal arch. The list is exhausting. He’s put himself in charge of telling our nation’s story; his administration has removed signs he doesn’t like from the nation’s parks, and is eyeing the Smithsonian next. It came as no surprise that he’d hijack the semiquincentennial, pushing out the bipartisan America 250 group in favor of the more Trump-friendly Freedom 250. Predictably, the anniversary celebrations in Washington took on a MAGA tint, and many Americans who oppose Trump steered clear. A concert featuring C-list stars was canceled. A state fair on the National Mall drew sparse crowds in the sweltering heat. The much-discussed Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was closed. Trump’s July 4 speech, delayed by storms, didn’t start until much of the nation had gone to bed. And the smoke from the fireworks display left Washington in a haze of poor air quality.

[Read: The capital is a mess]

To be clear, there were wonderful moments throughout the nation to celebrate the Fourth of July. Charming parades in small towns. Families all over the country manning the BBQs and the sparklers, and maybe reminiscing about James Madison. A naturalization ceremony on Long Island. Readings of the Declaration of Independence in Massachusetts. Trump recognized several elderly veterans in his speech on the National Mall. And, yes, the tall ships were back in New York Harbor, this time accompanied by a military flyover.

On July 4, in addition to watching the fireworks, millions of Americans were watching France take on Paraguay in the cradle of independence, Philadelphia. The game lost a little of its historical luster when Germany was upset by Paraguay (FIFA spared England the possibility of suffering a second devastating loss on July 4), but the roster of history makers in Philadelphia added a name: Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and now Mbappé. France’s 1–0 victory not even four miles south of Independence Hall was just one of the tournament’s seemingly endless supply of can’t-miss matches—and perhaps the country’s biggest victory on these shores since Yorktown.

[Listen: How the World Cup explains the world ]

The tournament has not been without its problems. Tickets are astronomically expensive. A highly decorated referee was barred from traveling from his native Somalia. International visits were much lower than expected. The Iranian team played a match the same day that Trump authorized a strike on its nation amid a dispute over the Strait of Hormuz. But, as I wrote last month, there was always the hope that the games would overcome whatever had seemed off about the tournament. And they have. Who will forget Cape Verde’s magical run and near-upset of defending champion Argentina? England surviving the cauldron that is playing Mexico in Mexico City? How so many of the tournament’s biggest stars—Lionel Messi, Erling Haaland, Harry Kane, Mohamed Salah, and more—have delivered for their squads?

But those bravura performances won’t be what I remember most about this World Cup. I’ll recall the Brazilians singing in the NJ Transit train as we journeyed to a World Cup match at MetLife Stadium. The Norwegians taking over a subway escalator to do their traditional “Viking Row” celebration. Watch parties at JCPenney stores. How every game day brings a new torrent of fans sporting soccer kits. In a popular culture that is so fragmented, there was something refreshing about how so many conversations, either online or in person, were about the same thing. At dinner the other night, I was happy to provide scores to a neighboring table whose cell signal wasn’t strong enough to refresh the ESPN app. The cities with some of the highest TV ratings—Boston, Austin, and the greater Kansas City area—are in both red and blue states. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, went to a game. California Governor Gavin Newsom and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were at the U.S. opener. Trump is expected to attend the final. For Americans who have grown to dread the judgmental looks when traveling overseas, it was a delight to see foreigners enjoying the U.S. again.

Trump, for a while, was preoccupied by the 250th celebrations and largely stayed out of the World Cup. But I knew that wouldn’t last. After a stellar group stage, the U.S. played Bosnia and Herzegovina in its first knockout game last week. As the team nursed a 1–0 lead, one of its stars, Folarin Balogun, was given a red card, which meant that he was ejected from that match, leaving his team to play with 10 men. The U.S. still managed to win and advance to face Belgium, but Balogun was supposed to be suspended from playing in that match as part of the punishment for the red card. Now, let’s be clear: The call was bogus. No foul was assessed in real time, and the red card was awarded only after the official stared at a slow-motion replay. It was a bad break, but there was also little that the U.S. could do.

