Sulzberger’s core argument when addressing the annual WAN-IFRA World News Media Conference on June 1 was that Big Tech is stealing the news media’s property and undermining democracy, and that the only solution is for news organizations to work together to resist it. 

Big Tech’s “hijacking of the public square is made possible by the original sin that animates their AI products—a brazen theft of intellectual property that has occurred at an unprecedented scale,” Sulzberger argued. “Tech giants strip-mine news websites without permission or compensation. They repackage these stolen goods as their own, siphoning off the audiences and revenue that otherwise would go to the news organizations that created this work.” 

If such stealing is allowed to continue, he continued, we risk a “future where a crucial wellspring of a healthy society and a stable democracy—the truth, understanding and accountability provided by original journalism—continues to dry up.… The news industry’s only path to counteracting [Big Tech’s machinations] … is by working together” to protect the industry’s property rights, including through lawsuits. (The Times, he noted, has spent $20 million on such lawsuits.)

In sum, the publisher of one of the world’s most influential newspapers has accused some of the richest, most powerful companies on earth of being criminals; of building their vast fortunes on a foundation of lies and theft at grand scale. And he urged the rest of the media to join the Times in fighting back, for the sake of not only their own commercial survival but the survival of a free press and the democracy it nourishes.

Bravo to Le Monde, Variety, and Press Gazette for writing about the speech, and to The Seattle Times for publishing excerpts on its opinion page. But given the big names, enormous sums, and profound stakes involved, why has there been so little other coverage? Why are those outlets the exceptions?

Here’s a hint: The Times itself didn’t report on the speech. Instead, the business side of the paper issued a press release containing the text. But there was no mention of the speech in the news, business, opinion, or other sections of the paper. That absence reflects a view long held by newsroom traditionalists: We (almost) never report on ourselves. The corollary—nor do we report on our competitors—likely explains why the rest of the media has been silent.

Perhaps such coverage is still to come; certainly Sulzberger’s call to arms warrants the attention of any specialist outlet focused on the news media. And maybe there are executive conversations taking place right now that will result in other newsrooms joining Sulzberger’s movement. After all, his speech did invite journalists and news executives to get in touch, offer their own ideas, and explore possible collaborations.

Covering Climate Now welcomes this opportunity, and we urge fellow journalists around the world to consider pursuing it, as well. We find Sulzberger’s analysis of the dangers facing our industry and our society persuasive, and highly pertinent to our core concern of how journalism reports on the climate emergency and its solutions.  

AI, in case it isn’t obvious, is bad for the climate because its data centers demand gargantuan amounts of scarce water and costly electricity, but it is also bad because building AI chatbots, among other things, sucks away revenue that rightfully belongs to news outlets. That theft is one reason why, as Sulzberger noted, the U.S. has “lost 75% of its journalists and more than 3,000 newspapers” over the last two decades. That’s 3,000 newspapers that will never tell the climate story. 

Even for news outlets that remain in business, shrunken revenues make it challenging to cover even routine subjects, much less a story like climate change. AI is no friend to a free press or a livable climate, and it’s time journalists grapple with how we respond.

This article is published as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

Last week, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema ordered that “Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, Jr., and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent FILE a declaration under the penalty of perjury that they will not take any action to create or operate the Anti-Weaponization Fund, and that the Anti-Weaponization Fund will not proceed in any manner, or under any name,” issuing a preliminary injunction and giving the government a deadline of June 19.

The deadline arrived on Friday, and the Department of Justice responded by refusing to file such a declaration due to “serious separation of powers concerns.” The DOJ claimed that Blanche’s congressional testimony earlier this month that the fund is “not going forward, period” is enough, along with similar statements from other administration officials.

This raises questions as to whether the Trump administration is sneakily trying to keep the fund alive in some form. After Blanche’s congressional testimony, Trump was asked if he was ending his slush fund plans. “No, a court ruled against it,” Trump said, going on to argue that “these are people that have been decimated” and “they should be reimbursed for a crooked government.”

Last week, The Atlantic reported that White House officials were still telling President Trump’s allies that they would get some form of payment, even with Blanche’s public statements disavowing the fund.

Department of Justice lawyers also refused to declare the fund dead in writing to another federal judge, Richard Leon, more than a week ago. At the time, anonymous sources told The Atlantic that work was continuing on the fund inside the Trump administration in secret. With that in mind, Friday’s court filing from White House officials makes it seem like they are trying to skirt the law and create the slush fund anyway.

The DOJ claims that the other three million pages are either duplicates, unrelated to Epstein, or protected by legal privilege. But because of the administration’s lack of transparency in regard to Epstein, many are concerned that something is still being hidden.

CBS News analyzed the available files to try to figure out which documents appeared to be missing, and found a number of notable omissions: questionable redactions, missing emails from older accounts, lack of massage scheduling records after 2009, missing prison surveillance footage, and more.

Notably, most of the emails in the released files were from an email account created in 2008, around the time Epstein went to jail: jeevacation@gmail.com.

But Epstein had other, older email addresses that were mentioned in only a few, highly redacted publicly released files. One missing account, littlestjeff@yahoo.com, was from the early 2000s—the time when Epstein was most in touch with Donald Trump.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that he is innocent of all charges when it comes to his connection with Epstein. But, as this analysis by CBS reveals, we may still be missing major pieces of the puzzle.

The Washington Post, citing unnamed former and current U.S. officials, reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is going to continue bombing and occupying Lebanon, even though the U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding demands a “permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon.”.

“Continuing to occupy part of Lebanon is a recipe for disaster,” an unnamed U.S. official told the Post. “Without a full Israeli withdrawal, the likelihood of resumed hostilities between the [Israeli military] and Hezbollah is all but certain.”

ّIsraelis have publicly denounced the 14-point MOU, with media commentators in the country calling it a “catastrophic capitulation” and a “diplomatic Oct. 7,” referencing the Hamas-led attack from 2023. Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir on Friday seemingly advocated for a genocide in Lebanon, posting on X in Hebrew that “for every tear shed by an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers should cry. All of Lebanon should burn.”

Netanyahu has used constant warfare, from relentless war crimes in Gaza to bombing Iran and Lebanon, to deflect against corruption charges and save his political fortunes. Any end to these conflicts would only hurt his chances in Israel’s October elections. He and his far-right, fascistic political allies in Israel are willing to slaughter countless innocent people across the Middle East to save themselves and continue their settler colonialism.

The filtration work of the Ohio firm, ironically called Greenwater Services, has come under scrutiny because … well. You’ve seen the pool.

Greenwater Services is owned by the J.J. Carafo Investment Trust, led by John J. Carafo. Carafo is a longtime Republican donor who Trump has described as a “fantastic man.” Carafo, who has previously skirted campaign finance law, also pleaded guilty in 2001 to conspiracy to bribe Democratic Representative James A. Traficant Jr.

The $1.7 million contract was directly awarded to Carafo’s company by the National Park Service, bypassing the usual competitive bidding process. Katie Martin, a spokesperson for the Interior Department, said the department did not know about Carafo’s political affiliation when his firm was hired.

“This company was selected because they had the expertise, work force and materials” needed to finish the job by the country’s 250th anniversary, she told the Times.

Carafo and Greenwater Services did not respond to the Times’ requests for comment.

Because the president wants the reflecting pool “American Flag Blue” by July 4, other firms have been hired for their ability to complete jobs on a short timeline, like Virginia firm Atlantic Industrial Coatings, which was given a no-bid contract of $14.7 million to put bright blue waterproofing material on the pool’s floor. That paint is already peeling.

At this point, it might just be easier to turn the flag green.

The forty-fourth president delivered an emotional speech at the Obama Presidential Center’s opening ceremony on Thursday. It offered a blistering indictment of the forty-fifth and forty-seventh president, all without mentioning the words “Donald Trump,” while offering his own ambitious rendering of the American story.

Yet in so doing, the speech also sent an implicit message to Democrats: Defeating Trumpism, MAGA, and the right-wing nationalist vision of America that animates them requires something more than small-bore politics and slogans about “affordability.” It requires a bigger and better story, a positive and aspirational vision, a full-throated declaration of what we liberals think the United States is—and should be—instead.

Obama has long been a spokesperson for the idea of creedal nationalism, which holds that American identity is defined by our founding ideals, versus a nationalism rooted in heritage or ethnicity or race. And so, Obama declared that the “story of America at its best” rests on “shared values that make democracy possible.” They include:

a belief in the intrinsic dignity and worth of all people and that no one is above the law or beneath its protection, a belief in checks and balances in our government … a belief that our military and law enforcement owe allegiance not to any president or political party, but to the people and our Constitution.

Let’s be blunt: It’s a defining fact of this moment that Trump and his movement simply do not accept any of those things. And it’s important that Obama used this moment to say so. Obama also lionized “the peaceful transfer of power” and called for a reaffirmation of “character, honesty, integrity” and “a sense of duty and honor” in public life. Guess who he was talking about?

But creedal nationalism was the main event here. To reinforce the idea, Obama also declared that these values are embodied in the Declaration of Independence, which provided the “framework that allows each generation to make our union more perfect.” Implicitly targeting Trump, Obama said that when we give up on these ideals:

we open the door to the most ruthless, or the most careless, or the most fearful among us, who see some groups as more equal than others, and see government as nothing more than a way to divvy up the spoils and punish enemies, and keep those who are different in their place. I do not believe that is the story of America that prevails in the end.

Emphasis mine. That’s as close as I’ve seen any leading Democrat come to stating outright that Trump and MAGA fundamentally do not accept the Declaration of Independence’s promise of equality. This is where liberals should go in the battle over our 250th anniversary.

Indeed, in delivering these lines, Obama likely had in mind not just Trump but also recent claims from JD Vance. The vice president—a self-imagined MAGA philosopher-king—has declared that “America is not just an idea.” Citing his own ancestors’ burial on a “mountainside in Eastern Kentucky,” Vance suggests that the “source of America’s greatness” is the “ancestral” bond Americans feel with the “homeland.” Vance mocks the “creedal nation” by insisting that its logic leads to an unacceptable conclusion: that all foreigners, everywhere, might instantly have a claim to U.S. citizenship merely by mouthing agreement with our founding ideals.

Few if any prominent Democrats or liberals believe anything like that last bit. The idea, rather, is that immigrants do have a claim to becoming Americans—they are “Americans in waiting”—provided they clear certain civic hurdles, including adherence to the nation’s founding ideals. Their rates of admission, and the conditions that shape their arrival and assimilation, are agreed upon democratically by our elected representatives in Congress and subject to revision over time. But yes, in the liberal vision, the idea that immigrants do have a conditional claim to belonging is fundamental to American identity.

Vance’s big claim, by contrast, is that fealty to our founding ideals cannot be the basis for American national identity. Blood and hereditary attachment to the soil are, to him, essential ingredients.

True, Vance takes care to praise immigrants and is married to a daughter of them. But he has also mocked immigrant Zohran Mamdani for mildly criticizing the United States, insisting Mamdani should be thankful for his admission here and thus self-censor. As Jamelle Bouie notes, put all this together, and Vance’s vision of citizenship involves “tiers of belonging,” in which those with long ancestry—“heritage Americans”—hold a superior position in an imagined national hierarchy.

Or, as Obama put it, that vision sees “some groups as more equal than others.” In this sense, Obama’s speech is a rebuttal to this sort of Vance-MAGA nationalism. Along these lines, Obama also gave a shout-out to the people in Minneapolis, who

braved frigid temperatures, risked their own safety, standing shoulder to shoulder to look out for their neighbors, and sometimes look out for strangers, because they knew that was the right thing to do.

Among the “strangers,” of course, are all the immigrants—undocumented and legal—who were targeted by Trump for forced mass removals.

In this understanding, the “strangers” do not become Americans simply via support for the nation’s ideals. But they may well be on the road to becoming Americans, via a social process. Crucially, the ties Obama describes here are not purely cerebral or only rooted in “an idea,” as Vance puts it. These are moral, ethical, communitarian, and even cultural ties that develop over time. And this process is molded by majorities deciding—again, democratically—how to shape their political life together and who can share in it.

In a recent column, Ross Douthat, a skillful interpreter of Vance, tries to offer a more measured critique of “creedal” nationalism than Vance does. Douthat suggests certain cultural and ethical habits are necessary for it to be sufficiently binding. But liberals don’t disagree with this. Many expressly see a role for all sorts of institutions—religious, civic, community-oriented—in creating the social conditions that enable pluralist democracies grouped around shared ideals to hold together. The new Liberal Currents Reconstruction Papers, for instance, suggest rebuilding such institutions to reinforce democratic cohesion.

Obama’s speech too makes this point. He says the American experiment relies on a sense of the “common good,” of “common humanity,” of social “trust,” and of “mutual respect,” and hails the role of community in helping create such conditions.

Meanwhile, it’s often argued that “the left” has foregone patriotism and positive nationalism—see Michael Kazin, Noah Smith, and Yoni Appelbaum—and that this is a political dead end. My strong hunch is that Obama probably agrees with some version of this. His liberalism is essentially that of Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country, a canonical call for a positive patriotism that depicts our country as flawed but progressing toward realizing its ideals. Obama declares as much with his paean to each generation making our “union more perfect.”

At bottom, Obama’s liberalism echoes Abraham Lincoln’s “electric cord” speech, delivered in 1858. In it, Lincoln declares that the immigrants of the day have no ties of heritage or blood to the founding generation. But once they reflect on the Declaration’s promise of equality, it allows them to claim such a bond:

That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.

In Lincoln’s speech, dedication to the proposition that all people are created equal is a substitute for ties of heritage and blood. So it is for Obama, and for him here’s the key: It’s no less strong for being so.

These bonds are not merely intellectual: They are deeply, powerfully rooted in “moral sentiment,” in a sense of common humanity and the mutual goodwill that arises from sharing a common political project. Obama’s speech tells us: If you’re looking for a rebuttal to Vance-MAGA nationalism, well, those ideas are a good place to start.

“We’ve now fought a war, spent billions and billions of dollars, put enormous strain on our military,” Obama said in an interview with NBC’s Craig Melvin.

“A lot of people have died. And it feels like we’re back where we were before we started the war, except maybe a little bit worse off,” Obama continued. “I am very happy to see a ceasefire. And I’m hopeful that it holds.”

The interview was conducted before the public opening of the Obama Presidential Center on Thursday, and aired Friday morning on the Today show. Obama pointed out that under the 2015 JCPOA agreement his administration negotiated with Iran, “Iran had agreed not to develop nuclear weapons.

“This administration, or a prior version of this administration, pulled out of it, which caused then Iran to develop more nuclear capacity,” Obama continued, referring to Trump’s decision to withdraw from that deal in 2018, despite the agreement also involving the European Union, Russia, China, the U.K., France, and Germany. International observers also said that Iran was complying with the JCPOA at the time.

Obama faced criticism from the right and his own party over the nuclear agreement, but the deal had the support of the international community, and it didn’t leave the U.S. in a worse position. Trump’s memorandum of understanding with Iran is under fire from virtually everyone, including Democrats, Trump’s MAGA base, Republicans in Congress, and Israeli officials, who are calling it a “surrender” and “total capitulation.”

In his speech at the opening of his library Thursday, Obama emphasized principles in the Constitution that Trump has flouted throughout his time in the Oval Office, and praised protesters in Minnesota who rallied against the Trump administration’s brutal immigration effort in the state, saying, “These are the values and traditions I believe in.” What values does Trump believe in, except for acting in his own self-interest?

The ruling struck down a lower court decision that said the National Park Service must restore the exhibit, which it had torn down to comply with the president’s executive order last year on “restoring truth and sanity to American history.”

In January, NPS removed the six-panel outdoor display, which documented the lives of people enslaved by Washington during the fight for independence. It was unveiled in 2010 after years of community advocacy, WHYY reported.

“It was the grand opening of the first slave memorial of its kind on federal property in the history of the U.S. We thought it would last forever. But 15 years later, the destruction came,” activist Michael Coard said to NPR.

Philadelphia quickly sued the Interior Department to restore the exhibit, and won. U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe ordered the Trump administration to put the panels back up, comparing the administration’s efforts to those taken by the totalitarian government in George Orwell’s 1984.

But now, the Trump administration will be allowed to replace the exhibit with its own version of history. The three-judge panel on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals praised the administration’s plan for a new installation, saying that it was “full of historical context.” The new exhibit will no longer center slavery or enslaved people’s role in the creation of the United States, and has been accused by advocates of “whitewashing.”

Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker said she would fight the decision, writing, “We cannot and WILL not rest until the full story of American history—including the existence of Slavery at the President’s House here in Philadelphia—is told, for our Nation and the World to see.”

As the country celebrates Juneteenth, the commemoration of the day when the last enslaved people in America were finally emancipated, the administration is fighting to erase Black history.

I think such thoughts this week because I have no doubt that future historians and readers of history will surely wonder what the ever-living fuck we were all thinking when Donald Trump both started and then lost his immoral and pointless war with Iran. What we have just witnessed is almost beyond belief, and would be beyond belief if we didn’t all know going in that Trump is such an aggressively and willfully stupid human being, utterly impervious to knowledge and facts, serenely cocooned in his carapace of ignorance, surrounded by flatterers who patronize him as one does a child and who scream at Americans about his nonexistent genius, courage, and virility. They exist in a fantasyland.

But we live in the real world, and in the real world, this war was a disaster in every imaginable sense. Let’s tally up the damage:

• First of all, there was already a diplomatic agreement with Iran that was working; the International Atomic Energy Agency reported repeatedly that Iran was abiding by the Obama-era JCPOA deal. There was no need for Donald Trump to do anything.
• But of course, the deal was the handiwork of Barack Obama—the Kenyan Marxist who made a few jokes at Trump’s expense at a dinner one time; so Trump tore it to pieces.
• Almost instantly, Iran started enriching uranium at levels well above the 3.67 percent limit set by the JCPOA. And why not? Trump broke the agreement. Of course they started enriching uranium at high levels again.
• In other words: The fact that Iran once again became a nuclear threat is entirely Donald Trump’s fault.
• With respect to its capability to build a nuclear weapon, Iran’s “breakout time,” in the preferred parlance of diplomacy, went from 12 months to seven days. That is not a typo.
• So Trump discovers this one day. Maybe Benjamin Netanyahu explained it to him. We’ll learn that whole story at some future point. In any case, out of nowhere on the last day of February, with no warning, no prep, no nothing, Trump starts a war. Within hours, we bomb a school, killing around 120 children.
• From a purely military standpoint, the war goes fine. We suffer few casualties, although we do kill 3,500 or more people. But Iran counters by doing the thing that every expert in the world knew Iran would do if it was ever attacked: It asserts its control over the Strait of Hormuz. If you want to come through, you have to pay to play. Up go the gas prices.
• Now Trump is trapped. And he’s starting to get bored because the regime didn’t collapse in two weeks like he thought it would. He wants out. So he sends his corrupt son-in-law, in bed with the Saudis and in the middle of trying to humiliate Albania for no good reason, to sort things out.
• That brings us to this week: the outlines of a deal that looks for all the world like a complete surrender. The United States of America, for only the second time in its 237 years on this earth, has unambiguously lost a war.

People can debate the above. I’m counting Vietnam, obviously; there’s no doubt about that one. I reckon the War of 1812 and the Korean War as stalemates. Under the Treaty of Ghent, the United States and Britain just agreed to go back to the way things were before the war, and with respect to Korea, the line was the 38th parallel pre-bellum and postbellum.

Some will say Iraq was a loss, but I rate it, too, as kind of a draw. It sure wasn’t a win of the sort Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz told us to expect. It cost many trillions of dollars and killed hundreds of thousands. To a mixed result: Today, Iraq is a democracy, of a sort, but it’s a long way from being free. But I perhaps charitably call it a draw because the U.S. did achieve the core stated aim: It deposed Saddam Hussein.

Here, though, we have not achieved any of Trump’s shifting stated claims. There’s no regime change—or, to the extent that Trump has managed to change the regime, it’s even more hard-line and more powerful in the region than it was before the war!

And that’s before we and other nations fork over the infamous $300 billion, just a mind-boggling figure. Conservatives wanted Barack Obama impeached over the money he agreed to pay Iran (which was Iran’s money, frozen in U.S. banks), which was $1.7 billion. Trump is going to hand Iran 176 times that amount. And it’s going to end up being more, because the $300 billion is separate from whatever frozen assets Trump decides to unfreeze. Word around the campfire is that we are talking about another $25 billion or so.  

Some perspective on how much $325 billion is. The total U.S. foreign aid budget for 2025 was about $60 billion. More pointedly: Estimates vary, but it seems that Iran spends around $1 billion a year propping up Hezbollah. Imagine how much they’ll be able to spend when their Trumpy ship comes in!

The one slender thread on which the Trump administration is now hanging its hopes is that in the coming negotiations, it’ll get Iran to surrender its current stockpile of enriched uranium. That, admittedly, would be something that the JCPOA didn’t do. If they pull that off, even I will say good for them.

But for Iran, of course, this is a nearly inconceivable concession. What seems more likely to happen is that the two sides will agree to terms calling for Iran to dilute its highly enriched uranium under international supervision. Trump will sell this as a great victory. But this “down-blending,” as it’s called, was also in the JCPOA!

Above, I called this war immoral and pointless. The pointless part speaks for itself. It has accomplished nothing except making Iran stronger and the United States weaker. If Barack Obama or Joe Biden had done this, not only would they have been instantly impeached if the Republicans controlled the House, but the entire Democratic Party would have been discredited on foreign policy matters for a generation at least.

But the immoral part is worse. Trump started a war, killed a few thousand people, got tired of it, and surrendered to one of the most reactionary regimes on earth, which went on a gleeful killing spree of its own citizens earlier this year. Since the commencement of these hostilities in February, Iran has executed 44 more people and detained another 6,000. That’s the regime Donald Trump just strengthened and is about to hand many billions of dollars to. “Immoral” barely scratches the surface.

This is an epic failure. It’s not quite September 1938. But that’s only because Iran’s mullahs don’t have Hitler’s global ambitions. Morally, it’s a Neville Chamberlain moment of a sort the United States has never experienced. The icing on the cake would be Trump taking to Truth Social and boasting about “peace in our time.” A man who signed a treaty at Versailles is ignorant enough of history to not even know why that phrase resonates.

Vance was asked at a news conference Thursday about reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was angry over the deal, which provides Iran with several major concessions. Vance said that he hadn’t heard Netanyahu offer any criticism, but he had words for Israeli Cabinet ministers attacking Trump and the deal.  

“My message to them would be twofold. ​No. 1: Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world ‌who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this ‌moment in time,” Vance said. “If I was in the Cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left ‌in the entire world.”

Vance added that two-thirds of the weapons that Israel has “have been built by American hands and paid for by American tax dollars.” 

“The problem for Israel is not Donald J Trump, and anybody in Israel who thinks their biggest problem is the president of the United States needs to wake up and smell the reality of the situation that country is in,” Vance said. 

VIDEO: Vice president Vance in a message to to Israeli cabinet members:

“If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have left

2/3 of the defensive weapons that have protected your homeland have been built by… https://t.co/asCV1nwUNr pic.twitter.com/DNA42AdgNp

— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) June 18, 2026

That was enough to set off the MAGA base, including Republicans in Congress.

Hard-right Representative Randy Fine, known for his bigotry against Muslims, called Vance’s comments “absolutely inappropriate and frankly disgusting,” in an interview on Real America’s Voice Friday morning. 

“The state of Israel was not created by the United States; it is not funded by the United States, except in some small way. It was created in the blood and sweat and tears of the Jewish people arising out of the Holocaust,” the Florida congressman said. “The United States didn’t support Israel in its formation: In fact, there were times when it put arms embargos in place, and JD Vance would be wise to go back and learn his history. I think his comments … were completely out of line.”

Fox News host Brian Kilmeade also expressed his dismay at the vice president Friday.

“If the cartels were lobbing rockets into Texas from Mexico, we would not allow that, even if Israel asked us to, and I think that I was a little surprised that the vice president was going after Israel yesterday at the podium more than he was going after Iran,” Kilmeade said. 

NewsNation host Batya Ungar-Sargon said Thursday that “JD Vance is out there criticizing Israel, making up fantasies about how it is Israel’s fault and Israel wants Iran to be failed state, and if only Israel would lay down its arms and allow Hezbollah to keep attacking it, there would be peace in the Middle East.

“It is disgusting, it is the complete Tucker Carlsonificiation of the vice president of the United States, and it is utterly deplorable. The only good thing I can say about it is if this was a dry run for Vance 2028, we sure learned a lot,” Ungar-Sargon said. 

Vance also told The New York Times earlier Thursday that his response to Israeli opponents of the deal “would be: What is your exact proposal? You’re a country of 9 million people. You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have.”

The backlash to Vance reveals that many conservatives want Israel to have a blank check, regardless of U.S. interests. Vance is also getting off easy compared to Democrats, who are called antisemites for anything resembling criticism of Israel, as Abby Phillip pointed out on CNN Thursday. Israel has committed genocide in Gaza and continues to kill civilians in Lebanon, trying to prevent any checks on its actions and block any hope of peace.

Vance’s words may be self-serving to protect the Trump administration from political fallout over a protracted war with Iran, but his criticism of Israel doesn’t go far enough, letting it off the hook for its ongoing genocide. Conservatives should realize that Israel trying to dictate U.S. foreign policy is bad for Republicans politically, and bad for the U.S. and global peace overall.

The president told an Italian TV channel Meloni “begged” to take a picture with him. “She wanted a picture with me so badly. I wouldn’t have taken it, but I felt sorry for her,” Trump said, according to Reuters.

Meloni responded with her own video, captioned, “Io e l’Italia non imploriamo mai,” which translates to “Neither I nor Italy ever beg.”

Io e l’Italia non imploriamo mai. pic.twitter.com/sTpKlqWB67

— Giorgia Meloni (@GiorgiaMeloni) June 19, 2026

“Donald Trump’s statements are completely made up,” Meloni said, writes Reuters. “I am frankly astonished. I don’t ‌know why ⁠the president of the United States behaves like this towards his allies: It is not the first time, moreover.”

Trump’s flippant comment had immediate diplomatic consequences. Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani canceled his upcoming trip to the U.S., writing on X, “The serious and offensive words of President Trump towards Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni offend all of Italy,” according to the platform’s translation.

Other Italian politicians are also coming forward in support of Meloni, including Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini.

“Whoever attacks @GiorgiaMeloni attacks all of us,” Salvini wrote, as translated by X.

Trump and the right-wing Meloni used to be close allies but recently sparred over Trump’s tirades against Pope Leo.

Italian Senator Giovanbattista Fazzolari, Meloni’s political ally, put it well: “It is ​unclear whether out ⁠of intent or ineptitude [Trump] is wrecking the historic relations between the United States and Europe,” he told Reuters.

His visit to the office caught everyone off guard, CNN reports, including outgoing director Tulsi Gabbard, who only got a brief notice that Pulte was coming. Trump had previously said that Pulte would start his job on Friday.

On Thursday, Pulte reportedly met with lawyers and staff. Pulte alarmed intelligence officials last week when, in his only other briefing with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, he asked if he could bring the President’s Daily Brief to his house, one intelligence source told CNN. That includes sensitive, classified information on national security issues. (Another intelligence source disputed this account, saying that the brief is provided electronically.)

At that briefing with the ODNI, Pulte also asked about his security clearance level, and whether he’d get access to a government plane, even though the meeting was supposed to be about explaining the ODNI’s main mission.

Pulte has reportedly asked about the use of a plane numerous times, and wants to know his schedule so he can travel between D.C., Florida, and Chicago, as he splits his time between three places. He also asked for a protective security detail before starting his job at the ODNI, according to CNN.

This seems oddly familiar to anyone who has followed the career of FBI Director Kash Patel, who has flown around the country on government jets partying instead of focusing on his job running the government’s preeminent law enforcement agency.

Earlier this month, Trump said to The Wall Street Journal that he wanted Pulte to shrink the ODNI because he thought it was “too big.” The president added that as acting director, Pulte would have more freedom to gut the office before a director confirmed by the Senate assumed the position.

Trump’s choice of Pulte drew almost immediate backlash from Democrats, as well as Republicans. Pulte had used his previous position as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, as well as the finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to pursue mortgage-related criminal charges against Democrats and others who opposed Trump’s agenda.

Democrats sought to block extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to prevent Pulte’s appointment, leading Trump to announce a formal appointment to the directorate, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton, in order to pass the national security measure. (Trump has since unilaterally “postponed” Clayton’s confirmation hearing.)

Trump is now holding up FISA in order to force his voter restriction bill, the Save America Act, through Congress, even though it stands no chance of passing the Senate. It’s all a big mess, with Trump hoping for a loyalist at the ODNI to get rid of the people who might have inside information about him, while also leveraging a national security bill to restrict voting so his party doesn’t get massacred in November’s midterms. Will Republicans in Congress cave and give him everything he wants?

Trump’s main takeaway? There are “no limits” to his power, as he declared on The Axios Show on Thursday.

Never mind that he went in with the goal of “unconditional surrender,” and left with a memorandum of understanding that provides a $300 billion fund for Iran’s reconstruction and opens the door to ending sanctions, in return for no real limits on Iran’s nuclear program.

Axios’s Marc Caputo asked the president whether he learned there are limits to his power after the war.

“I haven’t learned that lesson yet,” Trump replied. “I know there are, but there are no limits. We defeated them totally militarily.”

🔋 EXCLUSIVE: On the next episode of The Axios Show, President Trump tells @marcacaputo that in the aftermath of the Iran war, there are "no limits" to his power. pic.twitter.com/QrNPh3wPX1

— Axios (@axios) June 18, 2026

To Trump, his power is comparable to that of conquerors and dictators of history, according to a new book from The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. In the book, Trump shows off a document that argues he’s more powerful than Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and Hitler.

“They didn’t have airplanes, right? You couldn’t travel around,” Trump said of Alexander the Great, the Caesars, and William the Conqueror, according to the authors.

Grimly, Trump also seemed to take “evident pleasure” in “the company of Mao, Hitler, and Stalin.”

Trump also posted the document on Truth Social on Thursday. Whether comparing himself to Genghis Khan or saying he’s “the boss” of other G7 leaders, it’s clear that Trump sees power as the ability to submit other nations to your will.

On May 19, Bill Winters, a chief executive at Standard Chartered Group, told a roomful of investors that AI is replacing “lower-value human capital” at the firm, which announced cuts of 15 percent by 2030. These layoffs weren’t a cost-cutting initiative: Standard Chartered hit its 2026 medium-term financial goals a year ahead of schedule. This move was just a pure replacement of human talent for its AI equivalent.

Winters later apologized for the remarks on LinkedIn, which he said “caused upset to some colleagues.”

Weeks after Winters’ comments, WiseTech Global co-founder Richard White told a conference crowd that “it doesn’t take much effort to convince people … that they’re stupid to be paying $100 for labor when you can pay $2 for the AI.” Its CEO, Zubin Appoo, received a “hand-written threat of violence” containing his personal information and comments about his family.

The reaction was outsize and incendiary—all the same, CEO language on AI and layoffs seems to be purposely brutal. The performative brashness on display is not an accident; it serves two aims. First, it signals to Wall Street that these companies are serious about AI, which in turn boosts shareholder value. Next, it broadcasts to peers that they’re willing to talk tough on layoffs, as well. It also communicates something more insidious: With workers having less bargaining power than they’ve had in a generation, this language demonstrates just how far removed executives are from their employees.

“The tech sector, which is currently flush with investment and capital, is the ultimate example of this taken to the extremes,” said Dennis Tourish, a professor of leadership and organization studies at the University of Sussex. “With all of the money flowing into AI companies in particular at the moment, they are acquiring more and more power.”

The more severe these layoff proclamations are, the more investors notice. Cisco’s stock price jumped 13 percent after it announced 4,000 job cuts, which were “not a savings-driven restructure,” according to CFO Mark Patterson. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced plans to lay off 14 percent of its staff on X, citing the “need to return to the speed and focus of our startup founding, with AI at our core.” The company’s stock price rose 4 percent during premarket trading. AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI, whose CEOs forecast double-digit unemployment and that entire job categories will be “totally, totally gone,” are both racing toward IPOs.

CEOs making bold statements that drive markets—and alienate employees and the general public—may have behavioral roots that come with the role.

Robert Sutton, a professor of management science at Stanford University, refers to this as the “toxic tandem”: Executives stop paying attention to those below them in favor of tracking the company’s stock price. Executives eventually only look upward, be it to please their boards or to shape market movements.

“People look up the hierarchy rather than down the hierarchy,” Sutton says. “That’s what baboons do, too.”

The primate dominance metaphor is apt. CEOs are often in conversation through these statements, often as a form of competition.

Executives across industries don’t just look up the hierarchy, they may also parrot what their peers do. “You can never underestimate the extent to which corporate behavior is imitative,” says Tourish. “Laying people off then becomes a fad—a craze.”

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk made major cuts at X in 2023, saying the company had “a lot of people that didn’t seem to have a lot of value.” Musk challenged other companies to do the same, asserting that significant cuts wouldn’t negatively impact productivity. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made 21,000 cuts the same year. Salesforce head Mark Benioff went from being skeptical of AI layoffs in 2025 to cutting 4,000 customer support roles six weeks later. He slashed another 1,000 employees in March 2026.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince outlined which category of workers he’d made “obsolete” in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Block CEO Jack Dorsey cut the company’s workforce nearly in half while bragging that AI was enabling “a fundamentally new way of working.” Mark Zuckerberg parked his $300 million mega-yacht (and two support ships) in Seattle on the same day Meta cut 1,400 employees earlier this month.

The loudest Silicon Valley voices come from a culture that has long rewarded the perpetuation of cruelty. Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was known for being mercurial—and for being often imitated by his peers. Zuckerberg considered him “a mentor and a friend.” Musk called him “an incredible guy” with “a certain magic about him.” That “magic” may have been admired by Big Tech’s ruling elites, but it didn’t benefit those beneath Jobs on the org chart very much.

“Steve Jobs was one of the most gifted people I’ve ever seen in terms of building and designing products. He was also one of the biggest assholes I’ve ever seen in how he treated people,” says Sutton. Apple’s shareholder returns also averaged 33.6 percent per year during his tenure.

The language of “hard choices” and “difficult decisions” doesn’t convey enough strength anymore. Only aggression does that. But this posturing among CEOs comes at a cost, be it from employee burnout—or threats against their safety.

“When you treat people badly and they either get free from you, they feel shat upon by you, or you lose power—you lose power very quickly,” Sutton says. “They shove you down because they’re lying in wait.”

The gulf between what Rosen, alongside Homeland Security Investigations agent Michael McCarthy, said about the alleged conspiracists’ conduct and what the criminal indictment says about it is vast. A press conference is an opportunity for the government, as Rosen stated, “to get the story out,” and the story is meant for us, not (or not only) the courts. But considering how many federal indictments for protest activity against Trump’s mass deportations have fallen apart, stories may now take precedence over securing convictions. Last year, Trump assembled a bevy of far-right influencers at the White House for an anti-antifa roundtable; this particular story could have been ghostwritten by any one of them.

The indictment, filed under seal in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota on June 11 and unsealed on June 16, concerns alleged conduct over the course of quite a long time period, from January 2026 through June 2026. Each defendant is identified by at least one alias, meaning someone had to type the words “a.k.a. Kaos” and “a.k.a. D. Munny Big Dog Orf Orf,” among other purported nommes de guerre, which may simply have been people’s nicknames on Signal at the time the federal government acquired a copy of their messages. All defendants are identified as “members and associates of Twin Cities Direct Action (‘TCDA’), which later changed its name to Direct Action Minnesota (‘DAMN’).” In total, 15 people are named. Twelve were arrested by federal law enforcement early Tuesday morning and were granted release later that day under certain conditions, such as being prohibited from protesting on federal property and from communicating with other defendants, except through their attorneys.

The primary charge is that each “did knowingly conspire, with other persons known and unknown to the Grand Jury, to prevent by force, intimidation, and threats officers and employees of the United States Department of Homeland Security”—including ICE—“from discharging the duties of their officers.” Among the “manner and means” of this alleged conspiracy include “advocating and promoting direct action against ICE.” Throughout, “direct action” is used interchangeably to describe everything from standing in the way of federal law enforcement, using vehicles to slow down or obstruct federal law enforcement vehicles, or using a shield to protect oneself from law enforcement.

Federal prosecutors do not actually allege that any specific person harmed or injured any federal officer—unless you count one having allegedly “approached one of the agents and knocked the agent’s notes out of his hand” (this was charged as “Assault on a Federal Officer”) or allegedly causing damage to an agent’s vehicle. The majority of the actions attributed to individuals involved in the alleged conspiracy are routine organizing activities, such as moderating a meeting, sharing a fundraising link, or posting to social media. Many, many times, the action is merely “sent a message” to a Signal group. These alleged elements of the conspiracy are all breathtakingly ordinary actions people have taken and continue to take every day in an effort to resist ICE and defend their communities. That is the point.

“A conspiracy is a fascinating legal animal,” said Maura Meltzer-Cohen, a movement attorney who teaches at CUNY School of Law, on the podcast It Could Happen Here. What makes a conspiracy charge so attractive, Meltzer-Cohen explained, “is that it makes it possible for prosecutors to criminalize garden-variety lawful and even constitutionally protected behavior, and whole communities of people who are engaged in those behaviors, by making the claim that all of those things, and all of those associations, and all of those beliefs, and all of those otherwise protected activities are in the service of a larger agreement to do something illegal.”

In some of the only substantive background offered by the government on Tuesday, Rosen explicitly tied the case to Trump directives issued in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing in September 2025, one of which claimed to designate what it called “antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization.” (There is no such designation for a domestic group.) The other, known as NSPM-7, Rosen said, “directed the Department of Justice to prioritize politically motivated violence.” As a result, he said, “Joint Task Force Vanguard” was formed by the deputy attorney general in order “to enforce a national security strategy to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt those who engage in political violence and intimidation.” Whether this indictment was the result of that task force was not made explicit. Nothing that followed, however, offered evidence of a national security threat or a successful investigation uncovering political violence, only evidence that federal prosecutors are following the administration’s orders. After invoking NSPM-7, Rosen referred to defendants’ actions as “un-American” and told reporters, “They’ll be met with swift justice.”

The story told at the press conference bore little resemblance to the indictment’s 90-plus pages detailing who made what Signal post when. In the indictment, political violence is rendered invisible. The document offers a kind of bleak counter-history of the first five months of 2026, in which the federal agents’ violent repression of people engaged in community defense is completely absent. Missing too is any alleged violence from the defendants the government described at the press conference as “antifa.”

Curiously, although antifa is discussed in the indictment (awkwardly), the term the government associates with the defendants far more frequently is anarchist. “It is absolutely clear that the potential anarchist identity of some of the organizers is a large part of the case,” noted author Margaret Killjoy, who reported from Minneapolis during some of the events described. “Of course, it’s not illegal to be an anarchist.” For this very reason, the prosecution may not be able to deliver the story the administration seeks; the whole indictment could collapse too, just as in previous cases against protesters. But the government is hoping that the rest of us will associate anarchists with criminal acts, with terrorism, even if the courts do not.

For their part, the reporters who asked questions at the press conference did not appear to take the federal government’s claims of a criminal conspiracy at face value. They asked why federal prosecutors thought these charges might fare better than the numerous federal cases brought against those involved in challenging Operation Metro Surge, Trump’s mass deportation mission in the Twin Cities, when more than half of such cases have fallen apart. They asked how the courts and the public could be assured, given issues such as those exposed in the failed prosecution of the former Broadview Six, over which federal prosecutors in Chicago are now facing possible discipline themselves, that the indictment was truthful. They asked the feds when, in their quest to hold people accountable for violence related to ICE’s presence in the Twin Cities, they would be bringing charges against the federal officers who shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January 2026.

Crucially, in a few different ways, the DOJ and DHS officials present were asked: Do you have evidence that any federal officers were injured or harmed in these alleged attacks? In response, Rosen offered, “I can’t elaborate. I don’t think I used the word ‘attacks,’ but if I did, I stand by it.” Reporters were repeatedly told to wait for the case to “roll out” for specifics. “I would dare say,” Rosen said, a bit ruffled toward the press conference’s end, “we just cannot have in this country people getting together engaging in all of these violent acts and then simply saying, Well, you know, nobody got hurt, so how bad could it have been?”

Of course, once you do read the indictment, the idea that it describes people coming together to engage in violence does not hold. Instead, it describes—or tries to describe—the politics held by a group of people. “Antifa groups frequently blend anarchist and communist views,” prosecutors state. Anarchists are mentioned on 17 of the indictment’s 94 pages. In the list of acts allegedly part of the conspiracy is someone who “wrote an article” for an “anarchist blog,” the long-running website CrimethInc. (For what it is worth: CrimethInc. has featured one of my stories for TNR in its “Resistance Reader.”) Multiple alleged co-conspirators, as the indictment describes it, “took part in” an “Anarchist Speaking Tour” in Chicago, Ann Arbor, and Seattle. The tour, called “Breaking the ICE: Lessons from the Resistance in Minnesota,” was publicly advertised.

Those are the kinds of acts that form the backbone of the indictment, an accounting of political activity, and to be fair, they do conform with the red-scare-inflected portrait Rosen painted for reporters at the press conference. But to the extent that the indictment concerns political violence, as Rosen claimed Tuesday, it is violence from law enforcement, which people have been resisting all year in the Twin Cities and which has made them targets of government surveillance, as evident in the indictment’s 94 pages. At one point, prosecutors quote from what appeared to be participants in a Signal group chat discussing the White House Counterterrorism Strategy released this May. An “unindicted coconspirator” allegedly said, “The White house just declared us terrorists …” while one alleged co-conspirator replied, “My new bio: anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.” One can imagine it being said in the kind of kidding-not-kidding tone of countless people who are being targeted by their own government. It’s just that most of them rarely get a readout of their gallows humor in a federal indictment.

