In an ominous sign for the artificial intelligence industry, OpenAI reported this week that it had missed its targets for new users and revenue. 

The revelation sparked fresh worries about an AI bubble—and an imminent AI crash. According to The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI’s chief financial officer “is worried the company might not be able to pay for future computing contracts if revenue doesn’t grow fast enough.”

Roughly 3,000 data centers are currently operational in the United States, and AI companies are planning to build at least 1,500 more. It’s doubtful the industry can support so many data centers—which is one reason a crash is becoming more probable. 

According to Asad Ramzanali, director of AI and technology policy at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator, AI investment is on track to surpass “the Manhattan Project, the expansion of electricity, the Apollo space program, building the interstate highway system, broadband buildout during the dot-com bubble, and every other capital effort in U.S. history, except for the Louisiana Purchase and maybe the peak of railroad construction.”

Also concerning is the risky financial engineering to finance AI infrastructure. “Circular equity investment” and a heavy reliance on “private credit”—i.e., unregulated credit—are reminiscent of the sketchy financial maneuvers that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis.

In this episode of the Monthly podcast, Senior Editor Anne Kim speaks with Ramzanali about his new report After the AI Crash, which offers a blueprint for how to mitigate the impacts of a potential AI-led economic catastrophe. Ending the sector’s over-financialization is one of his many recommendations.

Ramzanali is the director of AI and technology policy for the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator. He also served as chief of staff and deputy director for strategy at the Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Joe Biden.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available at Spotify, YouTube, and iTunes. 

***

Anne Kim: Let’s start with the title of your report, “After the AI Crash,” which implies that a crash is both inevitable and/or imminent. Why do you think a crash is imminent? In particular, can you talk about the overinvestment you highlight in your report?

Asad Ramzanali: I started the inquiry not assuming we’re in a bubble, but that if we are, we should be prepared. As I got deeper into this, I became convinced that we are in a period of overinvestment where the money going out the door in the industry, which is primarily for data centers and chips, doesn’t match the money coming in. Bain & Company estimates that $2 trillion is what the annual revenue from AI will have to look like [to recoup all this investment].

Anne Kim: Have we ever spent this much in U.S. history on this kind of infrastructure investment?

Asad Ramzanali: There’s a great analysis done by The Wall Street Journal on capital expenditures as a percentage of GDP. And this year alone, if the 2026 capital expenditures numbers for just the hyperscalers pan out to the estimates that they’ve given, we’re talking about a higher percentage of GDP than the Manhattan Project, the expansion of electricity, the Apollo space program, the building of the interstate highway system, the broadband build out in the ‘90s, everything but the Louisiana Purchase. This nets out to about $700 billion of investment this year.

Anne Kim: Wow. And when you talk about “hyperscalers,” who are those companies?

Asad Ramzanali: “Hyperscalers” are the companies that make data centers at a hyperscale. The main companies we’re talking about are Amazon, Microsoft, Google (or Alphabet), and we sometimes throw in Meta and Oracle.

Anne Kim: Let’s talk about the stakes, because your report paints two possible scenarios for a crash. The “best case” scenario is where the crash is contained more or less to the AI sector, and the other scenario is economy-wide. How would those two scenarios play out? And if there is an economy-wide crash, how will it compare to the 2008 financial crisis?

Asad Ramzanali: Let’s call the scenarios “bubble” and “crash” because when a bubble bursts, maybe a little bit of soap goes somewhere, but it’s not going to be a drastic event. People compare it to the dot-com bubble, though that also minimizes the harms. You have to remember that hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs. A massive amount of stock wealth was lost.  I remember friends’ parents having to delay their retirement.

The 2008 crash went from a sectoral industry crisis in housing to an economy-wide crash because we realized the interconnectedness of the financing tools that were making that housing bubble inflated in the first place. All of that financial interconnectedness is what made it an economy-wide crash.

We’re seeing the same financial interconnectedness. Tech companies now make up one third of the stock market, and banks are invested in those tech companies in myriad ways including private credit, structured finance, many different pools of capital that end up going to a similar place.

That doesn’t create massive problems when you’re talking about a small sector of the economy. But when you’re talking about something that is this large, this high of a magnitude of our whole economy, that’s where I start to get worried about the spillover effects into the rest of the economy.

Anne Kim: Let’s talk a little bit more about that financialization you were talking about, because that is a really significant portion of your report. I remember the 2008 crash too. And one of the disturbing things about your report is just how much history is repeating itself. And by that, I mean, we seem to be repeating some of the same very risky financial maneuvers that led to the 2008 crisis. I remember there were a lot of complex derivative financial securities that no one understood that were layered on top of each other until there was a default somewhere along the line and then the whole thing came crashing down. I want to ask about two particular practices that I would love for you to explain because I think they illustrate how precarious things are right now. The first is the phenomenon of “circular equity investing.” Can you explain what that is and why we should all be really concerned about the impacts of that?

Asad Ramzanali: So “circular equity investing” is the idea that one company invests in another. Now that’s not new. Companies have corporate venture capital. They’ve done investments in each other. And we’ve seen centuries of history of companies lending to their customers. What does appear new and maybe unique, at least at this scale, is companies investing in unprofitable AI companies that are getting money from venture capital, from sovereign wealth funds, from a whole host of sources, and spending that money on the cloud computing layer, or building data centers.

These are all ways to artificially prop up revenues. These aren’t small sums. The other thing I worry about is if one part of that ecosystem starts to become problematic. That cascades because not only is any one company dependent on another for revenues, their valuations are also tied.

Anne Kim: And if one strand breaks, the entire fabric falls apart. So if I understand this right, just to analogize to a different context, what you’re describing is if, say, a meatpacker had stock in McDonald’s, and it was selling its burgers to McDonald’s, and McDonald’s was also invested in the meatpacker.

Asad Ramzanali: It’s like that, but instead of McDonald’s—a well-known company where we can model the revenue and risks—it’s an unprofitable company in a new industry where we don’t understand what’s happening. It’s one thing to invest somewhere where you know where the revenue is coming in and what that looks like. It’s a whole other thing where the company itself is saying “we’re not going to be profitable for at least three to five years, and even then, the profit numbers look really small.”

Anne Kim: The other phenomenon you’ve mentioned as part of this very incestuous financing is the debt that these AI companies are taking on in order to be able to make these investments in each other. Again, just layers and layers and layers of debt, which is also very reminiscent of what happened just before the financial crisis. Can you give us some examples of just how leveraged these companies have become?

Asad Ramzanali: Part of the benefit that investors saw in these big tech companies early on was they almost never took on massive debt loads. Google had $15 billion in long-term debt, which for a company of that size is not that big. And then last year, that shoots up to $50 billion, and now they’re raising a 100-year bond. Facebook’s a similar story where in 2021, they had zero debt, and then they took out $30 billion last year.

What’s tricky about this is that Facebook and others have shifted to private credit, which has no transparency, and we have little understanding of how the risks are spread across the economy. So Hyperion, their biggest data center in Louisiana is a $27 billion facility.  That is not owned by Facebook as an asset. The debt for that $27 billion is not part of the $30 billion bond that I was just talking about. It is a separate private credit debt facility that’s in a special purpose vehicle (SPV) that Meta set up with their private equity partner for that purpose. That’s where I start to get worried about, well, if there is financial pressure, that SPV is going to go under, right?

Anne Kim: When we are talking about private credit, it sounds like it’s somebody else’s money that the public at large doesn’t need to worry about, but that’s actually not true. Private credit just means that these are credit transactions that are happening privately. But a lot of times they’re using money that is coming from institutional investors—people’s pension funds or retirement accounts.

Asad Ramzanali: That’s right. If it goes bad, your life insurance or retirement fund is going to take a hit. Both the tech companies and the banks investing in or dependent on the private credit firms will take a hit when their investment goes sour in a private credit deal that didn’t work out. It’s the kind of market where even the bankers are really getting worried.

Anne Kim: That’s really frightening. When the public hears “private credit,” they really should think “unregulated credit.”  

Okay, so now that we’ve scared everybody, let’s start talking about what Congress should do to mitigate an economic catastrophe—or to help pick up the pieces if or when a crash occurs. First, it seems pretty obvious that the kind of financial engineering that we’re talking about really needs to stop. How would you go about doing that?

Asad Ramzanali: Because circular equity investing appears not to be a common practice in other industries, we should just end that practice. I love how you said we should really think about this as not private credit, but unregulated credit. We need to bring all of these systems into the more transparent, regulated part of the world where we understand risks better. I think we should require transparency in any investment that looks like a data center. 

The other thing that’s distorting markets that’s unappreciated is right now is that we have a race to the bottom among states where they’re giving tax breaks for data center construction. In some states that’s billions of dollars. We should end these subsidies that are distorting the market and making it where we as the public are internalizing an externality of data center costs. It should be the other way—where the builder of the data centers is paying for the full cost, not relying on economic development tax breaks.