[Read: A very bad World Cup call]

Enter Trump. He called his pal Gianni Infantino, the head of FIFA—who has spent nearly two years buttering up Trump, including awarding him the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize. And suddenly, out of nowhere, FIFA lifted Balogun’s ban, a decision that drew outrage from many international teams and fans. (Perhaps it escaped Trump’s attention that Balogun, who grew up in the United Kingdom but was born in the United States while his Nigerian mother was visiting New York, was allowed to play for the U.S. because of birthright citizenship, the constitutional protection Trump wants eliminated.) The president quickly took a victory lap, but the karma is not great.

The hard feelings around the decision will hopefully be fleeting. A series of great games await before the World Cup wraps up on July 19. Right now the surprising sense of national spirit is worth cherishing, and the renewed affection for the United States that so many nations are feeling is worth savoring.

So many nations—except for Belgium.

With Graham Platner, Democrats Got Drunk on the Beer Test

2026-07-06T18:37:35-04:00

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

Last September, the progressive strategist Morris Katz confessed to The New Yorker that the process by which he decided that Graham Platner was qualified to run for U.S. Senate required less time than drinking a cup of coffee. Actually, it seems to have been less a confession than a boast. “Within a few minutes of talking to him, I was, like, ‘This guy owes it to the country to run for Senate,’” Katz recalled.

In the 10 months that have followed, a procession of unflattering stories have made clear how dreadfully irresponsible it was for Democrats to entrust the task of flipping what seems like the most necessary seat to secure their potential Senate majority to a man who had never run for office or led an organization of any size. The almost-certain final straw is a Politico report that alleges Platner raped a woman named Jenny Racicot in 2021. The story includes messages referring to the incident sent by Racicot two years later, before Platner contemplated running for office. Platner called any allegation of nonconsensual behavior “categorically untrue.”

There is no longer much question as to whether Platner is suitable for public office, and even less question as to whether plucking him from political obscurity made any sense. A more pertinent question is: What could possibly drive a professional political strategist to support such a rapid promotion in mere minutes?

One plausible reason appears to be political ideology. Katz and his allies have sought out candidates who are willing to castigate the Democratic Party for selling out the working class—which necessitates, or at least militates toward, candidates who have no experience inside the party. And whereas this ideological orientation requires an intensity of commitment, it does not require a mastery of policy detail.

[Read: Maine has a Graham Platner problem]

Dan Moraff, one of the strategists who helped select and vet Platner, “wants his candidates to back Medicare for All and characterize the Israel-Hamas conflict as a genocide, but beyond that, doesn’t believe voters care about detailed proposals,” The Wall Street Journal reported last month. Having a policy agenda that could fit comfortably on a Post-it note without omitting any important details certainly speeds up the process. Platner, indeed, has boiled down nearly all political problems to the perfidy of sinister oligarchs. Whatever the merits of this worldview, it does not demand much knowledge.

But a second, at least as important reason for Platner’s lightning-fast ratification was that he has the desired look for the part. Donald Trump has described liking his appointees to come right out of “central casting,” by which he means that they look like a Hollywood version of the position they are filling.

Katz and Moraff have taken an almost literal approach to this “central casting” criteria, searching for candidates whom the camera loves and then offering them to an adoring progressive fan base. Platner’s qualifications in this regard are obvious. He has a masculine baritone, and works with his hands. Last year, Katz filmed a video of his new protégé shucking oysters, chopping wood, swinging kettlebells, and speaking directly to the camera in a muddy sweatshirt about how the oligarchy had screwed their beloved state.

The performance helped make Platner a political star. “I flew here to profile Graham Platner,” wrote Ana Marie Cox in The New Republic last September, “because his announcement video for his Senate campaign (produced by the same company that’s done work for Zohran Mamdani) struck the same deep chord in me as it did in the millions of others who watched it.” A stream of adulatory profiles followed.

It soon emerged that Katz’s abbreviated assessment of Platner had missed, or overlooked, troubling details. He had posted inflammatory messages on Reddit and gotten a tattoo associated with Nazi war criminals. Platner claimed that his past indiscretions were the products of post-traumatic stress, and promised that he was a changed man with no additional skeletons to hide.