Today, gallows humor offers only momentary relief from the reality of what these charges mean: the further criminalization of activities that dissent from the Trump administration and MAGA world at large. As this case unfolds, people may be asking themselves if they ought to stand up for these defendants, if they should defend anyone involved in resisting mass deportations. As one prosecutor implored, read the indictment: The government has worked diligently to hand us what it thinks are reasons to abandon that fight.

And yet. There is something deeply the matter here with JD Vance, and with this book. Reading Communion requires a strange leap of faith, a leap across a chasm into some alternate universe—several, actually. For in order to make sense of this book, one must be able to pitch one’s mind into a world where the Donald Trump of the past six years somehow doesn’t exist, a world where Christianity is somehow an entirely different religion than is generally manifested in American culture and politics, and a world where JD Vance himself is another person entirely. At times one feels as though one is actually reading Whitney Streiber’s Communion, the 1987 blockbuster about extraterrestrial contact, the content here so entirely alien to the world we now inhabit.

On its surface, the story Vance wants to tell is a familiar one, and a simple one, about “how a guy like me, who was raised Christian but considered himself an atheist for a time, came back to the faith.” Raised in Appalachia, he was surrounded by Christians for whom faith was simply a way of life. Poor, socially conservative, the adults of Vance’s childhood found community and kinship here; as a child, he came to see that “God loved us, that He demanded our best but would forgive our worst.” What’s clear is that from an early age, he saw religion not just in terms of faith but in terms of community, and as a way of bringing people together by creating structure to one’s life and forging bonds. “Christianity wasn’t just a ‘belief’ to us. It wasn’t a judgment we arrived at after evaluating the evidence. It was a practice, a way of life.” There’s a fair amount of nostalgia here, but such is memory.

By the late 1990s, however, the community was deep in the Left Behind era of eschatological fundamentalism that Vance saw as increasingly irrelevant to the poverty and need around him. At the same time, social issues like abortion that had always been present began to take a bigger prominence. His turn to atheism, he writes, was fueled in no small part by the Terry Schiavo case of the early 2000s, when social conservatives across the country rallied to keep a functionally brain-dead woman in Florida from being taken off life support despite her husband’s wishes. “As tragic as Schiavo’s case was,” he writes, “it seemed like a genuinely freak occurrence in a world filled with overlooked tragedy. It felt to me like our pastors spoke in abstractions about family values, while glossing over the divorce and family instability that had wrecked my family and community. They worried about the unborn, but ignored the abuse, neglect, and struggles in homes like mine.”

That growing sense of disconnect, along with losing his grandmother and joining the Army, led to his break: “What paved my path to atheism wasn’t books or ideas, it was sadness and a sense of betrayal.” What characterizes these pages, though, is less sadness than an emotion that comes to define Vance in these pages: rage. He comes to see expressions of religion as increasingly hypocritical and phony, performative and insulting. “All the fervor, all the overwrought emotion, infuriated me,” he writes. “I was sick of it and skeptical that it did a bit of good.” He is “furious,” “enraged”; like his 2016 book, Hillbilly Elegy, this is a story of an angry young man.

From there, Vance tells the story of his rise, through the military, and then on to Ohio State University and Yale Law School. It’s a period in which, as Vance describes it, he cared little for religion and was focused entirely on escaping the economic precarity of his youth and of reaching the brass ring. “I didn’t care about God’s will. I cared about my own. I cared about winning, about never having to worry about money again, and having the type of job that commanded respect.” It’s another theme he returns to over and over again: “I wanted to win for winning’s sake,” he says later. When he was an atheist he was mercenary, empty inside, determined to get ahead at all costs. Striving.

Two people at Yale will change his life. The first is Peter Thiel, who is described here primarily in terms of his religion—openly Christian, a rarity in the elite worlds Vance now finds himself in. Through Thiel, Vance finds the ideas of philosopher René Girard, including the idea of “mimetic desire.” As Vance explains the term, “We are such social creatures that we instinctively want what other people around us want: the same jobs, the same women (or men), the same university degrees.” In addition to his rage and his striving, mimetic desire is the third thing that will come to define Vance: finding himself in situations where everyone seems to believe and think and act in the same way, a predicament from which he seems desperate to escape. At Yale, the “groupthink pressure was incredibly powerful,” and he’ll later learn that “the intensity of social control was far greater among our elites than anything I’d seen in a Pentecostal or Southern Baptist church back home.”

And then there’s Usha Chilukuri, his future wife. Falling deeply in love with her, Vance resolves to do anything he needs to do to keep her. She forces him to address unresolved issues from his past—at first he tries therapy, but he scoffs after a few sessions. Therapy, he complains, “was divorced from any sense of responsibility or guilt.” The therapist’s suggestion that his problems stemmed from intergenerational trauma “turned me into a victim rather than an actor. I’m sure that therapy helps many people, but it made me want to puke.” This seems a crude rendering of how therapy works, but Vance wants to be the author of his own destiny and quickly gives it up. Instead, he finds himself “searching for a more satisfying accounting of wrongdoing and responsibility. Of temptation and willpower. Of virtue and guilt.”

Ultimately he finds this in a return to religion, this time via the Catholic Church. What’s made clear in Communion is that one of the most important reasons Vance found God again was to keep from losing Usha, and when he found it, she encouraged him to stick with it—despite not being religious herself. “Therapy didn’t work for you,” she tells him. “But church does.”

And so Vance finds his way back to God; the redemption arc is completed and the narrative fulfilled. The second half of the book charts his course from there: the success of Hillbilly Elegy and his rise to fame as an interpreter of the disaffected Appalachian Donald Trump voter, becoming a father, his run for Senate, and ultimately the vice presidency. As a book unto itself, such a thing would be fine. But in 2026, reading this is one of the strangest experiences imaginable, simply because nearly every premise of the book defies any kind of known reality.

For one, Communion’s policy proposals and vision for a future America suggest throughout a move toward the center—the kind of thing you might expect for someone lining up for a presidential run, if that someone was anyone, anyone at all, who was not associated with the Trump administration. But Vance makes these statements as though completely unmoored from everything that’s been going on, unmoored from who he is and where he works, unmoored from the current political divide and the current realities of what’s happening every day—as though he’s a center-right Republican cryogenically unfrozen from 2010. “We’re fine telling a businessman he must go to church and tithe but not that he must pay his people a fair wage,” he writes at one point. And: “If it is sinful to abort a perfectly healthy human baby before birth, so, too, is it sinful to depress that baby’s chance of a living a good life afterward.” They’re the kind of lines that were once focus-tested to a high polish but have long since been left on the shelf and allowed to rust.

Why this strange attempt to tack suddenly to the center-right? Does Vance think his readers have the attention span of goldfishes? What’s the matter with him? Communion seems to telegraph that MAGA will not last beyond Trump, that the raw nativism and brutality that have defined the past 18 months have an expiration date, and that Vance himself may only be buying into it because he’s good at following orders. Certainly, Communion is not a full-throated, impassioned case for the righteousness of MAGA. (On the administration’s immigration policy, for instance, he writes “Of course, critics of the Trump administration say we’re too tough. The point is not to litigate this issue on these pages but to highlight that any application of moral principles in the real world requires a constant evaluation of trade-offs.”) Instead the book is a chickenshit attempt to have it both ways by appealing to some rational middle that hasn’t existed in this country since at least 2014.

It’s hard to say how he thinks this is going to work out for him, but Communion makes clear how he sees his path ahead—even if, by releasing this during Trump’s reign, he may be playing his hand a bit too soon.

Additionally, Vance’s understanding of Christianity is singular, to say the least. It’s certainly complex, at times deeply thoughtful and at other times frustratingly facile. His turn from faith seems genuinely rooted in matters of social justice, in the religious right’s refusal to deal with poverty and drug addiction in favor of abstract social issues, eschatological fervor, and political power. And his way back appears to have involved a great deal of serious study and consideration. Again and again throughout his life, Vance finds himself looking for something that will answer “the big questions,” and neither atheism nor therapy comes close for him. Religion does.

Reading Communion, the theme that emerges is that Vance sees Christianity as a force for social cohesion, one that binds the family, creating children, and the nation by providing a “shared moral language.” But when it comes to political prescriptions, the picture of Christianity he presents is so oddly one-sided that it boggles the mind. When he discusses racial tension, writing that on the left, “people worry about a rising tide of white supremacism,” and on the right, “people worry about rising anti-white rhetoric or anti-Semitism on college campuses,” he offers Christianity as the solution:

From the intermarriage of the Spanish and native populations in Mexico to the American melting pot of the nineteenth century to the Civil Rights Movement, Christianity has long brought people together. And yet, as our leaders have ushered in an unprecedented increase in demographic diversity through immigration, they have simultaneously discarded the most powerful force for cultural cohesion: Christianity. It is hardly any surprise that the fruits of their labor are rising racial conflict and gender division. Secularism has produced social strife despite its promises of enlightenment.

No serious student of history would deny that Christianity has produced its share of good in the world. But Christianity is not good simply because it’s Christianity. Being a good Christian does not make you good. That both the Civil Rights Movement and the Ku Klux Klan claimed God was on their side is an undeniable fact, and makes the central argument of Communion more or less a nonstarter. Is he really this naïve about Christianity’s shortcomings? Is he really suggesting that the solution to antisemitism is Christianity? Does he really think the relationship between the Spanish conquistadors and Indigenous Americans was one of happy communion? What’s the matter with him?

This is why the country’s Founders tried to structure the United States in such a way that our laws did not rely on God, so we wouldn’t have to get into the thorny question of Whose God? and Whose interpretation? Instead, Vance seems to think that injecting God into policy is itself a panacea. He notes that at the 2024 Munich Security Conference, there “were no mentions of God,” but there were “lots of appeals to vaguely defined shared values. ‘Putin is evil,’ I heard many times. ‘We are on the side of justice and truth, and our enemies seek to destroy these things,’ a French parliamentarian told me about the transatlantic alliance.” It’s unclear why “justice” is any more vague than “God.” Putin’s invasion of Ukraine violated international law, which seems to be a textbook definition of injustice. Why the need to bring God into it?

Because it suits him. Of his meeting with Pope Francis in 2025, Vance comments, “I preferred his specific exhortations to the vagueness I encountered during our Vatican meeting. Better to have an honest conversation than one masked by clichés.” But for Vance, his discussion of Christianity is too often itself nothing but a cliché, a shield invoked as a cover for his specific policy preferences, held up as a transcendental ideal and thus something that need not be argued for or substantiated with evidence.

But most of all, in order to read and make sense of this book one must pretend, somehow, that JD Vance is not JD Vance. The arc of the narrative here is an angry young man, striving for the sake of striving, who once succumbed to groupthink—but who, through the love of a good woman and the grace of God, has found the grace to work past all that.

Communion accomplishes this in the strangest of ways. Vance continually reminds you of his faults when recounting his early days as an atheist: his anger, his hollow pursuit of wealth and status, how again and again he found himself in places like Yale where he was subject to groupthink.

But once his conversion takes place, significant events in his life just sort of seem to happen, without the same kind of burning motivation he once felt—though they are the sort of accomplishments that do not just fall into one’s lap without serious effort. His decision to write Hillbilly Elegy is reduced to a sentence: “On the side, I worked on a book slated for publication in the summer of 2016.” And his political moves are likewise minimized. Here is his decision to run for Senate: “I went back and forth for awhile on whether to run before eventually deciding to do it.” He adds one paragraph about his platform, and then here is the race itself: “Much has been written about that Senate race, and I doubt I can offer much original here. But the most important thing to say is that I thought we’d lose but we didn’t.” The 2024 presidential campaign—from the phone call where he learned he was being vetted for vice president to moving into the Naval Observatory in January 2025—is covered in three pages.

A memoir in which the most significant moments of a person’s career fly by as nonevents makes for a truly baffling read. Is not running for Senate and vice president the ultimate expression of someone still striving for “having the type of job that commanded respect”? And are we to believe Vance has broken free of mimetic desire—with its tendency toward groupthink—now that he serves in an administration where no one is able to say publicly that Trump lost the 2020 election? If it was in Yale that he first discovered that he “was susceptible to intense pressure to believe certain things,” are we to believe that has changed, when he and Marco Rubio now sport the too-large shoes their boss bought for them? Are we to believe Vance has let go of his anger issues, despite the fact that he still talks elsewhere about how he loses his temper? What’s the matter with JD Vance? What are we even doing here? Communion seems to be trying to convince us of its redemption narrative simply by ignoring who Vance is, and who he shows us to be every single day.

What, finally, has Christianity done for Vance, other than gird his marriage and make him a father? Has it, for instance, given him the grace to offer forgiveness to his enemies? The same Vance who, according to a New York Times story published the day before the book came out, was urging Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to crush the protest movement in Minneapolis, claiming without evidence that the protesters were paid agitators; who spread the accusation that Alex Pretti was an “assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents” and subsequently refused to apologize?

In what reality does he expect anyone—even his supporters—to believe measured, conciliatory lines like this? “I can believe (as I do) that I owe a given immigrant—even an illegal one—duties of charity and grace, while accepting that in a world of limited resources those duties necessarily come up against other responsibilities.” These words ring insultingly hollow when his public persona betrays no hint that he feels any duty to provide charity or grace to those his administration has locked up in the most appalling and inhuman of conditions, and not a hint of remorse about it.

Throughout Communion, he returns to Matthew 7:20 as a refrain: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” So then. Know him by his fruits. Not this book.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for himself and six other justices, said that federal prosecutors had not found a sufficient historical analogue under the court’s “history-and-tradition” test to support the prosecution. “Without more, the government asks us to analogize all such persons to habitual drunkards,” he wrote in United States v. Hemani. “To state the analogy is to expose its deficiency.”

Thursday’s ruling is another milestone in the federal courts’ four-year quest to reconcile America’s numerous gun restrictions with the Supreme Court’s new history-and-tradition test. While it marks the first time since adopting the test that the court has used it to invalidate a federal law, it also underscores how much the high court has curtailed the test’s original ambitions.

The case began when federal agents searched the family home of Ali Hemani in 2022. The U.S. government suspected that Hemani, a Texas-born American who also has Pakistani citizenship, had ties to terrorist organizations. During the search, Hemani surrendered a firearm that he otherwise lawfully owned and told them that he regularly smoked marijuana, some of which he had in his possession. He also took ownership of a bag of cocaine that the agents found in his parents’ closet.

Thanks in part to Hemani’s forthrightness, federal prosecutors charged him with violating Section 922(g)(3), which make it a federal offense to knowingly possess a gun in one’s home while being an “unlawful user” of a controlled substance. “The charge had nothing to do with terrorism—the reason for the search in the first place,” Gorsuch noted. “Nor did the charge involve possession of cocaine, drug trafficking, or anything like that.” Indeed, one gets the distinct impression that prosecutors were trying to prove that they weren’t wasting everyone’s time.

Before trial, Hemani sought to dismiss the indictment by arguing that it violated the Second Amendment. The Supreme Court held in District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008 that the amendment protects an individual right to bear arms. In the 2022 case New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, the court’s conservative majority laid out a strict new test to determine when a gun restriction runs afoul of this right.

Under Bruen, such laws that limit the individual right to bear arms are presumptively unconstitutional. “The government must then justify its regulation by demonstrating that it is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court. “Only then may a court conclude that the individual’s conduct falls outside the Second Amendment’s unqualified command.”

This history-and-tradition test prompted a wave of gun-related litigation in the lower courts. The Supreme Court revisited it in United States v. Rahimi, a case challenging the federal ban on gun ownership for certain domestic abusers, to clarify that the government need not provide a “historical twin” to successfully defend a gun restriction. Instead, lower courts can uphold them by identifying a “historical analogue” to the existing law—in Rahimi’s case, for example, founding-era surety and affray laws.

In Hemani’s case, the Justice Department argued that Section 922(g)(3) was akin to founding-era laws that prohibited gun ownership for “habitual drunkards.” Some of these laws required them to post surety bonds to carry a gun; others allowed legal guardians or civil officials to involuntarily place them in workhouses or asylums. In either event, federal prosecutors argued, these laws pointed to a historical tradition of disarming people who use certain substances.

The trial court and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found this reasoning unpersuasive. It fared no better at the Supreme Court, in part because of the sweeping nature of what prosecutors sought. “It doesn’t matter what controlled substance an individual uses, in what amounts he does so, or whether his drug use has ever made him a danger to himself or others,” Gorsuch noted. “It doesn’t even matter why he keeps a gun or how safely he does so. And for violating this automatic ban, the government insists, an individual like Mr. Hemani may be sent to prison for up to 15 years and disarmed for life.”

All those laws cited by the government, Gorsuch explained, affected a much narrower subset of people who used intoxicants. There is some historical evidence that early nineteenth-century Americans drank considerably more alcohol than their modern descendants do today. Founding-era laws only considered someone a “habitual drunkard” if they were basically unable to care for themselves. A person occasionally smoking marijuana like Hemani hardly fits that description.

“Had habitual drunkard laws applied to those who simply drank regularly, many notable early Americans could have faced trouble,” Gorsuch wrote, quoting from historians. “John Adams took ‘a tankard of hard cider’ with his ‘daily breakfast.’ Some say James Madison ‘consumed a pint of whiskey daily.’ George Washington often drank three glasses of madeira in the evening—‘not enough to be considered a heavy drinker in his day.’”

Gorsuch also took issue with Section 922(g)(3)’s reliance on the Controlled Substances Act to define who can be disarmed. “Without question, some unlawful users of controlled substances can pose a risk of violence,” he acknowledged. “But, by defining its scope through the CSA—a statute animated by a variety of other concerns—it is far from obvious that [Section] 922(g)(3) confines its reach to those who are categorically and unusually dangerous.”

He also stated the plainly obvious: Marijuana, though legally considered a Schedule I controlled substance under the CSA, is hardly treated like one by the federal government these days. Over the last quarter-century, many states have legalized marijuana for medical and recreational use. Federal prosecutions for mere possession of marijuana have vanished, and federal regulatory agencies actively turn a blind eye to the burgeoning marijuana industry.

“Whatever one thinks of these developments, the federal government has not just tolerated them; it helped fuel them,” Gorsuch noted. “All of which leaves it awkwardly positioned to suggest that the millions of Americans who now regularly use marijuana are categorically and unusually dangerous.” This is obviously not the case, and it is unsurprising that all nine justices reached the same conclusion.

The court claimed that Thursday’s ruling was a “narrow one” because it did not address other contexts, including whether the government could ban “addicts” or the “presently intoxicated” from possessing a gun. This will be relevant for prosecutions involving other controlled substances, of course—drugs like heroin, ecstasy, and fentanyl pose much greater risks and more easily replicate the conditions that habitual-drunkards laws addressed.

Beneath the surface, there were also some notable divides. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a concurring opinion, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, where she explained that she would have reached the same decision under the pre-Bruen framework. Lower courts previously used “means-end scrutiny” to weigh the constitutional burden of gun laws, Jackson said, and that approach was “more rational” than Bruen’s history-and-tradition test, which she described as “unworkable.”

The Bruen test “imposes on judges the unfamiliar and difficult tasks of sifting through centuries-old evidence in order to answer ‘contested historical questions,’ and ‘applying those answers to resolve contemporary problems,’” Jackson wrote, quoting from her predecessor Stephen Breyer’s dissent in Bruen. “Given those challenges, it is unsurprising that Bruen’s test is vulnerable to inconsistent and arbitrary application, as judges draw different conclusions from the same historical evidence and reach divergent assessments of the same laws.”

Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Elena Kagan agreed only with the majority on the outcome. Alito, writing for the two of them, argued that the court could have ruled more narrowly to say that there was no correlation between habitual-drunkard laws and modern marijuana use at all. “Here, the Government’s analogues are too far afield to justify the application of Section 922(g) to a marijuana user like [Hemani],” he wrote. “We need not say more to decide this case, and I would for that reason say no more.”

Ironically, the author of Bruen once again wrote for himself. Justice Clarence Thomas agreed with the majority, but also urged his colleagues to reconsider the constitutionality of a broad swath of federal gun restrictions beyond this one. Those laws may be invalid, Thomas claimed, because they exceed Congress’s regulatory powers over interstate commerce. If the court agreed with Thomas’s implied view, it would be striking down federal bans on gun ownership for convicted felons and fugitives, among other groups. One can hardly blame the other eight justices for their disinterest.

In the four years since Bruen was decided, courts reached wildly different conclusions about how far the history-and-tradition test should go in changing the landscape of American gun restrictions. There are plenty of questions left to be resolved by the justices: They haven’t yet heard challenges to state-level bans on AR-15s and other so-called “assault weapons,” for example. So far, however, the post-Bruen landscape at the high court doesn’t look all that different than the one preceding it—save for, as Jackson shrewdly noted, decisions that it could’ve reached without Bruen as well.

The first instance came on Flag Day, when the Department of Homeland Security’s official X account misattributed the following description of the American flag’s symbolism to George Washington: “We take the stars from heaven, the red from our mother country, separating it by white stripes, thus showing that we have separated from her, and the white stripes shall go down to posterity, representing our liberty.”

While this quote has been ascribed to Washington, it is evidently apocryphal. He “probably did not craft the quotation,” concludes Quote Investigator, a website dedicated to scrutinizing the origins of quotes circulating online. And the sentiment it expresses is as questionable as the sourcing; Andy Craig of The Unpopulist noted that the lofty meanings the tweet has assigned to different elements of Old Glory have to be a confabulation, as some were not standard at the time of the flag’s adoption.

The next instance was a display of the administration’s historical laziness writ large, literally. As observed by journalism professor Steve Herman on Monday and The Washington Post on Tuesday, the Office of Personnel Management has unfurled a giant banner bearing a portrait and misquote of Theodore Roosevelt on the facade of its building, which is named for the twenty-sixth president. “Courage is not having the strength to go on,” it reads, “it is going on when you don’t have the strength.”

Some online quote repositories—unreliable as they often are—credit the platitude to Roosevelt or to Napoleon Bonaparte. But a historian who co-directs the Theodore Roosevelt Center told the Post “for certain” that the quote “did not originate” from Roosevelt and that it will be added to the center’s list of sayings misattributed to him. An OPM spokesperson shrugged off the error.

These back-to-back slipups are somewhat unsurprising coming from an administration regarded by no means as a paragon of truth or factual accuracy. Examples abound of officials getting caught playing fast and loose with quotations. Recall Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s notorious delivery of a prayer that he claimed was based on the Book of Ezekiel, but which actually ripped off a monologue from Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film, Pulp Fiction. Or President Trump’s recent amplification of a ridiculous statement about the Affordable Care Act falsely attributed to Republican Senator John Kennedy.

What stands out about these newest gaffes is the way they exemplify the administration’s embrace of what critics have dubbed “slopaganda” in its public relations approach. Under Trump 2.0, executive branch agencies have abandoned their previously staid social media presences for trollish meme posting, engagement bait, AI-generated or -manipulated content, and the language and aesthetics of the extremely online far right. With these tactics in effect, the misquotations feel almost quaint. (After all, the erroneous appending of authoritative names like that of Winston Churchill to expressions they never actually uttered is a much-ridiculed staple of online life that long predates today’s feverish digital landscape.) But it is undoubtedly a sign of our slopaganda-soaked times that government agencies exhibit all the fact-checking rigor of a retiree sharing fake Albert Einstein quotes on Facebook.

The misquotes speak to a deeper issue, as well: the administration’s treatment of the past not as a subject of serious and objective study but as something to be wielded instrumentally, often to ideological ends. Such an approach to history is incautious at best—as in the case of the DHS tweet or the OPM banner—and destructive at worst, as is elucidated in a new report by the History, Archives, and Records Preservation Project, or HARPP, of the Organization of American Historians. The HARPP report documents how the second Trump administration, in its first 18 months, has launched a sweeping “federal assault on history”—dismantling institutions that contribute to the public knowledge of history, censoring facts that cut against the administration’s preferred narratives, and enforcing a biased, ahistorical version of our past.

The report describes, in detail, historical whitewashing, distortion, and erasure under Trump. But one point of focus is the president’s America 250 programming, which is ably characterized as a “pageant of the administration’s self-image and a narrowly celebratory view of the American past” rather than “a moment for national celebration and introspection about the nation’s full history, the promise of the Declaration of Independence, and the progress made and still to be made.”

Among other concerns about the administration’s semiquincentennial commemorations, HARPP cites a proliferation of “inaccurate information, shallow approaches, and superficial perspectives.” The bungled invocations of Washington and Roosevelt are two small but sure new drops in a bucket already brimming with slopaganda. With 250th celebrations underway, and Trump setting himself up to be the chief barker at that particular carnival, it’s a good bet that more fake history and ideological distortions are to come.

In an interview published Thursday, The New York Times’s Ross Douthat cornered Vance about how the Trump administration’s tone of “aggressive uncharity” contrasts with its purported brand of Christian politics.

Vance immediately started flailing, calling the interviewer’s claim “fundamentally unfalsifiable.” The vice president argued that there were plenty of “clips” of administration officials that would read as Christian or un-Christian, shamelessly plugged his new book, and then pivoted to something even more surprising.

DOUTHAT: Let's be honest -- the tone of the administration is not consistently a Christian tone. There is a tone of aggressive uncharity

JD VANCE: Tonal arguments are ways of, frankly, policing working class ways of communication, and covering them in elite preferences pic.twitter.com/YwFVAAVJBC

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 18, 2026

“The tone argument is in some ways, I think, people see what they want to see. I also think that tonal arguments are ways of, frankly, policing working-class ways of communication and covering them in elite preferences,” Vance said.

If that argument sounds a little “woke” for Vance, that’s because tone policing is most often used to prevent marginalized individuals and groups from sharing their experiences. The term typically refers to policing emotional language—not overt cruelty.

Vance suggested that if he was coming across as uncharitable, that was because he was speaking for a working class that was totally onboard with it. How little he must think of working class people to imagine that they’d co-sign gutting social programs and shuttering humanitarian aid. Not to mention all of the wildly un-Christian things Vance himself has said, including making up racist lies, defending an unjust war, and hating thy neighbor.

But it should come as no surprise that the “tone” of an administration headed by a billionaire is not representative of the working class. Rather, it represents the elite.

While he did not mention him by name, Obama criticized Trump throughout the speech. He noted that the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence was coming up, and that it emphasized that “we are all created equal, endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights. And that in the newly independent United States, there will be no kings or lords, no serfs or subjects, but only citizens,” perhaps alluding to the “No Kings” protests or Trump’s constant referral to himself as king.*

Obama on the message of the 250th: "In a newly independent US, there will be no kings" pic.twitter.com/JtgCpDZNxl

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 18, 2026

Obama pointed out that the exhibits in the presidential museum “focus not just on policies, but on the shared values that make democracy possible. A belief in the intrinsic dignity and worth of all people and that no one is above the law or beneath its protection.”

The former president then listed several principles outlined in the Constitution that Trump has flouted throughout his time in the Oval Office.

“A belief in checks and balances in our government and an accountability that comes with it. An independent judiciary and a robust free press. A belief that our military and law enforcement owe allegiance not to any president or political party, but to the people and our Constitution,” Obama said. “A belief in the peaceful transfer of power after the people have spoken in fair and free elections, recognizing that in a large, complicated society like ours, no group or faction gets its way 100 percent of the time.”

Obama pointedly highlighted Republicans hated by Trump who also believed in these values.

“These are the values and traditions I believe in. And they are not Republican or Democratic values. They are American values we can all share regardless of party. Values every president here today, as different as we are, has tried our best to uphold. Values that John McCain and Mitt Romney believed in no less than I did,” Obama said.

Obama praised one of the biggest acts of defiance against Trump so far in the latter’s second presidential term: The local resistance opposing ICE and Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota’s Twin Cities. He said that “those ordinary people in the Twin Cities who braved frigid temperatures, risked their own safety, standing shoulder to shoulder to look out for their neighbors and sometimes look out for strangers because they knew that was the right thing to do” were among the best of America.

Obama shouts out "those ordinary people in the Twin Cities who braved frigid temperatures, risked their own safety, standing shoulder to shoulder to look our for their neighbors and sometimes for strangers because they knew that was the right thing to do" pic.twitter.com/whuly2Szni

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 18, 2026

Trump wasn’t invited to the opening of the presidential center, although Obama Foundation CEO Valerie Jarrett said he is welcome to visit in the future. Thursday’s event was a reminder that at one time, presidents used to speak about America’s unifying values.

Watch Obama’s full remarks here:

* This article originally mistranscribed Obama’s speech.

“These fools, who think I haven’t been tough enough on Iran, when the Stock Market Just Hit A RECORD HIGH, and Oil prices are ‘tumbling’ down, are either jealous, bad people, or stupid,” Trump wrote on Truth Social early Thursday morning.

But that was only the beginning: Trump proceeded to post multiple times railing against his critics, pointing to the stock market and oil prices as proof of his masterful deal making.

“Markets are loving what is happening with Oil Prices way down, and Stocks way up,” Trump wrote in one post. “All there is for the U.S. is Success, Lower Oil Prices, and Victory. Check out the Stock Market,” he wrote in another. “THE STOCK MARKETS ARE ROARING,” he wrote in yet another missive.

After Trump signed the peace deal with Iran, Wall Street jumped one percent Wednesday, and stocks have continued to rise despite Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh’s decision to hold interest rates steady. Oil prices dropped to their lowest prices since the war began. Trump gloats about these changes as if he expects us to forget how they got that way in the first place.

But Trump’s peace deal won’t solve the country’s oil issues overnight, especially after the months-long closure of the Strait of Hormuz threatened to take the U.S. oil supply into the danger zone.

Even if some things are bouncing back, that still wouldn’t take away from the fact that Iran is in a stronger position now than it was before the war, and the United States is slowly crawling back to where it started.

Days after the water in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool turned green from algae, the recently applied blue paint is now peeling off the bottom of the pool. 

Clips are going viral of the new $14M paint on the Reflecting Pool peeling off just 12 days after the pool reopened. pic.twitter.com/4bX8v1jCfB

— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) June 18, 2026

Meanwhile, the current algae bloom in the pool is the biggest amount recorded in the month of June in at least five years, according to The Washington Post. 

The president personally requested “American flag blue” paint in his $14 million renovation of the pool, which didn’t go through a required bidding process and was instead awarded to a company with no federal contracting experience who is overcharging the government.  

Any outdoor pool of untreated water is prone to growing algae, and crews were seen Tuesday dumping hydrogen peroxide into the water in a hasty attempt to kill the aquatic plant. There’s one problem with that: Hydrogen peroxide also serves as a paint remover. So in trying to (ineffectively) kill the algae, Trump also ruined his new paint job and created a potential hazard to local birds such as ducks. 

A close-up photograph of the pool workers’ equipment revealed that they were using a 12 percent hydrogen peroxide concentrate, which can cause problems if inhaled and burns if the chemical touches the skin, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Trump administration blames residual material in supply lines for the growing algae problem. The Interior Department, which is in charge of the pool, said it was using hydrogen peroxide and “high-tech nanobubble ozone technology” to treat the outbreak.

But not only has the hydrogen peroxide failed to get rid of the algae, it has caused the blue paint to peel and raised phosphate levels in the pool “far higher than what is recommended to keep algae at bay,” according to CNN, which tested the pool’s water with the help of a swimming pool store. The whole project is now attracting attention for all of the wrong reasons, and it may look even worse than before by the time the America250 celebration takes place on July 4. 

Vance took the podium in Washington, D.C., Thursday afternoon to make his case.

“The nuclear weapons program is destroyed. It is gone. If the Iranians decided tomorrow to build a nuclear weapon, they simply don’t have the capacity in order to do that,” Vance said. “What we’re trying to ensure is they don’t rebuild that capacity—not just a year from now, two years from now, but many many years from now.”

JD Vance: "The nuclear weapons program is destroyed. it is gone."

(Bookmark this one!) pic.twitter.com/T9vSdVBbeo

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 18, 2026

This is lie number one. Although President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have claimed to have completely destroyed Iran’s nuclear program multiple times, U.S. intelligence reveals that there was limited damage during the course of the war. In fact, the time Iran would need to build a nuclear weapon has not changed since last summer. (Iran has long maintained that it is not seeking a nuclear weapon through its program.)

Vance also claimed that Iran has committed to destroying their enriched uranium stockpile and to cease enrichment—two more lies that aren’t even mentioned in the recently signed memorandum of understanding. In fact, Iran has never promised not to enrich throughout their entire nuclear history.

“Under this deal [Iran is] being allowed now to sell their oil freely. How is that not a financial benefit?” a reporter asked Vance. “And they’re being allowed to do that without making any new concrete nuclear commitments. So can you explain, how is that not lopsided?”

“They’ve made very concrete nuclear commitments—they’ve committed to the destruction of the highly enriched stockpile that they have in their possession,” Vance replied.

But that’s not what’s in the MOU. The final text says that Iran will use “minimum methodology” to gradually down-blend their stockpile. That is not the same as “the destruction of the highly enriched stockpile,” as Vance said. All other references to the uranium in the MOU remain vague, as both sides have agreed to revisit the issue at the end of a 60-day negotiating period.

The administration trotted out Vance to lie about how great his paltry deal he made with Iran was, and even he struggled to push the narrative effectively. The next 60 days will be a huge indicator of Vance’s actual negotiating abilities. As of right now, it’s not looking good.

Q: They are being allowed to sell oil without making concrete nuclear commitments. How is that not lopsided?

JD VANCE: They've made very concrete nuclear commitments. They have committed to the destruction of their highly enriched stockpile. pic.twitter.com/vsJ3ZVeAt9

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 18, 2026

The democratic socialist from Vermont introduced a bill on Thursday where leading AI firms making at least $200 million in annual revenue would pay a one-time tax of 50 percent of stock to create a sovereign wealth fund for taxpayers, which would be worth about $7 trillion. That fund would have a 5 percent annual dividend for direct payments to Americans, which Sanders estimates would be more than $1,000.

“AI was not created out of thin air,” Sanders said in a statement. “It was not a brilliant idea that just popped into Mark Zuckerberg’s head or Elon Musk’s imagination. The foundation of AI is based on the collective knowledge of humanity and the creative work of tens of millions of people.

“The principle is simple: When a public resource generates wealth, the public should share in that wealth,” Sanders added. Under the terms of the bill, companies would have to split their AI and non-AI businesses.

Sanders is proposing that the fund would be managed by a newly created, bipartisan Independent Commission for Democratic AI, made up of seven members nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. The commission could also have the power to use its voting shares in the companies to block AI decisions that are bad for the country.

“Left unchecked, Artificial Intelligence and robotics threatens the jobs, privacy rights and mental health of every man, woman and child in America,” Sanders’s statement said. “As a society, we can no longer sit back and allow a handful of Big Tech oligarchs to determine the future of this revolutionary technology with no democratic input.”

The bill is not without its pitfalls. The American taxpayer would be tied to the AI companies’ success, which comes at the cost of building unpopular data centers, displacing American jobs, and consuming vast amounts of electricity, including burning a lot of fossil fuels. In effect, the American public would own a profitable, but toxic, asset.

While the bill faces a tall order to pass, it’s a good start on the question of how to reign in and regulate AI. The ideal scenario, however, would have to go a lot further.

Israel killed at least three people in attacks on southern Lebanon on Thursday, just hours after the signed MOU specifically required an end to military aggression in Lebanon.

Meanwhile, Israel’s military released a new Lebanon occupation map, which shows a larger zone of control for the IDF in southern Lebanon.

“Prime Minister Netanyahu needs to tell Trump ‘enough,’” the conservative Likud Party politician Moshe Saada said. “I am bound to defend Israelis, and withdrawing from Lebanon right now poses an existential threat to Israel. Duty demands that we strike Lebanon everywhere, around the clock, with maximum force and with no proportionality.”

Aside from dropping bombs, Israel is turning to the right-wing media sphere to kill the deal, with sources telling CNN that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to use pro-Israel voices like Fox News host Mark Levin and Senator Lindsey Graham. (Graham, so far, has tentatively praised the deal.) With the bombings and the media campaign, it’s clear that Israel is feeling much less secure in its relation to the administration, as Trump continues to publicly distance himself from their actions.

During an appearance on CNN Wednesday night, host Kaitlan Collins asked Marshall if he believed Iran should be allowed to maintain its ballistic missile stockpile.

“You know, I’m hesitating,” Marshall said. “I prefer that they not. I sort of don’t want them to have long-distance missiles, I don’t want them to have nuclear armed missiles. I would prefer they didn’t, but I don’t think that’s the key issue here. I think that they have to be able to defend themselves.”

“You think Iran needs to be able to defend itself?” Collins pressed.

“I do, I think that they have to be able to defend themselves, or otherwise we turn this into a forever war,” Marshall said. “You’re never gonna get them—short of boots on the ground—surrendering everything, an unconditional agreement, if you will.”

KAITLAN COLLINS: Are you okay with Iran having missiles?

SEN. ROGER MARSHALL: I prefer that they not, but they have to defend themselves

COLLINS: You think Iran needs to be able to defend itself?

MARSHALL: I do, otherwise we turn this into a forever war pic.twitter.com/kkDKpPfkl2

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 18, 2026

Marshall seemed to be echoing Donald Trump’s remarks during a press conference at the G7 Summit, when the president claimed he didn’t actually mind if Iran had ballistic missiles. “If other countries have them, it’s a little bit unfair for them not to have some,” Trump told reporters later.

But eliminating Iran’s ballistic missile stockpile was a key aim of “Operation Epic Fury” from the beginning.

Marshall was an enthusiastic cheerleader for Trump’s military campaign, even as it sent energy prices skyrocketing. Now, he’s trying to sell Trump’s lackluster peace deal—but clearly, his heart’s just not really in it.

Last week, the White House Office of Management and Budget moved $352 million earmarked for Secret Service resources toward “White House Security Measures,” NOTUS reports. Those Secret Service funds had originally been set up by Trump’s tax law, the “Big Beautiful Bill,” passed last year.

A source familiar with the Secret Service budget told The Washington Post the funds will be used to build a new White House East Wing, which includes the ballroom.

Democrats and Republicans in Congress also warned the funds are being covertly diverted to Trump’s ballroom project.

“I don’t know whether it’s the ballroom, but it sounds like the ballroom,” Democratic Senator Brian Schatz said to NOTUS.

“That’s a big problem,” Republican Senator Thom Tillis said. “That sounds like a different way to fund the East Wing project. If the East Wing needs support, we should be transparent about if that is in fact what happened. It seems strangely similar to the ask of Congress, but my God, we just had people from [the] Secret Service coming here saying they needed more money, how they needed more funding, and now we may be shifting it away from a Secret Service priority. I just need details. On its face it doesn’t sound right.”

Democratic Senator Chris Coons is also suspicious.

“I think there’s been more and more credible coverage that President Trump was just flat-out lying when he said the taxpayers will not pay a dime for his ballroom,” Coons said. “I think he is now trying to find ways to funnel public money into it.”

Trump’s ballroom is expected to cost $600 million, and half of that cost will come from taxpayers, according to a Washington Post report from earlier this week. Raiding the Secret Service’s money pot would cover that and more. This wouldn’t be the first time Trump has dipped his hand into funds appropriated by his own budget bill. His administration has previously used those funds to buy a luxury jet for former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and for “border security executive travel.”

When NOTUS asked an OMB official about the transfer of funds Wednesday, that official brought up the ballroom unprompted.

“The ballroom will be built with private donations the President has secured,” the official said in a statement to NOTUS. “The administration and the President have been very clear about the need for additional security at the White House complex and the role the Secret Service, in addition to other White House components, will play in supporting the necessary security elements associated with the East Wing Modernization project.”

This story has been updated.

As the lead negotiator with Iran—who also happens to be running a rocky press tour for his new book—Vance has become the face for the controversial deal, which critics are already calling a complete surrender.

Republicans too afraid to challenge Trump directly have been pointing the finger at Vance, while some Republicans who don’t hate the deal view this as a golden opportunity for Vance to play peacemaker.

“Without question, the biggest potential political liability Vance had was the unpopularity of the war in Iran,” one person close to the White House who supports the deal told Politico Wednesday. “So it’s fascinating to watch his biggest enemies in the GOP unwittingly inoculate him from that liability by branding him as responsible for the peace deal.”

“He now gets to do a media tour defending the president—a.k.a. the kingmaker of our party—from their idiotic criticism of the deal,” the person said. “While even his critics would acknowledge that the vice president is a smart guy, sometimes what really matters in politics is how stupid your enemies are.”

But is Vance washing away his sins or getting himself dirty?

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, another likely contender for a 2028 presidential run, has remained eerily quiet throughout the process of launching the deal. As the president’s national security adviser, he reportedly opposed the deal behind closed doors.

Iran has agreed to return to its prewar position of allowing the free movement of trade through the Strait of Hormuz and pledging not to produce or acquire a nuclear weapon. In return, they’ve won a range of exciting cash prizes: a $300 billion investment fund, sanctions relief, and the potential to implement tolls in the strait after just 60 days.

Trump’s deal is at the very least an off-ramp from an expensive and unpopular war—but it’s clear that for now, the United States is walking away with nothing. Vance will bear the brunt of whatever comes from the continued negotiations, and given the administration’s proven ineptitude for striking deals, that could last well into midterm season.

Speaking at the G7 Summit Wednesday, Trump joked: “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD. You better be careful, JD!”

“It’s a bad agreement in which the Americans are paying with cash, and got, at the maximum, a letter of intent,” former Netanyahu adviser Yaakov Amidror told The New York Times. The Times of Israel’s editor, David Horowitz, called it a “catastrophic capitulation.” Israel’s Channel 12 news correspondent Nir Dvori even likened the deal to a “diplomatic Oct. 7.”

“Iran came out stronger, and I believe is now the regional hegemon,” former Israeli deputy national security adviser Chuck Freilich said. “They stood up to the U.S., the global superpower. They can have missiles, and there’s nothing in the agreement about the nuclear issue except [that] we’ll talk about it. This is an Iranian victory over the U.S. and Israel.”