Anne Kim: I do think that there is a public backlash now building to those data centers. Maybe political pressure can help end that particular practice.

Asad Ramzanali: It’s actually starting. Governor [JB] Pritzker in Illinois has proposed ending it. The Virginia legislature is looking at ending theirs.

Anne Kim: I live in Northern Virginia. When you drive out to Loudoun County, Virginia, which is, you know, ground zero for some of the larger data centers in the country, it is miles upon miles of these black warehouse squares. It’s very, very dystopian. It’s like you’re driving like through The Matrix or something. It’s crazy!

I also want to ask about another recommendation you have, and that is a “Glass-Steagall Act for AI.” What do you mean by that?

Asad Ramzanali: We’re going to have to go down history lane here for a second. So the Great Depression happens—massive financial crash—and Senator Glass and Representative Steagall, the heads of the Senate and House banking committees, come together on a number of structural reforms to the economy. That era is when we get the SEC, the FDIC—what’s now our modern banking regulatory infrastructure.

What we call the Glass-Steagall Act was really just four sections of the 1933 Banking Act. And the main idea was that commercial activity and investment activity shouldn’t be under the same house. You shouldn’t be able to use my deposits to make risky bets as a bank. That idea wasn’t new in the 1930s. It actually goes back to the 1694 Charter of the Bank of England, where we restricted the activities that a “bank of public consequence” could do.

We started repealing Glass-Steagall, and we formally repealed it in the 1990s. But court cases and agency decisions had already weakened it over time. And then you get the 2008 crisis.

What I argue is that we have a similar risk shifting going on where speculation in one market, the AI market, is leading to overinvestment in another market, which is data centers, cloud computing, and chips.

A company like Google is completely vertically integrated throughout. They own chip design, data centers, cloud computing. They own the physical fiber wires that are connected. They own the whole thing up and down through AI models and where the outputs of those models end up to consumers. That’s the kind of risk that we should separate. We should draw a line between those. We could do a more fine-grained structural separation where data centers also can’t own chip companies. And that is worthy of consideration, but at a minimum, we should separate the most speculative part of the market with the one that we actually depend on as a society.

Anne Kim: Let’s talk about your recommendations for dealing with the human cost. No matter what happens, we’re going to have unemployment—whether AI succeeds or if there’s a crash. You’ve got a menu of suggestions for how to help American workers, but the particular idea I want to zero in on is your recommendation for expanding unemployment insurance rather than universal basic income—UBI—which many people favor. I’m curious about why you went that route instead of jumping onto the UBI bandwagon as a lot of others have done.

Asad Ramzanali: Every time we’ve had a major financial crisis, we have expanded unemployment insurance. If people are out of jobs, the answer is to help them meet their immediate needs, and cash transfers are a good way of doing that.

UBI to me is an interesting policy idea for a whole host of reasons. My view is it’s not a good solution for the kind of job loss that we might initially experience, partly because of the amount of money involved. If you earn $100,000 today and you lose your job, a $2,000 or $3,000 check, which is about the range that people talk about for UBI, is really tough to make ends meet at that point. We know how unemployment insurance works. We’ve done this in the past. The administration of it leaves a lot to be desired, but it’s a thing we understand, and we can act more quickly with it.

Anne Kim: You also talk about what you call a “Digital Works Progress Administration.” How would that work?

Asad Ramzanali: The Works Progress Administration—the original one—was a 1930s-era program that was part of the New Deal, where millions of Americans were out of a job and the government hired them and put them to work for public purposes. What I think might happen here is if we do see large job losses, it’ll be in knowledge work—the kinds of work that you and I do—and that’s actually administratively easier than putting people to work in physically demanding construction or other types of labor jobs. And we have the need for those jobs across levels of government.

If the problem is mass unemployment in a short period, the most direct solution is mass employment.

Anne Kim: So to get some sense of the urgency of this project, will you hazard a guess about when a crash could happen? How soon do we need to start prepping for this?

Asad Ramzanali: I don’t think it’s happening tomorrow, but I also don’t think that we’re that far away from when it happens. These things are really difficult to time because it’s partly driven by expectations of individual investors and individual companies that then cascade throughout the economy.

But to me, there are enough people saying that there might be a problem here that we as a policy community need to prepare.

The post Get Ready for the AI Crash appeared first on Washington Monthly.

College accreditation is one of the least understood and most important issues in higher education. It is the process by which private, nonprofit organizations recognized by the federal government decide whether a college meets basic standards of academic quality, financial stability, and institutional performance. The findings of this process have enormous consequences for the institution, including its ability to access federal student grants and loans. Now that the U.S. Department of Education has completed the opening round of public negotiations over a major accreditation overhaul, accreditation will likely garner more public attention.  

The Department’s Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization, or AIM, process is not a modest tune-up of the rules governing the nation’s dozens of regional and national accreditors, such as the Middle States Commission on Higher Education and the Distance Education Accrediting Commission for online schools. The proposed rules, being hammered out by federal officials and the non-federal representatives of key stakeholder groups, are a broad effort to remake accreditation, including more competition among accreditors, fewer barriers for new accreditors, stronger accountability for student outcomes, and a system that’s responsive to taxpayers. One round of negotiations finished in April, and another is scheduled for May. 

Those goals are consistent with the Education Department’s February announcement that it was reducing barriers for new accreditors, noting that few new accreditors have received federal recognition in recent decades. The case for reform is not hard to understand. The current system has long been criticized for being insular, process-heavy, and weakly tied to students’ success following graduation.  

In the Education Department’s presentation and in the discussion that followed at its week-long opening round of public negotiations held in Washington, D.C., Department officials and the key stakeholder groups repeatedly noted that long-standing regional accreditors still dominate oversight of institutions, enrollment, and federal student-aid dollars. Voluntary switching by institutions from one accreditor to another is rare. And student outcomes vary widely across post-secondary institutions within the same accrediting agencies.  

That’s not a trivial indictment. It suggests that accreditation is less an important validation of quality than a cozy arrangement among incumbents. Some of the Education Department’s ideas follow naturally from that diagnosis. These ideas include making it easier for institutions seeking to become accreditors to gain recognition, thus easing the path for colleges to switch accreditors. Another idea: using risk-based institutional reviews to focus federal scrutiny on the institutions that oversee the most student-aid dollars, draw the most complaints, or are growing quickly. 

Critics of the existing system charge that accreditation is better at supervising inputs and procedures than at determining whether students are getting real educational value.  

But that’s only half of the story. The Education Department, under Secretary Linda McMahon, is not only seeking more open and competitive accreditation. It’s also trying to change what accreditors examine, how they judge institutions, and how federal pressure should be applied.  

The proposed rules go well beyond opening the accreditation market to more competition. It has become a fight over control. They reach into student achievement, faculty evaluation, transfer of credit, how students finish when a college or program closes, civil rights compliance, academic freedom, and what it calls “viewpoint neutrality” and “intellectual diversity” which seems like euphemisms for the Donald Trump’s administration’s concerns with schools that it views as “woke” and policies it opposes such as diversity, equity, and inclusion. 

The overhaul could reshape accreditation in specialized fields such as engineering, health care, and veterinary medicine, where standards affect curriculum, staffing, equipment, and even access to licensure.  

That’s why this moment seems less like reform than war. Reformers see a needed disruption of a closed and complacent system. Colleges, accreditors, and many higher-education lawyers see something else.  

They see the federal government using accreditation to govern colleges more directly, and perhaps more ideologically, than the law allows. Some argue the rules exceed the Education Department’s statutory authority and are vulnerable to legal challenge. “This is a kettle of contradictions,” John R. Przypyszny, a lawyer who specializes in accreditation, wrote in an email, many of which will be difficult to implement and “easily challenged in court.” 

The non-federal stakeholder negotiations made that conflict plain. As the parties worked through the rules draft, negotiators questioned whether Washington was trying to prescribe accreditor standards rather than regulate the process, especially regarding student achievement, faculty, facilities, and student support services.  

They also urged the Education Department to focus on topics such as academic freedom, intellectual diversity, First Amendment rights, and civil rights compliance, cautioning that accreditors are not intended to serve as civil rights investigators and should not be expected to do so. 

These are not marginal disagreements. They go to the heart of what accreditation is for and who defines educational quality.  

To the Education Department’s credit, it’s shown some awareness of its legal limits. As the talks progressed, officials revised parts of the proposal that made it appear as if Washington was directly telling accreditors which standards to adopt. Instead, they focused more on how accreditors would apply and enforce those standards. 

That suggests the administration understands that aggressive reform must withstand legal scrutiny. But it also shows how contested the enterprise has become. This is no longer a technocratic disagreement over wording. It’s a struggle over how far the federal government can go in remaking the accreditation system before reform becomes overreach.  