More skeletons kept turning up, though. Platner had sexted with at least half a dozen women after he was married, and reportedly lied about what he knew about his tattoo. He assured Senate backers that no additional negative stories would come out, only for his promise to crumble again.

Platner’s enthusiasts initially continued to support his campaign and reject the evidence of his misconduct. When The New York Times reported that a past girlfriend alleged he had physically abused her, the paper dismissed her testimony on account of her being a Republican, ignoring the discrepancies in Platner’s own defense.

[Mike Nelson: The ‘broke veteran’ excuse]

Matt Stoller, a researcher at the left-wing American Economic Liberties Project, wrote on X, “Graham Platner represents a rejection of Dem HR lady politics.” In a follow-up post, Stoller apologized for the impolitic term, but explained that he meant the party had fallen prey to a form of corporate rule that had especially harmed men. Human-resources departments, he wrote, “increasingly were forced to become bagmen for monopolists who hated labor.” Despising these departments, he reasoned, was actually progressive, because they represented the interests of the oligarchy.

At the risk of apologizing for the corporate power structure, one function of the HR department is to ensure the company does not hire somebody whose background contains multiple firing offenses.

In reality, Platner was the Democratic-candidate equivalent of the grinning empty suit who gets the job after a handshake because the boss likes the cut of his jib. He looked like the authentic working-class hero so many progressives wanted, so he had to be one. George Burns once quipped, “When you’re playing a role you’ve got to be honest. And if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” In politics, people call this “authenticity.” But maybe looking and sounding like a working-class dude who hates big corporations is not adequate qualification for high office—or even proof that you can be taken at your word.

The ‘Consumer Socialism’ Trap

2026-07-06T07:00:00-04:00

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This past January, in his inaugural address, Zohran Mamdani memorably promised to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” In the parlance of the Democratic Socialists of America, of which Mamdani is a member, collectivism is a good thing. It is not meant to recall Stalin’s seizure of farms, which resulted in mass famine, or Mao’s Great Leap Forward, which also resulted in mass famine. American socialism today is different. The DSA still formally aspires to “popular control of resources and production,” otherwise known as seizing the means of production. Yet the New York City mayor’s attention-grabbing policy proposals—to freeze rents, establish city-run grocery stores, and pay for universal child care—are aimed at a more modest goal: socializing the cost of consumption.

“Consumer socialism” does not liberate workers from the exploitation of owners; it liberates consumers from the burden of prices. Although its advocates may claim inspiration from both the Great Society tradition of the Democratic Party and Nordic-style democratic socialism, consumer socialism is really a muddle of the two. The Great Society emphasized poverty reduction through means-tested programs such as Medicaid and Head Start; consumer socialism is meant for all. And unlike the Nordic welfare states, which are supported by high levels of taxation for all workers, Mamdani’s approach aims to raise sufficient revenue from corporations and the rich. Consumer socialism tries to have it all: universal social provisions without universally steep taxes. It retains, like other forms of socialism, a supreme optimism in the ability of state planners to shape markets. Where the old central planners failed, the new ones think they will succeed.

Mamdani is only one of consumer socialism’s proponents. The newly elected mayor of Seattle, Katie Wilson, is a former transit organizer who campaigned on both universal child care and spending $1 billion to pay for union-built public housing. The leading candidate for mayor of Washington, D.C., is DSA-backed Janeese Lewis George, who also calls for universal child care and massive production of below-market-rate housing. (She is open to the idea of government-run grocery stores as well.) Mamdani, Wilson, and Lewis George have claimed the mantle not of Stalinists or Maoists, but of a different subspecies of socialist—the “sewer socialists” who ran Milwaukee for decades starting in 1910. They made peace with the capitalist superstructure and devoted themselves to good, incorruptible governance and reliable public infrastructure—sewage systems, yes, but also parks, libraries, and fire departments. In their time, they were skewered for practicing “slowcialism.” In a speech he gave to mark his 100th day in office, Mamdani labeled “our 2026 answer to sewer socialism” as “pothole politics”—doing mundane jobs, such as filling more than 100,000 potholes, because “government is not too busy, not too self-important, not too mired in paperwork to fix the problems of this city.”