Ensuring Iran is defenseless and economically crippled has been a priority for Israel for years. Trump’s recent deal all but assured that won’t happen. In the last 48 hours alone, the president has defended Iran’s right to have ballistic missiles, suggested that they should have the right to use nuclear power just like its neighbors, and criticized Israel for its deadly strikes in Lebanon—all which are points within the deal. And while it’s still unclear whether this is a temporary rift or a complete heel turn, this MOU endangers Israel’s long-term goals of a disarmed Iran and an occupied Lebanon.

Senator Bill Cassidy, who lost a primary election to a Trump-backed opponent last month, said in a post on X Wednesday that “Ronald Reagan is rolling over in his grave.

“Iran’s nuclear ambitions were not curbed, and they have learned that threatening the Strait of Hormuz works and will undoubtedly leverage it in the future. Now, Iran gets to build brand-new infrastructure under this deal,” Cassidy wrote. “Now, 13 Americans are dead, families have paid billions at the pump, sanctions will be lifted, and the bombing has stopped. This is the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.”

Senator Ted Cruz tried to thread the needle of bashing the deal while minimizing blame toward the president.

“What has been released so far suggests that, unfortunately, the president is getting, I think, very poor advice when it comes to this deal. History teaches that giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us is a bad idea,” Cruz told Ben Domenech at the Daily Wire Wednesday. “Under the terms of what’s been released, somewhere between $10 billion and $30 billion will flow to the ayatollah immediately before they make even a single nuclear concession.”

Retiring Senator Thom Tillis said to The Hill that the deal was not a good return for the costs of the war with Iran.

“You got to do the balance of accounts: A hundred billion roughly, maybe more, spent today, 13 dead, 365 wounded, injured, our partners in the Middle East bombed, they’ve had casualties. There’s got to be a lot of return on that,” Tillis said. “We set out by saying we were going to drive down to zero their nuclear capability. Now we’re equivocating on that. We said that we were not going to make the mistake that Obama did by sending them a plane full of cash. I got to reconcile the numbers there.”

Some Republicans in the House were more blunt when speaking anonymously. The terms of the deal contradicted the talking points that the White House asked its Republican allies to use, Republicans told Politico.

One House Republican said the Trump administration was “lying to some degree” about the peace deal.

“The president didn’t mean to, but he effectively acknowledged he lost the war. It’s no longer worth the economic price. This is the way out, as ugly as it is,” another House Republican told the publication.

“He promised total surrender. And here it is,” a third House Republican said.

With all of this pushback to the deal, one wonders if Republican-controlled Congress will try to pass legislation to constrain parts of it, such as preventing taxpayer funds from being part of the $300 billion reconstruction fund promised to Iran. But most of them will probably fall in line as the midterms approach.

Trump shared a post on Truth Social, attributed to “Presidential Historian Dave King.”

“Donald Trump is, without question, the most powerful man that the planet has ever known- by a long way. Historically, powerful people were characterised by brutal conquest and the fear that they instilled in the populations that came under their influence. Common names that would come to mind are Alexander the Great, the Caesars, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Tamburlaine, Napoleon and, more recently, Hitler, Mao, and Stalin,” read the letter. “The overwhelming difference between each of the above when compared with President Trump is their lack of global reach. Their power was limited to restricted local areas (even though some of these areas were quite large in a local context). They had nowhere near the control over modern logistics, manpower, technology, and the global economic muscle that President Trump can enforce.

“Hitler repeated Napoleon’s mistake in Russia. Mao and Lenin had access to immense power within the Chinese and Russian populations and some of their satellite states. They maintained this power through fear and authoritarianism. But, they lacked the economic and technology resources of the new industrial power, the USA, which resulted in the Cold War and prevented them from ever having a meaningful global reach,” the letter continued. “Additionally, President Trump is the first leader to be willing to use that power on a global scale. That makes him by far the most powerful person that has EVER walked this planet.”

Trump took no issue with these hagiographic comments, even as they directly linked him to the likes of Hitler, Genghis Khan, Joseph Stalin, and more. “Sounds good to me!” he wrote above the post. Unsurprisingly, our 80-year-old president is happy about being compared to Hitler if it is in reference to how much power he has.

The details of Donald Trump’s ceasefire deal with Iran have now been released, and it’s exactly what we expected. Trump got nothing of any significance. And a surprising group of people are now admitting this—Trump’s MAGA allies. Some Fox News figures and right-wing media figures are taking apart the deal in surprisingly harsh terms. Meanwhile, Trump let out a few tirades today attacking Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal, even though all indications thus far are that Trump has fared substantially worse than Obama did.

We think the big story right now is this: Everything we know at this moment strongly suggests that the next stage of the negotiations with Iran will be even worse for Trump.

We’re working through all of it with Sina Toossi, an Iran expert at the Center for International Policy. Sina, good to have you on.

Sina Toossi: Hey, Greg, thanks so much for having me on.

Sargent: So both sides have released the agreement. Here’s the short version: Strait of Hormuz reopened with no charge for passage, but that’s only for 60 days. U.S. blockade lifted—a victory for Iran. Iran also gets relief from sanctions. Iran reaffirms it won’t procure or develop nuclear weapons, which it has already said in many other instances. The U.S. is working with regional partners to open up $300 billion in reconstruction aid to Iran.

Sina, what did the United States get here? And what do you make of this deal?

Toossi: The most important thing is that this is not a nuclear deal. We’re already seeing comparisons to the Obama-era nuclear deal, the 2015 deal. This makes no nuclear obligations of Iran. That most critical issue has been deferred to this 60-day period of negotiations. What this deal really is is just a framework deal outlining the ostensible end of this war.

… The most important thing really is the U.S. lifting its blockade on Iran and Iran lifting its blockade on the Strait of Hormuz—this problem that did not exist before the war. But as part of that, Iran is actually getting upfront concessions.

Most significantly, these oil waivers to sell oil during this period of negotiations, as well as access to its own frozen money that’s been frozen due to sanctions, as well as a region-wide ceasefire, including Lebanon. This is a big deal. These are major up-front concessions that Iran is now receiving as a result of this war.

Sargent: Just to boil this down in really simple terms, what happened here is Trump said, We’re opening up $300 billion in reconstruction aid to Iran—provided you meet a bunch of conditions later, but we are opening it up—in order to undo the mistake I made in launching this war in the first place and [closing] the Strait of Hormuz and bringing the global economy to its knees. Is that what happened?

Toossi: Absolutely. It straight-up says that there’s this $300 billion investment fund. It’s worth being skeptical about whether that will actually materialize. But what Trump has agreed to right now is, on paper, such an investment fund being created. And for a deal that was already on the table in the past that he left—and then he launched his dumb war and only created this big quagmire.

Sargent: So let’s talk about the nuclear component for a second. As you pointed out, what it does is defer the discussion. But in the deal, there’s some text—not much—Iran agrees not to procure or develop nukes. But that is what it has always said. It said the same thing in the 2015 Obama nuclear deal.

The deal now requires Iran to dilute its enriched material but doesn’t require it to ship the material out of the country—and that was in Obama’s deal, right? And now the details on the constraints on Iran’s nuclear program have to be negotiated. Is that about the size of it? And what’s your take on all that?

Toossi: I think if this does lead to a nuclear deal, by all accounts—and this text also reinforces this—it’s going to look something similar to what Obama got, and what was actually on the table before this war, because Trump himself in his second term was engaged in nuclear negotiations with Iran. And in the middle of them, they launched surprise attacks on Iran, both last June and again in February.

In this February track, we had this British national security adviser who was there, and he himself said that the deal was basically at hand. And the Omani intermediary at this time said that it was at hand too. The contours of this deal, much like the JCPOA, seem to be Iran accepting more intrusive transparency mechanisms, inspections mechanisms, committing to get rid of its large stockpiles of enriched uranium. Right now it has 60 percent enriched uranium.

It’s agreed to dilute this within Iran—or at least that’s what the idea of this agreement is—as opposed to sending it abroad. Iran has many political constraints. It seems like Trump has accepted that this dilution can occur within Iran, and previously has said it should come to the U.S. or something.

It’s basically a very intrusive nuclear deal to enhance the transparency of the nuclear program. But it is a compromise. It’s not like they’re destroying their nuclear capabilities, giving up their nuclear capabilities. They’re still going to be allowed to, much like the JCPOA, operate a basic nuclear program. The Iranians are very intent on what they say is their rights within the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to basically produce their own nuclear fuel.

In the long term, this may very well still give them that ability. But in the shorter term, it seems like they’re agreeing to very intense restrictions that can prevent them from having a pathway to nuclear weapons.

Sargent: I just want to pick up on one thing you said there because it’s so batshit insane. We could have had this set of negotiations before the war started. People don’t really realize how absurd Trump’s handling of this has really been. Just one more time—Iran and the U.S. were talking about this stuff before Trump launched the war. It probably wasn’t out of the realm of possibility for them to have negotiated to the very point we are at now without the war happening. Is that right?

Toossi: Absolutely. Again—before the war, from the records we have, the British national security adviser said a deal was at hand. The Omanis said a deal was at hand. If anything, Iran’s position is much stronger now after the war. The card that the U.S. always had hanging over Iran, was the military card, the threat of military action—they used that card. They launched 13,000 airstrikes against Iran, 13,000 sorties, an unprecedented aerial campaign.

At the end of it, what do we get? According to The New York Times and other outlets that have reported on this, 70 percent of Iranian ballistic missiles are intact. Some similar amount of drones. Their underground missile cities, their ability to hit back in the region, close the Strait of Hormuz.

They’ve withstood everything that Israel and the U.S. threw at them, absorbed that punishment, hit back, exacted a high cost on the U.S. This deal is reflecting, ultimately, the battlefield reality, where the U.S. engaged in what was a regime-change war, engaged in going for the maximalist demands—total surrender, total capitulation. Trump listened to Netanyahu, listened to all these war hawks that are now criticizing him. And what he got was a huge quagmire, inadvertently strengthened Iran’s hand. It was classic imperial hubris.

Now he’s giving Iran upfront sanctions relief, trying to get them to let go of the Strait of Hormuz, and is seemingly on a path to accepting a deal that was at hand before the war.

Sargent: And is, if anything, probably not as good as Obama’s, or will in the best circumstances be as good as Obama’s. Pro-Trump media has been really harsh on this as the details have leaked out over the last few days. Media Matters had a good roundup of stuff. I’m going to read a few.

The New York Post says this: “Trump’s Iran deal gives Iran big wins up front—and America nothing.” Ben Domenech said, “This doesn’t feel like a victory.” Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade suggested that parts of the nuclear settlement here are “not acceptable,” while trying to throw JD Vance under the bus for this failure. Fox host Mark Levin said he’s “very skeptical.” Sina, what do you make of all that?

Toossi: Within the Trump world, within the MAGA camp, there have been some divisions on this issue. Right now you’re definitely seeing the traditional Republican hawks, the neoconservatives, the very ardent pro-Israel ideologues—they are coming out hard against this. They wanted this war. They got it. So it’s unclear what they wanted—this war to go on more? But it’s easy for them now from the outside to criticize Trump. They have no skin in the game.

But Trump is ultimately sitting in the situation room. He’s been hit with political, economic, military, and geopolitical reality. It’s not like Donald Trump was someone who—if he could go all the way with Iran, he would have gone all the way with Iran. He said today at the G7, I could have bombed them for many more years. What would have happened is the Strait of Hormuz would still have been shut and we would have been in a global depression.

So he was faced with the reality of the situation. He was, I would argue, ultimately forced to come to this compromise. It’s imperial overstretch. America expended so many munitions that it couldn’t afford to expend. It expended tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions, of dollars on this war.

And it racked up this immense cost with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, all the knock-on economic effects, the impact on global markets, the impact on global oil reserves, including America’s oil reserve—the latest headlines are that it’s reached the lowest level since 1984, the year it was established. This is a critical crisis. I think Trump is right when he said if this dragged on, it would have led to a recession, a depression.

This is part of the reality. But Trump listened to these people. He was all on board until it blew up in his face. Now he’s forced to try to get this deal, and these people are still attacking him. We’ll see if Trump can withstand this pressure. Obama got so much pressure in 2015 from similar actors when he got the deal, and he withstood it, he fought hard against it. We’ll see if Trump can now withstand this pressure.

Sargent: Well, Fox News’ Trey Gowdy had another quote criticizing Donald Trump. He said this: Iran is “better off than they were before hostilities began, and that should not be the consequence of war.”

Now again, Trey Gowdy is committing the same mistake that all these guys did, and Donald Trump did, which is that America wasn’t going to bomb its way to a successful outcome here. But it’s a very profound vulnerability for Donald Trump to have all these figures out there beating the hell out of him for failing, because the base was really sold a bill of goods on this. MAGA was absolutely sold a bill of horseshit on this whole thing by all these people and by Donald Trump.

The White House and Donald Trump are trying to sell the story that the great and mighty and glorious Donald Trump subjugated Iran. All of his enemies are always on the run and they’re always losing and he’s always winning. That’s why it’s so lethal for him to have all these figures in right-wing media saying, No, that didn’t happen. Actually, you lost, Donald Trump. I think that’s good to see.

Toossi: It’s interesting, because I remember during the war, he had this one Truth Social post where he really attacked Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and a lot of those right-wing pundits who were against the war. He kind of threw them under the bus.

But now you’re seeing that JD Vance went on Megyn Kelly’s show yesterday and he’s doing the media circuit. He’s going to need those people at his back again. I think he’s going to have to get Tucker back. He’s going to have to get Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens—all these various right-wing personalities that were critical to his rise, but were critical of this war, as opposed to that Fox News traditional Republican establishment machinery that is very much against this deal and is coming out against it.

Sargent: That is fascinating. They’re going to really be working hard to mend fences between JD Vance and all those figures, especially with JD Vance’s 2028 run coming up. I want to listen to a couple of things that Donald Trump said about Obama’s nuclear deal. First, he said this.

Donald Trump (voiceover): And then we terminated—I terminated the JCPOA. That’s Barack Hussein Obama’s horrible deal. It gave them a nuclear weapon. And I terminated it. And I stopped it.

He also said this.

Trump (voiceover): He tried to bribe his way out. I didn’t do that. Nobody mentions that. $1.7 billion and hundreds of millions of dollars. They tried to bribe their way out of it. And you know what the Iranians did? They laughed at Obama and they said, “He’s a stupid son of a bitch.”

Sargent: Sina, what do you make of that? There’s just no indication whatsoever that Donald Trump has any idea what was in Obama’s 2015 deal. All he knows is that he’s strong and Obama’s weak. That’s all he knows.

Toossi: I think one of his, arguably, main drivers for his 2016 campaign and his presidencies has really been undoing everything Barack Obama did. He really hated Obama. I would argue personally that a lot of that is driven by racism.

But Obama’s signature foreign policy achievement was the Iran nuclear deal. And when Trump came to office in his first term, all his advisers were saying, Don’t leave this deal. At the time we had Mattis as secretary of defense, we had McMaster as national security adviser.

All these people were advising him not to leave because it would weaken America’s position and it would ultimately harm American interests. And that bore out. But he didn’t listen to their advice. He did leave the deal, I would argue for a variety of factors, but a chief one is undoing Obama’s legacy, trying to do everything better than him.

Now you see all these years later—2018 was when he left the deal—now in 2026, after this disastrous war, his marketing pitch for this deal is still, It’s better than Obama’s, Obama was so weak, the Iranians were laughing at him, et cetera. When the Iranians are the ones who fought him in a war and basically had him by the balls, if I can say that. And he’s backed off.

You can let history make the judgment. But this is a strategic retreat, arguably, from America. America in a trans-partisan way was very hawkish on Iran. The foreign policy establishment [had] all these demands: Iran has to give up its missiles, Iran has to end its support for its regional alliance network and proxies, as we call them. And there’s a retreat on those demands. They’re not even in this deal. It’s just the nuclear issue now.

Sargent: Well, let’s just try to look forward to what comes now. They enter into this stretch of negotiations in which they try to figure out what the details of the constraints on Iran’s nuclear program are going to be. It looks to me like Trump is not in a very good position here.

First, it’s the stuff you said earlier: Iran has now discovered that it can bring the global economy to its knees and that that will actually get the United States and Trump to move.

But second, and also important, is the fact that every day that passes, we get closer to the midterm elections. Trump keeps going out there and saying, If Iran doesn’t do what I say, I’ll just start bombing again. That’s pure bullshit, because that will be something that Republicans really do not want as the midterms are approaching.

There will come a point where Republicans are in such a bad political position due to Trump trying to restart the war that they will probably say no. There will be a vote in Congress, and I think you would see Republicans at that point, with their careers on the line, suddenly saying, We can’t do this.

Iran’s got to know this. Iran’s got to understand these dynamics pretty well, don’t you think?

Toossi: The biggest thing that this war did for Iran is it allowed it to activate this leverage that it had but didn’t have before and couldn’t demonstrate before—which is disrupting the Strait of Hormuz, closing it, taking everything the U.S. and Israel could throw at it, and still maintaining that pressure on the Strait of Hormuz. So this is a new geopolitical reality that, as you say, gives Iran lasting leverage.

Even as part of this deal, the Iranians are saying they’re not going to collect payments for ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz in the 60-day period. But very much the Iranian rhetoric [is that] this deal leaves an opening for that. They’re saying that the new status quo is going to be them collecting service fees, and they’re going to administer it with Oman.

But on this question of Trump going back to war—the Iranians can’t trust him at all, obviously. He left the JCPOA. He attacked them twice during negotiations. They’re not trusting him at all. That’s why I’m skeptical, or I’m not bullish, that this is actually going to lead to this broader nuclear deal.

This is a temporary arrangement for now that achieves some interests on both sides. Trump just wants the Strait of Hormuz open. The average gas price in America was almost $5 a gallon just a couple of weeks ago. All the knock-on inflation went back to as bad as it was under Biden during the Ukraine war. All these bad economic consequences that, as you say, were going to have a big consequence for the midterms.

Now, if Trump wants to restart this war ahead of the midterms, those consequences are going to come back fast. But it very well could be that this is a temporary arrangement to push past the midterms and then potentially try to restart. They’ve already attacked Iran twice. They’ve already started this war twice.

They could be thinking, Third time’s a charm. That’s definitely what the most hawkish groups in D.C. are saying. People like Mark Dubowitz at the neoconservative, pro-Israel Foundation for Defense of Democracies—he’s basically saying, Third time’s a charm, do it again.

But even then, there’s a new reality at play. The Strait of Hormuz—and Iran is going to be rebuilding its capabilities with all this money that they are already getting. They’re going to get these oil waivers. They’re going to get their frozen assets. So it’s going to be a new geopolitical dynamic. I think overall the U.S. hand is weaker vis-à-vis Iran now than it was before the war.

Sargent: And you know what happens next year, if there’s discussion about another war or the negotiations of the nuclear deal continue? JD Vance is starting to run for president in earnest and he’s really not going to want to be associated with those positions. Sina Toossi, really good to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Toossi: Thanks for having me. This was great.

Fond thoughts of this tradition were revived this week by a New York Times investigation by Kenneth P. Vogel and Christina Jewett about efforts by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullen, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr., and possibly President Donald Trump to clear a regulatory path for a dietary supplement called kratom that “interacts with the brain’s opioid receptors” and “has been linked to liver toxicity, seizures, and thousands of deaths.” (Trump’s role in this mess is hard to pin down because the public statement he made on the subject was, characteristically, incoherent.)

The GOP actions are in response to a multimillion-dollar influence campaign led by Jerry W. Ross, founder of a kratom manufacturer called Botanic Tonics, a company in which Mullin invested between $500,000 and $1 million. Ross founded his company seven years after being released from prison, where he’d been sent for diverting $10 million from Oklahoma oil and gas companies that he ran under the name Jerry D. Cash. In 2023, the FDA seized 250,000 bottles of Botanic Tonics kratom from a Tulsa warehouse and posted on its website that “kratom is not lawfully marketed in the U.S. as a drug product, a dietary supplement, or a food additive in conventional food.” But last December the Justice department abruptly dropped its prosecution of Botanic Tonics. Just another day in the Trump administration.

But the Times story got me thinking: When did patent medicines—which today go by the more polite name of “dietary supplement”—become the exclusive province of the Republican Party?

If this legacy of chicanery possesses any political pedigree at all, it’s Democratic. That’s because, after the Pure Food and Drugs Act put most peddlers of liniments and kidney renovators and bladder remedies out of business, medicine shows continued to flourish in the then-solidly-Democratic South. The last great medicine show was the Hadacol Caravan, which barnstormed through the 1940s featuring stars like Hank Williams and Mickey Rooney. The Caravan’s impresario was one Dudley J. LeBlanc, a Democratic state senator in Louisiana. LeBlanc manufactured a “vitamin supplement” called Hadacol whose popularity, especially in dry counties, derived from its alcohol content of 12 percent, memorialized in a popular country-western song called “What Put the Pep In Grandma?”

Asked by Groucho Marx, in a 1951 appearance on “You Bet Your Life,” what Hadacol was good for, LeBlanc replied: “It was good for $5.5 million for me last year.” A few months later the Federal Trade Commission came calling. It concluded that LeBlanc was engaged in “false, misleading, and deceptive” business practices by marketing Hadacol as “an effective treatment and cure for scores of ailments and diseases.” LeBlanc’s answer was to run for governor of Louisiana. He lost.

I struggle to pinpoint the historical moment when medical quackery stopped being a Democratic pastime and became a Republican one. It didn’t happen all at once. One transitional figure may have been Ronald Reagan, who in the 1940s, while still a Democrat, appeared in magazine ads for Chesterfield cigarettes touting their mildness, a characteristic that tobacco companies encouraged smokers to believe made cigarettes more healthy. Reagan would later oppose creation of Medicare (in league, bizarrely, with the American Medical Association, which was slow to realize that Medicare would make doctors rich). The GOP eventually made peace with the program’s existence, but it argued endlessly for privatization schemes and budget cuts on the false premise that Medicare and its sister program for the poor, Medicaid, were riddled with fraud.

Demonizing the medical establishment as crooked probably helped encourage Republicans to fill the void left by Dudley LeBlanc after he died in 1971. Capitol Hill’s last gasp of Democratic quackery was a 1976 bill sponsored by Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire prohibiting the FDA from “establishing standards limiting potency of vitamins and minerals in food supplements or regulating them as drugs based solely on potency.” After that, the cause was taken up by Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah.

Why Hatch? Because herbal medicine was a strong Mormon tradition (Joseph Smith disdained medical doctors). The state is home to so many manufacturers of herbal and dietary supplements that a stretch of highway running through Salt Lake City is nicknamed Cellulose Valley. In 1994, Hatch sponsored the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, which allowed manufacturers to sell these products without first demonstrating that they are safe. One FDA commissioner later complained: “Products that contain substances similar to those found in prescription drugs are marketed for children as dietary supplements. Likewise, products with ingredients that simulate illicit street drugs are marketed as dietary supplements to adolescents via the Internet and shops specializing in drug paraphernalia.”

Steven Pray, a professor of pharmacy at the University of Oklahaoma, complained in The Journal of Child Neurology that “patients who purchase dietary supplements take the place of the laboratory rats used in legitimate safety research.… The United States is little better than a third-world country in regard to access to unknown products.”

Through the 1980s, dietary supplements and herbal remedies had been the exclusive province of granola-crunching New Age lefties. Marin County, California, remained an anti-vaxxer haven until 2020, when the MAGA right’s stubborn resistance to the Covid vaccine rendered that position no longer socially tenable. But after Hatch’s bill became law, vaccine skepticism increasingly became a right-wing thing. Alex Jones’s online store is a pharmacopeia of alt medicines: methyline blue, T-3 trifecta iodine tincture, turmeric gummies, sea moss capsules, and so on. Fox News is so reliant on pitches for dietary supplements and dubious gold-based retirement strategies that I’ve long argued the FTC should investigate the cable network as a form of elder abuse, on the grounds that its conspiracist news programming is a retiree-sorting mechanism to deliver the biggest suckers to advertisers. As Paul Krugman put it in 2021, “There are big financial rewards to extremism, because extreme politics sells patent medicine, and patent medicine is highly profitable.”

That’s no secret to the Republican former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell. A decade ago, McDonnell got busted for accepting gifts and money while in office in exchange for smoothing the regulatory path for a dietary supplement called Antabloc. His conviction was later overturned by the reactionary Supreme Court in one of a series of decisions decriminalizing political bribery. Bill O’Reilly, Doctor Phil, and Mike Huckabee can’t say enough good things about something called Relaxium. I doubt they’ve done so for free.

“Dear NewsMax Reader,” read a note to Rick Perlstein, a best-selling student of right-wing movements, as related in a 2012 Perlstein piece in The Baffler that documented how wholly the conservative movement had given itself over to scammers and hustlers:

If you have shied away from profiting from the immense promise of stem cells to treat disease because of moral concern over extracting stem cells from fetal tissue, pay close attention. You can now invest with a clear conscience. An Israeli entrepreneur, Zami Aberman, has discovered “an oilfield in the placenta.”

And now kratom.

If the GOP is going to bring back patent medicines, then I demand we be entertained by the medicine shows that used to go along with them. It was on a bus for Hadacol Caravan, legend has it, that Hank Williams plucked the first notes of “Jambalaya.” That beats the hell out of a UFC Freedom 250 Match.

The self-described “sports president” has been everywhere lately—most notably at Game 3 of the Knicks-Spurs series in New York City, where he became the first president to attend an NBA Finals game, and at the slate of UFC fights staged on the White House Lawn. Come July 19, he will be in New Jersey, this time to hand the World Cup Trophy to a victorious U.S. captain Tim Ream. (Or, you know, some other nation’s captain.)

Sports—especially combat sports and football—have always been important to Trump’s political project, never more so in this second term. It’s an area that’s meant to show the president the way he likes to be seen: not just an avatar for the nation—he’s just another one of those regular joes that support him—but as a culturally dominant force. Trump is inescapable. He pops up even in places presidents haven’t before (like the NBA Finals). At the same time, those appearances are also often carefully choreographed to show him receiving maximum adulation. Hence all the MMA bouts and Army-Navy games.

There’s just one problem: Trump has lost his fastball. Those ordinary people taking in a game? They hate him now, thanks to a destructive political agenda and the ongoing economic fallout from his global trade war and the war in Iran. Far from showcasing Trump at his peak, over the last week—and likely in the forthcoming World Cup final—we’ve seen a weakened leader who is not just losing his grip on power but on the culture, as well.

Let’s take stock of Trump’s most recent forays into sports. Last Monday, he attended the NBA Finals. There, he was greeted with a cannonade of boos, undeniably killed the vibe—and subjected the New York Knicks to their only loss since April. On Wednesday—with the atmosphere cleansed by some sage-sporting Gothamites and a halftime performance by the Wu-Tang Clan, the Knicks completed the biggest comeback in NBA Finals history—something that didn’t seem possible with the president in the building. On Saturday, they won their first title since 1973 and New York City exploded with joy: Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people took to the streets to cheer and embrace one another.

Trump tried to stage his own version of that triumph on Sunday, at a lavish 80th birthday celebration put on by the UFC. The event took place in a massive, garish cage on the White House lawn, with 4,000 business and political elites looking on—the real fans had to watch from far outside the security perimeter set up around the building. The event was a disaster in most respects. Marred by rain delays and a lack of marquee fights, it was a bit of a dud, an event mostly memorable for one fighter lobbing a transphobic slur at former first lady Michelle Obama.

It was a stark contrast with the real party in his hometown a night before. And the good vibes have only continued since then, as dozens of U.S. cities have welcomed tens of thousands of visitors from all over the globe to attend the 2026 World Cup.

American soccer fans have shown up with open arms and sportsmanship. In Lawrence, Kansas, fans have embraced the Algerian team with cries of “Rock Chalk Algeria”—a variant on a cheer for the University of Kansas’s basketball team—and a University of Kansas marching band that learned the nation’s national anthem (which, frankly, goes hard). In Boston and Rhode Island, residents have welcomed (and shared pints) with Scottish fans (the word on the street is that Boston bars have been drained of beer). In New York, fans of Senegal, Morocco, and Brazil have all been embraced by the locals. The World Cup: It’s fun, and Americans like hosting it! Whether in Dallas or Los Angeles or Kansas City, Americans genuinely like having people from around the world visit, and they’re showing them a good time. It’s a refutation of Trump’s entire political program.

It all goes to show that the idea that Trump is somehow the “sports president” is wrong at the core. Game 3 at the Garden showed it: No one can really have fun with him around. He looked genuinely bored at the game and was accused of falling asleep. More broadly, the cultural influence that seemed to be bending in his direction in November 2024, when the “Trump dance” was inescapable at college football and U.S. Men’s National Team soccer games has been obliterated. He tried to be a part of the greatest moment in New York City sports history and nearly blew it for everyone—his mood-killing influence will be part of Knicks lore forever. His UFC party was a disaster. Next month, he will try—and fail—to ruin a World Cup that he has done everything to blemish but has not quite destroyed. When he bestows the trophy on the winner, he will be booed. But the booing will stop, and people will return to doing what they were doing before he slouched onto the scene—having themselves a pretty good time.

Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. This is Right Now on The New Republic. We have a great guest today. Sarah J. Jackson is a University of Pennsylvania communications professor, and she has a great book out this week. The book is called Second Sight: How the Wonder and Vision of Black Media Makers Push America Toward Freedom. Sarah, welcome.

Sarah J. Jackson: Thank you so much for having me, Perry. It’s great to see you.

Perry Bacon: Obviously, this book speaks to me—Sarah had it sent to me a few weeks ago, and I read it. I’m a Black person in media, obviously. But I think it has resonance to readers beyond just people who work in the media or people who are Black. I might be the target audience, in a certain sense, but I think it has a broader resonance. It’s a great book, and I’m recommending it to people.

I want to talk about—I want people to actually read the book. It’s called Second Sight. It came out yesterday or today?

Jackson: It officially came out yesterday, yeah. Very exciting. I’m still on the new-publication high.

Bacon: Do show it. Bring it back again.

Jackson: Yeah, so here it is.

Bacon: That’s a great cover, too. I like that.

Jackson: And the back cover—if you read it on a bus or a train, you really look cool, because this graphic designer did a great job on the cover for me.

Bacon: So explain the concept of second sight, first of all.

Jackson: Absolutely. So a lot of people are familiar with Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness, where he talks about the experience of being Black in America as this jarring and oppressive experience of awareness: awareness of who you are, who your community is, what your values are, et cetera.

And the always-present skewed and warped vision of Blackness—of you as an individual and of your community—that comes from white supremacy. This has created … a lot of theorists took the theory of double consciousness from Du Bois and have written extensively about it. People are probably very familiar with that.

But what I have always been fascinated by is this thing that has gone less explored in Du Bois’s theorization of double consciousness, where he says one of the consequences of double consciousness—which of course is the consequence of marginalization and oppression—is this profound gift called second sight.

And second sight is this gift that allows African Americans to have a sort of pulled-back and expanded view of the country. Because when you’re on the margins, or when you’re an outsider looking in—as bell hooks would later frame a similar idea—you can see a more expansive picture.

So you can both see and subscribe to and care about and be invested in the values, the norms of the nation, the identity of the country, and so forth. But you can also better see and better assess and better critique the gaps—where the values don’t come together, where there is room for improvement, where people have not yet imagined alternatives.

Second sight is really this beautiful gift that Du Bois says results from double consciousness. I really wanted to explore how, in the case of my work—because I am a media scholar, and I work on technology, media, all these other media forms and the role they play in democracy and the public sphere—I really wanted to think about how that African American second sight gets built in, across generations, into the stories that Black media makers like you tell.

Bacon: “Media makers”—I want to talk about the way you define the term, because I think I initially thought the book was going to be about journalists who work at The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. But you have a definition of media—we have Phillis Wheatley, we have Ryan Coogler.

We have a long tenure in terms of years and decades. We also have a very diverse definition of media. Talk about why you chose “media makers” … you’re telling a story about politics and values, but you chose “media makers,” not just journalists. Talk about why.

Jackson: Absolutely. The American public sphere is fundamentally shaped, and the stories we tell about ourselves, the narratives we have about the country, are fundamentally shaped by media. Journalism, of course, is core to that.

A healthy journalistic system and democracy should go together like this. But our public consciousness, our public politics, our public culture aren’t only shaped by journalistic media. They’re shaped by narratives at large, stories that we tell about ourselves.

And one of the great examples of this in the very negative sense is the film Birth of a Nation. For folks who are tuning in who are familiar with Birth of a Nation—it was this white supremacist propaganda film that glorified the Ku Klux Klan, and really helped to perpetuate, in popular culture, Lost Cause myths.

This film was extremely powerful in normalizing those myths in the culture. In fact, there’s some research that shows that it also directly caused violence against Black communities in areas where it was released and shown at the time.

What we know is that journalism and these other forms of media work hand in hand—filmmaking and, as you mentioned, in the book I talk about slave narratives and literature. People forget that the printing press was a form of revolutionary technology. We’re all living in an era where we think of the internet as our era’s form of revolutionary technology.

But at one period, the printing press was a revolutionary technology that made it possible to circulate media, circulate ideas, whether those were newspapers or pamphlets or books of poetry. In another era, photography was a revolutionary medium, and that was helping people reimagine and envision what America looked like. Black media makers were engaged in intervening in photographic technologies.

Film, podcasts, journalism—all these things. This is why I use the scope and the framework of media making, because you can really see how they speak and talk to each other.

Bacon: The book is organized not chronologically but in some ways around these three ideas where the second sight—let’s talk about those. You first describe Black media as a second sight to—you use the term “life.” Explain what you mean by “life.”

Jackson: Yeah, absolutely. I’m going to jump ahead from your question a little bit.

Bacon: Sure.

Jackson: When people get their hands on the book, which I hope they will, they’ll see that the three core chapters of the book are “Life,” “Liberty,” and “The Pursuit of Happiness.” We know these ideas by heart, we think, because they come from the Declaration of Independence. And of course, we’re a couple of weeks out from the semiquincentennial—which nobody wants to say—the 250th anniversary of the first Fourth of July.

And I sandwich those three values between these Black theoretical concepts of second sight and sankofa, which is a West African ideal that you must look back to look forward—you must understand the past in order to imagine the future.

Really what I’m trying to do by engaging life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the book is think about how we might reimagine those ideals, those ideas, through the second sight of Black media making over the course of time.

In the “Life” chapter, I take up stories from across different historical contexts that Black media makers were telling about what American life could be if its values were really adhered to and embraced. What American life was, and how life was or wasn’t valued. That’s one of the chapters where I talk a lot about the struggle of Black journalists to really make everyone’s lives matter in this country, in terms of being able to tell those stories. But I do a similar thing also with “Liberty” and with “The Pursuit of Happiness.”

Bacon: Talk about “The Pursuit of Happiness” chapter a little bit now.

Jackson: Absolutely. That was one of the more fun chapters to write, because a lot of the imagination stuff comes up in that chapter. I got to write about the L.A. film school called the L.A. Rebellion, which includes folks like Julie Dash, who is an incredible and very influential filmmaker who made a film called Daughters of the Dust, where she uses speculative futurity to tell a multigenerational story.

In that chapter, I get to talk about things like Octavia Butler’s writing and also things like the BlackStar Film Festival, which is based in Philly, where I am. I really try to think about, in that chapter, what the stories are that Black media makers have told us about what happiness looks like.

There’s this great quote from Du Bois—I think I lead that chapter with it—about it not just being these constrained ideas of the American dream, but the ability to live freely, to love freely—I think he says something like “stretch one’s arms and one’s soul.” That’s what happiness looks like.

In that chapter, I really try to think about how Black media makers have given us a map towards a bigger, better future where Americans could actually be happy and experience joy and embrace complexity and do all these things. So I love that chapter, because it comes after the “Life” and “Liberty” chapters, which have some harder content in them.

I hope that I can tackle both the harder content and also think about some of what is the dual role of second sight in Black media. The first role is the critique—really tackling this gap. What isn’t being addressed? What isn’t being covered? Whose lives aren’t being valued? How might we expand how we understand life and liberty? How are there still really severe issues to solve in our country around those?

But then also the imaginative power of imagining a future where we have those things, and then we can get to the happiness part. We can get to these visions that we haven’t even gotten close to yet, but we can imagine.

Bacon: Let me talk about some media products you mention in the book, so people can understand the idea a little better. You mention the movie Sinners and write about that extensively. Talk about how that is an example of second sight.

Jackson: Yeah, absolutely. There are so many things about Sinners, and I love talking about Sinners right now because Sinners this year became the most Oscar-nominated movie of all time.

Bacon: OK.

Jackson: Which is amazing.

Bacon: Meaning it had the most Oscar nominations?

Jackson: Yeah, exactly. It received the most Oscar nominations of any film ever.

Bacon: Wow. OK.

Jackson: Which is remarkable. I talk about Sinners because Sinners is an example where Ryan Coogler is a contemporary filmmaker—compared to his predecessors, he has, relatively and extremely, much more freedom, much more economic support and power. But he still faces some of the same challenges in telling stories that center African American second sight.

The film itself, of course, centers that second sight. Because ostensibly it’s a film about vampires, but anyone who’s seen it knows that it’s a film about dispossession, about the stealing of Black culture, of the spirit of Black tradition, and the violence—the real violence—that is typical, whether it’s the scenes about sharecropping or the very remarkable monologue about lynching.

At the same time, he’s using this speculative form and the horror form of the vampire to give us an allegory that can better help us understand what the Black experience has been in the United States, which is a bit of a vampiric one in terms of our relationship to the nation. These are the ways that he embodies this in the film itself, in writing the film itself.

The film is also a great example of the ongoing challenges that Black media makers face, even in this era where they receive great recognition. Because he talks in interviews—and I interviewed dozens of contemporary Black media makers for the book, as well as doing historical and archival work—and Ryan Coogler has talked about the fact that Sinners was really the project he wanted to make. He made this incredible independent film, Fruitvale Station, about the murder of Oscar Grant by BART police in Oakland. It was this remarkable, well-received independent film.

But he couldn’t get the funding and support from the Hollywood studios to make a film like Sinners at that point, even though he had made this beautiful, remarkable film. Because there are biases built into all of these industries, whether it’s journalism or film or anything else. They say, Will mainstream audiences want this? Will this sell? Is it worth investing in? We could get into a political economic conversation for the rest of our time if we wanted to about where the money’s coming from and how much folks in media are dependent on that.

Ryan Coogler has said essentially that he had to make the Black Panther movies and the Creed movies and prove that he could make box office hits that made a lot of money before he could make a film like Sinners, which is really his heart project. The only way for him to get the funding and the studio support for Sinners was to make these other big box office hits.

I get into in the book how there’s a bit of a double standard there, because most white filmmakers don’t have to make a movie like Black Panther—which was, I believe, the highest-grossing Marvel film up to the time that it came out—in order to be taken seriously for funding for another movie. They don’t have to do quite so much overachieving.

There are multiple ways where his experience as a filmmaker—he also talks about being really influenced by the folks that came before him, John Singleton and Spike Lee and Gina Prince-Bythewood—is this pull-through legacy of Black media making in second sight.

Bacon: Talk about Du Bois himself. He is an intellectual, but he’s also in some ways a magazine editor. So talk about that role in second sight.

Jackson: Yeah. I love this—I’m a nerd and I’m always happy to talk about Du Bois or honestly any of the folks in the book. But people understand and know Du Bois as this really foundational thinker across a few fields—sociology, primarily, in the United States, but also across theories of identity and difference, of race, of propaganda and so forth. If you want to nerd out later, we can talk about how Du Bois was one of the first people to use the concept of misinformation in his writing.

Bacon: Really? OK.

Jackson: But Du Bois was also a media maker, and this goes back to your earlier question about why I use this expansive framework of media making. Because yes, Du Bois was the editor of The Crisis magazine for several decades, which was the NAACP’s magazine. He oversaw what he really understood as a project of positive propaganda—countering the denigrative representations of African Americans in this country, and also engaging in a lot of really heated, sometimes political, debates about things like whether Black men should join the military, and things around housing and housing segregation and so forth. And he was this very fiery editor.

He, in that regard, was a journalist. He often wrote editorials for Black newspapers and so forth. But he was also a creative. A lot of people don’t know Du Bois also wrote speculative fiction. And again, this goes back to why I use this broader term of media making, because we would be doing Du Bois himself a disservice if we just said, He was a scholar and a journalist, or, He was a scholar and an editor, or, He was a scholar and an activist. Because Du Bois was also writing kooky, honestly, speculative fiction throughout his life.

Bacon: I’ve not read any of it. It’s interesting. I knew that he’d written it—

Jackson: It’s fun if you can get your hands on it. It’s fun to think through what he’s thinking when he’s writing this stuff. Alien invasions, all kinds of things in his writing.

But he was also supporting multiple types of media projects. One example of that was that when Paul Robeson was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, Du Bois was an ally of his and helped to found an alternative radical Black newspaper called Freedom, which Paul Robeson and his wife, Eslanda Robeson, edited and ran. At that point, Du Bois had actually stepped down from working at The Crisis because it had taken on a more conservative bent, and Du Bois, over the course of his life, became more and more politically radical.

You see this in his own work, how he’s constantly engaging in media in these different ways. And you find this around a lot of different figures who you think you know what they did. Gordon Parks is a great example. Gordon Parks, incredible photographer—quite literally helped to shift American consciousness about what American life looked like, how expansive it was, what Black life looked like in particular, both the beauty and the nuances and the hard things and all of it.

But what a lot of people don’t know about Gordon Parks—I was actually thrilled to learn this—was that Gordon Parks was the artistic director for the first issue of Essence magazine, which is a women’s magazine focused on Black women, fashion, style, women’s issues, et cetera.

He was one of the founding powerhouses behind the founding of that magazine. He also made documentary films. He also made one of the first—what is now called Blaxploitation films. I would argue that a lot of the Blaxploitation films that came after tried to do what Parks did in the Blaxploitation genre and never quite got there.

He was doing a lot of different types of media. He was a media maker, just like Du Bois or Ida B. Wells or you or any folks that are working across registers and across technologies.