The politics surrounding the process reinforce the same point. One news account of the negotiated rulemaking noted that colleges and accreditors had fewer seats than in the past. That doesn’t by itself invalidate the process. But it underscores that this isn’t just a peer-review tidying-up exercise. It’s a battle over who defines public interest in higher education and how much deference traditional institutions like accreditors deserve.  

Accreditation only works when it commands widespread trust. Students and families need confidence that accredited colleges meet real standards and offer value. Colleges need confidence that accreditors are not arbitrary, politicized, or echoing federal preferences. The federal government needs confidence that taxpayer-backed aid is tied to something more than institutional habit and inherited prestige.  

When any bond of trust frays, pressure for reform grows. But when reform itself becomes politicized, trust can erode further. That is the danger in the current moment.  

The Education Department is right that the old system too often protected incumbents, tolerated weak outcomes, and resisted competition. But it can weaken a flawed system in the name of improving it. 

If colleges can switch accreditors too easily, low-performing institutions may shop for a friendlier gatekeeper. If wannabe accreditors are recognized hastily, the system may attract weaker referees rather than better ones. And if accreditors are pushed into policing political or constitutional questions beyond their competence, peer review may become an instrument of federal leverage rather than a mechanism of educational judgment. 

Those tensions surfaced repeatedly in the AIM talks held in April under the auspices of the Education Department’s Office of Postsecondary Education, over switching accreditors, major institutional changes, transfer, student complaints, college closures, student protections, due process, and the Department’s proposed “safety valve” for institutions that lose accreditation because of accreditor procedural error.  

Rather than defending the old order, accreditation should be more transparent, more open to new entrants, more attentive to student outcomes, and less deferential to inherited arrangements. But reform must be disciplined by law, institutional realism, and recognition of what accreditors can and cannot do well. 

Now that the first negotiations are over, the stakes are apparent. The college accreditation wars are about more than accreditation. They are about whether higher education will still be governed through trusted intermediary institutions, or whether Washington will try to rule it. 

Can the country build a system that is more open, more accountable, and more honest without making it less lawful, less stable, and less trusted? If this overhaul yields a louder and more partisan accrediting regime, students will be left with what reform was supposed to fix—a system that inspires less confidence when they need more. 

The post The Higher Education Accreditation Wars Are Heating Up appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In This Issue

FEATURES

EDITOR’S NOTE

ON POLITICAL BOOKS

The post Inside the Monthly’s Spring 2026 Issue appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Politico’s Jonathan Martin scooped that President Donald Trump, through intermediary Sean Hannity, pitched Senator John Fetterman on leaving the Democratic Party and becoming a Republican, offering “more money than he ever dreamed of” for a 2028 re-election campaign. Fetterman told Martin, “I’m a Democrat, and I’m staying one.”

But people can change their minds, and that has Democrats on edge. Flipping the Senate is already an uphill task, requiring—ostensibly—a net gain of four Senate seats in the November midterm elections with only one Republican-held seat in a state Donald Trump lost on the ballot. Now Democrats need five to be sure Fetterman can’t snatch the gavel out of their hands.

Net gaining five seats is not completely crazy. A Blue Wave is building, and the Senate map may be expanding.

The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter classifies seven Republican-held seats (along with four Democratic-held seats) as potentially competitive. North Carolina is now seen as the most likely pickup, deemed “lean Democratic.” Maine and Ohio are “Toss Ups.” Alaska is “Lean Republican.” The farthest stretches are Iowa, Nebraska, and Texas in the “Likely Republican” category. (Note that in Nebraska, the main challenger to the incumbent Republican is the independent Dan Osborn, who has the backing of the state Democratic Party even though he pledged not to caucus with either party.)

Other Senate ratings from The Center for Politics at the University of Virginia and Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales expand the right edge of the map further, with Montana, Florida, or South Carolina included in their “Likely Republican” category instead of “Solid Republican.” Last week, the race in Kansas—a red state with a two-term Democratic governor—was shaken up with the entry of Rev. Adam Hamilton, a Democratic megachurch pastor. (Seven other Democrats are running, but Hamilton out-raised all of them combined after one week of campaigning.)

General election poll data in several of these states is scant to nil, but what is available is favorable to Democrats. In averages of nonpartisan polls sampled over the last two months, North Carolina’s former Governor Roy Cooper has a lead of 8 points over former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley, Maine insurgent Graham Platner is up 7 points over incumbent Susan Collins, and Alaska’s former Representative Mary Peltola is ahead by 6 points over incumbent Dan Sullivan.

We have two Texas polls from April, with Democratic Texas state Representative James Talarico ahead of both potential Republican nominees, incumbent John Cornyn and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, by similar margins, albeit with his own level of support mostly in the low 40s. Up in Iowa, both primary candidates—state Representative Josh Turek and state Senator Zach Wahls—fare similarly against U.S. Representative Ashley Hinson, with the Republicans slightly ahead in a March poll and the Democrats slightly ahead in an April poll. Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, trying to make a comeback after losing his Senate seat in 2024, has hit a polling rough patch, trailing an incumbent in the last three polls by an average of about three points.

We have no springtime general election poll data for the other states mentioned, nor do we in Michigan, a Democratic-held open seat with an ideologically divisive three-way primary that has many Democrats biting their nails. And while Platner is looking good on paper, more than a few Democrats are worried that the often-unfiltered political novice with a checkered social media history can’t go the distance against a proven Blue Wave survivor like Collins.

The poll data we have reveals enough competitive states to give Democrats multiple paths to netting four, even five, additional Senate seats. In theory, Democrats could nominate flawed candidates who blow winnable races in Maine and Michigan, yet with a big enough national leftward shift, still win North Carolina, Alaska, Texas, Ohio, and Iowa to net a gain of four seats.

And that’s without considering what weird things could happen in Nebraska, Montana, or Kansas, because weird things happen in wave years. Consider the “Tea Party” year of 2010, when Republicans flipped Barack Obama’s home state of Illinois, deep blue Massachusetts (after Republicans first won the late Ted Kennedy’s seat in a special election), and several other Democratic-held seats, but missed opportunities with the one-time witch Christine O’Donnell in Delaware and the gaffe-prone social conservative Ken Buck in Colorado.

However, no path is a sure thing, and no lead is safe, far from it. Lots of things have to go the Democrats’ way, and that argues for limiting unnecessary risks. That said, Democrats lack consensus on what constitutes risk. In Maine, while some see the rough-edged Platner as someone who can’t be counted on to peel off moderates from Collins, others saw the elderly and politically cautious Governor Janet Mills as too similar to Collins and a poor choice to rally disaffected voters fed up with the political establishment, leading to her suspending her campaign.

As there is no way to adjudicate who is right before votes are tallied, a reasonable approach to mitigating risk—as with financial investing—would be to diversify the portfolio.

Democrats have largely already done this. As much as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has faced criticism for recruiting Mills, who went on to run a lackluster campaign, few Democrats are complaining about his recruitment of Brown, Cooper, and Peltola—traditional candidates with proven track records of winning statewide. Schumer also stayed out of the Nebraska race, giving a clearer path to the independent Osborn, a labor leader and economic populist who was not at all in the Mills mold. Texas primary voters concluded Talarico—an economic populist who focused his ire on “billionaires” but not Trump—was a safer bet to win over red state swing voters than U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett, who regularly attacked Trump.

Primary voters in Iowa (on June 2) and Michigan (on August 4) have to decide how much additional risk to add to the portfolio. Turek and Wahls don’t have big issue differences, but Turek—a Paralympian from a red part of the Hawkeye State—is seen as having tacit backing from Schumer. Wahls is from Johnson County, a blue square, and is endorsed by Senator Elizabeth Warren. His claim to fame is that, as a teen, he went to the Iowa House and defended the right of his two moms to marry, and he has made his opposition to Schumer’s leadership a centerpiece of his campaign. The three candidates in Michigan, state Senator Mallory McMorrow, former gubernatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed, and U.S. Representative Haley Stevens, are most notably divided over Israel and health care.

However that shakes out, Democrats must prevent Fetterman from defecting to the Republican Conference before his term ends in 2029, even though he has been driving them nuts by giving Trump political cover on Iran and the vanity White House ballroom project. Moreover, Fetterman has been a supporter of every military action taken by either the Trump administration or the Bibi Netanyahu administration, which has rankled not only the strongest critics of the Israeli government who want to cut off all military aid, such as Platner, but also “J Street”-style Democrats who are embracing conditional aid or limiting military aid to defensive weapons.

Yet a Democratic Fetterman beats a Republican Fetterman. As Politico’s Martin points out, Fetterman votes with his party 93 percent of the time, including on big legislation, as when he opposed Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill. Most importantly, if the midterms go well for Democrats, they will likely need Fetterman to at least retain his party affiliation so they can claim the Majority Leader post and control the Senate floor, allowing the chamber to conduct robust oversight of the Trump administration and to check Trump’s executive branch or judicial nominations.