Sewer socialism is attracting renewed interest in America because it is too boring to threaten capitalism. Lenin despised its predecessor, municipal socialism, for much the same reason. In the late 19th century in English and German cities, socialist administrators operated public utilities such as gasworks, electric trams, and even city-owned slaughterhouses. This variation of socialism aimed to blunt the rapacity of capitalism rather than sharpen its contradictions and hasten the coming revolution. Under municipal socialism, Lenin wrote in 1907, “attention is diverted to the sphere of minor local questions, being directed not to the question of the class rule of the bourgeoisie, nor to the question of the chief instruments of that rule, but to the question of distributing the crumbs thrown by the rich bourgeoisie for the ‘needs of the population.’ ”

Lenin’s ghost would be similarly unimpressed with contemporary American socialism—too much democracy, too little murder. Still, there’s nothing small-bore about consumer socialists’ desire to overhaul the economy. In their view, high prices are not market failures but moral ones, the result of greed and corruption, which can be vanquished with the right intention. The ideal state is a kind of Lake Wobegon, where every price is below average.

[Michael Powell: What Mamdani doesn’t know about tenants]

One irony of consumer socialism is that it is better tailored to the laptop classes—which now form the backbone of the Democratic Party—than to the American left’s traditional working-class base. The upper classes disproportionately use child-care centers, while lower-income households rely more on stay-at-home parents and relatives. This is partly because wealthier people can more easily afford formal care services. But not every community may even want to send their kids to a child-care center. Some evidence suggests that Latina mothers prefer to have a relative look after their children, even when cost is no issue. Rent stabilization and controls apply to units, not occupants—which in New York has sometimes meant showering benefits on celebrities and on politicians, such as former Governor David Paterson and the late Representative Charles Rangel. Upper-middle-class meritocrats are generally not exhausted by capitalism. They are exhausted by the costs of rent and child care in desirable neighborhoods—bills that the preexisting means-tested welfare state would never have covered.

Mamdani will probably fall short of implementing his vision: Budget constraints mean that buses are unlikely to be free, as he promised; his child-care proposal received funds to last for just two years so far; and New York, a city of more than 8 million people, will have, at most, five city-run grocery stores by the end of his first term. Despite his pledges to tax the rich, he is limited in his ability to do so, and although his recently passed pied-à-terre tax might raise $500 million a year, universal child care would, according to his own campaign, cost $6 billion a year.

The natural habitat of consumer socialism—solidly left-wing American cities—imposes serious limits on its ambitions. Unlike the federal government, cities typically cannot run huge deficits year after year, and must quickly reckon with promises that cannot be paid for. In 2018, New York City officials rolled out a voucher program with an unwieldy name, CityFHEPS, and the laudable goal of decreasing homelessness by subsidizing housing. In 2019, the annual cost of the program was budgeted at $25 million; its projected cost last fiscal year reached $1.7 billion, as the number of recipients and the cost per voucher increased simultaneously. Faced with the city’s daunting budget deficit, Mamdani reversed his campaign pledge to expand CityFHEPS and has instead scrambled for ways to hold costs down.

Many risks lurk in consumer socialism’s promises of cheap goods and services. If New York City or Washington, D.C., rapidly increases subsidies for child care, for instance, without expanding the number of approved providers, the existing ones will charge more to meet excessive demand. Another complication is that the more generous any city benefits are, the more people will move across municipal limits to use them—creating a cost spiral.

The sewer socialists chose their targets carefully. Milwaukee’s mayors had a strong economic rationale for pursuing public ownership of utilities: avoiding the massive, duplicative costs of rival water networks without letting a private monopoly gouge consumers. In contrast, publicly run grocery stores are interventions in a low-margin, highly competitive industry. In his 100-days speech, Mamdani pledged, “At our stores, eggs will be cheaper. Bread will be cheaper. Grocery shopping will no longer be an unsolvable equation.” But the mathematics of running retail outlets might prove more flummoxing than he realizes. Many aspects of life in the Soviet Union have come to be retroactively romanticized; its grocery stores are not among them.