Bacon: Let’s talk about the Code Switch podcast for NPR. I think people will know what that is already. Talk about that as an example of second sight, because it’s something very contemporary.

Jackson: Yeah, absolutely. If you’ll allow me to do a small shout-out here—Gene Demby, who is one of the founders of the Code Switch podcast and remains one of the hosts—it’s been long-running now—will actually be in conversation with me about the book in Washington, D.C., this Friday for Juneteenth.

So for folks in Washington, D.C.—Gene and I will be at Solid State Books this Friday to talk about this book.

Code Switch is a great example of what happens when Black media makers actually are able to integrate second sight into these more mainstream spaces like NPR. The story behind it is really a great story, because it shows the networks and the development of second sight as a collective.

Gene actually was a blogger. He founded a blog called PostBourgie, and it was in the Black blogosphere era leading up to before Obama was elected the first time—before 2008. He had this blog PostBourgie, this really vibrant space in the Black blogosphere where a lot of people who you then wouldn’t have heard of but now you have heard of were engaged in these political debates about race in America, politics, Blackness—

Bacon: Most famously Jamelle Bouie, right?

Jackson: Jamelle Bouie wrote for PostBourgie. The list could go on and on. There are many people who have associations with PostBourgie. I list them all in the book. They ended up being editors at the Los Angeles Times. They ended up going on to do all kinds of things.

But this was really a vibrant space for what we might now call the elder millennial or younger Gen X cohort of Black media makers who couldn’t find a voice in the mainstream media that continued to kind of exclude their voices, but were engaged in the blogosphere.

What happened was this moment opened up where, when Obama was elected, all of a sudden all these mainstream, historically white media spaces said, We need these young, vibrant Black voices to explain this young, vibrant Black president.

People like Gene Demby and many of the other people—Jamelle Bouie and others—were able to break into mainstream media. Gene first worked at the Huffington Post, then he worked at The New York Times, and then eventually he went on to co-found [Code Switch] with Shereen Marisol Meraji.

And I want to point out—Shereen, the other co-founder of [Code Switch], is Iranian and Puerto Rican American. You can be a part of second sight, you can be a part of uplifting alternative narratives and stories—you don’t have to be Black. This is a political and cultural project of telling bigger, better stories about the nation.

But to this day, the podcast continues to interrogate both American politics and American culture through the lens of race, centrally—insisting on race being a foundational way of understanding our nation. That is simply something that has been absent, largely, from public radio, mainstream radio, and so forth, until we got this crop of shows. There are a lot of other, now, Black podcasts and Black radio shows. I interviewed other folks in the book from various ones, including folks like Eric Eddings and many others.

But yeah, that’s a great story of how this happens. Of course, there are a lot of challenges along the way. I kind of told the triumphant version of this. But yeah, it’s a great podcast to this day.

Bacon: We emphasize—and you talk about this in the book—there’s not one single second sight. Stephen A. Smith and Adam Serwer are writing and doing different kinds of media with different kinds of views. The Kevin Hart roast on Netflix was a kind of media I’m not necessarily a huge fan of. Let’s discuss the diversity of the second sight, so to speak.

Jackson: I really appreciate that you asked this question, because this is a very important nuance that I want people to understand about my argument here. This is not a racial essentialism argument. This is not an argument that all Black Americans think the same or agree on politics or are participating necessarily in the same political project. In fact, I would argue that there are some people who are outside of this project.

My book really traces the folks who have a shared sense of, one, wanting to improve American democracy through the stories they tell, whether that’s through film or through journalism. And two, Black freedom—a commitment to what Black liberation or Black freedom [means], and an understanding that imagining a freer nation will make us all better.

Of course, there are many people who are not in the book. And I hate to call out names, but since you called out names, I want to give some examples. Candace Owens is an African American. She is not engaged in a collective project of political second sight.

There is a political valence to being part of this project that involves being in community and in earnest and honest debate, even across difference or disagreement, around issues that have to do with the liberation of Black people, the end of things like police brutality, and so forth. She’s not really a part of that.

That’s a great example of how just because someone’s Black and they’re a media maker, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re making media that reflects Du Bois’s concept—this political concept of second sight. That’s a perfect example.

But there is an immense amount of diversity within how Black people engage in these projects. I try to show this in the book through thinking about the historical Black press. There were always Black radicals who were really engaged in radical projects around labor, around anti-militarism, around Black power and so forth, who were part of the Black press. Often the owners and editors—who were Black—of Black newspapers were more conservative. They often came from families that were part of the Black bourgeoisie, and they tended to be more conservative, and sometimes they were itchy about certain things.

What I show in the book is that this actually provided a really generative—people talk about now how we need to hear different views and be exposed to different ideas. But if you looked at the editorial pages of a Black newspaper, you would see the Black radicals and the Black conservatives debating each other in the editorial pages. You would see the editor and the fiery young reporter arguing.

And Black newspapers always included white writers as well. In fact, many Jewish American writers wrote for Black newspapers at different periods of time, who were also engaged in questions around labor and inequality and other things. It’s very similar to the HBCUs—historically Black colleges and universities—and the Black churches, where yes, there is often, especially in the leadership positions, a more conservative valence.

But that sort of protects the radicals in their midst, in a way that—because it’s an internal community debate—they can really be engaging across registers in a way where it’s understood that everyone shares an interest in Black liberation, even if they think the means or the goals are different.

People aren’t speaking in one mind. But I do try to show in the book how people, even when they’re critical of each other—some of the contemporary folks I interviewed were critical of other contemporary folks I interviewed—even when they’re critical of each other, they assume that people are also interested in this greater project of expanding democracy and of Black freedom. There’s an earnestness in the engagement and debates that is actually, in my opinion, quite generous, for the most part.

Now, like I said at the start, there are a few people who fall outside of this.

Bacon: Yeah. We’ll discuss Stephen A. Smith offline. You said it’s not racial essentialism. I think that was important to say. But could you imagine a book about the second sight that Native American media makers or Latino media makers or female media makers have? This is not saying that Black people have some original insight that no one else has, or that we have insight above others.

Jackson: Well, I do think Black people have some original insight, because there’s something unique about being Black in America and that experience, for sure. But what I’m saying is, obviously, not all Black people think the same, or apply their [second sight] the same. I want people to see this book as an alternative media history of the United States. There are, of course, many other media makers who have engaged in projects to try to make the country better, try to make the country broader, more inclusive, more beautiful, more free.

So yes, of course, there are other folks. In the book, I give a few examples of white media makers who have allied themselves with Black media makers to show how you don’t have to be Black to be a part of this project. You can uplift. One of the great examples I give in the book is—I don’t know if you’ve seen the film Sing Sing.

Bacon: No.

Jackson: It’s a really great film. It’s based on a true story. I talk about prison media and the newspapers that come out of prisons as being one example of where, unfortunately, because of mass incarceration, Black second sight is also often revealed. But Sing Sing is about a theater project inside Sing Sing Prison where Black incarcerated men learned Shakespeare and performed it and led it.

The filmmakers who made the film are white, but they did this thing that is very easy to do. Instead of taking the story, writing it themselves, taking the credit, taking the money—instead of appropriating the story—they actually hired and paid equally the formerly incarcerated men who were a part of this project when they were incarcerated. And they gave an equal share. The directors, these men who both starred in it and helped to write it and direct it—there was an equal share of the proceeds of the film.

It’s really unique and really remarkable, because that doesn’t usually happen. Usually the person at the top is being paid more. I write about that in the book as an example of the ways that second sight can be supported by anyone in the media industry.

I don’t know about you, but many of the folks I talk to have white editors, or white bosses. They have to go to white investors to get their films green-lit or whatever. But it’s not that it’s impossible for those folks to understand second sight. They can read my book and then really understand it. It’s that they can make the choice to say, This person’s vision, this person’s insight, this person’s perspective is needed, and I can find ways to support this, to expand the kinds of stories that are being told.

Bacon: So my final two questions are these. The first is just from reading the notes for the book, it sounds like the book contract was signed in 2020 or … in a period in which it appeared that Black media makers would have growing influence. Now we’re in what I would describe as a backlash period, where a lot of Black journalists have lost their jobs or lost their influence.

To some extent the second sight has been objected to by Republicans who are trying to ban it. But I would also argue a lot of liberals, or people who consider themselves liberal, are complaining, Wokeness has gone too far—which is like a subcode … a lot of deep criticism of the second sight in ways that I think are a bit over the top these days.

Reading your account, you might say that there are always ups and downs in the ability of Black people to be in media. But I worry we’re in some kind of real decline. How do you view it? This backlash era feels very difficult, in part because I’m personally living in it right now in the media. But is this a dip, or is this a real permanent change? Can Code Switch survive as NPR tries to appease the right, is what I would argue? Where are we right now?

Jackson: I think this is a pattern, and I trace this across the different sets of historical moments in the book. There’s this real pattern that happens in America that—my argument is, if we actually listened to second sight and applied it, we wouldn’t keep being in this pattern.

But what happens is there’s some national crisis. That might be a war. It might be George Floyd is murdered on video and the country erupts. It might be whatever the crisis is—the Civil Rights Movement, et cetera. And there’s this opening. There are these openings where Black voices and Black stories aren’t just being pulled in to say, Oh, we’re an integrated newsroom, but you have to do it the same way we always did it. But to actually say, We need bigger, broader stories. We need more critique. We need more imagination. There are these openings.

Anybody who lived through the Obama era or the post-2020 moment knows that these openings have happened multiple times in our lifetime—where people pledged to do better. They pledged to tell bigger stories. They pledged to fund Black-led projects. All these things.

Then, because this is America, there’s always a backlash. There’s always a fatigue of talking about race. And there’s always this retrenchment. This has happened many times. In politics, Trump is the epitome of one of these retrenchments.

But if you look at history, you see this has happened many times. If you think about the aftermath of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery—we had Reconstruction. Reconstruction was this shining, very short, 15-year moment where there was greater Black political representation. There were multicultural governments all across the South of both Black people and white people working together. There were all kinds of renewed ways. In some ways, there were the beginnings of reparations and repair.

And then—because the policies that made Reconstruction possible were not enforced by the U.S. government, as we all know—we had the violent retrenchment of Jim Crow. We got lynching. We got hardline segregation. We got new forms of plantation economies that were no longer based on slavery but were based on sharecropping.

If you look through history, you see this in every moment. There are moments like this around World War II. There are moments like this around the Civil Rights Movement.

And so if it’s any consolation for you and other media makers, one thing we have to keep in mind is that we’re living in one of those moments of backlash and retrenchment. There’s no doubt. But the stories that are being told through second sight are crucial in terms of our democracy to getting us back out.

What I really hope when people read the book is that they can imagine a world in which we get out of this cycle of progress and backlash, because we finally apply and think about and really embrace the critique and imagination that second sight offers us.

Bacon: So the last question will be—we’ve talked about a lot of different kinds of media. But where is the second [sight]? There was a period from 2014 to 2020 where I would say there was a site for the second sight—it was Twitter. You would see Black voices saying important things.

I don’t want to over-celebrate that, but there’s a period where you did see one medium. I had Kathy Roberts Ford on here last week, and she’s talking about the period where there were a lot of Black newspapers that were very vibrant. I don’t really feel like we’re necessarily in that period now.

So when we’re talking about where is the second sight?—is it everywhere? I’m a little nervous about that. If you were looking for where the second sight is today, where would you tell people it is?

Jackson: I am a great person to ask this question, because my last book was about Twitter. I wrote a book about Twitter activism and hashtag activism and the ways that it was used in the 2012, after Trayvon Martin was murdered, through 2020 moments.

But I do want to say, it’s really important that we talk about these kinds of platforms with realism and nuance—which is that the majority of Americans were never on Twitter. If you look at the percentage of people that were ever on Twitter, it was a very small minority. It just happened that a lot of people in the media and political sphere were on there, and so we all felt like it was really important, and I wrote a book about it, et cetera.

Of course it was important. My last book really traces and shows through evidence how this shifted public discourse, public conversations about things like police brutality, about things like racism and the death penalty and many other issues.

But there’s never been a single space … that this is the space where second sight happens and where we have our hope for democratic media.

This goes back to your question at the start about the broad definition of media making, because this is a collective project. People are engaged in this project here on Substack. People are engaged in this project once on the blogosphere when the blogosphere was it, once on Twitter when Twitter was it, but also through traditional media, through print newspaper, through radio.

Yesterday I had an event in Philly with Sara Lomax, the CEO of WURD Radio, which is the only Black-owned radio station in the state of Pennsylvania. And honestly, more people listen to talk radio than are on TikTok or Instagram or whatever. It’s important that we have these institutions where members of our community hear and learn about civic issues, about democracy, about why they’re invested, why they’re involved.

And again, this might be another episode—we really need to tackle the conglomeration and political economic problems in our media system that mean that billionaires and trillionaires increasingly own more—

Bacon: Bari Weiss gets to run CNN and CBS and fire all the Black people that work there. Yes.

Jackson: More and more and more. And that restricts whether folks in rural areas get the information they need, whether folks in cities like Philly and New York get the information they need. And there are policy solutions to this, but it is a group project.

So when the 1619 Project came out, for example, this was in an era where everybody was saying that the internet had killed newspapers, that the internet had killed print. Nobody buys and picks up and reads a newspaper anymore. I believe it went through four print editions that kept selling out.

And it was hilarious, because there had been all this hand-wringing about how nobody will buy a newspaper anymore. The New York Times Magazine issue with 1619 goes into the newsstands and sells out instantly. People in bodegas and corner stores and gas stations on the highway—everybody is buying it. They have to print another edition, and then they have to print another edition.

It suggests that if media tells stories that matter, that there is a thirst for among the public, that there is an audience regardless of the technology or the platform.

But of course, the reason that project was possible was because somebody like Nikole Hannah-Jones had to work her way—I interviewed her in the book—through a lot of racist media experiences as a Black journalist and had to prove herself. And then her editors had to say, Yes, now is the time that we’re willing to offer this expansive project. We know it might be controversial. We know it might face backlash—which of course it did. We know it might be open to critique—which of course it was. But it’s worth it for our democracy to engage in these interrogations and questions.

So everybody has a hand in this. I don’t think there’s one place you can go.

Bacon: Now that I think about it, when we first connected, I think you said something on Bluesky about the idea. We were talking about Twitter being over, and therefore there’s no public square. And you were like, There’s never really been a public square where we’re all equally able to show up and speak equally. There’s never been that kind of—

Jackson: There never has been, because the public sphere in the United States is fundamentally shaped by our media systems, the stories we all share. And for so long in U.S. history, our media systems were segregated—and segregated in multiple ways. There weren’t people of color, but there also weren’t women. There also weren’t low-income—still, working people’s voices are very neglected in our media systems.

The idea is that we would have a healthier media system if we had more platforms, more outlets, more voices. And if the ones that have power—the big ones that have been here all along—actually adhered to the commitments that they made in 2020, which many have since very much rolled back on, to include the voices of the people—to include an expansive set.

The irony, of course, is that the people who say that they care about intellectual diversity and political debate in media are often the first people to essentially foreclose the more challenging perspectives that come from Black second sight, or from other alternative media spaces. But we actually do need that in our media system.

Bacon: Sarah, thanks for joining me. Anything else you want to say about the book or about your events for the next few weeks?

Jackson: I’m excited. I hope people will come out. I’m on Instagram, @sarahjjacksonphd, if folks want to follow me. That’s where I’m posting all the book stuff and book events. I’ll be across a few different cities—New York, Chicago, Boston, D.C., Baltimore, et cetera.

I hope people read it. I’m really interested to hear how folks receive it. It’s been a real honor for folks like you, who are Black media makers, to tell me they feel really seen in this book. That is phenomenal. I hope folks both in the media industry and the public—because we’re all consumers of media—will really take some of these stories and lessons to heart.

Bacon: A great book. I really appreciate you writing it. Thanks for joining me. Great to see you. Take care.

Jackson: Thanks so much, Perry.

Bacon: Bye.

Extractive interests in the U.S. brag that this stability is a product of their own dynamism. “The lesson from this moment is not that the United States is immune from global disruption,” the American Petroleum Institute argued last month. “It’s that decades of growth in American oil and natural gas production have fundamentally strengthened America’s energy position during periods of global instability. Maintaining that advantage will require continued investment in the infrastructure needed to connect abundant supply to growing demand—both at home and abroad.”

But the strength and nimbleness of the U.S. oil and gas industry isn’t the whole story. We don’t actually know how drivers in the U.S. might have fared if global prices had really soared. Booming U.S. domestic production is only part of why they didn’t. Pipelines across Saudi Arabia and the UAE kept about five million barrels per day flowing from the Persian Gulf. China ratcheted down fossil fuel demand, reducing imports by nearly 40 percent from 2025 averages. Affordable Chinese solar panels, electric vehicles, and two-wheelers helped other countries in Asia to destroy demand for imported fossil fuels too.

Wealthier nations, meanwhile, were able to draw on preexisting stockpiles to mitigate price shocks. The U.S. did this using its Strategic Petroleum Reserve. One of many federal energy security policies prompted by the oil shocks of the 1970s, the SPR is now emptier than it’s been since 1983. Earlier this month, oil executives warned the Trump administration behind closed doors that those stockpiles in the U.S. and elsewhere could start to run out and cause global energy prices to jump. Just because prices haven’t spiked doesn’t mean they never will.

One clear takeaway from all this is that oil markets can put up with a lot more disruption than even top oil executives claimed. If a climate-conscious government had credibly threatened to bring about “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market,” as the International Energy Agency has called the monthslong closure of the Strait of Hormuz, fossil fuel producers would have rioted. During the Biden years, executives whined endlessly that the administration’s climate policies were suffocating them. In reality, those years were fat ones for this country’s fossil fuel industry. Drillers enjoyed record profits and production. What if Biden had tried holding back 15 million barrels of oil every day for three months?

It would never have happened. Although you wouldn’t have known it from the CEOs’ grousing, the Biden administration never took a serious interest in phasing out fossil fuels. It opted for tax breaks and modest regulations to gradually incentivize lower-carbon alternatives; after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, former Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm promptly begged our fossil fuel industry’s top brass to drill more. Ironically, it took one of the world’s biggest coal, oil, and gas enthusiasts—Donald Trump—to trigger “the largest fossil fuel capital annihilation event in history,” as French philosopher Pierre Charbonnier called it in the first month of the Iran war.

Comparing Trump’s actions with the visions of climate advocates is grimly instructive. No climate law or treaty promised to knock out even a fraction of the supplies that were taken offline during the Iran war. Drillers nevertheless persisted in warning that the sky would fall if climate policymakers got their way, explaining that they had a moral duty to satisfy surging fossil fuel demand in fast-growing Asian countries. In the last days of the Biden administration, in November 2024, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods complained that the climate policies “that have been pursued to date are very narrowly focused on limiting the supply of traditional sources,” which wasn’t remotely true. He cautioned that such (nonexistent) strategies threatened global economic growth and prosperity for the world’s poor. The same year, the CEO of Saudi Aramco talked about the need to “abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas,” which was never on the verge of happening at any meaningful scale.

If there is a silver lining to be found in the last few months, it’s that middle- and low-income countries are increasingly seeing the fossil fueled development that Exxon and Aramco have tied their futures to as a bad bet for energy security. If the Strait of Hormuz does reopen—and supplies gradually come back online in the coming months and years—the International Energy Agency predicts that newly accessible supplies of oil will overwhelm demand. For a Trump administration more committed than ever to drill, baby, drill, that could spell disaster for its favorite industry, tanking margins for smaller and midsize producers who need higher global prices in order to break even on pricier, unconventional drilling.

But while Democrats and liberals should look back upon the Obama years with fondness, they must finally and fully move on from them. The Democratic Party has something of a cult of Obama, a “What Would Barack Do?” mindset, and a fixation with 2008. Liberal columnists call for the party to return to Obama’s policy positions and rhetoric; voters and donors make every presidential primary a search for the next Obama; and the words of David Axelrod, David Plouffe, and others involved in the 2008 campaign are treated like gospel. Enough. Barack Obama is a great man. A great Democratic Party will treat Barack Obama as a person, not a messiah.

What’s wrong with Democrats harkening back to their best recent politician, who won in a landslide, got reelected, and governed the country effectively? Three things. First of all, while Barack Obama still walks the earth and looks remarkably similar to when he first ran for president, we are living in much different political times. So we can’t learn much from his successes or failures.

You can believe that the rise of far-right politics in America and the Democratic Party losing ground among voters without college degrees and in rural areas are largely the failures of Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and “woke” activists. Many of my fellow political journalists do. They are wrong, though. Conservative parties in Europe are also winning over less-educated people and those in rural areas. The far right is surging across the globe. In 2012, Barack Obama won Michigan by nine percentage points, Iowa by six, and Ohio by three. I doubt Obama himself thinks he would do that well in those states today, even if he used the exact same rhetoric and tactics as he did 14 years ago.

So much about American politics has dramatically changed since 2012: the widespread adoption of social media and decline of traditional news sources; the growing strength of both the MAGA right and the progressive left; an oligarchy that has more money than ever and increasingly uses it to shape politics. One clue that Obama’s approach would be less successful today is that a man with a very similar ideology to Obama (Biden) just left office as one of the most unpopular presidents in recent memory.

There is one issue where the Obama model is particularly useless now: race. In 2008, it was easy to argue that America’s racial divides were diminishing and that a unifying Black leader might further accelerate that process. No one would claim that now. Raphael Warnock, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Wes Moore are optimistic Black politicians with cross-racial appeal. But on the campaign trail, they can’t position themselves as post-racial figures as Obama did. They must respond both to the racism of Trump, which is more overt than past Republicans, and the more fervent anti-racism of today’s Democratic Party.

Second, there is the man himself, and his limitations. We don’t have to ask “What Would Barack Do?” since the former president remains deeply involved in the machinations of the party. But while Obama made two brilliant decisions in the 2000s (opposing the Iraq War and running for president sooner than most anticipated), his record since then is more mixed. While in office, he suggested that the Republican Party would normalize, seemingly not realizing that Tea Party version of the GOP was the real thing.

Obama discouraged Biden from running for president during the 2016 cycle, effectively backing Hillary Clinton instead. On the eve of the 2024 election, he implied Black men who hadn’t yet backed Kamala Harris were motivated by sexism. His political advice these days, such as suggesting that Democrats should avoid speaking in super-wonky terms, isn’t particularly novel.

I am not singling out Obama—American politics is very complicated and unpredictable. Many people, myself included, never thought Trump would be elected president. The problem is that the Democratic Party has a few oracles (Obama, Plouffe, Nancy Pelosi, James Carville) who are treated as political geniuses based on their wins long ago. I’m glad that Obama, Pelosi, and other party leaders eventually convinced Biden to drop out in 2024. But a more effective party would not be looking to its 2008-era elders to make obvious decisions like sidelining a deeply unpopular 81-year-old candidate.

Third, the cult of Obama and 2008 leaves the party in a state of nostalgia, always trying to repeat a kind of fantasy version of the past. I covered the 2008 campaign closely, and there were moments when Hillary Clinton’s team was outsmarting Obama’s. But what’s taken hold in the Democratic Party is the view that Obama and his aides ran near-perfect campaigns in 2008 and 2012 and Democrats have gone wrong by not repeating them.

So you end up with Plouffe, who hadn’t held any senior political jobs since his work with Obama, chosen as a top adviser for Harris in 2024. Democratic presidential candidates should actually be listening to the political operatives who have advised Warnock, Andy Beshear, Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer, and others who have won in tough states in the 2020s, not people whose heyday was working for Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. I suspect there is more for Democrats to glean from the successful campaigns of Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, Canada’s Mark Carney, and Hungary’s Péter Magyar than the 2008 Obama campaign, which happened before the authoritarian/oligarch/social era of today.

What’s the alternative to an obsession with Obama and 2008? I worry that many Democrats are desperate to find another eloquent wunderkind (perhaps Pete Buttigieg or Jon Ossoff would fit the bill), charismatic leader (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), team of consultants (those who advised Zohran Mamdani) or ideal campaign operation (Mamdani 2025) to put on an Obama-like pedestal.

Please, no. Instead, Democrats need a strong party, with electoral strategies and policies not dependent on a single person or time. That won’t be easy to create. There are no shortcuts. It will require painful internal debates. Autopsies will need to be fully completed and then actually released. Democratic heroes (Pelosi, Obama) might deserve some criticism; the political tactics of the party’s enemies (Trump) perhaps praised and copied.

I’m sure I will eventually make it to the Obama library. The best president of my lifetime (and probably yours) is worth commending. Ten or 15 years ago, I would have also said Obama should also be emulated. But Democrats have tried that, over and over again, leaving America in the hands of Donald Trump. Democrats should celebrate 2008 this week—and then adapt to the reality of 2026.

Ten years after Vance released his bestselling book that was made into a major motion picture, he has released Communion, a reflection on his late-in-life conversion to the Catholic faith that has already earned a meager 1.27 stars on Goodreads. Apparently reading it is painful.

“I got a colonoscopy on Friday,” Ginny Hogan wrote for The Cut. “If only that were the least pleasant experience of my last week. But no, that would be when I pulled an all-nighter on Monday reading Communion.”

“Vance’s hypocrisy alone makes Communion nearly unreadable,” Hogan wrote.

“You don’t need me to tell you this, but he is not a good Catholic,” she wrote. “A good Catholic would never support [Donald] Trump’s hateful immigration policies, cruel Medicaid cuts, hatred toward trans children, and unnecessary foreign wars.”

Hogan also criticized Vance for how he managed to say so much about second lady Usha Vance, “without saying anything at all.”

“Vance came to fame on his writing talent, and all he could muster to describe his wife of 12 years were ‘beauty’ and ‘intelligence.’ JD, ask ChatGPT for some synonyms! Be romantic,” Hogan wrote.

The Wall Street Journal’s Barton Swaim wrote that the book suffered from “egregious sloppiness.”

Swaim found that Vance oversimplified complex issues and misunderstood research he cited. “Whether Mr. Vance’s error arose from laziness or dishonesty or something else, I don’t know, but alas it typifies the low regard he has for people who profess views he dislikes,” he wrote.

The Atlantic’s Alexandra Petri similarly called out Vance’s frothy phrasing that seemed to lack any understanding of his source material. “Here’s Vance’s gloss on the Book of Job and the problem of suffering: ‘We are like golden retrievers trying to understand how an iPhone functions.’ Well, the Book of Job left me troubled, but that golden-retriever analogy has fixed things!”

And Christopher Howse, for The Telegraph, wrote that Communion simply “lacks the raw impact of Hillbilly Elegy.”

Tuberville, a former college football coach, is being accused of failing to meet the eligibility standard for state residency as outlined in Alabama’s constitution. Candidates have to live in the state for at least seven years in order to be eligible to run. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit say that Tuberville has “usurp[ed], intrude[d], into or unlawfully holds or exercises a public office.”

Tuberville sold all of his property in Alabama as of 2023 but has since claimed that he lives in a 1,500-square-foot property, which originally listed only his son and wife on the deed. Meanwhile, Tuberville’s wife was working as a real estate agent in Florida. He also voted in Florida in 2018.

Earlier this month, Tuberville’s gubernatorial campaign released tax documents claiming to prove that he has lived in the state since 2018, but critics such as Ken McFeeters, another Republican candidate, say that they don’t prove anything, claiming they aren’t accurate.

“I want his wife to tell me, with a straight face, that she lives in a one-bathroom house with her husband and adults and guests,” McFeeters told AL.com. “A woman like that is not going to share a bathroom.”

Those documents were enough for Tuberville to fend off a residency challenge from McFeeters to the Alabama Republican Party. The party’s 21-member steering committee ruled in Tuberville’s favor Sunday, saying he met the state’s residency requirements.

“We looked at it with the facts. The contest was unsuccessful. And Coach Tuberville will be our nominee for governor,” said the chair of the state Republican Party, Scott Stadthagen.

But this new lawsuit, assuming it goes to trial, will open up Tuberville’s records even further, and could result in new information coming to light in the discovery process. The public will find out if Tuberville is actually a Florida man.

The full text of the 14-point agreement was released Wednesday, revealing the United States will end its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, work with other countries to give Iran access to $300 billion to rebuild its infrastructure, and cease sanctions, among other concessions.

“I’ve heard from the president. I have tremendous respect for him. I’d like to hear from Marco Rubio, and I’d really like to hear from John Lee Ratcliffe on the intelligence of whether or not Iran thinks they got the better of us. Because I guarantee, we got the best intelligence community in the world. I’d be really interested in what [Iran’s] reaction to this MOU is. It might be. ‘I can’t believe we got this, because we were losing,’” former Republican Representative Trey Gowdy said on Fox News after the MOU was released. “We had an economic stranglehold on that country. So, when you go back to the status quo ante before the blockade, how are we better off? What did we get?”

Gowdy then claimed the pressures of low approval ratings and incoming midterm elections may have gotten to the president.

“Don’t we have midterms coming up? Are gas prices high? I mean, I hate to be cynical, but I don’t think it’s a national security document,” he said.

Gowdy: How are we better off? What did we get? pic.twitter.com/VEBx6IZE1d

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 17, 2026

“Make no mistake: This MOU is a capitulation to the Iranian terrorist regime, potentially more dangerous than Obama’s JCPOA,” wrote Joel Griffith, a senior fellow at the conservative American Advancing Freedom and co-chair of Young Jewish Conservatives. “This will rejuvenate a terrorist regime with nuclear ambitions committed to global ideological domination through terrorism.”

“This is an American surrender,” MAGA commentator Erick Erickson said.

“This MOU with Iran does smack of the kind of appeasement that our administration rejected in the Obama-Iran nuclear deal and also when Joe Biden attempted to return to the politics of appeasement during his administration,” Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, posited. “I would urge the President to take a step back, continue the blockade and pursue a negotiated settlement that commits Iran to dismantling their nuclear program, dismantling this missile program, ends support for terrorist proxies and opens the strait. Failing that, we should let our Armed Forces finish the job on our terms.”

“Reagan is rolling over in his grave,” Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy wrote. “Iran’s nuclear ambitions were not curbed, and they have learned that threatening the Strait of Hormuz works and will undoubtedly leverage it in the future.… Before the war, the strait was open, Iran was being crushed by sanctions, and 13 service members were still alive. Now, 13 Americans are dead, families have paid billions at the pump, sanctions will be lifted, and the bombing has stopped. This is the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.”

“This MOU appears to be … a disaster that does not achieve any of the actual signal goals that were set by the administration at the beginning,” commentator Ben Shapiro said on Fox News. “There are effectively five goals that were set by the administration at the beginning. One was ending the nuclear program: not just nuclear weapons; no nuclear enrichment, zero enrichment, that is not in the deal. Ballistic missiles ended, that is not in the deal.… In my opinion, the vice president of the United States, the chief negotiator on this particular project, has not well served the president.”

Ben Shapiro: This MOU appears to be a disaster that does not achieve any of the actual goals set by the administration at the beginning. The Vice President, the chief negotiator on this project has not well served the president. pic.twitter.com/pQWgnZOBLe

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 17, 2026

During a press conference Wednesday at the G7 summit, Trump was asked whether he planned to hold anyone accountable for the attack on a girls primary school in Minab that killed dozens of young girls between the ages of seven and 12.

“No, if it was a fault—and as you know that’s under investigation—it’s such a strange question to be asked at this state because we’re talking about a long time ago,” Trump said. “Nobody did that on purpose.”

A preliminary inquiry found that the strike was the result of using outdated intelligence. Trump seemed to suggest that because the strike had been made in error, there was no reason to punish anyone.

Clearly, a deadly mistake warrants a response, and failing to respond in a timely manner is not in itself an excuse for doing nothing. If Trump were a real leader who valued human life, this would be unacceptable.

Instead, Trump insisted that one would have to examine how many soldiers Iranians had killed and chalked it all up to the cost of doing business.

“No mistakes are made. Yeah, war is nasty. But I know it’s under investigation, I could have a report for you tomorrow,” Trump said, adding that the question would be better directed to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

NYT: Now that you're approaching a new phase in this conflict in this Iran, can you now say whether you will hold anyone in your administration accountable for the strike on a school that killed more than 100 children?

TRUMP: No. It's such a strange question to be asked. It's a… pic.twitter.com/vh0plTlYKZ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 17, 2026

More than 100 days after the strike in Minab, the DOD’s investigation is now complete and awaiting sign-off, military officials told The New York Times Tuesday. The report became delayed as a result of the slow-moving bureaucratic review process, the Pentagon’s efforts to save its own skin, and intelligence and targeting agencies that couldn’t believe their data could possibly be wrong.

“It is a little hard that when you say that somebody wants it, other people have it, other adjoining states have it, and you’re not letting them have it for purposes of electricity and things like that. It’s always a little tough. You have to use a little common sense,” Trump said at the G7 summit in France, alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

Trump leaves door open to Iran enriching: "It's a little hard when other people have it, other adjoining states have it, and you're not letting them have it for purposes of electricity and things like that. You have to use a little common sense." pic.twitter.com/oVfBz4nuI8

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 17, 2026

It seems to be a sharp departure from Trump’s previous claims during the war. After months of insisting that the purpose of the war was to get rid of any nuclear capability, demanding “zero enrichment,” Trump is now saying that the country can use nuclear power for electricity.

One wonders what Republicans in Congress—let alone the international community—will think of Trump’s latest concession. If a final peace deal between Iran and the U.S. doesn’t have any restrictions on the country’s nuclear program, it will be effectively worse than the 2015 JCPOA agreement with Iran.

That agreement was drafted not only between the U.S. and Iran, but the other members of the U.N. Security Council, including China, Russia, the U.K., and the European Union. This deal was negotiated without Congress even being aware of the details. Iran will likely be receiving $300 billion in reconstruction funds, and now they might have a nuclear program too. What did the Trump administration accomplish?

“We’ll be working on a parallel effort with the Gulf nations to address nonnuclear issues, such as [Iran’s] conventional ballistic missiles,” Trump said at the G7 summit on Wednesday. “I mean, they have to have some. Because other people have some. You gotta have some. Somebody said ‘You shouldn’t give them more … sir, you shouldn’t let them have any missile.’ … What am I gonna do? I’m gonna let Saudi Arabia have missiles, but they can’t have them?

“It doesn’t work that way,” Trump continued. “Missiles, they hurt a little location. But they don’t blow up the planet.”

Trump says that Iran "has to have" ballistic missiles, adding "what am I going to do? Am I going to let Saudi Arabia have missiles but they can't have them?" pic.twitter.com/32nPskhLpb

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 17, 2026

“One of the goals of Epic Fury, you said going into it, was to destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles and its capabilities to build more,” a reporter asked Trump moments later. “Why is it acceptable to you now that they keep some of that capability?”

“What are they keeping? They have less than other nations now. We knocked out probably 84, 85 percent of their missiles. The rest of them are underground; they can’t even get ’em out,” Trump replied. “They’re gonna have a hard time rebuilding.”

Trump’s memorandum of understanding with Iran secures virtually nothing he sought at the beginning of this war. The Strait of Hormuz was already open, and Iran wasn’t anywhere close to obtaining a nuclear bomb. Now, even as the Strait of Hormuz is set to reopen, it appears that the president is back at square one—all while allowing Iran to retain their missile stock that he claimed to have destroyed.

Reporter: One of the goals of Epic Fury was to destroy Iran's ballistic missiles. Why is it acceptable to you now that they keep some of that capability?

Trump: What are they keeping? They have less than other nations now. The rest of them are underground. They can't even get… pic.twitter.com/3LVPRJlRtE

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 17, 2026

The decision came Wednesday after Governor Brian Kemp called the legislature into a special session to do so ahead of the 2028 election. But Peach State lawmakers flouted Kemp’s demands, arguing that the executive had not given them enough time to shift the state’s voting maps.

“When the House learned that it was placed on the call for a special session, we knew it was not the right path forward for our state at this time. We believe that it is important to do things the Georgia way—responsibly, transparently, and with ample opportunity for public input,” said House Speaker Jon Burns during a press conference at the state Capitol.

In a letter to Kemp, Georgia House Republicans wrote that they would entertain changes to the state’s voting maps “only when members of the General Assembly and citizens have been given ample opportunity to gather the facts, provide input, and engage in meaningful discussion.”

The discussion does not seem to be dead in the water. Instead, state lawmakers are expected to revisit redistricting further down the road, according to Republican state Senate President Pro Tempore Larry Walker III.

“Because any changes to our current congressional or legislative districts would not go into effect until 2028, we believe it is prudent to take the appropriate and necessary time to do this important duty the right way and not to rush through it,” said Walker.

Kemp pressed the issue in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision, which struck down Louisiana’s maps on the charge that they were racially gerrymandered.

The Georgia legislature’s conclusion is a rejection of a national GOP movement, spearheaded by Donald Trump, to redistrict their locales in an attempt to carve out as many Republican seats in the House of Representatives as possible.

Several red states have already caved to the White House’s demands: Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Tennessee redrew their maps in time to affect the results of the 2026 midterm elections.

Yet not everyone has uniformly complied. Republican lawmakers in South Carolina and Indiana balked at the prospect, earning the president’s ire in the process.

The president admitted during a press conference at the G7 summit in France Wednesday that there is nothing enforceable in the drafted agreement, but rather that the constant threat of bombs should be enough to keep Iran committed to its terms.

“There’s nothing enforceable in the deal itself, is that correct?” asked a reporter.

“Doesn’t have to be,” Trump said wearily. “I let them know. I said, ‘Look, if you don’t adhere to the agreement—I don’t want to do that—but we’re going to bomb the hell out of you.’”

“And I don’t think that they’re going to veer from the agreement. What else am I going to do? I’m not going to say, ‘I’m going to take you to court,’” he mused. “‘Let me take you to court, let me sue you.’ No, we’re going to bomb the hell out of them if they violate the agreement.”

Q: On Iran, there's nothing enforceable in the deal itself, is that correct?

TRUMP: There doesn't have to be. I let them know. I said, 'Look, if you don't adhere to the agreement, we're gonna bomb the hell out of you.' pic.twitter.com/KbXPsLfU42

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 17, 2026

The text of the arrangement has not yet been made public, though both the White House and Tehran reportedly signed the deal on Sunday. U.S. officials read the American draft of the agreement to reporters after Trump’s press conference, but did not release the document. Iran has not released a draft.

The latest draft reportedly proposes the immediate reopening of the Strait of Hormuz under Iran’s direction, a commitment from the U.S. not to interfere in Iranian affairs, and a reiteration of Iran’s commitment not to produce nuclear weapons, echoing language included in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

One component of the plan has become the subject of much debate: a $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran, which was originally understood to be provided at cost to U.S. taxpayers. Top Trump officials have wavered on the specs of the fund—first claiming that Iran would receive no money, then practically confirming the fund, then backtracking again to claim that the aid package would be bankrolled by Iran’s regional neighbors and managed by the U.S.

The murky arrangement does not seem to include details on whether Iran will stop enriching its uranium—a highly anticipated component and one of the White House’s most pressing demands. Failing to obtain commitments regarding Iran’s nuclear program would make the deal far weaker than the Obama administration’s JCPOA.

New reporting from Axios Wednesday cast doubt on whether U.S. and Iranian leaders have actually signed Donald Trump’s deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

A senior administration official told reporters that the deal was signed electronically on Saturday by Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Mohammad Bagher, the speaker of Iran’s Parliament. However, a diplomatic source from one of the countries who helped mediate talks told Axios that signing had never taken place.

A second source familiar with the negotiations claimed the electronic signing had taken place. It wasn’t entirely clear, though, why a second signing was necessary.

The diplomatic source’s claim directly contradicts the U.S. administration’s characterization of a done deal, and comes amid widespread confusion about what the memorandum of understanding actually says.

The Trump administration has refused to release the final MOU until a formal signing ceremony takes place. The supposedly secondary signing was originally scheduled for Friday, but now the United States and Iran are discussing the possibility of moving that ceremony up.

On Monday, Trump said that the deal with Iran was “already signed and the strait is already partially opened,” but speaking at the G7 Summit on Wednesday, he claimed the deal would be signed “shortly, tomorrow, maybe the next day.”

“We’re going to most likely sign a deal,” Trump said, but seemed less than sure.

Trump’s peace deal with Iran is increasingly reminiscent of one of his fictional trade deals, built on big loose agreements and threats that backfire on Americans. It’s gotten so bad that U.S. negotiators have even begun making efforts to downplay the actual text of the deal, claiming it was political performance more than staunch commitments.

It’s not clear whether or not the deal is signed, but that could potentially explain all the secrecy and mixed messaging.

On Tuesday, the Department of Justice asked a judge to end the program in Evanston, Illinois, offering $25,000 to the descendants of the city’s Black residents who experienced housing discrimination between 1919 and 1969 due to city policies and ordinances. All residents who experienced housing discrimination in the city after 1969, regardless of race, also qualified for the program, which began in 2021.

The DOJ said in its court filing that the program was “racially discriminatory, calling it unconstitutional because it doles out different benefits based on race.

“There are sound ways for a city to remedy past discrimination or direct resources to its most vulnerable citizens and neighborhoods. Simply handing out money based on race, however, is not the answer,” said Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, in a statement.

In total, Evanston has allotted $20 million to the program, raised from a tax on legal marijuana, and $7 million has been distributed for use on down payments, home repairs, and paying interest or late penalties on property in the city.

But to the Trump administration, any acknowledgment of racial discrimination toward people of color, historical or present, is to be rejected as “wokeness” or “DEI.” If the government’s lawsuit succeeds in ending the program, it could prevent similar reparations programs from starting all over the country—regardless of whether they’re effective or not.

Just four days before the UFC event, Tycen Proper, 19, of Ohio, reportedly told federal agents that he and four other people planned to bomb the event using drones and then shoot people fleeing. He was hospitalized with homicidal ideations and charged along with other members of his group. They had collected weapons and ammunition, but the status of the drones is unclear.

The Department of Justice refers to Proper’s alleged plan as an “assassination plot” in its most recent legal defense for the White House ballroom the president has been insisting on building for weeks now. But Proper was charged with conspiracy to commit an offense against the U.S., attempted murder, firearm possession, and receipt or transfer of a firearm used to commit a felony—not assassination, as the DOJ claims.