If Platner is part of that majority, the two will surely clash. Platner’s presumptive nomination prompted Fetterman to ratchet up his disgust with the party’s left flank, going on Fox News and saying it represents a “small Communist takeover in Maine,” and telling a reporter, “If Maine wants an asshole with a Nazi tattoo on his chest, they get him.” Meanwhile, in an interview with Zeteo, Platner called Fetterman “the bane of my existence” and stressed how they are complete opposites on Israel. Democrats have long been a big-tent party, and this will be a testosterone-fueled stress test on the tent poles.

The trick for Democrats is to embrace the differences. Even Platner and Fetterman will agree a whole lot more than they disagree—for example, both support single-payer health care. And Democrats have muddled through intra-party differences before. They held the caucus together during the Biden Administration, when Senators Krysten Sinema and Joe Manchin successfully resisted planks of the party’s agenda; they both became independents but didn’t leave the party’s caucus. They didn’t crack during the Barack Obama years, even though Democratic caucus member Joe Lieberman won re-election in 2006 as an independent when his support of the Iraq War led to a bitter primary defeat and campaigned for Obama’s 2008 opponent John McCain.

But too much disrespect can push a senator over the edge. In 2001, President George W. Bush wouldn’t agree to Senator Jim Jeffords’ request for additional special education funds, and Jeffords wouldn’t go along with a tax cut of Bush’s preferred size. Then the administration didn’t invite him to an event celebrating one of his Vermont constituents as a Teacher of the Year, and implied to a newspaper it might scuttle legislation to help his state’s dairy farmers. Shortly thereafter, Jeffords flipped control of the chamber by becoming an independent and caucusing with the Democrats.

Politico’s Martin reports that “Fetterman has become increasingly isolated” and until recently would “spend time between votes reading through his phone until [Republican Senator Katie] Britt came out to join him for meals.” But now, “Fetterman is spending hours with Senate Republicans in their cloakroom and in some leadership offices.” And he also “spends much of his time on social media” tracking closely what people are saying about him.

For Democrats, just as important as flipping Republican seats and holding Democratic seats on the ballot in November, is for their senators to bring Fetterman back into their social circles, and for their keyboard warriors to take it easy on the big guy.

At least until the 2028 Pennsylvania Senate primary.

The post Leave John Fetterman Alone   appeared first on Washington Monthly.

It’s increasingly apparent that public support for the nation’s colleges and universities has eroded over the past few years. While some of the disillusionment reflects the impact of conservative attacks on higher education, including Donald Trump’s campaign against prominent institutions, much of it stems from growing concerns about affordability, tuition sticker shock, student loan debt, and nagging doubts about whether a college degree is still a reliable ticket to a successful career.

One recent survey found that the share of parents who said a postsecondary degree program was their top choice for their child’s post-high school plans fell from 74 percent in 2019 to 58 percent in 2025. That result is not an outlier. Survey after survey confirms that Americans have become increasingly skeptical about the value of a college degree. (“Skepticism” may even be an understatement; resentment, especially toward elite colleges, may be the more accurate characterization.)

But here’s the odd thing: despite overwhelming public anger at the perceived unaffordability of higher education, the average net cost of college has barely budged over at least the past decade. It’s actually fallen a bit. 

What might explain this disconnect? One theory is that the opaque and occasionally deceptive ways colleges advertise their prices leads to public misperception about college costs. A 2022 Government Accountability Office study found that 91 percent of colleges understate or don’t include the net price families pay in the offer letters sent to students. Such incomplete or misleading information often leads to “uninformed and costly decisions, such as enrolling in an unaffordable college,” according to the GAO. The confusion has been aggravated by a policy, common across the vast majority of four-year schools, of discounting high “sticker costs” by strategically offering generous institutional financial aid through “merit scholarships.” 

This “high tuition-high aid” model results in a situation where published tuition prices bear little relation to what many students end up paying for college. Congress has recognized the problem, and, as this magazine has reported, several bills have been introduced in both the House and the Senate that would require greater clarity and simplicity in college offer letters.

Now, a new report provides the first empirical data showing a link between opaque college pricing and public anger at the system. The Price Transparency Imperative: Rebuilding Confidence in Higher Education, released Tuesday by the Strada Education Foundation, examines how colleges typically described their prices and, more importantly, how the public perceived them. Strada conducted a nationally representative survey of more than 5,000 participants, including current and prospective college students, their parents, adults aged 25 to 44 who were considering enrolling in a bachelor’s degree program, and the general population. More than two-thirds of parents and students believed that the ways colleges communicate their costs were either very confusing or “mixed” in terms of clarity and ease of understanding. On the flip side, a mere one in three students and parents found the process straightforward. The takeaway? Most higher education consumers feel they lack an accurate understanding of true college costs. 

Further, this confusion about college costs and financial aid appears to be breeding public mistrust about the main interests that motivate institutions. When asked if they believed institutions cared more about educating students or making money, the majority of every respondent group said that institutions cared more about making money. Even worse: current college students were the most skeptical about institutional priorities, with 68 percent believing that money was more important to colleges than educating. 

Strada also asked respondents whether they trusted colleges to charge a fair price. Fewer than half of those surveyed reported that they completely or largely trusted public four-year colleges to charge a fair price. Respondents were even less likely to attribute price fairness to private institutions.

Across both public and private institutions, respondents who found the financial aid process straightforward were also more likely to trust that schools charge fair prices. Conversely, those who found the aid process mixed or very confusing expressed higher rates of mistrust toward institutions.

Even with all that, however, 70–90 percent of current or future college students and their parents said that a college education was extremely or very important to achieving their or their child’s future goals. A majority of the general population (57 percent) also agreed that college was extremely or very important.

Similarly large percentages of students and parents believed that college was either a good or a great investment. While the general population was less confident, two-thirds still believed that going to college represented a smart investment—one justified by better career opportunities and stronger financial security.

Nonetheless, many students and families perceive college attendance—particularly at four-year institutions—to be financially out of reach. And cost, real or perceived, is often the decisive factor in where students’ choose to attend college: Out of 16 different options, respondents most frequently cited cost and affordability as important considerations in a college decision.

These findings come as some institutions are hinting that they may be receptive to the message. Just last month, a Yale University faculty committee issued a report commissioned by the school’s president, Maurie McInnis, who had asked the group to examine “the problem of declining trust in higher education” and recommend how Yale could address that problem. As part of its report, the committee urged the university to revise its “high tuition-high aid” system. 

While that model has lowered the expense of attending Yale for the relatively few low-income students it admits, the committee concluded that the process was “complicated, unpredictable, secretive, and highly variable,” and that applying for aid is “laborious” and “frustrating.”

It called for the university to “do everything possible to make the financial aid system more comprehensible, predictable, and fair,” and urged that “Yale provide a more accessible and reliable indication of the actual price that an undergraduate student will pay at the moment of enrollment and over the course of a four-year degree.”

Good for Yale, but the fact remains that a major revision in how it communicates its pricing and financial aid is not likely to occur while the rest of higher education remains wedded to a system where high sticker prices are substantially discounted through generous institutional aid. Too many institutions—Yale included—are committed to that business model, and too many students and families are flattered by the prestige of being awarded a big-dollar scholarship. 

Since unilateral disarmament won’t happen, stronger collective action is needed. One avenue for reform is the College Cost Transparency Initiative, sponsored in part by Strada, through which hundreds of colleges nationwide have committed to make their offer letters more clear and accurate. That effort could help students and families better understand college costs, but most schools haven’t joined the voluntary initiative. Moreover, it doesn’t require colleges to commit to standardizing their letters in a way that would allow students and their parents to easily compare offers.

The only way to achieve that is through federal legislation. A recently released Senate bill would require institutions to use uniform definitions of key components like loans, grants, and total costs in financial aid offer letters so that families can make well-informed decisions. Even though that legislation, and a similar effort in the House, enjoyed bipartisan support, it has yet to become law; higher education associations have successfully lobbied against it, and these groups particularly oppose the requirement of uniformly worded letters.

In fact, the bill has been watered down: its title was changed from the “Understanding the True Cost of College Act” to “Improving Financial Aid Offers for Students Act”—reflecting a step back from what student advocates say was a bill that initially ensured much more consumer protection. In its current form, the bill prevents the Education Department from requiring a standardized offer letter and allows colleges to refer students to website links for additional financial information (rather than laying out the full details about costs and aid in the letter itself).

So far, higher ed groups have been successful in convincing legislators that mandating uniform requirements would interfere with their efforts to woo students, arguing that the problem will not be solved by a one-size-fits-all approach. But that begs the question: if different colleges tailor their messaging to different types of students, doesn’t that increase, rather than lessen, the need for uniformity in their offer letters?