Optimists think—or hope—that Mamdani-style socialists have a greater awareness of economic constraints than they let on. My colleague Derek Thompson recently said that Mamdani may be sporting “the abundance mullet, which is to say, economic populism in the front and abundance in the back.” Abundance is a term that Thompson coined in this magazine to describe policies that expand supply through public and private investment and deregulation—essentially supply-side economics for liberals. The idea is that Mamdani would win popular support by freezing rents—an idea almost unanimously derided by economists—while simultaneously boosting home-building. But the second half of this bargain may never materialize. Although New York’s Rent Guidelines Board has approved a promised freeze for nearly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments, Mamdani’s efforts to permit more home-building have been plodding by comparison. Absent new supply, restrictions on rent increases will limit mobility for those who receive the benefit, and increase costs for those who do not.

[Derek Thompson: A simple plan to solve all of America’s problems]

Plans are already afoot to scale consumer socialism across America. National Democrats have realized that the high cost of living makes for a powerful midterm-election theme, and some in the party prefer to address it with subsidies and price controls rather than measures that increase personal incomes and economic growth. The Congressional Progressive Caucus recently released its “New Affordability Agenda,” which includes plans to make child care a nationwide entitlement—staffed by day-care workers paid as much as teachers—and to create a new set of housing subsidies for rent and down payments. Progressives also argue that this can be financed without tax hikes on ordinary people, but through targeted taxes on plutocrats and corporations. Enacting any such changes nationwide would require many more votes than the caucus currently has. And the problem with implementing such plans at the local level is that the rich can always decamp to Austin or Miami, as some of California’s billionaires are threatening to do over a ballot measure that would take 5 percent of their wealth.

Perhaps cities like New York will refine a functional version of consumer socialism, in which subsidies are balanced with enormous supply-side expansions in the number of homes and child-care centers, leaving everyone better off. Perhaps capitalism can be appropriately fettered within the confines of a select few cities, inspiring a nonviolent, nationwide socialist revolution. That would be a remarkable triumph for Mamdani’s consumerist ideology, which wears the transgressive label of socialism but is born primarily out of anger over prices (and an innate American antipathy toward taxes). American collectivism may be, as Mamdani promised, warmer than rugged individualism. It will certainly be warmer than Soviet or Maoist collectivism. It could also be just as unworkable. And it will certainly be extraordinarily expensive.

This article appears in the August 2026 print edition with the headline “The ‘Consumer Socialism’ Trap.”

The Alabamafication of National Politics

2026-07-05T08:00:00-04:00

On Juneteenth, I watched Doug Jones, the Democratic nominee for Alabama governor, deliver a speech at the Scottsboro Boys Museum, in the northeastern corner of the state. I found myself thinking of the 1960s civil-rights rallies that I’d covered as a young reporter, and that many of the older Alabamians in the packed venue had attended. A former U.S. attorney who served three years in the Senate, Jones is a master of the old-time Bama stem-winder in settings such as the 150-year-old Black church that houses the museum, which commemorates nine young Black men who were falsely accused of rape nearly a century ago.

“We don’t want to go back, folks,” Jones said, in a rising preacherly cadence. The audience responded with Amens. “We have a different view of governing,” he said of his campaign. “We have a different view of Alabama than somebody from Florida that wants to be your governor. My view of Alabama, and what we’re trying to do in this campaign, is to build a house with a crowded table.” He went on, “We’re all a little broken, but in Alabama we all belong.”

The Florida quip was a shot at Jones’s opponent, Senator Tommy Tuberville, and a nod to the one issue that Alabama’s Republicans fear in this campaign to lead one of the reddest states in the South. A Democratic judge in Montgomery will rule soon on whether Tuberville meets the state constitution’s seven-year residency requirement to run for governor. His opponents argue that his real home is the 5,000-square-foot Florida beach mansion that he bought after his 10-season coaching stint at Auburn University.