“This latest assassination plot against President Trump and dignitaries at the White House demonstrates the compelling need for the East Wing Project, with a Ballroom designed to defend against just such,” the filing Tuesday reads.

This filing came on the same day that Vice President JD Vance described the planned UFC attack as “not that advanced,” placing even more doubt on the legitimacy of the administration’s filing claim.

This shameless argument also came on the same day that The Washington Post reported that half the cost of President Trump’s $600 million ballroom will be paid by U.S. taxpayers—even after promising the project would be “taxpayer free,” with no U.S. citizen paying even “10 cents.”

Buried in the Department of Justice’s massive trove of files on Epstein, an interview conducted by the FBI on June 19, 2020, included allegations that the president had previously used Trump Tower as a hunting ground for young women, RawStory reported Wednesday.

In the early 1990s, the woman worked at a luxury shoe store near Trump Tower, and would study in the building’s public atrium during her lunch breaks. One day, she met a colleague at the atrium who pointed out two men lurking nearby.

“[She] described one of the men was dark haired and looked like Antonio Banderas, while the other man was blonde and looked like the surfer type,” the FBI report stated. “Her colleague told her that the men constantly picked up [redacted] women.”

The woman was then approached by the dark-haired man, who struck up a conversation with her. “He asked if she knew who Donald Trump was and told her he was meeting people that day,” the report stated.

“[She] told the man that she knew who Trump was. The man asked if she wanted to meet Trump and told her that she did not need to work so hard to go to school,” the report stated. “The man winked and said he could do whatever she liked.”

“[She] felt that it was clear that sex was on the table, even though the man never mentioned sex,” the report stated. “[She] felt these men were playing the role of recruiters for Trump.”

“The man told her that if she did not want to meet Trump right then, she could go to a party. The man told her that she could bring a friend if the friend looked like her, but she could not bring a guy,” the report stated. The invitation for the party had Epstein’s address on it, the woman told the FBI.

When she declined the invites, she said she began receiving death threats. “The threats consisted of the men saying that they knew where she worked and could find her. [She] never told the police because she did not think they would believe her,” the report stated. They never approached her again.

Over the next six months, the woman saw the two men continue to approach young women in the atrium at Trump Tower. She saw “girls, usually blondes, approximately 15/16 years old with one of the two men and saw them get on an escalator,” the report stated. She never saw anyone meet with Trump.

The woman also recalled a story from another woman who worked in Trump Tower, whose daughter had been brought up to meet Trump while she waited for her mother to get off of work. Later, that second woman claimed that “something horrible happened to her daughter that day.”

“The daughter had dropped out of school, got into drugs, and committed suicide,” the woman told the FBI.

While the interview was taken in June 2020, it was not officially filed until January 2021.

This is just the latest allegation against the president to be uncovered from the Department of Justice’s massive cache of documents on Epstein, the alleged sex trafficker. Still, former Attorney General Pam Bondi insisted that there was “no evidence” that Trump had committed any crime—adding to the growing pile of denials from Trump officials that constitute a sweeping cover-up of the president’s alleged wrongdoing.

Senators are threatening to cut off Hegseth’s travel budget until the Pentagon provides more details about the deadly U.S. strike that hit a school full of children on February 28, Politico reported Wednesday.

At the time, Pentagon intel had led them to believe that the school was actually an Iranian base. It was not. The DOD initially did not take responsibility for the strike.

The vast majority of the 175 people killed in the strikes were children, according to Iranian officials.

Senators have also asked Hegseth to turn over all the video footage of his department’s bombing campaign against small boats in the Caribbean, for which the death toll recently surpassed 205 people.

The U.S. has been attacking boats off the coast of Venezuela since September 2, in what it claims is a broad effort to stamp out drug smuggling into the U.S. By December, Hegseth and State Secretary Marco Rubio confessed during a classified meeting that there was no intelligence indicating that fentanyl was coming out of Venezuela. Instead the administration had learned the boats were carrying cocaine—bound for Europe, rather than America.

“That is a massive waste of national security resources and your taxpayer dollars,” Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy said at the time.

The details of Hegseth’s punishment were folded into a Senate Armed Services Committee’s defense policy bill, specifying that Congress would withhold 75 percent of his travel budget until lawmakers received adequate documentation for the aforementioned atrocities.

It’s the second such time that lawmakers have tried this gambit. Late last year, lawmakers passed defense legislation that cut a quarter of Hegseth’s travel budget under similar demands. The raised stakes, however, suggest that lawmakers did not get what they asked for.

Even Trump’s MAGA allies in the upper chamber seem disgruntled with the Pentagon’s lack of transparency. They’ve complained that Defense officials have kept them in the dark about major national security decisions—a frustration only further intensified by the administration’s cloaked proceedings around the Iran peace deal.

In a sworn statement in federal court, the DOD’s chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, Cameron Stanley, defended the chatbot’s existence as a “a matter of paramount national security,” saying that it was used to fire “2,000 munitions at 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours” in the Iran war.

Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI is being sued by the NAACP in Mississippi for allegedly running at least 57 gas-burning turbines to power its Colossus 2 data center without the necessary permits or pollution controls required by the Clean Air Act. Stanley issued his statement as part of the federal government’s effort to get the lawsuit tossed out on national security grounds.

It’s the first time that the Trump administration has admitted to using Musk’s AI in the Iran war, following reports that the military may have used AI targeting in its bombing of a girls’ school in Minab, Iran, that killed at least 175 people. Last year, the DOD awarded xAI a $200 million federal contract to install “Grok for Government” into its systems, ignoring a laundry list of issues with the platform.

Grok has often gone on antisemitic rants; it has pushed debunked claims of white genocide in South Africa, insulted X CEO Linda Yaccarino with sexual comments, and been used to generate explicit photos of women and children. Other government agencies even see the tool as a security risk. Why, then, is the DOD defending its existence and continued use for the military?

Within days of the pool’s refilling, the green algae hasn’t just returned but is having a “field day” thanks to high phosphate levels in the water, according to an algae researcher at the Smithsonian who spoke with CNN Tuesday.

CNN sampled and tested some of the pool’s water with the help of a swimming pool store. They found that the water contained phosphate levels “far higher than what is recommended to keep algae at bay,” based on estimates for a pool that holds 6.5 million gallons of water.

The Department of the Interior has so far blamed the algae’s resurgence, in part, on residual algae that had accumulated in the pool’s pipes—which it apparently neglected to clean as part of the multimillion-dollar restoration.

Washington’s hot and humid weather has also contributed to the bloom, as the Trump administration filled the Reflecting Pool with fresh water and, consequently, more oxygen. By the weekend, the green, plantlike form had coated the bottom of the pool in several areas and floated to the surface.

Now park workers are throwing darts at the wall trying to clean up the monument in time for America’s semiquincentennial. On Tuesday, hi-vis park workers were spotted dumping gallons of hydrogen peroxide into the Reflecting Pool. A close-up of their equipment revealed that they were using a 12 percent concentrate, a level that can cause problems if inhaled and burns if the chemical touches the skin, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Hydrogen peroxide is generally considered less environmentally destructive as its compounds readily break down in water, but the high concentration could nonetheless pose a risk to some of the pool’s frequent visitors, such as ducks or other birds.

Photojournalists also snapped shots of buckets of Induclor around the memorial, a chlorine compound used to control bacteria, algae, slime, and fungi in water, reported The Washington Post.

Fixing the Reflecting Pool is a headache that’s plagued pretty much every administration since its construction in 1923, because what makes the Reflecting Pool beautiful is exactly what makes it so difficult to maintain.

The pool’s expansive length is possible due to the use of multiple large concrete slabs at its bottom. But those slabs are also prone to serious, structural leaks, which requires the White House to replace roughly 16 million gallons of water each year. And the pool’s shallow depth—which creates its mirror-like appearance—also detracts from the pool’s health by creating a breeding ground for algal blooms that turn the water green.

“I met him early in the campaign when Crooked Hillary and I were running against each other, right, and I was told that the president of Egypt is here. That was a big deal. It’s still a big deal for me to be with the great president of Egypt, but not as big as it used to be before I ran. So he was in a hotel and I met him, and we fell in love. Deeply in love,” Trump said, while seated next to the Egyptian leader. “And he didn’t even want to see Hillary. He said, ‘You’re going to win, I don’t want to meet her. You’re going to win.’ He didn’t want to see her, remember that? So we had a good relationship right from there.… We had great chemistry, and I stayed twice as long as I was supposed.”

Sisi has long supported Trump, from the infamous picture of him, the president, Melania Trump, and King Salman of Saudi Arabia touching a glowing orb in 2017 to his current role promoting the Trump administration’s plans in the Middle East. He has been accused of employing torture and forced disappearances, as well as discrimination against the LGBTQ community, by multiple human rights groups.

Trump on Egyptian President el-Sisi: "He was in a hotel and I met him. We fell in love, deeply in love ... we didn't know each other before that. We had great chemistry, and I stayed twice as long as I was supposed to." pic.twitter.com/jSJyt8eIik

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 17, 2026

Speaking at the G7 summit Wednesday, Trump desperately tried to make his peace deal seem better than Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

“He tried to bribe his way out, I didn’t do that,” the president said. “Nobody mentions that. $1.7 billion and hundreds of millions of dollars, they tried to bribe their way out of it. And you know what the Iranians did? They laughed at Obama, and said he’s a stupid son of a bitch.”

Trump: "You know what the Iranians did? They laughed at Obama and they said he's a stupid son of a bitch." pic.twitter.com/2l712bUV2d

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 17, 2026

Projecting much? Obama’s previous nuclear deal with Iran unfroze a now meager-looking $1.7 billion. Now Trump wants to write Tehran a bigger check.

A leaked draft of the 14-point memorandum of understanding detailed the billions the U.S. would provide in financial relief for Iran—including a $300 billion investment fund for reconstruction in Tehran. Vice President JD Vance confirmed Monday that a $300 billion investment fund was included in the deal, but he walked back the claim just hours later, while Trump and the White House outright denied it.

Here’s why the investment fund matters: If such a fund does exist, that means that Trump will have spent hundreds of billions of dollars and killed thousands of civilians (including children) to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon that it wasn’t even building in the first place.

All of this would be cleared up if the White House would just release the text of the MOU. It’s hard not to imagine that if the deal was any good for the U.S., it would’ve released it right away.

Donald Trump cancelled the Senate confirmation hearing for Jay Clayton via a Truth Social post Wednesday, just hours before it was set to take place. Trump had tapped Clayton earlier this month to run the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, in place of acting Director Bill Pulte. Democrats had argued that even temporarily appointing Pulte, a housing regulator, was illegal, since he had no national security experience to bring to the job. (For the record, neither does Clayton.)

As a result, Democrats completely stalled negotiations over FISA Section 702, a statute that allows federal agencies such as the NSA and the CIA to surveil foreigners on U.S. soil without warrants. But even without Pulte’s name in the mix, negotiations had stalled over the FISA section as both chambers failed to pass an extension.

And Trump has undoubtedly only made matters worse by involving himself in the process. In a lengthy rant Wednesday, Trump baselessly lamented that Republicans had advanced Clayton’s nomination without any concrete assurances from Democrats. He then hitched the FISA section’s renewal onto his Save America Act, which Republicans have warned him dozens of times has no chance of passing the Senate. That legislation hinges on Trump’s conspiracy theory that noncitizens are voting (against him) in U.S. elections.

“Now, the Dumocrats are saying they will vote against FISA—So, the Republicans wound up having fulfilled their commitment, but Dumocrats broke the Deal,” Trump wrote. “Therefore, to add a slight bit of intrigue but, for the Good of the Nation, and the People of our Country, I will not approve FISA without THE SAVE AMERICA ACT going along with it. Not complicated, actually, the Republicans fell into a trap.”

The Save America Act sparked nationwide controversy earlier this year, particularly over a detail in the bill that would have made it more difficult for married women to vote. The backlash on Capitol Hill was grave, so much so that it gummed up efforts to fund Homeland Security for several months. Republicans eventually had to bail on the package to end the congressional gridlock.

The Save America Act suggests numerous amendments to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, including line items that would abolish mail-in voting, require voters to bring proof of citizenship and proof of residency to register to vote, require voter ID, and mandate voter roll purges every 30 days, an enormous bureaucratic task that would place undue burdens on local election officials. The measure would also add a federal law to prevent men from competing in women’s sports, and a ban on “transgender mutilation surgery.”

Trump noted that the pause on Clayton’s Senate confirmation would also interrupt the rest of the pipeline: in the meantime, Pulte would remain as the acting DNI, while Jamie McDonald—a litigation partner at law firm Sullivan & Cromwell—would wait to replace Clayton as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Senator Tom Cotton, who chairs the chamber’s intelligence committee, ignored the president’s bluster. He noted on his X account that the president’s influence did not extend to the Senate confirmation hearing process.

“Jay Clayton is a pending nominee before the Intelligence Committee,” Cotton wrote. “We will proceed with his hearing as scheduled unless the president directs him not to appear or withdraws his nomination.”

But by Wednesday afternoon, Cotton had postponed Clayton’s hearing, writing that the decision was “regrettable” and “unfortunate” and that the proceedings would continue in the near future.

Amidst the chaotic back and forth, committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner snarked to Punchbowl News: “I am not sure whether Jay Clayton has been simply postponed or withdrawn. I’m not sure Jay Clayton knows.”

This story has been updated.

CNN reported Wednesday that the deal consists of a 14-point memorandum of understanding, which it obtained from a U.S. official. The points include the terms of the ceasefire, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, and details about billions in financial relief for Iran.

However, White House Director of Communications Steven Cheung denied the CNN report’s accuracy, posting on X that “The supposed text of the MOU that was obtained by CNN does not reflect the language of the actual MOU.” President Trump also issued his own denial Wednesday when reporters asked about the inclusion of a plan for the U.S. and Gulf allies to “ensure financing of at least $300 billion” in reconstruction funds.

“It’s false. People, you can invest if you want. What am I gonna do, say nobody’s ever allowed to invest? We’re not invest[ing]—we’re not putting up 10 cents. People can decide to do that, but that’s up to them,” Trump said at the G7 summit in France, seated alongside Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El Sisi. “We are not investing in it, and we do not have a fund.”

Trump also denied that Gulf countries were investing in the fund, and added that the CNN report was a “false story that got picked up incorrectly from a statement that was pretty well made, I think.”

Q: It's been reported the MOU includes a $300 billion reconstruction fund funded by Gulf allies.

TRUMP: It's false. You can invest if you want. We're not putting up 10 cents.

Q: Are you asking Gulf countries to--

TRUMP: No I'm not. If they do it, that's fine. Don't forget --… pic.twitter.com/2TmhtR8eW6

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 17, 2026

Bloomberg also obtained a copy of the draft memorandum, which U.S. officials are not attacking, although an unnamed Iranian official told the country’s Tasnim news agency that parts of it were inaccurate. It contains similar language regarding $300 billion in reconstruction funds for Iran. Both versions also promise that the U.S. will release additional billions in frozen Iranian assets.

Until the official terms are released to the public, we won’t know for sure if any funds will be transferred, or what assurances are being made to ensure that the war doesn’t resume. Trump could easily clear this all up by releasing the signed agreement in full, but for now, he’s content to attack the media and leave everyone guessing.

The president made the hawkish comments while touting the agreement at the G7 summit in France on Wednesday morning.

“Is the text of the agreement final?” a reporter asked.

“No, it’s not final. It’s a memorandum of understanding. And if I don’t like it, we’ll go back to shooting at ’em—dropping bombs on their head. If I don’t like it, if they don’t behave, we’ll go right back to dropping bombs right smack in the middle of their head,” Trump replied. “Because they’ve misbehaved for 47 years, alright?”

Q: Is the text of the agreement final?

TRUMP: No, it's not final. It's a memorandum of understand, and if I don't like it, we'll go back to shooting at them, dropping bombs right smack in the middle of their head pic.twitter.com/F7JHHNfGDC

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 17, 2026

Then he began to gloat about how great the deal was, just seconds after threatening to inflict more violence on Iran.

“Nobody could’ve made this deal. The JCPOA done by Obama … he gave ’em $1.7 billion in cash—green cash, from banks—into a Boeing 757 and flew it into Iran,” he continued. “He tried to bribe his way out. I didn’t do that.… And you know what the Iranians did? They laughed at Obama and they said he’s a stupid son of a bitch.”

Leaked versions of Trump’s memorandum of understanding suggest the U.S. has promised Iran access to $300 billion in reconstruction funds and billions more in currently frozen Iranian assets.

In return, Iran will reopen the Strait of Hormuz and commit to no nuclear weapons development—two points that already existed before Trump went to war in February. And what does it say about Trump’s belief in an eventual deal if he’s already threatening to drop bombs if the whole thing falls through?

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

JD Vance is having a moment. He’s selling his new book and he just appeared on The View, where the hosts worked him over pretty hard. In a telling exchange, Vance found himself defending Trump in the context of the Iran war in a way that will come back to bite him later.

Indeed, there are several other signs that Trumpworld is setting up Vance to take the eventual fall on Iran in a number of different ways. New leaks from inside the administration are making Trump’s Iran deal look even worse, and they’re also shedding light on what this shivving of Vance really entails.

We’re talking about it all with one of the best observers out there of the intersection between politics and culture, New Republic contributing editor Virginia Heffernan. Hey, Virginia, always nice to have you on.

Virginia Heffernan: Hey, Greg, same here. I like being on the show.

Sargent: Well, we like that. So let’s start with JD Vance’s appearance on The View. He took a hammering on a number of fronts. I want to highlight one exchange, though. They’re talking about inflation. JD says, We’re doing all we can. Then one of the hosts points out that Trump recently said, I love the inflation. Listen to this.

JD Vance (voiceover): We’re doing a lot to make it better. It’s going to take a little bit of time. There’s a lot more work to do. But the president knows that a lot of Americans are struggling. In fact, he ran on that, he talked about it, and we’ve done some things and made some good progress on that point.

Ana Navarro (voiceover): He just said he loves the inflation.

Vance (voiceover): What he said, Ana, what he said is that he loves the fact that the inflation is going to come down when this war is over. That’s what he said.

Joy Behar (voiceover): Are you his—wait, are you his interpreter or are you his vice president?

Vance (voiceover): Well, look—what the president said—people were asking about the inflation, they were asking about the affordability problem, which, again, is very real. And what he said is, I love the inflation because it’s going to come down when the war is over.

Sargent: Joy Behar got a good dig in there saying that Vance is just functioning basically as Trump’s propagandist and not leveling with people, although she said it in a way that kind of kept it light. Virginia, what did you make of the exchange?

Heffernan: I don’t know, do people still say “mogged?” I do think that JD Vance got mogged by the women of The View. They were all on top of him. He had said on Fox News the day before, or maybe earlier this morning, that he was trying to prepare for a civil conversation, but he knew he was going into the lion’s den.

The inflation question is going to be really interesting to View viewers. JD Vance has this book come out about his Christian faith, about his Catholic faith, and he really wants everyone to focus on his religious journey because he believes that he can bond with the suburban women who sometimes lean Republican, especially on issues like crime, and he might get to them by The View.

So he wasn’t going into the lion’s den for no reason. He was going into it to promote a book. And they gave the QR code so you could buy the book at the end. They did their part. And they gave him a onesie for his forthcoming newborn that says The View on it. But—

Sargent: I have to ask—do you think that JD Vance and Usha are going to put that onesie on their baby?

Heffernan: I was wondering about that. Maybe that was just another mog moment; we’ll brand you with The View, brand your baby. We don’t want to get too symbolic about it, but there was a lot going on and it’s a lot to watch.

And Whoopi and some of the other hosts of color were especially incensed and didn’t give any ground. And there was something satisfying about seeing that, because we’ve seen Trump attack so many women over and over again in interviews, walk out of interviews, call women “nasty,” call them “piggy,” call them whatever. And so just saying, We’re not really going to entertain the idea that there’s a kumbaya here with you, and making it very clear with their expressions that they weren’t going to entertain it.

Sargent: JD was really on his best behavior, though. We should point that out. What do you think of the inflation exchange? Because I want to clarify for people that the inflation exchange is really about inflation from the war.

That’s what Trump was talking about when he said, I love the inflation. It maneuvered Vance into a position where he was essentially forced to defend what Trump said there. What did you make of the exchange?

Heffernan: So what Vance says is he didn’t mean he loves the inflation, he meant, I love that the inflation is going to go down after the war. For some reason, everything these days is reminding me of this moment in The Simpsons. I can’t remember what season it is, but Krusty the Clown or someone who’s trying to kill Bart has “Die Bart Die” tattooed on his chest. And when it’s revealed—“Die Bart Die”—he says, No, this is just German. “Die Bart Die.”

And I love that because no, he didn’t say I love the inflation. He said I love that the inflation is going down. “Die Bart Die.” There’s no way that that’s what he was saying. Everybody knows that’s not what he was saying. For JD Vance to introduce doublespeak, to introduce propaganda, really shows how he’s on his back foot.

Sargent: I want to add something about that exchange as well. As you say, it’s a stretch, as Vance said, that Trump was claiming that he loves the fact that inflation will come down after the war. I think Trump was more saying, I don’t give a shit about the inflation because the problem’s going to magically go away because I say it is, and that’s it, and you should make it go away in your head. That’s what he actually meant.

But seriously, there’s another vulnerability here, which is that Vance is tying himself to the idea that costs will come down significantly after the war. In other words, he’s endorsing that idea and aligning himself with it. That’s going to take a while. Whatever actually happens with costs, I’m not sure the public’s going to feel good about costs anytime soon.

So Vance has been maneuvered into a position where he’s tied to defending that big, big, big thing about the Trump term, which is a very, very tough thing to defend.

Heffernan: It’s asking people to pay more for groceries in exchange for some foreign policy goal that keeps shifting, that we don’t understand. And that, frankly, the administration did nothing to gin up support for.

We don’t even have a narrative about why we’re in Iran. They weren’t building nukes—or were they? Nobody is following this enriched uranium conversation or whatever JD Vance is saying this new Iran deal is, which sounds like the last, or good, Iran deal, except worse.

Nobody understands what we’re doing there, just as they didn’t understand Venezuela and they didn’t understand the first attack on Iran. This has not been sold to the American people, and yet we’re asked to make a sacrifice for it. We’re asked to pay more for groceries while he keeps telling us affordability is a hoax and that he loves inflation. This is the signature piece of foreign policy, clearly.

It reads to the American people as, We’ve gone to war for Israel and we don’t know why. Nobody has a stake in figuring out this nuclearized Iran because we keep not understanding it. The only thing we understand is we’re paying more, something about the Strait of Hormuz, and this is all Trump’s fault. We have then no faith in him. There’s not even a strong base that’s trying to spin up support for it. What they just say back is, It’s a hoax, or, You’re nasty for asking questions about it.

Sargent: A hundred percent. There are clear signs that Vance is getting set up now to take the fall for the Iran deal if it goes south. Axios reports that CIA Director John Ratcliffe told Trump and other top officials that the intel agencies seriously doubt that Iran will ultimately make the concessions that Trump will demand in terms of constraints on its nuclear enrichment program.

This is a really key thing. I want to read it: “In internal discussions, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth both expressed concerns and raised questions about the memorandum of understanding announced Sunday, while Vance and U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner advocated for it, according to two of the sources.”

Virginia, that’s strongly suggestive. People around Trump who expect—rightly—that he’s going to have serious trouble pinning Iran down when the talks on nukes get going, want it very clear that Vance internally rooted for this deal. We’re talking here about people who are sympathetic to Hegseth and Rubio. What do you make of that?

Heffernan: As you said before, I think he’s being shivved. The person who is least confident in Trump’s decisions around foreign policy—as we’ve seen from his past disputes with Trump and Hegseth, and pretty aggressive, meaningful isolationism—is having to defend those things and then babble about how bad Obama was, about whatever comes into his head, because the details of the deal have never been fully exposed. We don’t know what they are.

But we don’t even know what our objective is. The objective of the first deal was to prevent supposedly breakout capacity from Iran so that they couldn’t turn what they had into nukes. That was a deal that the UN was invested in with its nonproliferation treaty. It was a deal that Iran was ultimately invested in because it got a lot of goodies, and that it complied with.

But now, are we trying to prevent breakout capacity? What’s the time horizon? What are the things that an ordinary diplomat would ask about with this deal? No, it’s just Trump trying to humiliate people or be humiliated himself.

Iran has gone to psychologists to say, what is it like to deal with—remember with Nixon, he was exercising the madman option? Well, Trump’s madman-ness is nonoptional. He is a madman. He’s not choosing, Am I going to act like a madman? He just is.

This isn’t a question of Democrats saying, He’s crazy. This is a question of, if you are negotiating with this person, how do you talk to an actually insane person? How do you flatter his ego, do XYZ? Iran is very likely to get away with some pretty hideous things with JD Vance scrambling to defend him, being shivved by the president, and the president himself insane. And Hegseth pretty insane.

Sargent: To pick up on this idea of JD Vance getting shivved and this idea that you mentioned of Vance being somewhat of a skeptic of this stuff—he’s getting screwed in two ways. Not only was he initially skeptical of this thing, but now he’s got to be the one to defend the deal in a more frontal way than anyone else.

Everybody knows that vice presidents are on the hook for that as a general matter. They’re supposed to go out and take a lot of shit for the president. That’s just part of the role. Everyone knows that. And now he’s got to go out there and defend this deal when everyone knows it’s a complete joke and nobody else has to be as frontal as him.

Heffernan: It really would be Marco Rubio who should be talking about it. But Trump is way more threatened by JD Vance’s future career than he is by Little Marco’s. And so he wants Vance out there and he wants Vance to have to do the doublespeak that he’s getting him to do.

Also speak for something that he doesn’t know about, because nobody has seen this deal. This deal is like Pam Bondi’s, I have the list of Epstein’s people on my desk. There may be a piece of yellow paper with some Sharpie scribbles on it, but we don’t know what this piece of supposed diplomacy is.

He’s just going to end up making no sense. It’s like hang Mike Pence. The version of hang Mike Pence for now is hang JD Vance out to dry.

Sargent: Very well put. There are more signs of Vance getting set up here. Joe Perticone of The Bulwark highlighted a number of statements from Trump-friendly people. For instance, Senator Lindsey Graham, who’s a staunch Trump ally, described Vance as “the architect of the deal.” Very, very clear. This is Vance’s deal, says Senator Lindsey Graham, who probably hates the deal and thinks it’s going to fall apart later. That’s a key point.

Senator Lindsey Graham, who’s a real Iran hawk—I hate that phrase, but whatever—he’s an Iran hawk who expects this deal to not produce any real results later. And he’s saying that JD Vance is the architect of this deal which will fall apart later. That really screws him.

Trump himself recently said that JD Vance will probably be at the signing ceremony instead of him. We’ll see how that pans out, but it’s really obvious where all the arrows are pointing.

Heffernan: I don’t think Lindsey Graham cares about getting out of Iran. He probably would be happy with forever war. It seems to be his sweet spot, and certainly Pete Hegseth’s. But Trump does have trouble on his hands if this—every day this war continues, it’s expensive. It’s very, very, very unpopular.

He wants a way to back out of it, but he doesn’t want to make something called “the Iran deal,” because an Iran deal is supposedly what made Obama seem effete, seem like a globalist, seem like he didn’t understand hard power. So here he is making an Iran deal in order to back out of the optional war of choice that he started for no reason to get attention.

Sargent: Trump wants it to be Iran’s surrender. That’s what he wants.

Heffernan: He wants an Iran surrender and they are not—there is no white flag from Iran. The other thing is: We haven’t had this open collision with Iran ever. We’re starting to see their cards. And they have played the propaganda war very well. The Lego videos have mostly been taken down, but those were really influential. And “Your Government Is Run by Pedophiles,” their hit song of the summer—you can still find that. It was on Spotify and rising up the ranks.

Americans have paradoxically acquired at least some understanding, if not sympathy, for Iran. For Iran being a closed rogue state, defined as the most hated nation on earth for all this time, and suddenly people have started to think, There’s schoolgirls there. There’s schoolgirls that were killed by a bomb. The consequences of this for geopolitics are going to be felt forever. And it’s just on somebody’s whim. What a nightmare.

Sargent: You raise a really interesting point there. There’s the global economy as well, which is going to continue to be in a really ailing state because of all this.

Let’s spool this forward and see what it looks like. So down the line, maybe Trump reaches this stupendous deal with Iran in two to three months before the midterms. I don’t think that’s likely. I think it’s more likely to drag out and the Iranians have every incentive to drag it right up to the midterms to hurt Trump as much as possible.

We start to get into next year, and then that’s when the presidential race starts. At that point, Trump is really checked out. He’s passing from the scene. And so next year you’ve got JD Vance as the frontman to defend all of the legacy of the Iran war.

We’re talking about the global economy. We’re talking about potential trouble that they run into with getting Iran to constrain its nuke program. We’re talking about the money that’s going to start flowing to Iran—which, when Obama did that, was this huge betrayal of America according to Trump. How does Vance manage all this in, I don’t know, March or April of next year?

Heffernan: As you point out, there are Republicans who hate the Iran deal and want to see it fail, like Lindsey Graham, because they’re hawks, because they are really invested in this idea of Iran as a rogue state in opposition to Israel as a democracy and an ally in the region—which has also shifted in popular imagination, yet that’s something that a Lindsey Graham is going to hold on to. So you have old-school Republican hawks who are going to hate that there’s a deal at all.

Then you have people for whom the deal is bound to fail. At very least, even when you talk about this perfect deal idea—the first Iran deal was close, it was a B-plus as a deal at least—it takes a while to bear fruit. You can call it a failure at any given time because you could say, Well, they’ll have this breakout capacity in 10 years, 15 years, we should have gotten it in perpetuity. They can always be flexing. We can suddenly be like, The uranium is enriched to 68 percent, so it’s a failure.

There’s absolutely no way that an Iran deal of any kind is going to play as a success with the American people. The only way that this could come to a soft landing for them is if prices go steeply down, if affordability goes up, if the strait is completely open and free, and if we have a complete surrender by Iran. And none of that is possible either.

So they’re not going to get there. Jamelle Bouie says that they reiterate the logic of domination in these wars. What they want to see is Iran crying in pain. That seems like a fool’s errand. It’s not a very Iranian position. They have shown that they’re refusing to do that.

This is an impossible position. JD Vance is so in a corner. It’s impossible for him to make a friend. Tucker Carlson is just going to hold him responsible. Tucker Carlson, who hates this war, who broke with Trump over this war, who begged Trump not to go to war, and now opposes Trump and is sort of the leader of this particular—maybe running for office himself, right? We shouldn’t rule that out.

If JD Vance had been able to stay with Tucker Carlson and have that group of people on his side, he might have had a chance in 2028. But you know what it is? He’s tarred with the brush of the war and he’s tarred with the brush of the deal. That’s as bad as it gets. Both things are going to cling to him and both things are huge failures.

Sargent: Just to really boil this down, basically every major element of the MAGA coalition will dislike whatever emerges here, so they’ll dislike Vance for it. And all the constituencies that Republicans, especially Trumpy Republicans like JD Vance, need to win majorities—young people, working-class nonwhites—they’ll also hate it. So that’s where Vance is.

Heffernan: That’s where Vance is. I’m not going to say I feel sorry for him, but just strategically, he is in a very, very bad spot. I don’t see a way out of it for him. I don’t see where his reputation is at the end of this.

Sargent: I don’t either. Virginia Heffernan, awesome to talk to you. Thank you so much.

Heffernan: Thank you.

Alex Shephard: I’ve always wanted to say that our guest needs no introduction, but I have never been able to do so, because it has never been true. But now it is. Our guest is Michael Tomasky, the editor of The New Republic. Michael has written a funny, biting new novel, Killing Baby Hitler, that is more or less about just that, although it is a little more complicated. Set in a dystopian 2141, the world in the future looks a lot like ours, just worse; divided into spheres of political influence and ravaged by climate change. A group of scientists discover time travel, and they go back to late nineteenth-century Austria to try to set their worlds right by killing baby Hitler. What follows is a sharp and sometimes scathing satire, and a novel that hopscotches between genres— speculative sci-fi, thriller. It’s also just a fun and funny novel. I’m joined by my colleagues Emily Cooke and Kirsten Denker, and also Michael Tomasky. Welcome.

Michael Tomasky: Hey, that was great, thanks.

Alex: I was wondering if we can start just by talking about the genesis for the novel itself. When did you get this idea, and when did you start to work through it?

Michael: I seem to remember that I got the idea in late 2022 and I don’t remember exactly how. It just popped into my head one morning, I think, while I was exercising. The question obviously isn’t original to me. I did go and immediately Google to see if anybody had written a book about it. I didn’t turn up who anyone had, although I have subsequently been told that none other than Stephen Fry wrote a novel that was built around this idea back in 1996. I looked it up: It’s true, Michiko Kakutani absolutely savaged it in The New York Times. I haven’t even bothered to read it, because I’m just going to live with the idea that mine might actually be funnier than Stephen Fry’s. So anyway, I had the idea late 2022; it was my New Year’s resolution to sit down on New Year’s Day and just start writing and see what came out and see what happened. I was immediately confronted by the reality, which I hadn’t thought of, I admit, that if I’m going to write a novel about time travel, it probably needs to be set in the future when time travel might theoretically be plausible. So I just kind of picked 2141 randomly out of the air, and that’s when it’s set.

Then I realized I have to build this world of 2141. You referenced how dystopian it is, although the idea, for example, that men like Peter Thiel or his heirs literally own countries, which is the case in my novel—that seemed a lot more far-fetched in early 2023, when I was writing that bit, than it seems now. So anyway, I created this world of 2141, and then the characters travel back to 1889 Austria, or at least two of them do, so I had to create that world. I actually did a lot of reading and research about that world. It’s a novel, so I make a lot of stuff up, but a lot of it is grounded in reality, too. Then of course there’s the question of whether they succeed and so on, but we’re not going to give that away.

Emily Cooke: I’m curious—it’s essentially a comic novel. I found it really funny, but of course it describes all these very disturbing developments, not least the division of the world into these horrifying spheres owned by the mega-rich. Of course, it’s fiction, and also tonally it’s quite different from the sort of thing that you’re doing every day as the editor of this magazine and as a writer. I was wondering, was that difference part of the motivation to write it? Did you want a relief from the work that you normally do, or was there some way that engaging with this different form that performed that function for you?

Michael: Yeah, it’s a really good question. In some ways it was a release from what I do, and from thinking about Donald Trump for 14 hours a day, and it was fun. I wrote it in this chair where I’m sitting, and I would come down here on Saturday morning at 7 o’clock before other people in my house were awake and start pounding it out, and I had a lot of fun writing it and letting my imagination run in that way. At the same time, it wasn’t that different from the work I and we do at TNR. It’s still a pretty political novel, as we’ve already established, and it deals in a lot of the stuff that we all have to think about, the way the world is turning very dark on us very fast. I wrote an exaggerated version of that, and it was fun to write, but it’s also sort of frightening to think about the fact that the world that I conjure up in 2141 (and there’s another section that’s in the 2060s) is also really bad. My own daughter will still be alive then, presumably, so it was kind of unsettling in some ways too.

Kirsten Denker: You were saying how between your writing it and it being published, some things are actually seemingly a little bit less absurd than they were when you wrote them. I copyedited this book, but I also gave it another little read to sort of refresh my mind on the details before this session, and the thing that jumped out at me was this moment where you wrote about the Republicans’ decision to raze the Lincoln Memorial and build the Nathan Bedford Forrest mixed martial arts arena, and I think when I copyedited it just in October, that was a funny joke. Now it’s not so funny, actually. It’s a little like, Gosh, we’re living this now. Were you expecting that when you wrote it?

Michael: Not in the least, Kirsten, and that’s pretty on the nose, all right. I’m kind of proud of having come up with that. Based on where it is in the book, I must have written that in the first half of 2023. This is describing an American Republican Party in the late 2040s. Nathan Bedford Forrest, of course, was a Confederate general, so they tear down the Lincoln Memorial, they decide to build something that they name after a Confederate general, and it’s a mixed martial arts arena. Of course at that point I had no idea that Donald Trump was going to be president again, let alone have the kind of celebration that he had the weekend of his birthday and building an MMA octagon on the White House grounds. So yeah, I nailed that one.

Alex: I gotta say, he was also the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. I don’t want to shift gears too much away from the politics, but there are a lot of funny cultural references. One of the things that stood out to me is you have a riff about the Beatles not existing in the post-world. I was wondering how you came across those. Were there just things that your own personal cultural interests would make you say, Would Paul McCartney exist in this alternate version of the 1960s? How did you come up with them?

Michael: That was one of the most fun things about the book. I’ll give this much away. The people who go back to kill the infant Hitler botch the job and don’t succeed. However, he does not become the Adolf Hitler we all came to know and hate in history. His life takes a very different course, and he indeed becomes somebody else, so there being no Hitler, history changes a lot, and so I have some sections toward the end of the novel that talk about those changes, and that was probably the most fun part of it to write. I don’t want to give away too much of what happens and doesn’t happen, but there is no World War II, there is no Holocaust. Interestingly, in Stephen Fry’s novel, the Nazi Party found somebody who was even more diabolical and powerful and intoxicating than Hitler, so it became worse. In my version, the Hitler-less Nazi party is nothing, and Joseph Goebbels is a history professor and a writer of novels—he did, in fact, write novels in his life—and Goering ran a flying circus—he was still a World War I hero, as he was in real life, he’s still a World War I hero in the non-Hitler reality—but never became a Nazi. The Nazi Party existed but was a minor thing.

So I had a lot of fun with stuff like that, and then, to get the Beatles in this reality, John Lennon and Paul McCartney didn’t meet on the fateful day, they met in July of 1957, they both separately formed bands. They met later as competing leaders of two local Liverpool bands, and they hated each other because they sensed prodigious talent in each other. So the Beatles never happened, and that had reverberations for Bob Dylan and for the rest of the culture, and it was just a ton of fun to write that stuff.

Kirsten: I especially like the bit about—was it Paul McCartney’s brother being in the loo too long?

Michael: Yeah, those kinds of details were just really fun to write. I’ll just add that there was a President Roosevelt in this non-Hitler reality, but he was a two-term president. Another American political figure becomes the dominant figure of the mid-twentieth century, and he was, in real life, in our reality, a senator, but somebody that very few people today have even heard of. I had fun with that too.

Kirsten: I feel as though you had fun throwing in a lot of cultural references that are just your favorite things, like there’s a Casablanca moment.

Michael: It’s just sort of unapologetically stuff that I like and I’m interested in and things like that, but there are also a number of jokes in there for people who know their history. You don’t even have to know that much history, you just have to know the basics of twentieth-century European history to get these jokes. There’s a point when my two time travelers encounter a police officer in 1889 Austria in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and they finish their conversation, and one of my two protagonists stops and turns around and says, I want you to remember a name, and the officer says yes, and he goes, The name is Princip, Gavrilo Princip, and if you’re still wearing that badge in 1914 you want to find an excuse to arrest him. I thought that was really funny, and I drop all kinds of things like that in there.

Emily: In the profusion of references like these, but also for a lot of other things—the sprawling cast, the the madcap jaunts through history—I thought of Thomas Pynchon; Alex mentioned H.G. Wells, Kurt Vonnegut. Would you think of the book as being in conversation with particular writers? Who are your influences?

Michael: Those are apt, and I’m obviously quite flattered by them. H.G. Wells, for obvious reasons, is a point of comparison. I had a friend who said it’s very Pynchonesque in the way that it brings in all these different things.

Alex: The name Darius Shrike is also very Pynchonesque.

Michael: Yeah, I guess it is. Well, that’s cool. I’m glad to hear that. But yeah, the thing I’ve heard most often is Vonnegut. Kurt Andersen gave me a nice blurb, and he compared it to Vonnegut, and I have a friend who says he’s a big Vonnegut fan and told me that Killing Baby Hitler is as good as any Vonnegut, which I’ll take from him. That’s obviously really flattering. I read Vonnegut in high school and college, but it’s literally been that long, which is decades. I should go back and read Breakfast of Champions or something and see. I read three or four of his novels in those days, loved them. Was I conscious of Vonnegut while I was writing this? Not very. I thought it was kind of Vonnegutesque, but it’s been so long since I’ve read him that I really didn’t know.

Alex: You mentioned reading Vonnegut in high school, and it also made me think that one of the things that jumped out to the book as well is that there are various personal moments, or not-quite-autobiographical ones. Like the sections in Morgantown, West Virginia, where you grew up, are very lovingly written. I was wondering if that was something that was conscious, were you just looking for settings that you were familiar with, or are there other bits of Tomasky autobiography sprinkled throughout for those who know?

Michael: I think that’s the only bit that’s autobiographical. They say write what you know, and 90 percent of this novel is not that—I’m not German, I’ve never been to Munich, I wasn’t alive in 1889. I think I do a pretty serviceable job of evoking the smells and sounds of the nineteenth century, which are a lot grosser than you think, but obviously I wasn’t there, so I decided to, for those few pages, write what I know and put in something about a place that I know. Another protagonist is from Pittsburgh, which is just up the road from where I’m from. I’ve been to Pittsburgh a lot and I know Pittsburgh pretty well, but the rest of it is imagination. There are a lot of great novels where people write what they know, but I’m always a little bit more impressed as a reader when people write what they don’t know. It feels more adventurous to me.

Alex: You mentioned the research. I was wondering what that was like, actually. I understood a lot of the World War II references, but then I was like, Oh, you’re not writing World War II. You’re writing nineteenth-century Austria, a place about which I know nothing. So what did you go through to flesh that out?