Strada’s new survey makes one thing certain. The majority of students, families, and the general public favor requiring colleges and universities to provide accurate and complete information about the costs of education up front, and standardizing the way financial aid offers are presented. And they also favor requiring colleges and universities to provide greater transparency about their own spending.

The sooner our colleges and universities come to grips with those simple mandates, the better. These reforms would not only enable students to make better choices, but also build trust between institutions of higher education and the public they are intended to serve.

Editor’s note: The Strada Education Foundation is a funder of the Washington Monthly’s higher education coverage.

The post Higher Ed’s Affordability Problem Isn’t Just the Price appeared first on Washington Monthly.

After the Secret Service apprehended an armed intruder sprinting toward the ballroom at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner last month, where President Donald Trump, the vice president, cabinet members, senators, and representatives sat, public figures issued familiar refrains of disapproval and regret.  

President Barack Obama pronounced, “It’s incumbent upon all of us to reject the idea that violence has any place in our democracy.” Following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy (senior) uttered perhaps the most poignant expression of this type, less than two months before he, too, was assassinated: “What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr’s cause has ever been stilled by his assassin’s bullet.”  

Fine sentiments all, but evidence tells us that large swaths of Americans, across parties and political beliefs, accept and even endorse political violence. It’s embedded in our political culture, transcending debates over panaceas such as gun control or greater access to mental health care.  

Earlier this year, I reviewed in these pages the startling levels of support for political violence among self-identified members of the MAGA mass movement. A recent, largescale academic study of more than 7,000 Americans of every political leaning by the Violence Prevention Research Center at the University of California, Davis, reported that 83 percent of its sample of 1,128 MAGA followers said the American way of life was disappearing so fast that force may be required to save it, and 61 percent endorsed violence and force to stop protests by those with whom they disagree.  

More disturbing, when MAGA believers were asked whether they would personally be willing to use violence against a federal or state official to advance their political objectives, 11 percent said yes; based on surveys of the MAGA movement, that translates to 4.4 million people. Some 5 percent also said they would be personally willing to attack people who don’t share their views.  

Liberals cannot feel smug about these numbers: MAGA believers are not alone in their willingness to consider violence. Democrats, Independents, and non-MAGA Republicans may be less likely to endorse violence in politics or participate in it. But most Americans are Democrats, Independents, or non-MAGA Republicans, so those who do agree add up.  

In addition to its sample of MAGA believers, the study recorded responses from 2,211 non-MAGA Republicans and 3,916 Independents and Democrats. The Census Bureau tells us that 174 million Americans are registered to vote, so, based on recent Gallup surveys, 47 million, or 27 percent, call themselves Republicans, another 47 million, or 27 percent, call themselves Democrats, and 45 percent, or 78 million, identify as Independents.  

For the record, Pew Research reports that when Independents were asked which party they lean towards, they split nearly evenly: 46 percent of Independents said they lean Republican, 45 percent said they lean Democratic, and the rest said they don’t lean at all.  

On the threshold issue of whether force or violence may be required to preserve the American way of life, 28 percent of Democrats and Independents and 48 percent of non-MAGA Republicans said yes, alongside the 83 percent of MAGA believers. It suggests that 57 million non-MAGA Americans see a potentially legitimate role for violence in our politics, a signal that violence-as-legitimate-recourse is well embedded in the culture. 

The “violence is okay” numbers decline when survey researchers offer more specific scenarios, but they remain substantial, even alarming. Some 17 percent of Democrats and Independents and 14 percent of non-MAGA Republicans join the 22 percent of MAGA who say force or violence is justified to advance political ends they see as important. That translates into some 28 million non-MAGA Americans open to tolerating violence when the political cause matters to them.  

When the question is flipped to the use of force and violence in opposing actions by the government, support is comparable or greater. In principle, 17 percent of non-MAGA Republicans and 13 percent of Democrats and Independents are on board, along with 27 percent of MAGA followers. That suggests that some 24 million Americans consider legitimate the use of force and violence to oppose the government when it does not share their beliefs.  

Drilling down to gauge how many people would themselves engage in political violence, the study found that 6 percent of non-MAGA Republicans and 7 percent of Democrats and Independents joined 11 percent of MAGA believers in saying they would personally be willing to engage in force or violence against an elected official when it was justified to advance an important political objective. That adds up to 11.6 million Americans.  

Finally, there is the question that the alleged assailant at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner presumably answered in the affirmative: “Thinking now about the future and all the changes it might bring, how likely is it that you will use a gun … in a situation where you think force or violence is justified to advance an important political objective?”  

About 2 percent of non-MAGA Republicans, 3 percent of Democrats and Independents, and 4 percent of MAGA followers responded that it was somewhat likely, and another 1 percent of each group said it was “very or extremely likely.” That hardcore 1 percent who expect to personally use a gun to advance or protect their political goals add up to nearly 2 million Americans. 

Of course, there is a difference between what people say and what they do. Political violence or violent plots are not regular occurrences. They are also no longer rare.  

In 2024, there were two direct attempts on the life of candidate Trump, including one that killed a bystander, three gunfire-strafing incidents of Kamala Harris’ campaign offices, and two foiled murder-for-hire plots targeting Trump sponsored by Iran. (Anyone else thinking retaliation here?) In 2022, an American savagely attacked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s octogenarian husband. Last year, politically-motivated citizen assassins set fire to the home of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, killed the prominent, conservative organizer Charlie Kirk, murdered former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, and shot and injured another Minnesota lawmaker and his wife. 

The murder of the CEO of United Health Care was politically motivated, a young gunman in Wisconsin shot his parents to fund his plot to assassinate President Trump, politically-inspired killers took down two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington D.C. following a Jewish event, a shooter shot nearly 500 rounds into the Atlanta headquarters of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, an arsonist set fire to the headquarters of the New Mexico Republican party, and the Secret Service discovered a hunting stand with a line of sight to the landing zone of Air Force One at the Plam Beach International Airport, one day before the president was scheduled to arrive there.  

So far this year, an attacker assaulted Representative Ilhan Omar, Secret Service officers killed a young man armed with a pump-action shotgun who slipped past security at Mar-a-Lago, and, most recently, apprehended the armed man trying to storm the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. And the U.S. Capitol Police report that they investigated 14,936 threats against members of Congress, their families, and staff in 2025, up from an average of 8,644 per year from 2020 to 2024. 

Broad toleration of violence in American politics is also evident in the confrontations between immigration and community advocates and federal agents of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and CBP (Customs and Border Protection). Non-violent demonstrations have stopped the construction of mass detention facilities across the country in the long tradition of constitutionally protected assembly and dissent. But shootings and beatings of immigrants and protesters, as well as ICE and CBP agents, represent the use of violence for political ends, especially but not only by the government, on a scale not seen since the conflicts between workers and state militias and the private security forces of factory owners in the Gilded Age. 

Verifiable data are still developing, but there is clear evidence that ICE and CBP agents have killed nine people in incidents in Texas, Illinois, Minnesota, and Vermont, and shot and injured 34 people in Illinois, California, Maryland, Minnesota, and Arizona, often justified by claims that the victims were “not following directions.” The administration’s tolerance of violence as a legitimate tool is evident in the federal government decision to not file criminal charges against any agent involved, a position clearly articulated by deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller: “To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties, and anybody who lays a hand on you, or tries to stop you, or tries to obstruct you, is committing a felony.”  

On the other side, there are three documented cases of people shooting at ICE and CBP agents, and one case in which a sniper attacking an ICE facility in Dallas inadvertently killed two detainees. Many violent incidents did not involve shootings. In the El Centro sector of California, there were 83 documented cases of people assaulting ICE and CBP agents in recent years, alongside 300 documented cases of ICE and CBP agents assaulting people.  

Circling back to where we began, it turns out that how political leaders respond to political violence does matter, and usually in ways that make matters worse. Rachel Kleinfeld, a leading scholar on the growth of violence in democracies, has concluded that “leaders’ rhetoric has the power to de-escalate and deter violence … (but) only if they are willing to speak against their own side.” Instead, as Thomas Zeitzoff, an expert in how leaders mobilize supporters for violent political conflict, has found, political leaders who blame the victim’s side signal that violence against the other side is understandable, and their supporters who harbor violent tendencies shouldn’t fear any rebuke from their leader.  

The dynamic in which each side blames the other and dismisses any responsibility for itself may play a critical role in the growing acceptance of political violence in the United States. When a Trump follower beat Paul Pelosi with a hammer, President Trump, his son Donald, Jr., and Elon Musk joked publicly about it. Trump also dismissed the murders of Minnesota House Speaker Emerita Hortman and her husband by one of his supporters, and he and Vice President JD Vance blamed Democrats for the assassination plots targeting Trump and Charlie Kirk’s murder. When ICE agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, the President described said Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE officer,” and called an “agitator and, perhaps, insurrectionist.” When videos contradicting his claims came to public light, Trump said the shootings “should have not happened,” but when pressed on whether the deaths were justified, said he would “always be with our great people of law enforcement.” For their part, many Democrats blamed a posting by Sarah Palin for the shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords and the deaths of six other people in 2011, and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker recently pinned Kirk’s killing on Trump’s rhetoric. 