Tripp Skipper, a former paid consultant to Tuberville, summed up the Republican view of the contest for me. “The only path for victory that I see for Doug is one that the courts provide for him, and I don’t see that happening,” Skipper said. “The voters have already rendered a verdict on Tuberville and Jones, and the political environment has not changed in any significant way since 2020.” That year, Jones, who was trying to hold on to the Senate seat he’d won in a 2017 special election, lost to Tuberville by nearly 472,000 votes.

[Adam Serwer: The Supreme Court has invented a right to discriminate]

Tuberville is certainly the favorite in the race. He is a committed loyalist to Donald Trump, who won the state by 30 points in the last presidential election. Alabama hasn’t had a Democratic governor in more than two decades. And yet, during a recent visit to the state where I was born and began my newspaper career, I came to believe that Jones’s candidacy has a long-shot logic, positing a collapse of Trump’s popularity. Jones must stir voter resistance to Tuberville’s political baggage and his gift for goofy statements. At the least, Jones’s candidacy is a bravely idealistic waving of the flag in a state that is growing more diverse and lurching toward modernity in its population centers.

Roving 187 miles from Scottsboro to the Montgomery bedroom town of Wetumpka, I didn’t see a MAGA cap on the sidewalks. The Trump faithful seemed hunkered down. Doug signs festooned the lawns in the rich suburbs south of Birmingham, just as they had when Jones won in 2017. Republican leaders in Alabama are demonstrably jumpy on the residency issue. A sure sign was the state GOP’s executive meeting on June 14, when Tuberville’s party put him under oath behind closed doors to testify about his homes. Tuberville told a committee that, since 2018, his effective residence has been a small house in Auburn that his wife and son bought in 2017; he presented tax statements that his lawyers said supported this. He also testified that he’d voted in Florida as recently as 2018 and hadn’t put his name on the Auburn deed until two years ago. The committee rallied behind Tuberville, dismissing a challenge by an obscure candidate who wanted to replace him on the GOP ticket.

In an interview, Jones, who is 72, told me that he is counting less on the residency issue than the national mood swing that he believes has reached even the Trump faithful in Alabama, and on the arithmetic of his previous campaigns. He scored a come-from-behind win in 2017 against a flawed Republican candidate, former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore. Moore saw his lead vanish after several women credibly accused him of pursuing sexual relationships with them when they were minors. (He denied engaging in sexual misconduct.) This year, Republicans are fretting about a slide in voter participation. AL.com reported that, in the May 19 primary, the state moved from “as far red as you can go” to “something that might almost look purple in the right light” in terms of voter turnout. On primary day, 42.5 percent of the votes cast were Democratic, up by more than 20 points from 2022, while “Republican turnout dropped by nearly as much as Democratic turnout increased,” according to AL.com.

If this turnout pattern continues in November, Jones hopes that his “magic number” of 920,000—his vote count against Tuberville in 2020—could squeak him into the governor’s mansion. In short, he’s counting on MAGA no-shows rather than conversions. “We’re not going to spend any time trying to persuade the unpersuadable,” he said.

Jones is Alabama’s proven upset artist. Witness not just his 2017 victory over Moore but his successful cold-case prosecutions of Klansmen. While back home, I spent time with his political role model, former Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley, another civil-rights hero who, like Jones, is an avatar of Alabama’s embattled, but occasionally decisive, progressive coalition. Made up of minority and white voters from the state’s professional classes—educators, trial lawyers, union members—and suburban independents, this bloc undercuts stereotypes about Alabama as a white conservative monolith. Elected in 1970, Baxley shamed the FBI into giving him the evidence needed to convict the infamous Klan terrorist Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss of murder in 1977 for his role in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which killed four Black girls on September 15, 1963. Chambliss had escaped punishment for 14 years because J. Edgar Hoover closed the celebrated case as unsolvable in 1968. Birmingham police had never shown much interest, because Chambliss operated under the personal protection of Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor.