Michael: Some Hitler biographies that talked about his youth and his upbringing, some books about the Habsburg Empire, and little specific things. There’s one thing in there involving a female character, Ulrike, who turns out to be an extremely important character in the book. When she’s introduced to readers, she’s sitting in a tavern reading a short tract by Nietzsche about Wagner. The casual reader of that paragraph could think I just made that all up, but I actually researched that. I was thrilled to find out that this pamphlet or short book that Nietzsche wrote was indeed published, I think, two years before the action in my novel is set. It’s entirely probable that this intellectual, bohemian, lefty young woman would be reading this book, in which Nietzsche denounces and announces his break from Wagner. It was indeed written just a year before Nietzsche went mad, so all that stuff’s true. I researched that, and I even read this book, which was really passionate and fascinating. I didn’t need to just to write this paragraph, but it was great.

Kirsten: You’ve created a world that’s dystopian, that is extremely dark at times, and I was struck by your tone as a writer. You have a fluid tone, and you’re able to say things in a very casual way that are actually horrific. A lot of this world you describe, it’s described in a very offhand way. I particularly noticed that when you’re weaving climate change into this dystopia you’ve imagined, it really figures in a large way, in terms of shaping how society works, and in its effects on characters. At one point you make a joke in the Jaipur section about a well-loved cricketer who’s struck down by heat stroke and dies in the middle of a speech or something. It’s a funny line, but it’s also dark, and it reflects the reality we’re all staring down the barrel of: the way we’ve had to accept discussing these things in a very quotidian way. This is now the reality we have to tell our kids about. That’s all normal. How would you say that your awareness of climate change and maybe even the coverage we do at The New Republic has fed into this?

Michael: I think we—led by Kate Aronoff, but a whole lot of other people too—do a really first-rate job on that topic, and I read our stuff, and I think about it, and it just struck me. I said, Well, if I’m creating a future world, I can’t ignore this, and it’s probably likely to be pretty bad, so let’s not sugarcoat it. But you’re right, I do try to present heavy things in a jokey way, just for the sake of the tone that I’m going for. I also try to do it not in terms of big pronouncements, but just little examples that make a reader go oh Christ. There’s one point where I say that alligators have migrated as far north as southern Illinois and grown to 30 feet. That’s like, Whoa, and another way of saying climate change has really had a massive impact on the world.

Emily: There are so many ways that the book is so prescient, but one of them is in these robot companions that many of the characters have. Again, when you were writing this, people were not keeping AI girlfriends and boyfriends, as far as I know, but what do you make of how well you envisioned what was about to soon happen?

Michael: I don’t know. I guess by the time 2141 actually rolls around—if it rolls around—things will be a lot freakier than I managed to portray in this novel, because it sounds like it’s all coming faster. One thing I ducked is this question of AI and how many people would be out of work. I did have one passage in there that said only about 30 percent—I forget the number, but only about 30 percent of the people had jobs anymore. But yeah, the robot assistants that people have—I don’t know, I was just trying to think of something science fiction-y, and I was thinking also in cinematic terms, and I could picture a person’s personal assistant—the word I came up with is filo. I don’t even remember why, but there’s some Greek root there that I forget, and you could picture people’s filos materializing and dematerializing and answering their questions, and being at their beck and call, and even in the case of at least one having intercourse with them.

Alex: There’s another similar element as well, with one of the things is very prescient in the book: its conception of a far right that is globalized, which was a trend when you were starting to work on it; but especially as we’re talking this week, it’s like, Elon Musk encourages what are essentially pogroms in Belfast and in parts of the U.K. It’s one of the parts of the book that scared me the most. As I say this, also, it’s 99 degrees in New York, so climate change would be one of those things as well, but that was something that I was wondering—if this was a means for you to think through some of the ways that you’re thinking about politics right now.

Michael: There’s a section—it’s not that long, maybe 12 pages or so—that discusses the breakup of the United States over the course of the mid-twenty-first century, and that’s something I’ve kind of thought a lot about. It seems to me like there’s decent odds that that’s going to happen. I’ve thought about how it might happen, and on what timetable, and what compromises people might have to make. To make a long story short, it doesn’t happen the way it happened in the 1860s, by these states going here and those states going there. It’s not geographically that simple in 2060 as it was in 1860. I’d like people to read it to see the details. The things that I describe the Republican Party of that period coming up with are pretty extreme, but also pretty plausible, and I’d also point out—in case any conservatives are actually watching this—that I don’t hold the left entirely blameless in what happens. There’s some, there’s some liberal shortsightedness in this story as well.

Emily: Well, we have a final question for you, a very important final question: Michael, would you kill baby Hitler?

Michael: I might do what my character did and chicken out, but I would certainly find a way to get him out of Braunau am Inn, which was his little hometown in Austria, right along the German border, and lead him to a to a different and better life. I just—I’m not sure I could. I thought about this a lot while I was writing it, and I might ask the three of you. I’m not sure I could kill an infant, even if I knew it was that infant.

Alex: I would do it.

Kirsten: You have a joke at one point about babies, which did make me laugh, where I think Harry’s trying to decide whether he wants to be involved in bringing up baby Hitler, and he says, I don’t think I want to. Not because it’s Hitler, but just because it’s a baby. Anyone who’s brought up babies can understand that.

Alex: Well, thanks very much.

Michael: Yeah. I’m really grateful to all of you. Not just for this—everyone should know that I asked a handful of friends and colleagues to read this in advance to see if there was anything that struck them as weird and that I needed to be careful about, and I’m grateful to all three for doing this, and Kirsten copyedited it into the bargain, and knows German, which really came in handy here. So thank you all a whole lot.

I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand what is making me act in such an irrational way—squandering my energy and resources and seeking out physical and emotional risks for something that will likely never happen. But lately a couple books have helped me think about the pursuit of parenthood in new ways. It’s probably not an accident that they are written by queer or gay men whose path to parenthood has been similarly mediated by reproductive technology and defined by deferral.

Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood is an utterly unique contribution to the often predictable genre of infertility and parenting lit. Written by Joseph Osmundson, a professor of microbiology, it begins with an immersive account of reproduction from the perspective of a female salmon. A salmon mother swims thousands of miles against the current to spawn, and then guards her nest until she dies. After her death, she nourishes her children with her decomposing body. Of her thousands of fertilized eggs, perhaps one or two, perhaps none, will survive to become adult fish capable of spawning the next generation. The whole system is bizarre enough to make IVF injections and egg donor ads seem normal. In Osmundson’s telling, it’s also beautiful—a fluid vision of “translucent tails and pink yolk sacs,” and a moving metaphor for maternal endurance and sustenance against the odds. “A mother doesn’t let her children go hungry,” he writes. “This is one way I’d like to be a mother.”

Salmon reproduction provides a structure for Osmundson’s own “experiment in queer parenthood,” from his lifelong yearnings for pregnancy to his life-changing journey through sperm donation, embryo creation, and family reimagining with two lesbian friends. His story is told in four parts—“Fry,” “Salt Water,” “Humpy,” and “Hatch”—that map his life onto stages of a salmon life cycle. (A fry is a young salmon that has just emerged from its nest—hence the phrase small fry. Humpy is a nickname for a male pink salmon; they develop a small hump during their spawning migration.)

This whole-life-cycle framing allows Osmundson to take a capacious perspective on the conception and care of progeny, seeing it not simply as an adult rite of passage but as a life-defining desire that begins in childhood and continues far beyond the limits of legal or literal parenthood. The awe-inspiring reproductive drive of the salmon also allows him to express an unapologetic urgency about procreation that cuts through common clichés and ambivalences about when, whether, or how to have kids. “We are human animals,” he writes. “The purpose of an animal is to mate and make more animals. If biology has desire, this is its root.… We human animals render things so complicated; we hide desires even from ourselves.”

This is not to say that the desire to be a parent is universal—it clearly is not—or that the human complications aren’t real. Osmundson writes about them with palpable poignancy. In addition to dealing with the particular challenges facing queer people who want to procreate, Osmundson faces some systemic struggles common to millions of potential parents, regardless of their sexuality. His list of difficulties includes “money, my lack of a uterus, the ethics of surrogacy, the adoption-industrial complex.… I don’t own a home … my car is a two-door … climate change and American politics have only gotten worse; did you know adoptions can cost $100,000 out of pocket?”

Osmundson and his friends make a plan in which he will provide sperm, one woman will provide an egg, her partner will carry the baby, and they will all share the parenting. It’s not a simple scenario, and they face the further complexities of figuring out the role of genes and culture in an interracial family (Osmundson is white, while one of his potential co-parents is Indonesian), as well as the uncertainties of building a family in which two parents are romantic partners and one is not. The stakes of working it all out are high. Osmundson feels like it might be his only chance at parenthood; he can’t afford to have a child on his own.

Spawning Season is, among other things, a deeply personal exploration of “situational infertility,” the voluntary or involuntary lack of children due to external factors. Whatever the various causes of our plummeting birth rate, the crushing costs of parenthood are clearly not helping. Neither is the bleakness of the political landscape, as the U.S. government makes reproductive health care more dangerous and queer families more precarious, defunds education and childcare at home, and bombs children abroad. In some ways, the situationally infertile are not so different from endangered salmon whose reproductive efforts are thwarted by dammed rivers or warming oceans.

It’s rare to read a well-researched nonfiction narrative that blends fascinating specialized knowledge with sharp political critique and a moving, gripping personal story. It’s even more rare to read one that is unafraid to move beyond nonfiction into the realm of fantasy. “Critical fabulation” is a technique used by scholars like Saidiya Hartman to flesh out historical narratives where the surviving records fail us, imagining the experience or interiority of people whose lives have been lost to time. Osmundson experiments instead with a kind of “uncritical fabulation,” giving himself permission to conjure up an imaginary fish-child friend called Fry—a dream child hovering somewhere between potential and real, salmon and human, who expands the narrative into what-might-have-been or what-might-be, alongside what is and was.

Fry first appears a few pages into the book and recurs throughout, a daughter figure whom Osmundson longs for, cares for, talks with, carries in a Ziploc bag full of water, introduces to some of his trusted friends, and goes to the beach with. Sharing Fry with us is a wild narrative risk that pays off, allowing him to express lyrical tenderness, protectiveness, laughter, hope, and loss—a full range of parental feeling—even and especially when suspense is submerged in heartbreak and it looks like his real-world child will never actually come to be.

If Spawning Season dramatizes the near-impossibility of parenthood in a world of material limitations, the biographer Brad Gooch’s Good Morning Moon conjures an enchanted world seemingly free of constraints. It is a memoir of gay fatherhood infused with children’s literature that sometimes reads like a “happily ever after” fairy tale, with any shadow of suspense dispelled at the beginning. Unlike Osmundson’s book, which keeps us wondering where his journey toward parenthood will end, Gooch informs us at the outset that he and his husband have two sons and are happy. The book is thus less a quest narrative than an ode to joy: “I’ve never believed all happy families were alike. I’ve been wanting … to voice our happiness.” The apt first epigraph, self-deprecating yet proud, is courtesy of Frank O’Hara: “Happiness, the least and best of human attainments.”

Gooch and his husband, Paul, had children late, in their fifties and sixties. (I’m obviously delighted for them, but as a woman who is approaching my fertility clinic’s age cutoff, I couldn’t help remembering the time I saw a headline about a septuagenarian celebrity father and wailed to a friend, “I just want to have my first child before Mick Jagger has his ninth!”) Gooch was an only child from the midcentury suburbs, emotionally distant from his parents. For him, as for many in his generation, being gay meant leaving traditional family decisively behind to live a nontraditional life in the city. Marriage and children were not legally options for most of his adult life, and would not have been appealing to him even if they were. Paul, 12 years younger and a Baptist minister, was close to his large and lively family of origin and interested in building a family of his own.

Eventually, after over a decade together, the couple decided to have children via a Stanford-educated egg donor and two decidedly non-Stanford-educated surrogates. Osmundson wrestles with the ethical complexities involved in assisted reproductive technology, and surrogacy can be especially fraught, as relatively wealthy parents pay poorer women to provide an immense, intimate, and dangerous service. But Gooch and his husband were able to move beyond what Gooch calls the “moral awkwardness” of surrogacy by focusing on the undeniable rightness of the children who result from it, encouraged by the experience of friends who had already been through the process: “Paul excised those doubts decisively on the afternoon we left the playground where my friend’s son was playing. ‘If you look at him, you could never think that this was anything but right,’ he said, truly articulating the nub.”

In a way, the entire book is devoted to articulating the doubt-defying truth of the rightness of children, especially his own. Gooch’s sons, Walter and Glenn, are lovingly evoked, a study in contrasts as siblings inevitably are, Walter suffused with the meditative spirituality of Rumi (about whom Brad was writing when he arrived) and Glenn with the lively spirit of Keith Haring (Gooch dedicated his biography of Haring to him). Gooch revels in the gentle gifts of being the quieter, older, “indoor” parent—the father mostly likely to read with his sons or console them in the wake of bad dreams. Meanwhile Paul is the comparatively youthfully exuberant “outdoor” parent, swinging his sons up on his shoulders or challenging them to a game of paddle tennis. Both fathers are doting and devoted. When Walter asks Gooch, “What is the biggest thing that happened to you in your life?” the answer is obvious: “Having you kids.”

At times, some of the privileged parenting problems in the book are hard to empathize with—for example when Gooch writes about the stresses that come with having two full-time nannies—and I wish that the women who carried and helped to raise the boys were depicted more fully. But overall I was enthralled by the literary snapshot of “Papa Paul, Walter, Glenn, Dad Brad.” Gooch’s ode to his family is irresistibly bright.

Happiness is satisfying but can be narratively flat. Good Morning Moon avoids this problem with an unexpected swerve: Like countless twenty-first-century Americans, Gooch takes a DNA test and discovers that his family of origin is not what he thought it was. His discovery has implications beyond the personal, reminding us that even the most hyper-conventional, heteronormative families are far from straightforward. As Stephanie Coontz argued in The Way We Never Were, the much-revered and reviled 1950s-style “traditional family” barely if ever existed. Perhaps every family is nontraditional in its own way.

At the end of Spawning Season, Osmundson calls us to think about having children beyond the narrow bounds of the nuclear family. He brings soup to a friend who has just given birth, then sits with her and her partner and their baby and reflects, “Everyone belonged to everyone.… There are many ways to have a child together.” His vision reminded me of the ubiquitous James Baldwin quote that “the children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe.” Baldwin, the eldest child of nine, who carried his baby siblings on his hip, wrote a book for his nephew, and advocated for millions of children he never met, lived out this principle. I’m not sure what my future holds, but especially in this celebratory season of Father’s Day and Pride, this is the version of family I’m holding close.

It may be aging now. Public approval of labor unions, which bottomed out during the Great Recession of 2007–2009 at 48 percent, has been rising ever since, according to Gallup, and lately it’s around 70 percent, which is higher than at any time since the salad days of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Although support stands highest (90 percent) among registered Democrats, in 2022 a 56 percent majority of Republicans also approved of unions. That’s fallen since to 41 percent, but it’s still a significant minority for a party that for nearly four decades included right-to-work boilerplate in every quadrennial platform. 

It took a few years, but a significant minority of congressional Republicans is now beginning to catch up to GOP voters. The 2024 Republican Party platform was the first since 1980 not to include a right-to-work plank, and, as I noted last week (“How to Get a Labor Rights Bill Through a GOP House”), two labor rights bills successfully bypassed Republican Speaker Mike Johnson in recent months via discharge petition and passed with support from 20 Republicans. Meanwhile, Democrats are fielding, to challenge red-state Republicans, candidates who appeal to the working-class voters they long neglected. Even the problematic oyster farmer Graham Platner has a good shot at unseating Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine.

Given that the culture war no longer serves to distract voters reliably from labor rights, the new conservative strategy is to redefine labor rights as culture war. On Monday, The Wall Street Journal published an editorial  (“A GOP Gift to the Cultural Left”) that’s a sort of trial balloon.

The editorial addressed House passage of the second labor rights bill to sneak past Speaker Johnson, the Faster Labor Contracts Act (text; summary), which time-limits management dithering after a union election. I fully expected the Journal edit page’s usual tirade about greedy union bosses extinguishing capitalism’s animal spirits. That was the gist of the Journal’s previous editorial about the bill in May, when the discharge petition acquired the necessary 218 signatures. 

But the thrust of the new editorial was quite different. Unions, it said, only seem like they’re about improving your working conditions; really, they’re just a front for sex-changers and baby-killers. “We wonder if Republicans know what they’ve voted for,” opined the Journal. “Unions, allied with Democrats, have long supported a progressive agenda that includes collective bargaining for abortion coverage and transgender healthcare.” Those 20 Republicans who voted for the Fair Labor Contracts Act, the Journal said, are “selling out their constituents to the progressive left.” 

The Journal’s Exhibit A was an “Abortion Model Collective Bargaining Agreement Language” recommended by the AFL-CIO. This document does indeed propose “comprehensive sexual and reproductive health care services, including contraceptives, abortion services (procedural and pharmaceutical) and gender-affirming care.” But the AFL-CIO is not a labor union—it’s a federation of labor unions that plays no role in negotiating union contracts. That’s typically the work of a union local. 

“Unions are democratic institutions,” Steve Rosenthal, former political director of the AFL-CIO explained to me, with officials at all levels elected by members and conventions. “They take positions accordingly, based on where the members are.” If a contract includes health coverage for gender-affirming care or mifepristone, that’s because members want these things. Any member of Congress who actively opposes such language is interfering with the terms of a private contract, which is something conservatives are supposed to hate.

The Journal editorial didn’t identify any union members who object to their health plan covering abortion and gender reassignment. (My guess is such people are hard to find.) Instead, the Journal complained that “many businesses have objected to those provisions on religious grounds.” Oh, please. If I may be permitted a conservative complaint: I never even imagined I’d hear such an argument before 2014, when the Supreme Court decided, outrageously, that businesses enjoy the same First Amendment right to religious freedom as individuals. Bring back the good old days when they didn’t! Fourteen years after that high court ruling, I’ve still never seen a corporation take communion or read from the Torah.

The culture-war argument is being test-driven not only by the Journal editorial page but also, according to Gabrielle M. Etzel of the Washington Examiner, by Thomas Beck of the union-busting law firm Littler Mendelson. “It’s going to be easy for the arbitrator to say, OK, employer, I’m not going to make you pay the high wages that the union is demanding,” Beck told Etzel, “but what I am going to make you do is … make you give generous health benefits and give very generous access to abortion on demand and give very, very generous access to so-called gender-affirming care.” But in truth, that will be easy for the arbitrator to say only if the union local, which is accountable to rank-and-file workers, truly does care more about abortion and gender-affirming coverage than about a wage hike. The arbitrator has no reason to prefer one over the other. 

Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, who introduced the Senate version of the Faster Labor Contracts Act, was confronted by the Examiner with Beck’s and the Journal’s moronic argument. Rather than present any of the logical arguments I make here, Hawley, who is a social conservative, accepted a culture-war framing but performed a sort of jujitsu, identifying the woke enemy to be not unions but corporations. Or rather, his spokesman did. “Giant corporations are desperate to kill legislation that would help American workers,” the spokesman said, “while they invest billions in DEI insanity.… Senator Hawley is fighting for the American worker, rather than the same Big Business who stands with the radical left to push woke, transgender ideology.” 

But Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and therefore will decide the fate of Hawley’s bill, sides with Beck and the Journal. In reality, I’d guess Cassidy opposes the bill not because it gives aid and comfort to the trans and abortion lobbies but, more straightforwardly, because Cassidy is anti-labor, with a lifetime AFL-CIO score of 13 percent. (Hawley’s, it should be noted, is only two percentage points higher, so don’t call him a working-class hero just yet.) But rather than tell the Examiner, “Look, I don’t want to give organized labor more power,” Cassidy said piously: “I’m all for finding solutions to strengthen workers’ rights and make collective bargaining more efficient, but a policy forcing Louisiana workers and small businesses to potentially fund abortions and sex-change operations is not the answer.”

So that’s one Republican legislator willing to embrace the new dogma.  

Then again, Cassidy, an actual physician, allowed himself to be conned by Robert Kennedy Jr., when the health and human services secretary promised at his confirmation hearing to leave vaccines alone. And anyway, Cassidy will be gone from the place in six months. It remains to be seen whether anybody else will recite this new catechism.

Littlefield and I spoke in May about how Roe became so vulnerable in the first place, what we can learn from its demise, and the cost of people accepting, as Littlefield told me, “that there’s one set of rights for folks who are low income, for people of color, for folks who are on the margins, and then there’s another set of laws and policies for the rest of us.”

Melissa Gira Grant: There are still people who think that it’s completely shocking that we lost Roe. What do you think led people to feel as if Dobbs came out of nowhere, when in fact we had been losing Roe for decades?

Amy Littlefield: What most stood in the way of people’s ability to recognize the incremental death of abortion rights—and the fact that Roe v. Wade itself was going to fall—is a lack of awareness within mainstream media, and also mainstream progressive and pro-choice organizations, of just how profoundly race and class and geography shaped people’s lives, including their ability to access an abortion.

The Hyde Amendment was first passed in 1976, and in a way, a huge part of the fight was over right then, because this meant that low-income people for the most part were going to have to fundraise hundreds if not thousands of dollars out of pocket for an abortion. The fact that an estimated more than one million people have been unable to do so and have given birth as a result should be at the center of our abortion politics. Roe v. Wade was extremely meaningful for people who had access to wealth and privilege, more than it was for people who were poor, or who were Black, or who lived many hundreds of miles from the nearest abortion clinic and couldn’t get there.

Melissa: It also seems like very quickly after Roe there was a desire to claim that victory, and to not push further. You mention the incoming NARAL executive director in 1975 being told “the job would be a cinch,” that “it didn’t seem like it would have too much left to do.”

Amy: What could possibly happen next? (laughs)

NARAL started out as an effort to repeal anti-abortion laws in the states. There was this initial sense that the job should be a cinch now because we have Roe v. Wade and that the fight was over. I think that sense faded very quickly because of the Hyde Amendment.

I do think that there was immediately this sort of complacency. But I think pretty quickly after that it became clear, “Oh, Roe v. Wade is under attack, and the opposition is better organized.”

Melissa: You also write that at that time, some people regarded issues of abortion funding as obscure or complicated, compared to whether abortion was legal. It looked like they were then choosing to shift focus toward threats they assumed more people would care about, like a national ban. Do you think some people benefited from that simpler story?

Amy: One of the most fascinating interviews I did for the book was with a man named Roger Craver—I call him the father of the nonprofit industrial complex. He’s the guy who helped nonprofits figure out how to raise money from small donors. His equivalent on the right, who he managed to have a friendly relationship with, was Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail mastermind of the conservative movement. The two of them were doing same thing. Fifty-odd years ago—that was like the hot new controversial technology. What I really took away from Craver is that you do need a pretty simple, straightforward, but compelling story that has a very clear enemy. And when the devil is winning—in his terms—and you can point to something like the threat of a nationwide constitutional ban on abortion that’s looming, then you generate a sense of urgency that will lead people to sit down at their kitchen table after a long day of work and write a check.

Another thing that I learned from him is that people’s attention spans are pretty limited. We think of this as being a function of our era, but it was maybe always the case: that the story needed to be changing. You couldn’t just be like, “Poor people lost their right to access an abortion when the Hyde Amendment passed in 1976, and now, they still don’t have it.” You had to constantly convince people that there was this urgency.

I hadn’t really understood the degree to which the story that is written by nonprofits when they are trying to raise money determines the way that their donors—who are their most supportive base, the people who are writing checks to NARAL and Planned Parenthood—those folks learn the story of what’s important in part through these mailings, through the stories told to them by the folks who are trying to get them to donate.

So there is this simplification of the story, and this way in which incremental, more subtle changes, and the changes that affect low-income people, Black people, people who are not the donor class, get obscured as part of that process.

Melissa: Do you think that that dynamic is still with us—the competing demands, the fact that you need to reach people with a simple story? And are we repeating a story that didn’t work?

Amy: My fear around storytelling, and one of the themes of the book, is: Why aren’t stories enough? Why aren’t the stories of women like Rosie Jimenez and Becky Bell and Portia Ngumezi, who have died from abortion bans in their respective eras, from the ’70s to the ’80s to today, why are their deaths not enough? Why is it not enough when we know that a 4-year-old girl in McAllen, Texas, lost her mom, Rosie Jimenez, to the Hyde Amendment? Why is it not enough that we know that Porsha Ngumezi’s son chases after women who look like her on the street, shouting out to Mommy, because she died when she didn’t get care in time for a miscarriage in Texas? Why, why are those stories not enough to change the outcome of our elections?

Part of what I’ve been grappling with in our current moment is that I don’t think stories are enough if you haven’t built the organizing infrastructure that it takes to change the political landscape, to repeal these policies, to mobilize the very real outrage and sadness that many people feel when they hear those stories into a channel that will actually create political change. That requires massive amounts of grassroots organizing and mobilization. It doesn’t just require a text message being sent to your phone with someone’s story and then you make a donation and then it’s over.

One of the enduring legacies of the Hyde Amendment that I really wanted to highlight in the book is that it directed a lot of the energy of the most radical, intersectionally minded activists in the abortion rights space into mutual aid work. Because it took an enormous amount of energy to raise the tens of millions of dollars, in recent years, that it takes to actually pay for people’s abortions, and to pay for the practical support they need in order to get that care.

Meanwhile, I think the organizations that were more geared toward political organizing—chiefly, Planned Parenthood was very focused on providing health care. It’s a health care safety net provider. But I think we can see in retrospect that having an organization that is reliant on federal funding to provide those non-abortion health care services that are lifesaving to millions, and so they couldn’t risk losing them, having that organization steer the political direction of the movement was a mistake. There was a reliance on the courts to protect a right that had been given through the courts. The larger white-led groups within the abortion rights space had trusted, for almost 50 years, that the Supreme Court was going to protect the legal right it had bestowed in 1973. And I think there was an inability to absorb the possibility that that backstop was finally going to fail.

Melissa: It makes me think of something you mentioned early on in the book, the millions of dollars that are fundraised for people’s abortions—what if the folks doing that work had been able to do something different, and what if those resources had been able to be marshaled in a different way?

Amy: Exactly. What if they’d been running for city council? Or whatever!

There’s such a tremendous amount of energy that went into getting people the abortions they needed—from the people who worked in clinics, from people who worked in fundraising, people whose work is basically invisible. And when they succeed, what happens is the crisis is ameliorated somewhat. There are fewer people being forced to carry pregnancies to term, even now in the post-Dobbs moment, precisely because we have these brave clinicians operating under shield laws and mailing medication abortion to states like Texas, because we have abortion funds that are still raising millions of dollars to help people who still need to travel.

I think it also makes it harder to do what Roger Craver and his contemporaries were trying to do, which is to tell people, “There’s an emergency, the devil’s winning, we have to get out there,” because the number of abortions is up, because a lot of the energy of the movement has been directed into providing the abortions and paying for the abortions.

Melissa: There are so many characters in the book—like Craver, like Viguerie—that aren’t the bold-faced names that people have heard of. What drew you to these particular players?

Amy: I loved finding these people, precisely because I had never heard of them even though I’ve been reporting on abortion for many years. I want to believe in a version of history where crucial events are driven by folks who are not famous, who are behind the scenes. Their motives were really different from the motives that were on the minds of the presidents and the political figures. These were folks who were the keepers of the flame, right? They truly believed that they were doing God’s work. Some of them believed God was speaking to them directly. They believed that they were going to earn their place in heaven for the work that they were doing chipping away at abortion access. That taught me a lot about the relationship between the true believers that power social movements and that come up with long-shot ideas, and how they drive our politics in ways that are less visible. It’s only through dogged organizing that long-shot ideas become thinkable, right? And we can see that on the right and the left.

That’s why one of my favorite stories is the story of All* Above All, the initially long-shot campaign to repeal the Hyde Amendment and how it changed the way that we talk about that policy today, and made this unthinkable idea that we would ever try to repeal this policy that by then was so taken for granted, even by Democrats. They forced a lot of Democrats to change the way that they talked about that policy. They didn’t repeal it, because those changes don’t happen overnight. But they did have some incremental wins at the state and local level.

I hope people take away from this an understanding of how the smaller players, the true believers, the behind-the-scenes figures played a role in the death of Roe v. Wade; that it wasn’t just Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society working with the Alliance Defending Freedom to bring the perfect case to the perfect Supreme Court justices; that it was much more incremental than that, that a lot of the fight was in state legislatures and city councils and at the local level. And I think a big part of how the anti-abortion movement won was by building power in the states that progressives did not have.

In numerous social media postings, Musk highlighted the crime in starkly racist terms. Several nights of violent anti-immigrant pogroms orchestrated by fascist mobs followed. It was a telling confluence of events: Musk’s extraordinary wealth is fueled by investors’ bedazzlement at his techno-utopian schemes. But the Belfast conflagration revealed the other side of his future vision: his belief that the white populations of the world must violently subjugate the nonwhite enemy in what he sees as a multicontinental, Armageddon-like Total War for global racial supremacy.

As the bedlam raged in Belfast after the stabbing—resulting in far-right rioters torching cars, buses, and even the homes of immigrants—Musk egged it on. Using X—the platform he acquired precisely for moments like these—he posted locations for groups of rioters to congregate. He elevated vile, overtly fascist and white-supremacist exhortations. When one far-right British politician called for the prosecution of officials who “placed dangerous third world savages in our communities,” Musk replied: “This is the way.”

These developments graphically illustrate the future that Musk truly envisions. They also demonstrate that Musk will use his stratospheric wealth and influence to incite untold levels of global fascist violence going forward. Which leads to an unavoidable conclusion: At some point, friends of liberal democracy throughout the advanced democracies—including future liberal governments—will simply have to come together in a concerted and deliberate way to constrain Musk and all he’s unleashing. Whenever Democrats take back power in the United States, this must be squarely on the agenda.

In a very real sense, the fires in Belfast illuminate the emerging outlines of that coming struggle. Musk’s involvement in British politics has tracked with his growing fantasies about global race war. Last fall, he compared nonwhite immigrants in the U.K. to orcs—the dangerous, inhuman monsters from Lord of the Rings—and enthusiastically endorsed a tweet claiming: “If White men become a minority, we will be slaughtered.” As Musk has watched the anti-immigrant far right grow in the U.K., he has gravitated toward extreme versions of “great replacement theory,” ones that posit a far-reaching plot to violently eliminate whites or breed them out of existence entirely.

A coming-out moment for Musk came last September, when he spoke via video link to a “Unite the Kingdom” rally—a gathering of far-right and anti-immigrant groups organized by Tommy Robinson, a British white nationalist with a long history of thuggery. Musk promoted the event on X. He addressed a crowd of more than 100,000 people, warning of the dangers of multiculturalism and “uncontrolled migration.”

“Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you,” Musk warned. “You either fight back, or you die.”

In the United States, Musk had already been experimenting with a consistent trope in fascist rhetoric: seizing on a crime committed by an individual member of a minority group and claiming that it shows the innate murderous tendencies of the group as a whole. The real claim here is that these isolated horrific acts “reveal” the whole minority group’s disguised genocidal intent toward white peoples—and suggest that this is why the group has deviously infiltrated white countries and communities.

Musk zealously adapted this to the U.K. context. In one case he suggested that “the gentlefolk of the English shires”—that is, the descendants of the imagined, unsullied Anglo-Saxon island existence mythologized by white nationalists everywhere—will be “brutally murdered” if the “tide of illegal immigration is not turned.”

With the Belfast stabbing, Musk hit paydirt. After a Sudanese man who’d legally sought asylum brutally mauled a white man, video of the attack rapidly circulated online, amplified by Musk. The perpetrator was swiftly arrested and charged, but that didn’t stop loud demands for “justice,” which actually meant collective retribution against all nonwhite and foreign-born residents. Rioters clashed with police and threw bricks. Hooded masked men roamed in large gangs, setting up roadblocks to check cars for immigrants. The Police Federation of Northern Ireland, hardly an overly woke institution, explicitly described the rioters as “fascist.”

Even as his trillion-dollar payday came together, Musk promoted a pamphlet calling for action against this supposed “invader attack on our people.” He amplified far-right politicians demanding retribution against “third world savages.” He posted a reminder of his September exhortation that “you either fight back, or you die.”

These were violent, fascist ethnic purges—or pogroms. As an Indian man who’s lived in the U.K. for 25 years told the BBC: “It was horrible. It was like a war zone. Everything was burning.” The man added: “I pay my taxes. I am British.” Yet he’s preparing to leave: Across Belfast, others are finding themselves forced to make similar decisions.

It’s instructive that amid the violence, Musk endorsed a call for “Reconquista,” an allusion to Christian military campaigns to retake the Iberian peninsula from Islamic forces. (Modern-day keyboard fascists have long rather pathetically imagined themselves to be akin to Charles Martel, who turned back the Muslims at Tours in 732.) And Musk boosted a call for the removal of millions from the U.K.

The turmoil has now subsided, and soon after, thousands demonstrated in Belfast against the pogroms. But nonetheless, Musk’s influence on events there must be reckoned with. While what transpired is not all about Musk—political violence in the region has deep roots, and many homegrown demagogues in the U.K. have demonized immigrants there—the riots demonstrated a real-world manifestation of the racial apocalypse Musk wants and may increasingly be in a position to summon into being.

By endorsing Reconquista, Musk is amplifying one of the clarion calls of the European far right and, increasingly, the American right, as well: “remigration.” This is the idea that saving Western civilization (as Musk imagines it) requires the forced expulsion of huge numbers of immigrants, especially Muslims, and even untold numbers of their descendants. In response to a missive about white people potentially becoming a minority in New Zealand, Musk posted recently: “The doom of Western Civilization must be averted!”

In other words, nonwhite immigrants are by definition invaders who threaten “Western civilization” wherever they infiltrate, from New Zealand to Belfast to Minneapolis, where Musk called for a military crackdown on pro-immigrant protesters. True, Musk employs high-skilled immigrant tech workers and has defended the need for them. But this does not constitute a general tolerance of immigration or a desire to see immigrants integrate at scale within the embattled outposts of Western civilization.

Indeed, in some respects, Musk’s vision is a classically fascist one: He appears to believe that race and culture are inseparable. Fascism is a set of interconnected values and yearnings that center the state, the nation, violence, masculinity, and the rebirth of a mythic, heroic past. It’s an ideology of palingenetic ultranationalism: Though the nation is a broadly contested concept, to the fascist, the nation is defined, in an almost transcendent spiritual sense, by culture and race. These are inexorably linked: Only certain races are capable of producing certain cultures.

Thus it is that Musk is also obsessed with white fertility—he has done his part to save civilization by siring over a dozen children by multiple women. There is no doubt that this is deeply entangled with his belief that nonwhite immigration threatens the West.

One of the greatest challenges in combating fascism, both in the early-to-mid-twentieth century and today, is getting comfortable, middle-class, politically moderate people to understand that its adherents actually mean what they are saying. Musk’s favorite politician in Britain—Rupert Lowe of the far-right Restore Britain Party—has called for the deportation of almost every immigrant in the U.K., which Musk too has endorsed.*

Such large-scale mass expulsions of legal residents are rare. The closest modern analogue is Idi Amin’s expulsion of Uganda’s Asian population. The famously insane tyrant forced out 80,000 legal residents in the 1970s. Britain has a foreign-born population of around 13 million. So if we take Musk’s calls for remigration at his word, he’s envisaging an act of ethnic cleansing over 100 times as large. He apparently hopes to see this in all majority-white countries with large immigrant populations. There is nothing in the modern era that compares.

In their great book Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff take an exhaustive look at just about everything Musk has said on these and other topics. As they observe, we know Musk’s preoccupation with declining birth rates is linked to his embrace of remigration because he’s far more preoccupied with declining birth rates in some parts of the world than others. As Slobodian and Tarnoff conclude: “Musk’s demographic panic is bound up with his concern for the survival of white civilization.”

Here’s the idea, put simply: Nonwhite immigration and reproduction threaten “white civilization.” By definition, that threatens the survival of Western civilization (remember, to the fascist, race and culture are inseparable). The only hope for humanity’s future is the West, which can only be preserved by halting and reversing declining white birth rates and migration to majority-white nations. In short, saving whitness—via remigration and white reproduction—is essential to saving humanity.

What does Musk envision for those who are not privileged inheritors of Western civilization? On the one hand, he sometimes gives voice to the hope—albeit vaguely—that his companies’ breakneck development of AI and robotics will unlock a future of widespread, drudgery-free abundance. He has flirted with progressive ideas like universal basic income to spread the fruits of technological advancement.

But it’s difficult to take all that seriously in light of Musk’s emergent fascist politics. Musk—whose contributions to combating global warming are unquestioned—knows what the models show: Under plausible climate scenarios, large additional swaths of the earth will be rendered uninhabitable. That could mean much more human misery and/or dramatically scaled-up mass migrations in the future.

Here’s where Musk’s well-known fondness for terms like empathy gene and suicidal empathy enters the chat. As Slobodian and Tarnoff document, Musk’s pronouncements amount to suggesting that “civilization” is committing “suicide” when Western countries allow migration while showing too much “empathy.” Musk insists this constitutes allowing “the Rape of Europe” by nonwhite immigrants. He has absurdly claimed that hordes of thousands are invading “lovely towns” of 500 people throughout the U.K. and “raping the kids.” The idea of nonwhite predation on Aryan women is, of course, a core historical fascist narrative.

But the real intent behind Musk’s indictment of “suicidal empathy” appears to be future-focused too. In an interview, Tarnoff points out that Musk’s imagined future of humanoid robots and AI can be squared with his hatred of mass migration. “You reduce your reliance on immigration as a labor source if you automate more labor,” Tarnoff tells us, noting that in this scenario, AI and robots might then be pressed into service to “restrict immigration.”

In this context, we believe it’s not an accident that Musk explicitly denigrated “civilizational suicidal empathy” while his Department of Government Efficiency decimated the budget of USAID, which helped produce hundreds of thousands of deaths abroad. That was a test run: If Musk’s robot-and-AI utopia fails to produce mass abundance for the global poor, and global warming spurs more suffering and more migrations, saving human “civilization” will require dispensing with the empathy gene: It will give us the fortitude to cut loose all that third-world civilizational dead weight.

“Musk’s vision of the world is extremely anti-humanitarian,” Tarnoff tells us. “Empathy enables human beings to relate to one another across differences. And that is very threatening to Musk’s vision.” In Musk’s future, Tarnoff continues, “the vast majority of humanity is expelled from the productive process.” In a sense, Tarnoff says, Musk’s logic is ultimately “eliminationist.”

Musk often speaks about his goal to save the “light” of human “consciousness.” It’s a tellingly cold formulation. It doesn’t entail a concern for actual human beings. It just requires preserving the select and their descendants—perhaps through mind merges with digitally superintelligent machines, or behind the walls of vast Muskian compounds guarded by humanoid robots, or on faraway planets.

“Whatever happens, we have got the spaceships, and they do not,” Musk posted recently. As chronicled in Muskism, that alludes to a quote from a nineteenth-century colonialist celebrating the machine gun’s power to put down colonial subjects. If the global race war doesn’t accomplish Musk’s objectives, there’s always interplanetary escape—or perhaps the extermination of the brutes left behind on land with the spaceships’ lasers. Those who call themselves inheritors of “Western civilization,” then, are making a coded declaration of privilege: We get to be on the spaceships. The savages do not.

Understood this way, it all looks like some supercharged Muskian version of the “reactionary modernism” that John Ganz frequently discusses. Technology will be used to fortify and harden global hierarchies and protect those chosen to carry humanity forward from the disposable hordes. Hypermilitarized borders and violent pogroms will grow even more necessary as human labor is replaced and climate-fueled global suffering produces more desperate migrations. Perhaps the robots—who have no empathy gene—will carry it all out.

We don’t mean to oversell Musk’s influence. He’s not unstoppable. He often fails, is thwarted, or just doesn’t follow through. He’s also clearly not the only, or even primary, reason for the global reemergence of fascism. But he wields immense power.

Political theorist Stephen Lukes famously divided power into three dimensions: decision-making power (should we do A or B?), agenda-setting power (is it a choice between A and B, or B and C?), and ideological power (how do people perceive and understand A, B, and C?).

People who question Musk’s influence note that his decision-making power is limited, as his DOGE fiasco revealed. But Musk has tremendous agenda-setting power. His white-nationalized Twitter—now X—is somewhat diminished by backlash but still helps shape how many journalists in developed countries interpret the world while enabling him to launder fascism for the mainstream. His deep embeddedness within the machinery of Western governments through immensely lucrative contracts in everything from space travel to national security means he has incredible power to derail the projects of modern states.

What about ideological power? It is bad, very bad, that a fascist controls an information conduit that still shapes a fair amount of how many politicians and the press understand global events. Ideology is not just how we label ourselves, or what policies we endorse. It’s also how we see the world. Because of Musk, more and more people have in their heads a fascist conception of the nation—that of an inexorable fusion of race and culture, under unrelenting racial siege.

Ultimately, Musk is playing a crucial role in the global fascist resurgence. He represents at once one of its loudest megaphones, the organizing space for its paramilitary wings, a fifth column of sorts inside the apparatus of many states, and the movement’s bank.

It’s hard to know what dealing with this should look like. Obviously it includes moving to break the power of the oligarchs in a broader sense. This must start with higher taxes on billionaires—and trillionaires. It requires stringent limits on the ability of people like Musk to singlehandedly spend immense sums on our elections, such as the extraordinary $290 million he plowed into the 2024 contest. It should go without saying that breaking the power of the tech oligarchy—Democratic proposals along these lines would rupture tech monopolies, curb market dominance, and empower labor—is also essential, as is far-reaching AI regulation.

Another big question is whether liberal democratic governments should remain on Musk’s disinformation platform. “X is now the mechanism through which white nationalist groups have organized violent riots three years in a row,” Ian Dunt, a prominent U.K. commentator, tells us. “There’s no good reason for the British government to remain on X. Its continued presence keeps journalists on the site, allowing Musk to mainstream far-right rhetoric.” A future Democratic administration will have to weigh similar dangers.

Then there’s what a future Democratic Congress can do. The Musk problem will have to be on its agenda in a serious and meaningful way. Claire Finkelstein, a professor of national security law at the University of Pennsylvania, points out a core problem here: His many government contracts, and his access to privileged information, pose a “national security threat,” even as Space X itself is in many ways a “national security asset.” We need to know a lot more about what Musk’s contracts actually translate into in terms of his personal influence inside the government.