Experts on political violence also warn that unless leaders stop partisan finger-pointing and accept more responsibility, political violence in the United States could worsen. Drawing on extensive data analysis, Taegyoon Kim, the Korean social scientist, has concluded that “the inflaming effect of partisan elites’ threatening rhetoric—and the absence of counteracting behavior—suggest a potentially pernicious dynamic where partisan elites and their followers mutually escalate violent hostility.” Similarly, suggests that Americans’ growing acceptance of political violence may lead to escalating bloodshed: “Once violence begins, it fuels itself,” she warns. “Far from making people turn away in horror, political violence in the present is the greatest factor normalizing it for the future.”  

The post White House Correspondents’ Dinner Aftermath: Many Americans Entertain the Idea of Violence appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Even before Donald Trump launched his ill-advised war on Iran, America’s allies were already pronouncing the end of the era of U.S. leadership of the free world. “The West as we knew it no longer exists,” European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said in April of 2025 as she tried to rally governments in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe to counter massive tariffs that Trump had recently imposed. “The old order is not coming back,” declared Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney this past January in a widely reported speech at Davos after fresh attempts by Trump to seize Greenland.

But in the wake of Trump’s cavalier attack on Iran and the global economic pain that has resulted, even some of America’s most vocal and influential champions of U.S. supremacy seem ready to throw in the towel. The neoconservative national security scholar Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution recently penned a requiem in The Atlantic for eight decades of Pax Americana:

Those days are now over and will not soon return. Nations that once bandwagoned with the United States will now remain aloof or align against it—not because they want to, but because the United States leaves them no choice, because it will neither protect them nor refrain from exploiting them. Welcome to the era of the rogue American superpower. It will be lonely and dangerous.

Such declarations of the end of the U.S.-led international order are understandable. In a sense, they are a simple recognition of what Trump writes every day in ALL CAPS in his Truth Social posts, and of what his second-term government has been doing for 16 months. Just as Trump burned through his inherited wealth in a series of failed real estate ventures in his younger years, so is he now squandering decades of accumulated U.S. power in a mad attempt to overthrow the post-war system of alliances and institutions that was the means of acquiring that power. And he still has more than two-and-a-half years left in his presidency. Who knows how much more damage he will do? There is no reason to think he will abandon his beliefs that our allies are parasites, that international institutions are for losers, and that strongmen like him and Vladimir Putin should rule their spheres without constraint.

Countries across the globe are now recognizing that their past reliance on Washington for everything from advanced weaponry to sea lane protection has made them vulnerable to a leader like Trump. Consequently, they are looking for ways to give themselves some “strategic autonomy” from the United States—by, for instance, tilting towards China, or crafting a new coalition of “middle powers,” as Carney suggested in Davos, or creating a “European NATO” in which the U.S. no longer plays a leading, or perhaps any, role.

Given the circumstances, countries are wise to pursue these new arrangements. But they are poor substitutes for the U.S.-led liberal international order that Trump is dismantling. A better strategy is to rebuild that order in some form as soon as Trump leaves office. That might seem like wishful thinking, but it is not. Rather, it is the probable course of events if (as also seems likely) a Democrat wins the White House in 2028.

According to numerous polls, Democratic voters remain staunch supporters of Ukraine, NATO, and international institutions generally. They profoundly oppose Trump’s gunboat diplomacy in Venezuela and Iran. To win the presidential primary, any Democratic candidate must adhere to these views and, if successful in the general election, follow through in office to remain popular with the base. That shouldn’t be a problem if Democrats also control both houses and support a more internationalist foreign policy. Agencies gutted by Trump, such as USAID and the State Department, could be refunded and even expanded via reconciliation, thus requiring no GOP votes.

Some Republican lawmakers, free of Trump, might also be willing to support a more traditional foreign policy approach. In April, when Trump threatened to pull out of NATO if the allies didn’t help open the Strait of Hormuz, GOP Senate Majority Leader John Thune said there was little appetite in his caucus to support Trump in that effort. “We got an awful lot of people who think that NATO is a very critical, incredibly successful post-World War II alliance. And I think in the world today, you need allies,” Thune told reporters. Additionally, a NATO in which member states have raised their defense spending and taken increased responsibility for aiding Ukraine is an alliance that more conservative Americans can get behind without feeling like suckers.

Many supporters of traditional U.S. multilateralism fear that, because of Trump’s nationalist and extortionist policies, other countries can no longer trust us. After all, American voters elected Trump not once, but twice. That’s a fair point. But it’s also true that American voters threw Trump out of office once and, in virtually every election over the past year-plus, have signaled their unhappiness with the state of the country under his leadership. Moreover, all advanced democracies have far-right authoritarian political movements that could take over their governments. We can’t trust their voters any more than they can trust ours. We may all be fated to oscillate between liberal and illiberal governments, as Hungary has, until we address the working-class economic distress that is the root cause of the problem. As I have argued, it’s easier to do that multilaterally than separately.

Of course, another possibility is that Trump’s Iran “excursion” leads to a global recession, which the International Monetary Fund now sees as a possibility. In that case, the 47^th president could exit the White House as the most despised in history, leaving MAGA-aligned politicians unable to get elected dogcatcher for years to come.

Still, why should other countries risk resubmitting themselves to U.S.-led alliances and institutions, given the Lucy-and-the-football chance that we will screw them again? The answer is that their other options are worse.

For all the brave talk about creating a European NATO, the truth is that the continent would have a difficult time defending itself from a full-on Russian attack at its weakest points, such as the Baltics, without U.S. assistance. Sure, events over the last year have forced more NATO countries to increase their military budgets, and plans are afoot to invest those funds in building up the European defense industrial base to reduce dependence on the U.S. But it could take decades for Europe to build the military capabilities that America has to counter the Russian threat—including the nuclear umbrella and the long-range intelligence and surveillance capacity that makes nuclear deterrence credible. The investment required for Europe to achieve that level of security on its own would entail unprecedented cuts to its social safety nets, which in turn would further fuel support for the far-right. If, three years from now, a newly elected American president promises to renew the U.S. commitment to NATO—including to Article 5, which states that an attack on one member is an attack on all—in return for continued U.S. preeminence in the alliance, will member states refuse?

We don’t have to speculate. Consider what happened five years ago. The very same president, Donald Trump—having spent his first term badmouthing NATO and pulling America out of various international agreements—was tossed out of office and replaced by Joe Biden. Soon after his inauguration, Biden flew to Munich and announced, “America is back.” European heads of state embraced him. And over the next four years, Biden—despite his fumbles, as with the shambolic exit from Afghanistan—led the international community as capably as any president in decades. He built a global alliance to support Ukraine after the Russian invasion, strengthened and expanded NATO, and brokered a military partnership between once-antagonistic allies Japan and South Korea to counter China’s rising power.

We often read that America’s ability to lead is fated to decline because we now live in a “multipolar” world with many competing centers of power. In fact, there are only two superpowers with the military and economic heft to lead international alliances: the United States and China. Yet while the United States has binding mutual defense treaties with more than 50 countries worldwide, China has only one, with neighboring North Korea. If it chose, it could probably expand that list to include the handful of dictatorships—like Russia, Myanmar, and Cambodia—with which it has looser military arrangements, and possibly draw in a few more in the so-called “global south” thanks to the goodwill it has built up with its Belt and Road Initiative of foreign investment. But few, if any, advanced democracies would accept membership in a China-led military coalition and risk being enmeshed in that dictatorial country’s many systems of repression.

There’s a reason the U.S.-led international order survived for 80 years and remained vital a year and a half ago, despite the relative decline of the American economy in recent decades. All things considered, it was a good deal for participating countries. Smaller states got security guarantees, access to larger markets, and a bigger voice in international decision-making. The U.S. obtained the cooperation of allies that multiplied its power and influence while helping defend and spread its values—democracy, human rights, open markets, the sanctity of borders, environmental stewardship, and so on.

Of course, America frequently acted in blatant disregard of those values. But it still had the clout to promote them as long as it was seen as acting on their behalf most of the time. And in addition to being admirable in and of themselves, those values enhanced the power of our smaller partners, because they could call America out when it threatened to act in contravention of them, often to positive effect. Just because Trump is contemptuous of those values and blind to their strategic advantages doesn’t mean that the next president can’t rededicate the U.S. government to them—and reap public support at home and cooperation abroad in the process.