I covered the dramatic Chambliss trial in Birmingham for the St. Petersburg Times. Unbeknownst to me, Jones had skipped law-school classes nearby at Samford University and watched from the courtroom balcony as Baxley presented the tightly choreographed prosecution that put Chambliss in prison for life. Inspired by Baxley’s performance, Jones went on to become U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama in 1997. The FBI’s Birmingham field office had quietly reopened the 16th Street case, and provided Jones with wiretap evidence that the bureau had withheld from Baxley. In 2001 and 2002, Jones secured murder convictions against Chambliss’s aging accomplices, the Klansmen Thomas Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry. Chambliss was unrepentant when I visited him in prison in 1980, and both Blanton and Cherry died in prison without admitting their guilt. (All three men had lived in or near the industrial neighborhood in Birmingham where I came of age. I am revisiting those places now to research a book about “Bombingham.”)

To this day, repentance and empathy are not much part of the political ethos in Alabama. The Alabama style, with proven voter appeal, has more to do with anger, violent language, and an enduring sense of grievance about being looked down upon by outsiders in the public, the media, and the federal government. Scratch enough and you’ll surface these sentiments among even rich, educated Republicans in the most affluent suburbs of the big cities. It is no mystery, then, that Trump and Tuberville have both found success in Alabama by railing against elites and intellectuals, as George Wallace did in his day. Jones knows all about Alabamians who cast throwback votes, even as he declared defiantly in Scottsboro that the Confederate flags he’d spotted on the way to the museum are “a symbol of hatred.”

“I know I was preaching to the choir back there,” Jones told me as we drove away from the museum. Still, he insists that the zeitgeist is shifting in Alabama in light of socioeconomic change and the trickle-down effect from Trump’s erratic record. There is some truth to this; the state is now a land of high-rise financial offices, Mercedes and Honda plants, a nationally ranked medical center, and soon data centers and energy farms around Birmingham and Mobile, and in the Black Belt. Birmingham has even become a destination city for foodies. As a reporter for The Atlanta Constitution and The New York Times, I watched Atlanta evolve in the ’70s, and I’d judge that my hometown is on a similar arc, just one or two decades behind.

Tuberville, 71, has yet to campaign hard. He must recognize that the residency litigation could be a close-run thing. On June 29, Circuit Judge Brooke E. Reid said she’d read all the briefs, and noted that “it’s not a well-settled issue in my opinion.” Reid, a Democrat, said she expected her ruling to be appealed to the all-Republican state supreme court. There, a rejection of Tuberville’s candidacy would shake the highly political city of Montgomery to the foundations of the antebellum capitol building.

In a state that favors performative politicians, Tuberville is far from a perfect candidate. He sports nice suits and Conway Twitty hair, but he’s hardly charismatic. AL.com’s cartoonist and liberal columnists openly ridicule him as “dumb.” Tuberville’s 2023 blocking of Pentagon promotions was not popular in a state that’s heavily dependent on spending for military bases and NASA. His recent suggestion that President Obama should be jailed for imaginary offenses may be too absurd even in a state used to hyperbole. Tuberville also has a way of talking himself into trouble, as when he promised during his 2020 campaign to give his $174,000 Senate salary to veterans. Lagniappe Daily, a frisky newspaper in Mobile, recently reported, based on tax information released by the Tuberville campaign, that the senator might have broken that pledge. “Coach has to live with that himself, I know what he said and I know what he promised—me and the people heard that,” Chester McKinney, the treasurer of the senator’s own charitable organization, the Tommy Tuberville Foundation, told Lagniappe Daily. “I’m not trying to cover for him.” Tuberville’s office has declined to answer questions on the matter.

Then there’s the mystery of why anyone would give up a Senate seat to be governor of an eccentric state. “He’s an executive by nature,” Tripp Skipper offered. “The sausage-making of being in Washington does not suit his skill set. Being at the head of the table, head of a team overseeing departments, that’s his strength.” That is to say, he wants to be head coach again, and he wasn’t bad at that at Auburn: From 1999 to 2008, he defeated the Alabama Crimson Tide six straight years in the Iron Bowl. Auburn fans believe that his undefeated 2004 team was cheated out of a national championship, which fits nicely with Alabama’s traditional persecution neurosis. Both football and basketball seemed to be on Tuberville’s mind after a June 24 meeting in which he watched Trump dress down Republican senators who’d voted to limit the president’s war powers. “It was like a half-time speech from a coach,” Tuberville told White House reporters. “If we don’t do something with the filibuster, and we don’t get things passed, it’ll be the last time we have a Republican president or a Republican Congress. The ball’s in our court.”