“Congress has to do rigorous oversight of Musk’s government contracts as well as his entire financial empire,” Finkelstein tells us.

Other ideas abound. Brian Beutler has urged the next Democratic administration to closely scrutinize the murky circumstances of Musk’s own immigration to the United States. Beyond such things, we’ll need a coordinated effort across liberal democracies. Appropriately, the targeting of apartheid in Musk’s native South Africa provides a model. We need an international consensus that recognizes the threat Musk poses and works against it with boycotts, with the withdrawal of support and funding, and with whatever creative tools are available. Politicians and publics alike need to think internationally.

The world’s richest man is participating in a transnational terror campaign. Ultimately, what’s really needed in response is a new mindset: We are now fighting a global battle against resurgent fascism. The fight is across nations and at every level of society. The response must be international, as well. Any path to a free international order, unthreatened by fascism, must run in part through breaking Musk’s power.

* This article originally misidentified Lowe’s party affiliation.

Buried deep in the Senate Armed Services Committee’s annual defense authorization Tuesday was a measure to redesignate the Department of Defense as the “Department of War.”

The measure would also change the titles and acronyms for the secretary of war, assistant secretary, and under secretary, as well as the names of other programs and offices that use the word “defense.” Another clause would ensure that all laws, documents, and records referring to the department or secretary of defense would be understood to apply to the secretary of war.

Of course, the Trump administration has already been using its own made-up name for months. So Pete Hegseth is sure to have his new desk placard already.

The Congressional Budget Office previously estimated that a statutory name change implemented throughout the department could cost up to $125 million in taxpayer dollars.

Trump has made it clear he’s willing to spend millions to make the United States look tough—but in reality, the president appears to be caving to our country’s purported enemies.

As The New Republic’s Indigo Olivier pointed out: Trump’s rebrand may be stupid and expensive, but at least it’s honest.

i24NEWS correspondent Guy Azriel reported Tuesday that Israel was denied access to the informal agreement, which he called a “remarkable and highly unusual development between close allies on an issue of such critical national security importance.”

The White House and Tehran signed a peace deal on Sunday, though the exact specifications of the agreement are not yet public and are still being hashed out.

The final draft reportedly proposes the immediate reopening of the Strait of Hormuz under Iran’s direction, a commitment from the U.S. not to interfere in Iranian affairs, and a reiteration of Iran’s commitment not to produce nuclear weapons, echoing language included in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, according to a senior Iranian official who spoke with Reuters.

One component of the plan has become the subject of much debate: a $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran, which was originally understood to be provided at cost to U.S. taxpayers.

Vice President JD Vance has wavered several times on that particular issue. He first claimed on Saturday that Iran would receive no money at all. He seemingly reversed course on Monday, when he all but confirmed the reconstruction fund to CBS’s Ed O’Keefe. Within hours—and after some monumental backlash from his party—Vance seemed to change his tune again, telling Fox News’s Sean Hannity that Iran would not receive a “single dime of American money.”

Instead, Vance claimed that the U.S. would allow Iran to receive foreign aid from its Gulf State neighbors so long as the “Iranians behave.” Vance has not yet elaborated on how the administration plans to manage or gatekeep foreign aid packages intended for Iran.

The murky arrangement does not seem to include details on whether Iran will stop enriching its uranium—a highly anticipated component and one of the White House’s most pressing demands.

Vance told Hannity that the particulars of the enriched uranium depletion would be figured out over the next two months, “but the basic structure is they can get a lot if they comply with the United States’s demands.”

Donald Trump has pledged since the beginning of the war that any peace deal he signs would end Iran’s uranium enrichment program. But now that the deal is actually being negotiated, Trump seems to have lost his bluster, even disengaging from the idea of collecting Iran’s nuclear dust.

“You could make the case, ‘Why even bother?’ Because it’s not really valuable, it’s probably half a million dollars’ worth,” Trump said Tuesday while at the G7 summit in France. “It’s not very valuable stuff. But I think, psychologically, we want to get it.”

Failing to obtain commitments regarding Iran’s nuclear program would make the deal far weaker than the Obama administration’s JCPOA.

Iran lacked a single bomb’s worth of uranium in 2018, three years after former President Barack Obama brokered his deal to limit the country’s enormous uranium stockpile. But that changed when Trump withdrew the U.S. from the pact and imposed a series of tough economic sanctions against the Middle Eastern country.

By 2025, Iran had curated an 11-ton stockpile of enriched uranium, the whereabouts of which remain largely unknown. The total stockpile could create as many as 10 bombs if fully enriched, according to a 2025 assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Justin Smith, 41, was confirmed by the Senate Tuesday in a 48–43 vote, with every Democrat voting against his nomination, while all but one Republican, Lisa Murkowski, voted for him. Nine senators missed the vote: Michael Bennet, Kevin Cramer, John Curtis, Angus King, Ben Ray Luján, Cynthia Lummis, Bernie Sanders, Raphael Warnock, and Mitch McConnell.

Bennet, King, Luján, Sanders, and Warnock all caucus with the Democratic Party, and if they had been present to cast a “no” vote, Smith’s vote would have been blocked in a 48–48 tie. Smith will now sit on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, overseeing federal district court appeals in Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota.

Smith represented Trump in his presidential immunity case before the Supreme Court and worked on his case to have the Supreme Court overturn the sexual assault and defamation charge against the president brought by E. Jean Carroll. Despite being nominated to the federal bench in March, Smith continued representing Trump in Carroll’s case.

In his confirmation hearings in April, Smith refused to say who won the 2020 presidential election, and refused to answer questions about whether he would recuse himself from any cases involving Trump, sparring with Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal.

Smith is now the third of Trump’s personal lawyers to be appointed as a federal judge, and the second to be confirmed. He’ll join Emil Bove, who, while working for the Justice Department in Trump’s first term, told his fellow federal prosecutors to disobey court orders and say “fuck you” to judges who ruled against them.

Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said on the Senate floor Tuesday that Smith’s conflicts of interest raised “serious questions.”

“These are lifetime appointments to federal judgeships—lifetime appointments which have to be given to people who have been carefully scrutinized. We have not done that when it comes to Mr. Smith,” Durbin said.

The Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services will be moved to the Department of Health and Human Services, while the Department of Justice will take over civil rights issues, the Trump administration announced Tuesday.

The moves are worrying, especially considering Trump’s campaign to dismantle the Department of Education as well as who he has appointed to HHS and the DOJ. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made worrying comments about autism, making outlandish claims and changing policies on vaccines to fit his medically inaccurate views.

Kennedy’s views have also been criticized as incorporating eugenics, which should not be anywhere near special education in America. It raises fears that students with special needs could be marginalized or worse.

When it comes to civil rights, the DOJ has been ground zero for the Trump administration’s attacks on “wokeness,” undermining its own Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and targeting one of America’s leading civil rights organizations, the Southern Poverty Law Center. The person in charge of the Civil Rights Division at the DOJ, Harmeet Dhillon, is a loyal foot soldier to Trump.

Now the Department of Education will be weakened further, and students will lose valuable resources as these offices are moved into departments without education experts. Combating discrimination and increasing special education resources used to be a priority in the United States, but no longer.

All 15 people are involved with Direct Action Minnesota, which the administration accuses of “aggressive use of shields against law enforcement, surveillance, operational planning, and rapid mobilization against law enforcement actions.” The U.S. attorney for Minnesota, Daniel Rosen, alleged that the group “advocates, promotes, and utilizes militant tactics and violence.”

These are people who are using non-electoral tactics—many of which are legal, like observing—after watching federal agents kidnap immigrants and shoot their neighbors dead in the street. The administration even pointed to a Facebook post in which defendant Cameron Kennedy stated that they needed to become “ungovernable” as a flimsy example of antifa activity. And even with all that, it’s worth mentioning for the umpteenth time that antifa is not a cohesive, established group that exists. There is no leader, no headquarters, no yearly conference. 

The Trump administration is cracking down on people who took action against what they saw as a violent occupation of their city by following and impeding ICE officers and making mean posts on Facebook. This crusade against antifa is a cover for a wide net of First Amendment suppression against any kind of left-leaning individual or group–from Rümeysa Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil to these 15 Minnesotans.  

World Liberty Financial, the decentralized finance platform co-founded by Eric and Donald Jr., will almost certainly be approved for a national bank trust charter, according to two former staffers at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency who spoke with NOTUS Tuesday.

It was “inconceivable” that World Liberty Financial wouldn’t be approved, one of the staffers told NOTUS. Jonathan Gould, the current Trump-nominated comptroller of the currency, is due to deliver his decision on World Liberty Financial’s application soon. He has previously eased restrictions and allowed for more crypto companies to receive bank charters.

Receiving a national bank trust charter would allow World Liberty Financial to independently issue its USD1 stablecoin directly to American consumers, sidestep liquidity requirements, and settle financial transactions like platforms such as Venmo or Paypal—for which the Trump family could potentially receive a cut.

David Wachsman, a spokesperson for World Liberty Financial, insisted to NOTUS that “none of its leadership or employees work for the U.S. government, and there are no conflicts of interest.”

Eric and Donald Jr. are the company’s co-founders, while Barron serves as a “Web3 Ambassador,” and Donald Trump reigns as “chief crypto advocate.” The company has previously claimed that the president has not been involved in its business since he was reelected to the White House. But his family took even greater control over the company after his inauguration, asserting a claim to more than 75 percent of net revenue from token sales, and 60 percent from the firm’s operations.

Trump owns 70 percent of an LLC that owns 38 percent of the shares in a holding company behind World Liberty Financial, according to the president’s most recent financial disclosures. The rest is managed by family members. In June 2025, Trump reported having earned $57 million from World Liberty Financial in 2024.

The FBI director frustrated Secret Service officials by prematurely announcing the details of an investigation into a violent attack planned for the White House UFC event, according to multiple sources that spoke with MS NOW Tuesday.

Patel revealed components of the investigation via a social media post earlier in the day, sharing that “multiple individuals” were in custody.

“On June 10, FBI and our law enforcement partners became aware of a potential threat to the UFC America 250 event in Washington, D.C. involving individuals outside of the National Capital Region,” Patel wrote.

Nearly two dozen people participated in Signal group chats discussing an alleged plot to strike the UFC’s America 250 event with explosive-laden drones so as to rush the evacuating crowd into the crosshairs of a pre-staged sniper team, reported Fox News. Five people are reportedly in custody in connection with the scheme.

“While the result represented the best of investigative work, it was also nothing out of the ordinary for this law enforcement team—we are built to detect, respond to, and bring to justice those who threaten the lives of American citizens—particularly during large gatherings like the historic UFC 250 fight,” Patel continued in his X post. “That’s exactly what we did here. I want to thank our great agents and partners, this work remains ongoing and we will continue to update the public as permitted.”

A White House spokesman claimed that the incident was exactly why the White House needed the proposed $400 million ballroom—though the 90,000-square-foot space still would not have been capable of housing the UFC event, nor was the fight ever planned to be indoors.

It’s not the first time that Patel has flubbed a federal investigation. In September, Patel’s reliance on the bureau’s planes waylaid the investigation into Charlie Kirk’s assassination by at least a day, preventing a critical analysis team from accessing a flight to the crime scene.

His personal flights interfered with another FBI investigation on December 13, when the FBI’s shooting reconstruction team was unable to immediately respond to a shooting at Brown University due to a lack of available bureau planes at an airport in Richmond, Virginia, according to Senator Dick Durbin.

“What did Black people do to this administration that has allowed it to really stigmatize folks of color?” asked host Whoopi Goldberg, referring to the Trump administration’s efforts to remove Black history from American monuments and museums.

“What exactly are you talking about, Whoopi?” Vance pressed, prompting loud groans from the audience.

“It seems that it has been very easy for this administration to remove that, and to denigrate Black folks who have worked their behinds off to get this American dream,” Goldberg said.

“So, that was actually a very helpful intervention because, I think the story you’re talking about is where you know, allegedly the administration is holding back the appointments of people based on skin color,” Vance said.

“Well no. I’m talking about a host of things,” Sunny Hostin interjected. “I’m talking about Black history getting erased from public spaces, Black voter districts are being dismantled, Black leaders are being sidelined from our ranks. Where do Americans of color fit in this vision? Because it doesn’t seem like we fit.”

Host Ana Navarro added that the Trump administration had allowed only 6,668 refugees into the country since October, and all but three were white South Africans. Vance denied Navarro’s number, claiming “everybody is welcome in our political coalition.”

“So, you say we’re anti-minority or anti-Black—” Vance said.

“No I didn’t say that. I asked, see?” Goldberg said. “Don’t start any stuff with me, man. Don’t get me in trouble!” The audience burst into cheers as Vance conceded.

WHOOPI GOLDBERG: What did Black people do to this administration that has allowed it to really stigmatize folks of color?

JD VANCE: What exactly are you talking about?

AUDIENCE: *groans* pic.twitter.com/xFozfFCohk

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 16, 2026

The hosts of The View also pressed Vance over the economy.

Host Joy Behar criticized the president for calling affordability a “hoax,” while spending millions of taxpayer dollars on his ballroom, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, an arch for himself, and a UFC-themed birthday party.

Vance denied that Trump had called affordability a “hoax,” though he has many times, and argued that Trump had made “good progress” bringing prices down.

“He just said he loves the inflation,” Navarro said, referring to Trump’s recent remark responding to surging inflation rates.

“What he said, Ana, what he said is he loves the fact that the inflation is gonna come down when this war is over,” Vance said. “That’s what he said.”

“That’s not what he said,” Goldberg interjected.

“Are you his interpreter, or are you his vice president? Come on,” Joy Behar chided. The hosts laughed at the flailing vice president, who chuckled uncomfortably along with them.

NAVARRO: Trump said he loves the inflation

JD VANCE: What he said, Ana, is he loves the fact the inflation is going to come down

WHOOPI: That's not what he said

BEHAR: Are you his interpreter, or his vice president? Come on pic.twitter.com/VNXTzb9NOv

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 16, 2026

At one point, Vance was brutally fact-checked after he brought up the claim that Trump had called all Mexicans rapists, saying that was a misconception. Instead, Vance argued that South American countries were off-loading criminals into our borders.

“There have been many, many journalists, including CNN, where you used to work and be my colleague, that have tried to find evidence of that,” Navarro replied. “There is no evidence that [Nicolás] Maduro was releasing people from insane asylums or jails, like Fidel Castro did do. This was made up. And we just can’t, you know, accept it without pushing back.”

Vance’s attempt to peddle his book on The View was a disaster—but honestly, it was entertaining.

The strange moment was caught on C-SPAN: Trump slouched in his chair with a vacant expression as French President Emmanuel Macron encouraged everyone at the table to turn and face a photographer. But while every other leader smiled and complied, Trump didn’t budge.

Trump, 80, seems unaware that everyone else is posing for a photo pic.twitter.com/XGEK4p8kpS

— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) June 16, 2026

There could be several reasons why Trump would be so obstinate in front of the summit. The G7 consists of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States—but Trump has railed against the alliance for years, departing from prior administrations by taking issue with the G7’s trade negotiations, climate change efforts, foreign policy, and international cooperation.

So far through his second term in office, Trump has threatened G7 allies (namely Canada), resisted the alliance’s joint statements on issues such as Ukraine, and advocated for Russia’s inclusion in the informal forum.

Another reason for Trump’s detachment could very well be his health. He is the second-oldest man to ever serve as America’s commander in chief, and his increasingly erratic behavior has sparked global concern in recent weeks about his stability and judgment.

The 80-year-old has spent hours at Walter Reed Medical Center on multiple occasions over the last nine months, fallen asleep during more than a dozen critical meetings, seemed lost and disoriented around foreign heads of state, frequently slurred his speech, and appeared with discolored and bruised skin on several occasions.

He has also derailed press conferences to throw cheap and petty insults at members of the press, taken jabs at the pope, and become so obsessed with his Washington renovation projects that he has a difficult time focusing on anything else. That last detail has been flagged by leading clinical psychologists as a tell-tale symptom of dementia.

Trump made his geographical error Tuesday while speaking to reporters alongside the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, at the G7 summit in France.

“They are the closest to Iran physically, so, with other countries, I noticed that they had to travel about 45 minutes to get there. With you, you could walk right across the border, so you are in a more dangerous position,” Trump said.

Trump: "Qatar is the closest to Iran, physically. With other countries, I noticed they had to travel about 45 minutes to get there. With you, you could walk right across the border."

There's no land border between Iran and Qatar. They're separated by the Persian Gulf. pic.twitter.com/Li2RBmeFK9

— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) June 16, 2026

Qatar and Iran are actually separated by the Persian Gulf, a body of water, at a distance of about 119 miles. Trump had the audacity to claim otherwise even next to the country’s ruler, and it’s not even the first time. In October, Trump told reporters on Air Force One, “They’re literally, you walk over from Iran to Qatar. You can walk it in one second. You go ‘boom boom,’ and now you’re in Qatar, that’s tough territory”—to much ridicule online.

Has no one bothered to correct the president? It’s possible that advisers have tried, only for Trump to ignore them. Iranian state media decided to offer their help in a post on X Tuesday, including a map with video of Trump’s comments.

Donald Trump says Iran and Qatar share a land border and you can cross on foot.

Here's the map to check that claim. pic.twitter.com/zVgWc8wSax

— IRNA News Agency ☫ (@IrnaEnglish) June 16, 2026

“We have been receiving troubling reports that you may be using part of the budget of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as a personal slush fund to make tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in unlawful ‘bonus’ payments to loyalist MAGA henchmen who have engaged in misconduct,” Raskin wrote in a letter to Patel. He went on to allege that Patel made “nearly $8,000 payments” to multiple different people who had already eclipsed their maximum salary.

“We can confirm that numerous loyalist employees have received at least five such payments in consecutive pay periods, amounting to nearly $40,000 per agent. We can also confirm you have depleted this reserve at such a frenzied rate that some of the payments have bounced back from exhausted accounts,” Raskin continued. “It is not clear whether these bonus payments have simply been a corrupt attempt to slide cash to friends or whether they are also meant to ensure the silence of the agents who witness your inebriation and accompanying professional negligence and misconduct.”

The FBI has yet to respond to Raskin’s letter. This is the latest in a string of troubling allegations against the FBI director regarding his use of federal resources for personal gain or convenience.

Park workers outfitted in hi-vis vests were spotted dumping gallons of hydrogen peroxide into the Reflecting Pool Tuesday morning. A close-up of their equipment revealed that they were using a 12 percent concentrate, a level that can cause problems if inhaled and burns if the chemical touches the skin, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Hydrogen peroxide is generally considered less environmentally destructive as its compounds readily break down in water, but the high concentration could nonetheless pose a risk to some of the pool’s frequent visitors, such as ducks or other birds.

Records indicate that the Trump administration spent at least $14.8 million renovating the Reflecting Pool—a project that was, apparently, all for naught. (As well as a far cry from the president’s original promise of a $1.8 million price tag.)

The project wrapped earlier this month to praise from Donald Trump, who celebrated its “beautiful, clean water” following the overhaul. The job involved painting the bottom of the memorial a color that Trump has described as “American-flag blue” ahead of the country’s semiquincentennial anniversary.

But within days, the relentless algal bloom was back—almost in full force—thanks to Washington’s hot and humid weather. By the weekend, the green, plant-like form had coated the bottom of the pool in several areas and floated to the surface.

Photojournalists also snapped shots of buckets of Induclor around the memorial, a chlorine compound used to control bacteria, algae, slime, and fungi in water, reported The Washington Post.

Fixing the Reflecting Pool is a headache that’s plagued pretty much every administration since its construction in 1923.

What makes the Reflecting Pool beautiful is exactly what makes it so difficult to maintain. The pool’s expansive length is possible due to the use of multiple large concrete slabs as its bottom. But those slabs are also prone to serious structural leaks, which requires the White House to replace roughly 16 million gallons of water each year. And the pool’s shallow depth—which creates its mirror-like appearance—also detracts from the pool’s health by creating a breeding ground for algae blooms that turn the water green.

During an interview Monday night on Fox News’s Hannity, Vance was asked whether Iran had agreed to end its uranium enrichment program.

“They’re agreeing right now to eliminate the enriched stockpile,” Vance said. “And, if they don’t get to a point where they agree to stop enriching, then they don’t get any other benefits of the bargain.

“A lot of the technical details we’re gonna figure out over the next month, over the next two months, but the basic structure is they can get a lot if they comply with the United States’s demands.”

Hannity: They’re agreeing never to enrich?

Vance: They are agreeing right now to eliminate the enriched stockpile…a lot of the technical details we will figure out over the next month, over the next two months pic.twitter.com/NEKtI7rVCA

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 16, 2026

Since the beginning of the war, Trump has repeatedly promised that his deal with Iran would end the country’s uranium enrichment program. However, it seems that’s a commitment Iran has yet to make. Rather, Trump’s deal seems primarily interested in collecting Iran’s nuclear “dust.” But now the president doesn’t seem committed to doing that, either.

“You could make the case, ‘Why even bother?’ Because it’s not really valuable, it’s probably half a million dollars’ worth,” Trump said Tuesday while at the G7 summit in France. “It’s not very valuable stuff. But I think, psychologically, we want to get it.”

Trump is backing away from getting Iran's enriched material: "You could make the case, why even bother? It's not very valuable stuff." pic.twitter.com/CgNgnZCaMQ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 16, 2026

So rather than stop Iran from enriching uranium, Trump made a deal to collect Iran’s nuclear dust—which he says probably isn’t worth it, except that it will make the United States feel better.

Crucially, it’s not clear that Iran was actually enriching uranium in the first place. At the beginning of the war, Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted that Iran was not currently enriching uranium. Later, multiple U.S. intelligence officials suggested that Iran did not present an imminent threat.

Still, upending Iran’s uranium enrichment program was a central demand for the Trump administration, though now it appears that it’s been punted to further negotiations.

The team was forced to leave the U.S. immediately after its World Cup match with New Zealand Monday night in Los Angeles, which ended in a hard-fought 2–2 draw, and head back to their Tijuana, Mexico, base camp.

“After the game today they said to us, ‘You have to leave immediately,’” coach Amir Ghalenoi told the press after the match. “Whereas today it’s very important for us to have recovery.

“We’ve been asked to get on a plane and return to our camp in Tijuana, and we are really troubled by that. They are forcing us to go back early. They are making the situation more and more difficult, more hurdles, but we’re not going to let that stop us from doing our best.”

Iran wasn’t even supposed to have its tournament base camp in Mexico. They were forced to abandon their original plans for a base camp in Tucson, Arizona, thanks to the Trump administration, which isn’t letting them stay overnight in the U.S. despite their group stage games taking place in Los Angeles and Seattle. Their fan base is also being punished: Iran’s entire ticket allocation was taken away last week, although it’s not clear if that was a U.S. or FIFA decision.

Before their match, the team had to go through five hours of travel and security checks on Sunday, despite the distance between Tijuana and Los Angeles only being 140 miles.

“We don’t know why they’re returning us, to be honest. I think it’s very strange. It seems like others are doing the planning for us.… We were supposed to arrive two nights before the game, but they didn’t permit [it],” Ghalenoi said. “We were supposed to stay here tonight to recover and return tomorrow lunchtime.

“I think our team is the most oppressed one in the whole World Cup. Our federation isn’t here, our media isn’t here, our management isn’t here.”

The U.S. government initially denied visas to 15 of the Iranian team’s support staff, later reducing that number to 11 after some visas were approved. Those excluded from the U.S. include both of the team’s media officers, analysts, and Iranian Football Federation President Mehdi Taj.

Inexplicably, winger Mehdi Torabi’s visa has also expired, as he was only granted a single entry visa to the U.S., Iranian state media reported. The Iranian federation is scrambling to get Torabi a new one that lets him take part in the remaining matches.

“I think it’s not good for the football,” team captain Mehdi Taremi said of the team’s situation. “In [the] World Cup, you have to prepare good for the next game, which is a lot of stress for the players and the staff and everyone. But we don’t have that support, and I think FIFA have to help us more than this. Let’s see what’s going to happen in the future.”

🚨🇮🇷 BREAKING — World Cup “Disaster”

Mohammad Mohebi and Mehri Taremi Say:

“Not to Make Excuses but This Is Not a Fair Competition.”

Iranian Players argued they should arrive 2 days before matches instead of traveling, training, and playing while exhausted by 5 hours in… pic.twitter.com/Z0ViTFEoRO

— Pamphlets (@PamphletsY) June 16, 2026

The Trump administration has yet to release the text of the memorandum of understanding officials signed with Iran, leaving senior GOP members frustrated at everything they don’t know, Politico reported Monday.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a defense and Iran hawk, voiced concern about discrepancies between different parties’ descriptions of the deal. “The MOU being described by us sounds really very good; the MOU being described by Iran sounds awful,” he told Politico.

The South Carolina Republican fretted that the deal would resemble former President Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which defense hawks despised.

“If they can enrich [uranium] anywhere at all, then it’s the same as JCPOA. If they can’t enrich, then that makes it a good deal,” he continued, and added in a separate conversation that he was “skeptical that Iran will ever go there.”

It seems that the similarities between Trump’s deal and the JCPOA are already coming into sharp relief: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth crumbled on live television when trying to explain the difference.

Some Republican senators are wary of the deal, believing they will have to review and vote on it.

“If you want a deal to last, it can’t be an executive agreement,” said Oklahoma Senator James Lankford. “We’ve got to have a vote of Congress to be able to solidify [it] long term.”

But others suspect that, like the JCPOA, the deal will be a political agreement.

“They’ll try to write it around the treaty requirements, so I don’t expect we’ll vote on it,” said Texas Senator John Cornyn.

GOP lawmakers aren’t the only ones wary of Trump’s deal with Iran: Even his own Cabinet members seem to hate it. Trump has claimed he will release the text of the deal on Friday, after the formal signing ceremony.

The ballroom has already eclipsed the $400 million Trump originally said it would cost. And while Trump has defended the necessity of the ballroom profusely, it’s become abundantly clear that this is simply another vanity project for him to feel like he’s actually done something successful, even as there’s no real need or demand for the ballroom—especially not if Americans are paying for $300 million of its price. And the wealthy individuals who are actually paying for it are getting government contract kickbacks for doing so.

“I guess ‘privately funded’ meant Trump was keeping it private that he’s stealing hundreds of millions of the public’s money for his ballroom. All this while gutting health care and raising costs,” Democratic Representative Gabe Amo wrote on X. “Shame. We have to stop this grift.”

Vance confirmed to CBS’s Ed O’Keefe Monday morning that the $300 billion was a real proposal in the Iran peace deal. Yet within hours—and after some monumental backlash from his party—Vance tried to stress that Iran would not receive a “single dime” of U.S. money.

“The agreement says they are not getting a single dime of American money, that’s just not what this is,” Vance said on Fox News Monday night. “What the agreement does say, Sean, is again, if the Iranians behave, and if there are sanctions relief, and if the Iranians are integrated into the world economy, we would invite other countries—not us—but other countries to invest in their country.

“That’s fine, but only if they comply with the terms of the agreement,” Vance added.

Hannity: There’s a report that the Qataris are giving them $300 billion with the approval of the US. Did the U.S. Ever sign off on the Qatari paying them that money?

Vance: No, the agreement says they are not getting a single dime of American money, that is just not what this… pic.twitter.com/qk024IvfLS

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 16, 2026

Vance did not elaborate on how the administration planned to manage or gatekeep foreign aid packages intended for Iran.

The White House and Tehran have already signed a peace deal, though the exact specifications of the agreement have not yet been revealed (and are still being hashed out). The final draft reportedly proposes the immediate reopening of the Strait of Hormuz under Iran’s direction, a commitment from the U.S. not to interfere in Iranian affairs, and a reiteration of Iran’s commitment not to produce nuclear weapons, echoing language included in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, according to a senior Iranian official who spoke with Reuters.

The most contentious point of the plan, however, is a reported $300 billion reconstruction fund—which the U.S. is set to facilitate with the help of Gulf allies. There are no details as to which countries are paying how much.

President Trump similarly tried to cast doubt on the proposal Monday evening, claiming on Truth Social that “the story that the U.S. is paying Iran 300 million Dollars is Fake News, put out by the Dumocrats!!!”

But not everyone in the administration is on the same page. Earlier that day, a U.S. official told reporters that the White House had “discussed the possibility of releasing frozen funds, sanctions relief, you know, a big $300 billion fund to rebuild their country, and all of these things are going to be tied to performance.”

This story has been updated.

Trump told reporters at the G7 summit in France Tuesday morning that unlike with 2015 JCPOA agreement with Iran, the U.S. was not transferring cash to Iran, ignoring the fact that reports of the still-unpublished deal include Iranian access to $300 billion in reconstruction funds and releasing $25 billion in Iranian assets.

“We’re not investing any money. We have the right to if we want, but we’re not investing any money. We didn’t pay for it like Obama did. He paid billions of dollars, he paid $1.7 billion from an airplane, all green cash. I watched that, I couldn’t believe it,” Trump said. “But the one that’s happening that’s of note, frankly the only thing that matters to me is that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.”

Trump: "I want to mention Iran. We appreciate the relationship we've had over a short period of time with Iran. We're not investing any money. I have the right to if we want, but we're not investing any money. We didn't pay for it like Obama did. He paid billions of dollars." pic.twitter.com/zBqNl2cGe9

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 16, 2026

The JCPOA also included a commitment from Iran that it would not pursue a nuclear weapon. Plus, it included the U.S. lifting sanctions and sending Iran $1.7 billion to settle decades-old failed contracts between the two countries. In Trump’s new deal, the funding sources for the $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran are unclear, although Vice President JD Vance said Monday that they would come from the “Gulf coast coalition.”

Is that some combination of Persian Gulf countries and the U.S., or did Vance actually mean to refer to the Gulf Cooperation Council? If some of that money does come from American taxpayers, that’s not going to go over well with most of Congress, except a few of Trump’s most sycophantic supporters.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and Ratcliffe each voiced their doubts regarding Iran’s commitment to the memorandum of understanding announced on Sunday, as each detailed “intel” that led them to doubt Iran’s side of the MOU agreement.

“The intelligence reflects that the Iranian intentions are not in line with their commitments under the deal,” one source told Axios.

While the full text of the deal has yet to be released, it is understood that the MOU requires that Iran reopen the Strait of Hormuz for 60 days and refuse to develop nuclear weapons, while the U.S. must end its blockade of Iranian ships in the strait and Israel must withdraw from Lebanon. It’s important to note that the strait was already open before the war, and this commitment to no nukes from Iran was already in the original deal from 2015—a deal that Trump canceled in 2018.

It’s also not clear just how seriously Trump will take this “intel” from Rubio, Ratcliffe, and Hegseth, as his son-in-law Jared Kushner and envoy Steve Witkoff are supportive of the MOU.

The widespread opposition to the construction of data centers is a huge opportunity for liberals and Democrats, says author and organizer Astra Taylor. In the latest episode of Right Now, Taylor argues that Americans are frustrated about data centers in part because they are being built in communities without residents’ knowledge and consent. Rural residents and Republicans also oppose data centers, making them fertile ground for politicians. Taylor also discussed her upcoming book on “end times fascism” and the importance of Democrats defending higher education and debt-cancellation programs.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Donald Trump has signed a deal with Iran to cease hostilities and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. We still haven’t seen the document, but all of the reporting suggests a very simple story: Trump lost. He got nothing of any significance. Trump himself plainly has no idea what happened, as he revealed in a strange ramble to reporters. But JD Vance does know what happened, even though he’s trying very hard to sugarcoat it in a pretty revealing way.

We’re really lucky to be talking about all of this with Tom Nichols, a staff writer for The Atlantic, who has a good piece arguing that Trump capitulated to Iran. Tom, great to have you on, man.

Tom Nichols: Good to see you, Greg.

Sargent: So let’s just sum up where we are. We haven’t seen the document, but all the reporting suggests that while the Strait of Hormuz will reopen, all that does is return us to where we were before Trump’s war.

Meanwhile, they’ve punted the discussion over Iran’s nuclear program until later. And the Iranian regime has survived. So basically, Trump’s tens of billions of dollars in bombing didn’t compel Iran to do what he said he’d make them do. Tom, is that basically the size of things?

Nichols: I think it’s worse than that. The bigger problem is that he counted on regime change. This was what the war was really about. So when that wasn’t going to happen, when it became clear a week or so in that this regime wasn’t going to collapse, this outcome, I think, was more or less inevitable.

And the people that are now waiting and saying, Well, we need to see the details of this MOU. That’s fine. But even without knowing the details of the MOU, the Americans have been defeated here. And that pains me to say as an American. Because the regime is still intact, their nuclear material is still in their country. They’re actually politically more powerful now that they’ve flexed muscle and done some serious harm to the other Gulf states as a warning not to cooperate with the United States. There’s going to be some money going back into Iran, whether it comes through third parties or not.

If you had said any of this to Donald Trump on the first night of the war, he would have said, That’s impossible, we’re going to get unconditional surrender. Well, we didn’t. And all of these things are going to happen. Without even knowing what’s in the MOU, you can know at least this much.

Sargent: Right. Trump absolutely did expect unconditional surrender, even though he was told by lots and lots of different people within his administration, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, that that wouldn’t happen. He was told that the strait would be closed by Iran and that that would exercise leverage over the global economy and over us.

Trump couldn’t fathom that possibility because he’s strong. It’s just that simple, right? He’s strong, he wins, he’s a winner, so there’s no way that things won’t go exactly the way he says they will.

Nichols: It’s bitten him before and caused him problems before, but there’s this weird quirk in Trump’s personality where he really believes that saying things makes them real. That, like a child, he can sort of wish-cast things into existence.

And you can play that game with domestic politics and tariffs and taxes and do some fancy dancing around where the money is in terms of things like revenue. You can bully other Republicans to agree with you. What you can’t do is do that with a war where the enemy gets a vote.

Every day that Trump said they’re eager to make a deal, there’s going to be a deal, a deal is imminent—the Iranians are not Republican House members. They are a foreign country and an enemy of the United States. And there’s nothing to stop them from saying, No, there is no deal. And now that we have one, it’s not great. It’s basically an acknowledgment that the United States failed to gain any of its strategic objectives.

Sargent: That seems beyond clear. So Trump talked to the media about his deal today. He blasted Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal, which unfroze tens of billions of dollars that Iran could then access in foreign accounts. Listen to Trump.

Donald Trump (voiceover): It was a horrible deal for the United States. It was a deal where billions of dollars was given to Iran. It was a deal where $1.7 billion in cash was put on a Boeing 7—well, not a 757, I guess, right? But on a big, beautiful Boeing 757. They needed a Boeing 747, to be honest with you, because it was a lot of cash. $1.7 billion was taken out of the banks and given to Iran. And on top of that, tens of billions of dollars was spent. So they tried to bribe them to make a deal and that didn’t work. It never works.

Tom, as far as we know now, Iran will also be able to access a huge tranche of funds under Trump’s deal too. Can you explain that? How do you respond to what Trump said there?

Nichols: Well, I was a critic of the JCPOA because I didn’t like how much of it was front-loaded. But I also have to be honest and say that in the years that followed, the deal seemed more or less to work.

Now Trump has wandered into a crappier version of the JCPOA, starting all over again, with the argument that they’ll get access to this money if they clear certain gates and engage in certain things. And the Iranians are just better at this than he is. I think that money is going to start coming to them again through third parties.

That’s why you keep hearing Trump and Vance both being careful to say, Well, we’re not just going to give them cash. No, you’re going to open up the ability to have cash get to them with your OK. And I suspect that once people are tired of this whole process, which will be very soon, and once Trump is no longer paying any attention to it, the Iranians are going to get what they want. How soon, how much—that’s just a matter of working out the details.

Remember, in the end, this was supposed to be giving the Iranian government back to its people, who would then dismantle the nuclear program, end support for terrorism, restrain their proxies, blah, blah, blah. None of that’s going to happen. They’re going to get the money one way or another.

Sargent: What’s the basic difference between what Obama did with the money and what Trump is doing with the money? Do we know?

Nichols: Well, without seeing the MOU, hard to say. But I would say that Obama did it without completely disrupting the international economy, blowing billions of dollars’ worth of expensive American weapons, getting some Americans killed, getting many hundreds more wounded, and then weakening the United States by forcing us to basically admit that, yes, the Iranians own the Strait of Hormuz.

Sargent: Right. The bottom line here is that Trump is in some sense using the mechanism Obama used, which is a financial incentive to get Iran to cooperate with oversight of its nuclear program. Obama did this through negotiation.

Trump did it through spending tens of billions of dollars committing massive war crimes, bombing an Iranian school filled with children, et cetera, to practically melting down the global economy. That’s the difference. They’re using more or less the same mechanism.

Nichols: Trump blew up a lot of things, expended a lot of weapons, messed up the global economy, and now is doing it exactly the way Obama did it. And we’ll probably not get as good a deal, because now the Iranians have made sure to do things like booby-trap the uranium. Even if international inspectors get in there—and whatever Pete Hegseth says, you’re not going to have Marines in there digging this stuff out—getting inspectors in there is going to be a lot trickier than it was 10 years ago. It was just stupid and pointless.

Sargent: I think there’s actually another reason for that that I want to get to in a second. But first, let’s listen to JD Vance for a second. There’s a bit of confusion about how Iran will get access to this money. It’s being described as $300 billion. JD Vance was asked about this. Listen to this.

Reporter (voiceover): The Iranians are saying that they’re going to have access to a $300 billion reconstruction fund. True or false?

JD Vance (voiceover): Well, that’s the sort of thing they could have access to, funded by the Gulf Coast coalition, so long as they honor their end of the obligation. I think that one of the things you’re going to see, Ed, and people have to be skeptical of this, is that the hardliners in the Iranian system will overemphasize the benefits that Iran gets while underemphasizing all the things that they have to concede and all the things they have to provide in order to get these benefits. So we absolutely are open to the Gulf Coast countries investing in the reconstruction of Iran, but only if Iran ends their nuclear program, ends their enriched stockpile of material, and is really open to an inspections and enforcement regime that gives the American people confidence they’re never going to have a nuclear weapon.

Sargent: So if I understand this correctly, the U.S. will allow Iran to get access to this money if and only if Iran agrees to some kind of binding long-term constraint on its nuclear program. What you’re saying is that once the nuts and bolts really hit, when they really start to talk about this, probably Iran will be able to get access to that money fairly quickly, or at least before any final commitment is made.

And when JD Vance says this money will come from other Gulf Coast countries investing, what’s he referring to there? And what’s your overall reaction to what you heard from JD?

Nichols: Well, I don’t know how quickly they’ll get it. This is where I will be cautious and say that until we see this MOU—which for some reason the administration really doesn’t want to release to the public, which should tell you something right there—I don’t know how quickly it’ll get here. But basically, we’re committing to supporting the reconstruction of the country we just blew to smithereens after getting nothing.

It really is staggering to have the administration claiming, We finally got a commitment not to build nuclear weapons. Look, I was never in favor of attacking Iran, but I was a real hawk on the issue of, if they ever get close to a nuclear weapon, that could actually be the trigger for war. But there was no evidence of this, and there’s been no evidence of it for 10 years, since the JCPOA.

So again, we’re back to this problem that they’re going to get a lot of money, they’re going to get reconstruction support from the Gulf states that they have pounded and inflicted punishment on for cooperating with us. How does this not leave Iran—even though Iran is temporarily militarily weakened—in a strategically more powerful stance?

That’s why, when you listen to that part we just listened to, Greg—where you ask JD Vance these questions and he does the Jackie Gleason thing, where he’s trying to explain his way out of it—the reality is Trump wants out. And he’s willing to buy his way out if he couldn’t bomb his way out.

Sargent: Right. Obama actually ended up getting more because he had an actual deal that laid out what oversight of the Iranian nuclear program would look like. Trump doesn’t have that. He’s just now doing what Obama did, which is using money to try to get it.

Nichols: And doing it without the support of the international community.

Sargent: And after spending tens and tens of billions of dollars committing war crimes, destroying the global economy—

Nichols: I’m not there yet on war crimes. I think that waits for an investigation. But he started a preventive war. He started a war of choice, which itself is horrific, because this didn’t even have the rationale of the Iraq War behind it. I said at the beginning of this, the Iraq War looks like it was competently lawyered up compared to this.

Bush went to the United Nations, he had allies on board with at least some of it. He made a case, he put a clock on it about the inspectors. This was Trump just getting up one morning and saying, you know what, it’s time to take out Iran.

Which itself is a problem when you’re talking about war crimes and crimes against humanity. But in the end, I will also say that had he toppled this regime, Greg, I would have been one of the people shrugging and saying, Well, you have to congratulate him if he managed to get rid of one of the worst, most dangerous regimes on this planet. I may not have liked the way he went into it, but I would have had to certainly congratulate him on coming out of it.

Now he’s gotten the worst of all worlds. He’s taken America on a discretionary war, didn’t get what he wants. He’s going to have to pay off the bad guys so that he can get out of this. And basically he’s going to paper over his own mistake here with dollars. That’s what he’s going to do.

Sargent: I think that’s basically the size of it. I just want to say one more thing about JD Vance’s strange ramble there. He’s basically admitting that Trump is using the same mechanism that Obama used—a financial incentive to get Iran to cooperate with oversight of its nuclear program. Doesn’t JD just end up making Trump look like a complete moron, given that it comes right after Trump compared his deal favorably to Obama’s unfreezing of funds to Iran?

Nichols: No part of this administration communicates within itself. And what we’re seeing here—given the concerns about Trump’s health, his state of mind—JD Vance’s answer was sort of stumbling and bumbling, but within the normal range of political dissembling, if that makes any sense.

Trump, I think, just doesn’t have any idea what’s going on. That’s the bigger worry—that Rubio and Witkoff and Kushner are saying, OK, we’ve got it, but I don’t get the sense that Trump himself really understands anything that’s going on here. The idea that Trump and Vance aren’t on the same page isn’t surprising at all. I really wonder how much Trump understands any of this at this point.