I know it may seem absurd, or at least a profound misreading of the room, to argue that a return of benign U.S. leadership of the world is on its way when billions of people are being made economically miserable by the folly of the current White House occupant. But the truth is that the same power that makes America capable of doing vast damage also enables it to do great good. The world understands that. Liberals here at home must not lose sight of it.

The post Why the U.S.-led Liberal World Order Is Only Mostly Dead appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In an ominous sign for the artificial intelligence industry, OpenAI reported this week that it had missed its targets for new users and revenue.

The revelation sparked fresh worries about an AI bubble—and an imminent AI crash. According to The Wall Street Journal, Open AI’s own chief financial officer “is worried the company might not be able to pay for future computing contracts if revenue doesn’t grow fast enough.”

Roughly 3,000 data centers are currently operational in the United States, and AI companies are planning to build at least 1,500 more. It’s doubtful the industry can support so many data centers—which is one reason a crash is becoming more probable.

According to Asad Ramzanali, director of AI and technology policy at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator, AI investment is on track to surpass “the Manhattan Project, the expansion of electricity, the Apollo space program, building the interstate highway system, broadband buildout during the dot-com bubble, and every other capital effort in U.S. history, except for the Louisiana Purchase and maybe the peak of railroad construction.”

Bain & Company estimates that the AI industry would have to generate $2 trillion in annual revenues to recoup its current level of investment—a figure that seems wildly aspirational at the moment. (By comparison, total federal spending in 2025 was about $7 trillion.)

Also concerning is the risky financial engineering to finance AI infrastructure. “Circular equity investment” and a heavy reliance on “private credit”—i.e., unregulated credit—are scarily reminiscent of the sketchy financial maneuvers that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis (some of which I saw firsthand—more on that below). Companies are also loading up on debt. Google, for instance, now carries a debt burden of $49 billion—compared to about $15 billion just one year ago. That’s not inherently bad—but it creates vulnerability in the event of a serious downturn.

In one of my earlier incarnations, as a cog in the wheel of Big Law, I did some time in “structured finance”—helping investment bankers create exotic debt-fueled financing arrangements that as a clueless junior lawyer I honestly didn’t fully understand. I helped close gazillions of dollars in transactions for “collateralized debt obligations,” “collateralized trust certificates,” and funky flavors of “mortgage-backed securities,” often involving multiple tiers of financial entities created out of thin air. Many of the investment banks that engineered these transactions—like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers—went bust.

History threatens to repeat. The AI industry’s complex and incestuous financing arrangements “obscure risks and increase the precarity of financial markets,” says Vanderbilt’s Ramzanali.

Ending this over-financialization of AI is one of many recommendations in Ramzanali’s new report, After the Crash, which offers a blueprint for how to mitigate the impacts of a potential AI-led economic catastrophe. Ramazanali, who served as chief of staff and deputy director for strategy at the Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Joe Biden, also proposes a “Digital Works Progress Administration” to cope with mass unemployment.

You can watch an interview with Ramzanali in a sneak-peek version of the Monthly podcast below. (The full episode will be out next week.)

New at the Monthly…

Supreme injustice. The Supreme Court ruled this week to gut the Voting Rights Act. While unquestionably devastating, the decision was also not unexpected. Voting rights expert Joshua Douglas calls it the culmination of a decades-long project by the conservative majority to eviscerate civil rights protections. “American democracy will be much weaker as a result,” he writes. The ruling has already unleashed Republican lawmakers salivating at a chance to tilt the field in their favor. This week, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry said he would suspend the state’s primaries—scheduled for May 16—to accommodate the drawing of a new map eliminating the state’s two majority-minority districts. Read Josh’s analysis here.

Corruption du jour. The Trump administration is currently “in discussions” to bail out the United Arab Emirates as it struggles with the economic consequences of the Iran war—but the real beneficiary might be Trump himself, writes historian Mike Lofgren. That’s because the UAE is a big investor in Trump’s businesses. “That a portion of UAE’s assets are invested in Trump and his family … gives off more than a whiff—more like a stench—of corruption,” Mike writes. Read here.

Raise the wage. Yes, companies can in fact afford to pay their workers more, and it won’t kill the economy. Using reams of real-world evidence, economist Arindrajit Dube “skewers popular arguments against raising the minimum wage,” writes Jacob Fuller in his review of Dube’s book, The Wage Standard. Dube estimates that companies are paying as much as 20 percent less than they would in a perfectly competitive economy. Read here.

The I-word. Contributing writer David Atkins calls out the spinelessness of Congressional Republicans who whisper against Trump but lack the courage to act. “It would take fewer than two dozen of the 535 members of Congress to take a stand for the preservation of the American republic,” he writes. David also argues that, given so many prominent MAGA influencer defections lately, a Republican who broke ranks in favor of impeachment could survive politically. Read here.

Bait and switch. Many families struggle to understand college financial aid offers—a situation that may suit colleges just fine. The Hechinger Report’s Meredith Kolodner reports that colleges managed to water down legislation that would have required colleges to use a standardized form for financial aid offers so that students can compare apples to apples when making a decision. “In fact, the new bill specifically prevents the Education Department from requiring a standard offer letter,” Kolodner writes. Is there any wonder that higher education has a trust problem with the public? Read here.

Plus…

• Marc Levin of the Council on Criminal Justice shares good news on the progress of criminal justice reform.
• James Zirin warns that the Trump administration’s legal harassment of Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell may not, in fact, be over.
• Former White House speechwriter Zev Karlin-Neumann urges commencement speakers to skip the Hallmark sentiments and take a stand for democracy.
• Journalist Michael McGough notes how Catholic support for Trump was slipping even before his feud with the Pope.
• Jonathan Zimmerman argues for more nuance in the current debate over Michael Jackson and his alleged crimes.
• Politics Editor Bill Scher compares the insurgent Senate campaigns of Maine’s Graham Platner and Michigan’s Mallory McMorrow and finds that one of these candidates might be getting a lot more latitude for controversial social media posts. In another column this week, Bill also makes what should be an obvious point—political assassinations don’t achieve the aims assassins claim they want.

Coda (spring reading edition)…

The Monthly is one of the few outlets left in America with a robust selection of nonfiction book reviews. ICYMI, here are some of our latest recommendations:

• The Descent: Witnessing Russia’s Spiral Into Madness Under Putin, by Marc Bennetts. “Searing and deeply personal,” writes Publisher Emeritus Markos Kounalakis, who was himself a foreign correspondent in Moscow.
• Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class, by Noam Scheiber. This journey into the travails of baristas with bachelor’s degrees is “a wake-up call to fundamentally reform higher education,” writes Obama administration veteran Kenneth Baer.
• Killers of Roe, by Amy Littlefield. “For anyone who is enraged over the loss of Roe,” declares journalist Clara Bingham, “this is required reading.”
• Hated by All the Right People, by Jason Zengerle. Jacob Heilbrunn calls this Tucker Carlson biography “a vivid, well-researched, and astute portrait” of one of America’s most dangerous and polarizing figures.
• The Science of Second Chances, by Jennifer Doleac. For those who care about what really works to bring down crime, this book is a “well-organized, well-reasoned, thought-provoking volume that merits close attention,” writes Stanford professor Keith Humphreys.

One book not worth your while is constitutional scholar Alan Dershowitz’s book on why Trump can legally serve a third term. Legal Affairs Editor Garrett Epps, once an admirer of the ubiquitous Harvard professor and appellate attorney, suffered through the book (so you don’t have to), and found Dershowitz’s argument rather unconvincing.

As always, thanks for reading, liking, and sharing.

Have a great week!

Anne Kim, Senior Editor

The post An AI Crash Is Coming. What Then? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Mallory McMorrow is the latest U.S. Senate candidate in the crucible for old social media posts. CNN dredged up deleted Twitter (now called X) posts from 2014 to 2020—a period that spans her move from California to Michigan, her election to the Michigan state Senate, and Donald Trump’s 2016 victory in the state.

The posts show McMorrow missing California; venting about Michigan’s weather; seemingly wishing for the demise of Michigan’s signature product, cars; defending “coastal elites”; and dreaming of a separation from “Middle America.” (Some of the posts were uncovered last year by the New York Post.) 

Polls show the U.S. Senate Democratic primary in Michigan is a tight three-way race, and McMorrow’s rivals—both Wolverine State natives—did not hesitate to use their X accounts to pounce on the revelations. Abdul El-Sayed slyly posted, “Born in Michigan, hallelujah / Raised in Michigan, hallelujah / Believe cars should exist, hallelujah.” U.S. Representative Haley Stevens was far more direct, sharing a link to the CNN report and adding: “I have pretty thick skin about people making fun of the way I talk or the clothes I wear . . . So what actually ticks me off? Someone who wants that job—representing Michiganders—talking crap about us and our state.” 