Still, it’s a home truth that Alabama voters habitually forgive rascals and verbal excesses. Jones is not just running against a vociferous Trump puppet. He is running against the state tradition of entrenched, defiant passivity. Since Reconstruction, the state’s white majority has almost always voted against progressive change. For top offices, Alabama voters time after time have elected the candidates who put the state in the worst light nationally. Wallace was hardly the most extreme product of this strange land. In 1908, Representative James Thomas “Cotton Tom” Heflin shot a Black man on a Washington, D.C., streetcar for allegedly cursing within earshot of a white woman. In 1920, Heflin, a Klansman, was rewarded with a Senate seat, which he held until 1931.

[Read: The great resegregation]

On my visit to the state, I was struck anew that Alabama is the Deep South’s last stronghold of what V. O. Key Jr., in his 1949 classic, Southern Politics in State and Nation, called “a comic opera staged on a grand scale for the amusement of the nation.” The state’s carnival politics have frequently foreshadowed larger developments, as when Wallace’s race-conscious conservatism paved the way for the Nixon and Reagan presidential campaigns. Today, Alabama demonstrates the durable power of corrupt oligarchies to block progressive politics. From the start of the 20th century, the “Big Mule” cabal led by U.S. Steel and the Black Belt cotton-and-timber barons owned the Alabama legislature. Now politics in Montgomery are swayed by the Southern Company, a multistate utility that owns the Alabama Power Company, and Alfa, the insurance giant sprouted from the venerable Alabama Farmers Federation. National Republicans’ unfair tax policies that rip off MAGA voters are another example of what Kyle Whitmire, a columnist for AL.com, has dubbed “the Alabamafication” of U.S. politics. In Alabama, industrial and agricultural businesses pay only token property taxes on their large timber and mineral holdings. The cost of running the government is billed to consumers through taxes on food, gasoline, alcohol, tobacco, and household necessities. One reason this regressive system persists is that every newly elected legislator knows that someone with ties to Alabama Power or Alfa will show up to retire his or her campaign debt and finance the next campaign.

Alabama politics have a time-warp feel to them, on both sides of the aisle. Jones favors the humanistic homilies of the ’60s. He was received rapturously by the crowd in Scottsboro. After he drifted away for handshaking, I asked a friend of his, Jackson County’s Republican sheriff, Rocky Harnen, to assess Jones’s chances. He responded warily, and I sensed that he didn’t want to undercut Jones. He probably wouldn’t carry the very red Jackson County, the sheriff said. “But statewide you can’t even tell if he might have a chance.” After this very thin slice of optimism, Harnen sheltered in the idiom of Alabama’s civic religion, football. “Auburn people are all for Tuberville. Alabama people, they’re not so sure,” he said, making a holding-my-nose gesture. The suggestion was that Jones’s University of Alabama degree might be a factor against an Auburn man.

Tuberville’s campaign looks back to the ’60s too, but he emulates the apocalyptic tone that worked so well for Wallace. On statewide radio, I heard the Republican candidate call Alabamians to battle against the “socialistic, communistic Democrats.” It sounded both anachronistic and Trumpian to me. But Alabama voters have often responded well to dark warnings.

Trump Is Getting Tired of Losing Election Cases

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

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

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

[Read: A serious debate about an unserious bill ]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: The election deniers are winning ]

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Capital Is a Mess

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

Photographs by Caroline Gutman

The capital city is an absolute mess.

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

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

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

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

Caroline Gutman for The Atlantic

Construction materials sit near the Lincoln Memorial on June 25.

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

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

Happy birthday, America.

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

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

[Read: Trump’s other paint job]

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

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

Caroline Gutman for The Atlantic

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

Caroline Gutman for The Atlantic

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

Caroline Gutman for The Atlantic

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: The YOLO presidency]

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

Caroline Gutman for The Atlantic

A banner near the White House on June 25.

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: What I saw inside the Kennedy Center]

Caroline Gutman

Two visitors look through temporary fencing on June 25.

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

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