McMorrow finds herself in a similar position as Graham Platner, the insurgent Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Maine, once did. Last October, a few months into his campaign, media outlets uncovered a trove of offensive Reddit posts from 2013 to 2020.  

What happened to Platner is now familiar. His supporters not only accepted his apology, but they also argued that Platner’s unvarnished past underscored his authenticity and distinguished him from the highly vetted candidates favored by the party establishment.  

Mischa Ostberg, the tattoo artist who covered up a symbol with Nazi origins inked on Platner’s chest, told the Associated Press that Platner’s mistakes show “he’s a regular person like all of us.” Ryan Grim, the outspoken co-founder of Drop Site News, declared, “this is a crucial moment for the Democratic Party. If they decide that normal people with some small skeletons in their closet (or inked on their chest) are not welcome, they are finished. Because they’ve tried the other way and it didn’t work.”  

The 41-year-old Platner, in an interview with Semafor, made his own electoral case on the grounds of age and gender: “How do you expect to win young people? How do you expect to win back men when you go back through somebody’s Reddit history and just pull it all out and say: ‘Oh my God, this person has no right to ever be in politics?’ Good luck with that. Good luck winning over those demographics.” 

The strategy worked. Money kept coming into Platner’s coffers. He lapped Janet Mills, the 78-year-old incumbent governor who became the personification of establishment gerontocracy, in primary polls. Seeing no path forward, Mills suspended her campaign yesterday, effectively surrendering the Democratic Party nomination to Platner. 

The 39-year-old McMorrow, however, shows that it’s not just Millennial men who can be messy on the Internet.  

We now have another crucial moment for the Democratic Party. Will the Platner standard be applied to McMorrow?  

Perhaps the same standard should not apply when there are material differences in controversial statements. But Platner’s were the more disturbing of the two, as he alone veered into racism, misogyny, and homophobia. Still, there is a politically treacherous overlap regarding their observations of rural and white working-class voters, constituencies that can determine elections in their respective states.  

Soon after the 2016 election, McMorrow favorably shared a Twitter thread that argued, “All of this talk about coastal elites needing to understand more of America has it backward. It is much of white working-class America that needs to reach outside its comfort zone and meet people not like them.” McMorrow added, “I’m from rural New Jersey, this rings 100%. Empathy should go both ways, but Trump’s base fears what they’ve never seen.” In 2020, Platner posted a comment in a Reddit thread titled, “white people aren’t as racist or stupid as Trump thinks,” offering an opposing view: “Living in white rural America, I’m afraid to tell you they actually are.” To my eye, based on the statements, McMorrow deserves as much, if not more, latitude than Platner.  

Perhaps the same standard should not be applied if two candidates handled their situations with dissimilar degrees of political dexterity.  

McMorrow hasn’t yet apologized and instead is adopting a posture of nonchalant defiance. When CNN flagged a tweet of McMorrow’s that read, “Yesterday it was nearly 50 and now the sky is just shitting ice on everything. I don’t like you, Michigan,” the McMorrow campaign issued the following response, “The Michigan sky does in fact sometimes shit ice. She stands by that.” (Lee Devito, editor-in-chief of the Detroit Metro Times, defended McMorrow along the same lines: “To that, I say: sounds like she’s one of us. Whom among us hasn’t lamented Michigan’s long, cold, and grey season?”) 

Last year, McMorrow’s spokesman offered this statement to the New York Post: “Mallory grew up in the social media era, and, like most normal people, she engages in self-deprecating humor. These are normal tweets by a normal person, something Washington needs a lot more of.” That tracks with arguments made on Platner’s behalf, which testify to his authenticity.  

Unlike McMorrow (so far), Platner did post a video apology, seeking to assure voters he has matured in the past several years. However at other times, as in the Semafor interview, he comes across as less apologetic. “That was me trying to get a rise out of people on the Internet,” Platner said on the Pod Save America podcast, “Those weren’t even reflective of my opinions back then.” On The New Yorker Radio Hour, Platner noted that he didn’t apologize for everything he ever said: “I made a lot of comments that I’m not ashamed of. It’s not as though I have this ream of comments in which I look back and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I was a terrible person back then.’” While their scandal management strategies are not identical, both candidates downplay their posts as the stuff of everyday Millennials.  

The only reasons for holding McMorrow to a double standard would be unfair reasons, such as gender. Some might be more inclined to defend Platner than McMorrow because they prefer his policy positions. For example, he supports single-payer health care and cutting off all aid to Israel (as does one of McMorrow’s opponents, El-Sayed). She supports a public health insurance option and only cutting off aid for offensive weapons to Israel.  

Of course, no one is obligated to support McMorrow’s candidacy if they disagree with her positions. But ethical standards should be consistently applied. If they are not, the next candidate to get a raw deal might be yours.  

The post Hold Mallory McMorrow’s Social Media Posts to the Same Standard as Graham Platner’s  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Michael Jackson was the King of Pop. Stop sullying his reputation with unproven charges of sexual abuse! 

Michael Jackson molested children. Stop listening to his music!

Welcome to the debate—such as it is—over Jackson, who is the subject of a new movie that set box office records last weekend. Nobody contests Jackson’s incandescent talent or his influence on popular culture. But we can’t seem to agree on how we should address the ugly parts of his past. 

That’s because we’re all stuck in a kind of perpetual childhood, where everything is simple. We can’t accept that terrifically gifted people can do terrible things. So, we either deny what they did or cancel them, which are different sides of the same coin. 

The director of Michael, the blockbuster biopic about Jackson, seems to be in the denial camp. In an interview in The New Yorker, Antoine Fuqua, the acclaimed director of action films including Training Day, cast doubt on the charges against the singer. “When I hear things about us—Black people in particular . . . there’s always pause,” said Fuqua, who—like Jackson—is African-American. “Sometimes people do some nasty things for some money.” 

Translated: Jackson was accused of molesting children because of his race. And his accusers are gold-diggers. 

In 1994, Jackson settled a lawsuit for an estimated $23 million with the family of a boy he allegedly abused. The original version of Michael opened with a police raid in that case at Jackson’s Neverland Ranch, in which Fuqua depicted the star “being stripped naked, treated like an animal, a monster,” the director said. Again: Jackson is the victim, not the perpetrator. 

That scene got cut from the film after attorneys representing Jackson’s estate realized there was a clause in the settlement that blocked any mention or depiction of the family that accused him. The movie ends in 1988, before allegations against Jackson surfaced. 

In the 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland, two men said that Jackson molested them as children. And earlier this year, four siblings in a family that was close to Jackson charged that they, too, were abused by him. 

But to Jackson’s defenders, there’s nothing to see, folks. It’s all rumor, innuendo, and character assassination. He’s been railroaded, just like so many innocent Black men before him. 

Meanwhile, critics said that watching the movie—or listening to Jackson’s music—makes the audience complicit in his awful acts. “It’s time to take a stand,” British journalist Charlotte Cripps wrote last week. “That means turning off the radio when his songs come on, and walking off the dancefloor at weddings.” 

That’s her right, of course, but that’s different from insisting that others do the same, or that they’re accessories to Jackson’s crimes if they don’t.  

This is the heart of cancel culture, which seeks to erase any trace of the monster. It’s not enough to criticize J.K. Rowling for her supposedly transphobic comments: you must stop buying her books. You shouldn’t attend a performance by comedian Louis C. K., who exposed himself to colleagues. And by all means, never go to a Woody Allen movie. 

Our heroes must be clean. And if they’re not, we need to drag them—and anyone who still admires their work—through the mud. 

The same holds in our stale debates about history. Either Thomas Jefferson was the freedom-loving father of our country or a racist who fathered children with a woman he enslaved. And to take a more recent example: either Cesar Chavez was a courageous spokesman for farm workers or a vicious predator who groomed young girls for sexual abuse. Either Roald Dahl was a brilliant children’s author or a chronic antisemite. (A new play on Broadway, Giant, makes the case that he was both.) 

You’re good or bad, friend or foe, victor or vanquished. That’s a child’s world, much like the one Michael Jackson created at Neverland. It featured a Ferris wheel and a petting zoo. And it’s also where he allegedly molested children. 

So, should we cancel him? Intriguingly, the director of Leaving Neverland—which detailed Jackson’s abuse of two boys—doesn’t think so. “I’m not trying to stop anyone from consuming his music,” Dan Reed said last week, as the Michael biopic opened. “Book burning is for the Middle Ages and the Taliban.” 

But people also need to reckon with Jackson’s misdeeds, Reed added, instead of blindly worshiping him. “It’s like religion,” he observed, denouncing Jackson’s defenders. “They think he’s a God, so blasphemy is not permitted.” 

Michael Jackson wasn’t a God. He was a human being with huge talents and horrible flaws. Why can’t we say both things at the same time? It’s time to leave Neverland. It’s time to grow up. 

The post Our Childish Debate over Michael Jackson  appeared first on Washington Monthly.