Sargent: So Tom, I just want to close on a point you make in your piece, which is really interesting. Trump is threatening to restart hostilities against Iran if it doesn’t agree to surrender its nuclear program. You point out that Iran just won’t believe that, because Trump has shown that he wanted an exit from all this. I want to add to your point and get you to talk about this. As we get closer to the midterms, it becomes next to impossible for Trump to restart military action of any kind, let alone using any kind of ground invasion. Republicans will just not allow that to happen because it’ll utterly crush them in the midterms.

So I think, Tom, what Trump has really done here is lock in a time frame that actually weakens his leverage over Iran over time. It weakens his leverage over Iran’s nuclear program over time. And Iran knows that. Am I right?

Nichols: I think so. And he’s also alluded to using a nuclear weapon at one point. He said, We still have the ultimate, you know. But I just find it hard to believe—although with this administration and this president you never know—that right after Labor Day, as everybody’s going into the midterms and he’s still trying to wait for good news on the economy … remember, what he really cares about is international markets. He’s going to say we’re starting up the war again? On what pretext? And by that time, he really will have to go to Congress or do something.

He surprised the country and the American people and the world by doing this when he did it. I don’t think you can go to that well twice. And I could be wrong—I just don’t believe him when he says, Well, if this doesn’t work out and they don’t behave, I’ll just start up the war again.

That means he’s willing to tie down huge numbers of U.S. forces halfway around the world on a maybe while negotiators negotiate. At some point, ships have to come home. Soldiers and sailors need to be cycled through so they can do the things they need to do. They can’t just sit on ships for three or four months. I just don’t buy it.

Sargent: So just to boil this down, we’re now entering the really hard part, which is the part where we negotiate over the future of the Iranian nuclear program and the nuts and bolts of that have to be worked out. And Trump has weakened his leverage going into that. And Trump has also strengthened Iranian leverage because Iran knows it can hold the global economy hostage now. Is that the size of it?

Nichols: Right. And the Iranians get to appear like the aggrieved party now that they’re the ones that have lost thousands of people and been attacked. And even with a competent team that understood the issues and knows what it’s doing, trying to negotiate a nuclear program after you’ve bombed it and put it under a lot of rubble takes a long time. It’s going to take even longer here.

So the idea that somehow in 60 days, sometime again around Labor Day or something, Trump’s going to say, That’s it, everything’s fixed, we’ve got it—none of that’s going to happen. This is going to be a long cold war with the Iranians, just like the one we’ve been in with them for 47 years. And Trump made it worse. So I don’t see any way out of this in a way that enhances American security anytime soon.

Sargent: Utter catastrophe all around. Tom Nichols, awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Nichols: Thanks for having me, Greg.

The Sixth Amendment requires, among many other things, that criminal trials be conducted before an “impartial jury.” In nearly every state, this jury consists of 12 members of the community where the alleged crime was committed. But in a handful of jurisdictions, states use fewer jurors to more easily secure convictions.

Hamed Kian, the defendant in this case, is a chiropractor in Jupiter, Florida. State officials suspended Kian’s license in 2021 while they investigated allegations of sexual misconduct against him. Kian allegedly continued to treat patients in the years that followed, leading state prosecutors to bring five counts of practicing chiropractic medicine with a suspended license.

Under Florida law, trials for capital offenses are held before a 12-person jury. Defendants who face noncapital felony charges, however, are instead prosecuted before a six-person jury. One of those smaller juries convicted Kian on all five charges. He was sentenced to one year in prison and five years of probation.

On appeal, Kian sought to overturn his conviction by arguing that the Sixth Amendment required him to be tried before a 12-member jury. Forty-four states in the Union currently impose that requirement for all felony trials. Florida and five other states—Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Massachusetts, and Utah—allow at least some trials to be held before juries with fewer than 12 members. No state allows juries with five or fewer members.

In 2022, an Arizona man asked the Supreme Court to review his conviction of felony offenses by an eight-member jury on Sixth Amendment grounds. While the court declined to do so, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh publicly indicated that they had voted to review his case. Gorsuch also wrote a solo dissent where he forcefully argued that the court should have taken up the case.

Twelve, Gorsuch argued, was not some arbitrary number. By the time the Framers adopted the Sixth Amendment in 1791, their English ancestors had upheld the right to a 12-member jury for nearly four centuries. (Other accounts date the 12-member jury even further back, to around the enactment of Magna Carta in 1215.) As a result, founding-era Americans understood “the right to a trial by jury for serious criminal offenses meant a trial before 12 members of the community—nothing less.”

Florida’s deviation from this legal norm came as federal troops withdrew from the South, heralding the end of Reconstruction. Kian noted that the Florida legislature first enacted a six-member jury law in February 1877, one month after President Rutherford B. Hayes ordered the military’s withdrawal. “The jury-of-six thus first saw light at the birth of the Jim Crow era as former Confederates regained power in southern states and state prosecutors made a concerted effort to prevent blacks from serving as jurors,” Kian told the justices in his petition for review.

Historians have long noted that Southern Redeemers used a variety of subjective legal tests to eliminate Black civic and political participation, both at the ballot box and in the jury box. Along with this historical evidence, Kian pointed out that Black jury participation in Florida became so rare in the Jim Crow years that state newspapers treated it as remarkable and newsworthy on the rare occasions when a Black juror was actually empaneled.

The Supreme Court is well aware of this general history. In 2020, the justices struck down another Jim Crow–era jury restriction in Ramos v. Louisiana. Two states, Louisiana and Oregon, allowed nonunanimous jury convictions for felony offenses. This allowed states to convict defendants even if one or two members of the jury voted to find them not guilty. (Though Oregon was not technically a Jim Crow state, it is well established by historians that the Ku Klux Klan played a key role in the restriction’s adoption in the 1930s.)

Oregon’s nonunanimous jury law had been previously upheld by the Supreme Court in the 1972 case Apodaca v. Oregon. But Gorsuch, writing for the Ramos majority, rejected what he described as the “functionalist” reasoning of the Apodaca justices, where they looked to the rule’s “function” in “contemporary society.” Gorsuch instead adopted an originalist approach to require jury unanimity in all felony trials.

“When the American people chose to enshrine that right in the Constitution, they weren’t suggesting fruitful topics for future cost-benefit analyses,” he wrote in his Ramos decision. “They were seeking to ensure that their children’s children would enjoy the same hard-won liberty they enjoyed. As judges, it is not our role to reassess whether the right to a unanimous jury is ‘important enough’ to retain.”

When the court declined to hear the 2022 case involving juries with fewer than 12 members, Gorsuch took the same approach. “For almost all of this Nation’s history and centuries before that, the right to trial by jury for serious criminal offenses meant the right to a trial before 12 members of the community,” he wrote. “In 1970, this court abandoned that ancient promise and enshrined in its place bad social science parading as law.”

That 1970 case was Williams v. Florida, where the court upheld Florida’s six-man jury law as a constitutionally permissible change to the long-standing tradition of 12-member juries. “That mistake,” Gorsuch explained, “continues to undermine the integrity of the Nation’s judicial proceedings and deny the American people a liberty their predecessors long and justly considered inviolable.”

Kian’s appeal received a favorable hearing from a Florida appeals court that reviewed his conviction. At the same time, that court concluded that it was bound by the Supreme Court’s earlier holding in Williams, even though the precedent’s reasoning had been severely undermined by the court’s 2020 ruling in Ramos. The appeals court effectively signaled to the justices that they hoped to be overturned by praising Ramos, when “the light of originalism began to [peek] out from the darkness of functionalism.”

Florida, for its part, had urged the justices to maintain the status quo. The state claimed in its brief that Kian had made “no serious attempt to show that overruling Williams is warranted under traditional principles of stare decisis.” Florida also warned that overruling Williams “would imperil thousands of criminal convictions in Florida and five other states that for more than 50 years have relied on its rule.” Though the state could not provide exact numbers on how many Floridians had been convicted by six-member juries since the 1970s, it noted that “roughly 5,000 criminal convictions are currently pending on direct appeal.”

Those numbers would likely pose little impediment for the Supreme Court to overturn Williams when it hears Kian’s case next term, however. When the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Ramos six years ago, the ruling took effect for future trials and those that had not yet exhausted their appeals. In a follow-up case, however, the court declined to apply it retroactively, meaning that finalized criminal convictions remained intact.

It is always a fool’s errand to predict exactly how the Supreme Court will decide a case. One subtle sign of Kian’s confidence is that he and his lawyers declined to file a reply brief to Florida’s brief that urged the court not to take up the case, as if they had already said everything they needed to say. The stage is now set for the Supreme Court to further strengthen one of the great bulwarks of American liberty—in the few states, at least, that have gotten away with diminishing it for so long.

Candidates often do better in their second bids for office. But El-Sayed’s strong performance is emblematic of broader trends. Progressives, after struggling in 2022 and 2024 in primaries against more centrist Democrats, are in the midst of an electoral revival. And they are breaking through not just in very blue areas but in purple ones, such as Maine, Michigan, and California’s Central Valley.

Why? Because the Democratic establishment has made some huge blunders, and the party’s left wing has made some smart tactical adjustments. Put all of that together, and the battle for the soul of the Democratic Party is alive again, with progressives winning key primaries around the country and positioning themselves to potentially capture the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028.

We’re now a decade into intense primary battles between the Democratic left and center-left, with both sides having strong and weak periods during that time. Sanders’s surprisingly strong campaign against Hillary Clinton back in 2016 reinvigorated the Democratic left and inspired a spate of other progressive challengers to more centrist Democrats. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the most prominent of the numerous Sanders-aligned progressives who defeated more centrist Democrats in 2018 and 2020.

But centrist Eric Adams’s win in the 2021 New York mayoral primary was the first of a string of major defeats for progressives. Two years ago, Representatives Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, who had been elected in 2020 as part of the initial progressive wave, were defeated in primaries by opponents who got heavy support from centrist organizations. Centrist Democrats successfully painted progressives as ignoring practical issues like crime and damaging the Democrats’ national brand by pushing overly liberal ideas. They also were shrewd in fighting the intraparty war, targeting progressives like Bush who had controversies around them unrelated to their policy stands.

So how have progressives come back? In large part because of own goals by the Democratic establishment. Zohran Mamdani was greatly helped by city’s center-left backing a candidate (Andrew Cuomo) who was lethargic on the campaign trail and had to resign the governorship in shame after being accused by numerous women of sexual harassment. Graham Platner is the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine because the party establishment backed a candidate (Janet Mills) who was lethargic on the campaign trail and almost 80 years old, annoying Democratic voters who are leery of older candidates after Joe Biden’s failed 2024 run.

Peggy Flanagan, the progressive candidate in Minnesota’s Democratic Senate primary, is leading in part because her centrist opponent, Representative Angie Craig, stupidly voted for a Trump-backed anti-immigration bill, angering the state’s liberals. In nearly all of these races, the progressive candidates can straightforwardly condemn Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, while centrist donors insist that the candidates they support take pro-Israel stances that are out of touch with Democratic voters.

Broadly, the Democratic establishment has discredited itself with the party base, with massive electoral (2024) and policy (the Gaza war) mistakes. So endorsements from centrist leaders such as Joe Biden, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Chuck Schumer no longer carry much weight and arguably hurt centrist candidates more than they help them. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, is so toxic in liberal circles that it tries to hide its role in backing centrist candidates, thereby limiting AIPAC’s effectiveness. A candidate such as El-Sayed can brush aside the establishment’s claims that he is unelectable in a general election because the center-left’s political acumen is no longer trusted by voters after it lost the White House, Senate, and House in 2024.

“When you have 70, 75 percent of the Democratic base saying, ‘We don’t agree with what Netanyahu’s doing in Gaza,’ but you have members of your party who are still voting to send arms to that government and who are telling you that the issue is complicated, when you’re seeing children being blown up … you start to question them not only on that issue but on other issues, as well,” Mamdani adviser and longtime Democratic Party operative Patrick Gaspard told me on a Right Now episode last year.

At the same time, the progressives have sown the seeds of their recent successes. They have smartly changed their rhetoric. Mamdani and numerous other progressive candidates deleted their tweets calling for defunding the police and have broadly stopped calling for police reforms.

In terms of policy, that’s disappointing. The police in America deserve much scrutiny and accountability. But this shift is shrewd politics. Progressives are no longer fighting on an issue where public sentiment is against them. Leftist candidates still support Medicare for All, free college, and other big expansions of government programs, but they fixate on those ideas a bit less than a decade ago, perhaps aware that even voters who agree with those proposals doubt they will ever happen.

Instead, the left these days leads with an anti-billionaire, anti-Washington populism, along with more incremental affordability proposals. Candidates such as Flanagan and California House hopeful Randy Villegas decry the growing power of billionaires and call for banning members of Congress from selling stocks. Both of those positions are extremely popular with the public.

Progressives have also gotten savvier and more ruthless in their campaign strategies. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and New York Governor Kathy Hochul are as centrist as Representative Dan Goldman and even more powerful. So why did New York progressives opt against aggressive primary challenges to Jeffries and Hochul while focusing attention on taking down Goldman? Because Goldman is in a very progressive district and therefore easier to beat.

Progressives, while still decrying the outsize role of money and big donors, are creating their own super-PACs, aware that they can’t win races if they are vastly outspent. Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, and Mamdani often endorse the same candidates, creating a kind of progressive crescendo behind their choices. In Nebraska, populist candidates are running as independents, realizing they can’t win under the mantle of the Democratic Party in places where the party is super unpopular.

None of this guarantees progressive success this November or in the future. Mamdani could fail as mayor. Platner could be hit by another scandal, and he and other progressive candidates could lose in November. It will still be extremely hard for Ocasio-Cortez, Representative Ro Khanna, or another person closely associated with the party’s progressive wing to win the Democratic presidential nomination. All that said, in the days after the 2024 election, when party strategists were blaming progressive causes and groups for the losses, I was deeply concerned that the Democratic Party would move decisively to the right. It hasn’t. Instead, progressives have led the fight against Trump, forced the party’s establishment to admit its failings in the Biden years, and reinvented their own strategies in winning ways. A Muslim man named Abdul, backed by Bernie Sanders and calling for a new kind of politics in America, could be the party’s candidate in Michigan. Progressives are making progress.

Perry Bacon: We have a great guest today: Astra Taylor, one of the smartest people I know. She’s done documentary filmmaking, she’s written a ton of books, she’s an organizer with the Debt Collective, and she’s a person who’s just studied and is very thoughtful about a lot of different subjects. So Astra, thanks for joining me. Welcome.

Astra Taylor: Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Bacon: So we’re going to start with the topic of the year, millennium, decade—I want to talk about AI for a bit, because you wrote a piece I’m interested in. The title’s in The Guardian: “The fight against data centers isn’t just about tech, it’s about democracy.” But let me start with a basic premise here, which is: Are data centers inherently bad, and is AI inherently bad? So talk about those things first.

Taylor: Oh, those are some big questions. Are data centers inherently bad? No. And data centers aren’t new. They’re new in the news. But data centers, 20 years ago, before we were talking about AI—data centers are where we store our data. We were storing our data for old-fashioned social media usage or streaming services.

So data centers have been around for a long time, and there was a big boom, a data center build-out during Covid, actually, when internet usage exploded and there was a lot of access to low-interest capital that facilitated the build-out.

One way of thinking about data centers is they’re the backbone of the internet. It’s where the cloud comes to earth. But they’re obviously much more prominent now, and they’re just being built at a different scale—hyperscale, to use the term.

Bacon: Let me come back to that, though. Data centers themselves have existed a long time. That’s what I wanted to get at.

Taylor: Yeah. They’re not inherently evil.

Bacon: It’s new in the news, but it’s not new. We’ve had data centers. That’s what I was trying to draw out a little bit.

I want to ask—a lot of people, on the left, are very AI-skeptical. And I wonder—we can talk about the economics of it and the growth of it, but is AI inherently bad itself? It’s a very broad question, but I’m curious what you think.

Taylor: I think AI in this economic model, in this political economic paradigm, is veering towards inherently bad. You cannot separate the technology from the economics. This is a point I’ve been making since my first book, which is called The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, which came out in 2014. That was essentially a political economy of the old-fashioned, pre-AI internet.

And my argument there was that you cannot separate technology from the underlying business model of these firms. That just seems to me like one of those basic eternal insights we should not lose sight of. In a sense, this is the same movie but on steroids. The AI boom is happening in a period of much more intense wealth concentration.

So the “inherent” question—people like to say technology is neutral. I think that’s a bit wrong. Yes, you can use machine learning to assist a robust scientific infrastructure, or you can use machine learning to enhance a drone that is engaged in a genocide.

Bacon: That’s what I’m getting at. Could there be a world where AI is used nicely?

Taylor: Technology is flexible. But we would need very different societal conditions and be operating under a different government with a lot more constraints. On the “neutral” point: You can use a knife to kill someone or to make a sandwich, but that doesn’t mean it’s neutral. It’s a tool that cuts things.

The AI that is being designed right now is being designed for specific purposes. OpenAI—the definition they have of AGI, artificial general intelligence, that they’re looking towards is a tool that can do economically valuable labor. In other words, they’re trying to build a human worker replacement engine. So I don’t think this technology is neutral, but I also don’t think it is inherently bad or good. It’s embedded in societal conditions.

Bacon: So we’ve talked about data centers and now AI. Now we’re talking about AI data centers. How did this happen? You’re in North Carolina, but it’s nationwide. I feel like … in the last 18 months, you’ve had AI data center protests, bans, really [in] almost every part of the country—rural, urban, suburban. Not really urban, because data centers are mostly in more spread-out areas, but how did this happen?

Taylor: It’s actually becoming more urban. There are protests in the streets of Vancouver right now over a big data center. Seattle just issued a moratorium, which is interesting because Seattle is a big tech hub.

So absolutely this movement is growing, and there are different reasons for it. One is people don’t like this infrastructure. It has all sorts of negative consequences. These are absolutely massive build-outs. They often have real consequences for people in the vicinity—incredible noise that keeps people up at night, that makes people want to move, but by that point it has destroyed their property values.

They’re often run on what should be temporary power sources—gas turbines, methane turbines that have very immediate consequences for the air people are breathing. Sometimes it smells bad. Even if you can’t sense it, there is extra pollution. Depending on the locality, there can be strains on the water supply. They often raise utility bills.

And then people don’t really like what it’s about. There used to be a compact, which was, OK, we’re going to do industrial development, but you’re going to get some jobs. Maybe you’ll get a few hundred jobs. You may get a few thousand jobs.

These data centers—sometimes they’re billion-dollar build-outs, and there are 30 jobs, 100 jobs. There’s a company now that’s offering robot security dogs to replace the human security workers that were guarding these places.

So the jobs that are permanent tend to be low-wage security jobs or janitorial jobs. The higher-paid work is temporary—it’s in construction or building the actual computers. It’s a bum deal. People are also finding out that they are being built with incredible tax incentives that often don’t benefit the community. So there are all sorts of reasons that people are questioning this.

Then there is the bigger context of: Hold on, what does this portend for our collective future? Do we want to live in an AI world? And then amazingly, something as amorphous as AI or the cloud—you go, Oh, it’s actually in my backyard. They’re trying to build it here.

And people are realizing that they can fight back. I’m on some Signal chats, one with people from 45 states, who are fighting back against these developments and definitely seeing themselves as part of a bigger push. I wrote the piece in The Guardian with Saul Levin, a longtime environmental organizer—he’s from Michigan, and he’s been on the data center beat for a long time. We were actually replying to those folks who were like, Oh, is that really the best way to fight AI? It’s kind of whack-a-mole.

Our point is: We’re on incredibly complicated political terrain. It’s actually amazing that there is a space where people can gather, find each other, and push back. And when people do gather, they’re finding out, Actually, we might not have voted the same way. We might not have a lot in common in terms of culture war issues. But we actually all object to this. It’s creating these new solidarities. The physical space that these data centers offer is actually providing an incredible opportunity for organizers.

Bacon: I want to ask: How did this get politicized? The reason I want to ask this is because it appears the Democrats have decided they oppose them now, but they followed—

Taylor: Not all Democrats.

Bacon: Yeah, some of them are. But what I’m getting at is: It seems to me that AI data center proliferation was fine with most elites in media, business, politics, both parties. Yet a groundswell of people started opposing it. So I’m curious—it’s unusual in our culture today. You often find political movements are top-down. Sometimes they’re bottom-up, but usually … Black Lives Matter, there were at least active civil rights groups that existed for a long time.

So I’m curious: How did these people figure out, Oh, this is something we can oppose? Because a lot of these cities, the city council was trying to hide the tax credits from them. It was not very transparent. A lot of places where the media’s not very strong. So how did people get informed on this?

Taylor: That’s a really interesting question. I do want to just linger on your point about the lack of transparency, because that’s a huge element that is pissing people off.

Bacon: That also causes that. Yes.

Taylor: All of these deals are under the cover of these NDAs, where often much of the city council doesn’t even know what’s going on.

Bacon: The government in the city has decided either to cover it up, or they don’t know themselves. The mayor or whoever has done it without them knowing.

Taylor: I did some reporting in Memphis, where Elon Musk has built his Colossus supercomputer—there’s actually now three of them in Tennessee and Mississippi, all in this area—and just, absolute secrecy. That’s part of what created this incredible outrage. As people dug, they realized they’re secret for a reason, because it’s these temporary polluting turbines and because he’s not keeping his other promises.

That’s a big part of it. There are a lot of reasons. On the progressive side, one is that on Inauguration Day, there was the phalanx of tech executives and the sense that tech had gone MAGA. And so suddenly people were like, Hold on, what side are you on? Now you want to totally merge with the U.S. government and build this AI dystopian future.

That doesn’t really explain what has happened on the right. On the right, big tech has been their enemy. For years, Silicon Valley was this techno-democratic formation, and—in the views of the right—they felt social media companies were censoring the truth, whether it was about Covid or about election conspiracies. There was a lot of animosity to big tech.

Then you have these AI executives going, In the future, we’re going to be eliminating half the jobs, maybe all of them. And by the way, we’re building a transhumanist digital God. And people were like, We don’t want to be replaced. We hate that. They just haven’t built up a lot of public goodwill on either side.

And even though the populism of the right is fake, there’s an anti-billionaire vibe. These guys are like, We don’t even want to be billionaires. We want to be trillionaires. We are talking in a moment when Elon Musk, on paper, is a trillionaire. We have entered a new phase of oligarchy, a new phase of plutocratic power. Today is a tragic day. The vast majority of people who have two brain cells are not for this. It’s just the perfect—

Bacon: Also, in this case, it went local to national as opposed to the opposite. Usually so much of our culture is national to local, and in this case, I think it bubbled up. The New York Times did not invent the data center rollback. In some ways, it was covered in a local paper first.

Taylor: Part of this is, people [say], My utility bill is being raised, and I don’t like the noise from this thing, I can see this ugly thing. But there’s also part of it that’s like, These billionaires from Silicon Valley want to replace us, and we don’t like that.

It’s both at the same time, and that is powerful. But I don’t think the Democrats have polarized against this or taken this opportunity to the degree that they can or should, given how it’s shaping up to be such a huge issue.

Bacon: So “the fight against AI centers isn’t just about tech, it’s about democracy.” We use this word “democracy” all the time, and usually it’s a predictable Democrat saying Trump is bad. But you have written about democracy before the Trump era and thought about it deeply. So what do you mean when you say this is a fight about democracy? Because you mean something more than just “Trump bad.”

Taylor: Yeah. I mean, Trump is bad. Bad, bad man. [laughing]

Bacon: Yeah, I know.

Taylor: For me, it comes back to political economy. You cannot have democracy under conditions of incredibly concentrated wealth or oligarchy. One of my favorite definitions of democracy comes from Aristotle, who said democracy is the rule of the poor, because the poor outnumber the rich. If democracy is the rule of the majority of people, then it should not be the rule of the super rich. And again, this is a pivotal day in terms of the history of oligarchy.

Bacon: Did Musk just today become a [trillionaire]? Is that what you’re—

Taylor: Yesterday, the SpaceX IPO. I was just reading this Guardian piece, and it said that for somebody who’s a trillionaire, $100 million is the equivalent of $19.27 for the median American. And I was like, “Can that be right?” That is so mind-boggling.

But democracy means that people have a say in the conditions that affect their lives, and it also means they’re not ruled by the super wealthy. The AI fight is absolutely connected to both of those things. We weren’t asked whether we want this AI revolution. It is being forced on people. It’s being forced on people at their jobs. It’s being forced on people in their search results.

The government is essentially backstopping—the way that Trump has fully merged with Silicon Valley, he is putting an incredible amount of government force behind this industry and bet his presidency on it in a sense, because it’s been floating the stock market. So that’s absolutely a democratic issue.

And again, what direction is this tech going? Are we building tech that serves humans’ needs? Or are we building tech that aims to replace a lot of human jobs and human relationships, to further concentrate wealth? Are we building AI as a wealth-siphoning straw, or something that could help people?

I’ve been thinking about what it would take to have the best iteration of this technology, and fundamentally, I think it requires a robust welfare state, it requires labor protections, it requires environmental protections. Those are things that are not on the table with this administration. So in a sense, this AI revolution is happening in the worst of all possible worlds.

But this gets to very fundamental issues about who has power in our society. The last thing I’ll say on that is: To me, democracy is not just the political sphere. It is something broader than that. To go back to the labor issue—the fact that AI is being sold as something that can do economically valuable labor, the dream of a one-billion-dollar company with only one employee—

Bacon: The nightmare, in my view, but the dream to them.

Taylor: Yeah. Sam Altman has said that he has a chat with his executive buddies betting on when that will happen—when they’ll finally have this employee-less company. This tool is being developed to degrade labor, but also to further erode what power American workers have.

These are companies that are backing lawsuits against unions and would love to get rid of the NLRB and all of that. So that just seems deeply undemocratic to me. And I’m very happy that people from all walks of life are rising up against this.

Bacon: You said the Democrats are not seizing this issue—Democrats in the parties. So let’s talk about that, because one of my favorite writers, Tressie McMillan Cottom, has a column in the Times today, and the headline is, “This Could Be the Winning Issue for Democrats”—talking about AI data centers and AI more broadly. Is the answer to this question very simply that the rich like data centers and AI and the Democratic Party is captured by the rich? Is there anything more to say than that?

Taylor: There’s a lot of that. I haven’t read Tressie’s piece, but I fully endorse it in advance because I know that she’s right on about this.

That’s a huge part of it. The reason billionaires and trillionaires are a threat is in part because there are no rules, or very minimal rules, on how much they can spend on elections and how much they can spend to buy off politicians.

We know that there’s a lot of dark money flooding into races at every level right now. That’s part of it. A lot of Democrats are looking to either tap into those resources or actually to just not trigger a huge spend, because they’re fighting really dirty.

Bacon: Crypto companies defeated Sherrod Brown’s functioning. It is a real thing.

Taylor: Yeah. Or there’s the New York congressional primary that Alex Bores is in. This is a guy who worked at Palantir and then quit, because he had—I wouldn’t say a moral awakening, because he’d been involved in labor and other causes before—but left in protest due to some of their dealings with Trump 1.0.

These super PACs funded by Silicon Valley are now trying to use that against him: Oh, he’s a Palantir employee. In other words, they’re shameless. They are willing to absolutely punch below the belt, and they’re funding millions of dollars into this, and that’s just one race.

So politicians are afraid. I think, though, a lot of voters are tired of fear. They’re tired of fearful politicians. And the way to cut through the noise is to stake a clear moral position, name the proper enemies, speak to this discontent, and believe what the tech executives have been saying. Believe them when they say their agenda is to replace human workers and to replace our relationships. They want to be our bosses, and they want to be our girlfriends and our boyfriends. And believe them when they say that they’re willing to risk ending the world.

A lot of what they say about their superintelligent machines and stuff is sci-fi. But I believe Dario Amodei, and I believe Elon Musk when they both say they think there’s a 20-to-25 percent chance that AI will annihilate humanity. I don’t think their computers are as good, as great, as conscious as they think they are. But I do believe them when they say that’s an acceptable level of risk. That’s what I believe. And that is demented.

Bacon: I interviewed somebody who’s made the same point of just, Listen to what they say. That person’s name is Bernie Sanders. Sanders has come up with this idea of a sovereign wealth fund where the government controls how these companies—I’m not sure how I feel about it. It’s an idea that’s out there, and I’m glad he’s pushing stuff, but I’m not sure that’s where I want to land. I’m curious what you think.

Taylor: I’m with you. What worries me about it—and you can see this in OpenAI’s openness to some version of this—these companies are not against it. They have very inflated stock valuations at this point. They might like to have—they’ve been seeking to merge with the federal government.

Bacon: Sure.

Taylor: They’re like, Let’s do it. Let’s get married. I don’t love a scenario where the American people have even more exposure or investment in these firms and this technology being, quote-unquote, profitable—the profit is, at this point, based on very socially pernicious consequences. The displacement of labor, the burning of immense amounts of fossil fuel.

The climate dimension of this is just incredibly critical. There was just a very reputable academic study that came out that said due to the build-out of new crypto and AI data centers, the demands of the energy sector could increase by almost 30 percent in the next four years alone. I don’t want the American people to have a piece of a toxic asset. That’s it.

Industrial policy, though—Trump has shown that industrial policy is possible. Under different conditions, in different countries or with different leaders, you can use those tools in really powerful ways. You can say renewable energy only. You can say labor protections. You can say privacy protections. You can say accurate data sets. You can say all sorts of things using the power of the state. But the proposal on the table is not going in that direction.

I also think one of the biggest bulwarks against this technology is investing in social services. In other words, the more excellent our health care is, the less we want an AI doctor. The better funded our schools are and the lower the teacher-to-student ratio, the less we’re tempted by the idea of plugging every kid into a Google-controlled iPad.

In this book with Naomi Klein that we have coming out in September, that’s part of it: We need to make the real human living world irresistible and supportive and secure enough that part of the appeal of these virtual tools is diminished.

Right now, people are turning to AI because sometimes it’s the only option. That’s the vicious cycle that we are in, where the diminishment of public services feeds a demand for tools that further degrade those services and also further enrich the people who own them.

Bacon: You mentioned the book you’re doing with Naomi Klein. The title is End Times Fascism. So tell me what “end times fascism” is.

Taylor: Yeah. The subtitle is And the Fight for the Living World, so it’s not all negative. “End times fascism”—it’s our attempt to understand what kind of fascism we are living through, what has changed. It’s based on a piece that we wrote for The Guardian that came out not this April but the April before. Essentially, it’s looking at the main constituencies of this far-right alliance. Fascism historically is always a weird amalgam. That’s what the word “fascism” comes from—it’s a bundle. It’s always contradictory. We’re looking at what is making up the reactionary right today. The tech sector is a major prong, as well as the religious right and this ethnonationalist front as well.

Bacon: Let’s pursue one piece. What is the “end times” part? I think people know what fascism is.

Taylor: The “end times” part is that this is an alliance that is flirting with the end of the world. They’re so comfortable in the sense that we will make it. On the tech side, this is just part of being alive today: You’re like, Oh, there’s another bunker. There was a recent piece about Peter Thiel going to Argentina, and part of it is he loves Milei and his libertarian policies, and also, if there’s a nuclear war, maybe it’ll be OK there.

Or we have people leading the charge into these wars in the Middle East thinking that they’re going to hasten Armageddon, because they’re in these biblical narratives.

We are operating in a moment of unprecedented global crises. The climate crisis, as much as we’re not talking about it these days, is very real. The threat of artificial intelligence—my idea of what the threat is might not perfectly align with what Musk is saying, or Altman, or Amodei, but there are very real dangers here.

The dangers are real, and we have world-destroying tools that our species has not had before. So we’re trying to think about what that means for our politics and how the hell we get out of this.

Bacon: You and I met in 2022 or 2023. You were working at the Debt Collective, and the thing you all were working on then was getting the Biden administration to forgive—you always said “don’t say forgive”—

Taylor: Don’t say “forgive.”

Bacon: Cancel. It’s an important distinction. Cancel student debt. I want to ask you about—we’re about to start this Democratic primary. Why Biden lost and why Biden wasn’t popular—I think the narrative the Democratic Party has concluded is that he was a little too left on economics and a little too focused on the college grads and not focused on the working class.

And the embodiment of bad ideas was canceling student debt. I think you’re going to hear 15 candidates say a version of that, even the quote-unquote progressive ones. So respond to the [idea that] the student debt policy was emblematic of Biden’s bad instincts.

Taylor: Certainly an idea, and it’s being pushed by the corporate wing of the Democratic Party, mostly.

Zooming out—I helped found a group called the Debt Collective, which is the first union of debtors. We have been organizing people—student borrowers, also medical debtors, people with back rent debt—to fight, inspired by the example of the labor union. Essentially, people who lack wealth need to have power in numbers. We need to have solidarity in order to push for political change.

We never talk about forgiveness because we don’t think that people need to be forgiven for going into medical debt, or going into student debt, or going into credit card debt. If you live in a state where the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, I don’t really think it’s your fault if you end up having to borrow to make ends meet.

Yesterday, there was news that the Trump administration is now thinking about further eroding the Affordable Care Act, but offering people loans to cover their medical emergencies. So debt’s not always a choice.

What we are saying at the Debt Collective is, again, a clear and moral position. Guess what? People should have the right to be educated. We live in an incredibly complicated society. We at some point decided that public education, K-12, should exist, and that people should be able to go to school and get that level of education. We live in a more complicated world. Let’s add four years.

This is how higher education in the United States actually began, if you go back and you look at the GI Bill and the building of these incredible public institutions of learning and research. These were public goods that became privatized over time and became financed by tuition, which means financed by debt. That is a new development. So that’s our proposition: Let’s cancel student loans and let’s make college free as a public good.

That feels to me all the more urgent right now in this moment of AI. It’s actually very connected to the AI discussion. When we’re talking about, Oh my God, what is knowledge? What is truth? How do we discern fact from fiction?—the fight for public education is actually incredibly urgent.

And the right knows this! Why is the right laser-focused on attacking education, attacking academic research, attacking funding for science? Because they know that it is a threat to their oligarchic and racist and misogynist ambitions. In fact, the Heritage Foundation released a report recently that said, Too many women are going to college because they get subsidized student loans and there’s federal investment. And when they do that, they just don’t have enough of the right kind of white babies that we want them to have. This should be a Democratic Party issue. And instead they’re—

Bacon: When you said “this,” you mean free college, higher education, defending colleges.

Taylor: Defending it as a public good, not, Oh, you’ll get job training. Maybe we’ll fix the economy with some education. No. Education is something that matters for a democratic society and that people should be able to access.

Biden should have listened to us, because we laid out a way to cancel student debt quickly and efficiently. If I had been in charge, I would have also canceled all the debt owed to veterans from military hospitals and created an alliance, presented it as solidaristic. Instead there was a lot of misinformation about the demographics—who is a student debtor. There was always this idea as though they all went to Harvard or something.

No—if you go to Harvard, you actually don’t graduate with student debt, because there’s this huge endowment that is owned by this tiny little university. Most people with student debt went to for-profit colleges, to vocational colleges, to public schools. Forty percent of people with student debt don’t have college degrees because they couldn’t manage to get through school because they worked three jobs.

So this is definitely going to be a live issue. Right now, the Debt Collective is continuing to fight. We think there should be another payment pause, because people are in such a financial emergency and the Trump administration has thrown the student loan system into such incredible disarray.

Debt is exploding under Donald Trump because cost of living has not come down, because of the changes to the student loan system. They’re attacking programs like the SAVE plan, which listeners probably know about. They’re attacking subsidized student loans looking forward.

This is going to be, unfortunately—it’s very tragic to say—more of an issue and more of a pain point for the American people. Instead of running away from this issue, the Democrats should own it and say, We’re going to do it, and we’re going to do it right this time, and we’re going to understand why the right has made higher education such a focus of their attacks.

The last thing I’ll say is: If they don’t, the right is going to take this issue. Just like the Democrats risk the right owning the data center issues and the antiwar space, I have spent the last year listening to right-wing podcasters. I have taken in so much Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and Nick Shirley. You name it, I’ve listened to it.

Bacon: Bless you, because I’m not going to.

Taylor: They talk about debt all the time. Tucker Carlson took the stage at CPAC, the big conservative conference, and said, We need debt strikes against credit card lenders. Nick Shirley—why are people believing this kid when he’s doing these investigations into the welfare state? [Because] he’s like, We’re all mad because we have student debt. This is an issue in American people’s lives. People are in debt. They cannot pay.

And the problem is … when the right takes these issues, guess what? The problem isn’t the economic system at large. It’s not capitalism. No, it’s the Jewish bankers. It’s the immigrants somehow driving up the cost of something, so you have to borrow more. It’s incredibly dangerous for the Center for American Progress—or name other names—to run away from this issue, because they are then ceding very real pain and a very real problem to faux-populists who will only deepen the problem.

That is something I’m worried about. What does it say about a party when you can’t just say, People deserve education. We stand behind education as a public good. We want people to use their real minds. We want people to learn things?

Bacon: So last question. I got an early edition and mostly finished reading this book called Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisers, and Israel’s War in Gaza. The author’s name is Akbar Shahid Ahmed. He was at the Huffington Post for a while and is now at a place called NOTUS. He was one of the leading reporters in the behind-the-scenes accounts of the Biden administration ignoring federal law in terms of arming the Israelis and allowing the genocide to happen.

The question I’m going to ask you in a democracy sense is: What do we do with a political party that I’m going to be voting for that legitimized the genocide? There’s talk now about how the people who worked for Biden, who were involved in the policy, should not get jobs in government in the future. I’m not really sure—if Jake Sullivan can’t be secretary of state, I’m not sure what that really does for me.

But in a certain sense, what should we do? How do we deal with a party that wants to say, We’re going to defend democracy in this country, but leaned into legitimizing a genocide and really won’t apologize for it even now? A lot of the leaders in the party are still much more focused on Israel is good than genocide is bad.

Taylor: That’s a huge question. How do we build the power to transform American electoral politics when we are locked into this two-party, first-past-the-post system that I know you have talked about a lot with your listeners?

There are major impediments in terms of just the way our politics are structured, and it’s getting worse—with the attacks on voting rights and the all-in on gerrymandering. Now you can do it for partisan purposes.

Bacon: And it’s happening everywhere, yeah.

Taylor: People need to get organized. Often when I give talks in public, people raise their hand and go, What can I do about all the problems you’re naming? My response is always, You have to join with other people. You have to find some political home where you are. It doesn’t have to be perfect. There is no perfect solution. There is no button that will save the world. You have to build power with people where you are.

If it’s a data center fight, join a data center fight. If it’s Indivisible or a chapter of DSA, or if you have the ability to form a union or join a union. A tenant union. Join the Debt Collective. We have to join things, because they have money, and we have the many in theory, but we have to be organized to exert collective power. We need that organizational force, and then we need that moral clarity.

We were told right after the 2024 election, Oh, there’s a vibe shift. Cruelty is cool now. We can say now that was bullshit, and it was wishful thinking, not just on the right, but among some in the Democratic Party.

Bacon: Today is the day to abandon trans people was literally said, from November to January after the election, by all these people.

Taylor: It was real wish-casting. I think, no, we’re not throwing people under the bus. We’re going to have moral clarity. Naomi and I end this book by saying: Yeah, we need to say, International law, we should try it. Universality, let’s try it. Let’s really mean it. These are principles that we take for granted. But if you actually try to enact them, they’re really radical. That’s the horizon we need to work for.

At this point, on the issue of Palestine, the American people in general are absolutely opposed to what happened and what transpired. There’s still just enough democracy in our diminishing and racing-towards-fascism society that the party is going to have to respond to that.

We just need the courage of our convictions, and we need to organize. That’s it. That means doing Substack Lives and talking, but it also means getting offline, meeting with people, and building those relationships and doing the annoying work of social change.

Bacon: The thing I’ve been heartened by the last year—until this conversation—was thinking about the New York race where they had this unknown person who brought enthusiasm, energized people, and also had a lot of moral clarity in Zohran. But the data center fight might be a better example of the organized democracy we really need. It’s not about one person—it’s about the many.

Taylor: And it is an opportunity for people to see how much they have in common with each other and to break us out of these cartoonish narratives about each other. That’s also why I stay committed to the Debt Collective, because medical debt—that’s another huge unifying point.

Something like 92 percent of people, according to polls, believe that medical debt should be all canceled. There are so many issues. The issue of money out of politics. There are so many issues that people could organize around.

On the electoral reform front, it’s more parties. You know what we hate? We hate the Democrats and the Republicans at this moment. A more-parties movement could actually be one way of framing a horizon—more proportional representation, money out of politics.

That’s not to downplay what we’re up against. I’ve been in the trenches for a long time at this point, and it’s hard out there. The presence of a fascist trillionaire is going to make it that much harder. But that means we have to meet the moment, and we have to get organized. There’s so much to work with right now. That whole moment where they were like, Progressives are over. We’re on this reactionary train. Get on board—no. That was a total lie.

There’s something bubbling up in this moment. As a result, even after writing a book called End Times Fascism, I’m not completely discouraged.

Bacon: That left me thinking, is it better to be focused on one person or one movement these next couple of years? How important is it that AOC or Ro Khanna fill all our needs and runs the greatest campaign of all time? Is there any alternative to that?

Taylor: To me, the electoral dimension is important. But the American political system is geographically based. Ultimately, I vote in a primary, I vote in an election, I donate to people I like. But that’s not where the work is. These people are not messiahs. AOC’s one person in a large Congress, and she’s in a party that has the minority. So it really should only take a tiny amount of my brain space.

What really matters is how we are organizing in other realms to change conditions or to spread different ideas. That’s why I’ve stayed dedicated to the Debt Collective for all these years—it’s a space where I can help build power with other people and change the political conversation and maybe change the political terrain.

But sometimes we spend too much time on the horse race and expect too much of people who are in these elected positions, when what we need to do is continue to work so that they actually are able to exercise more power in the ways that we want them to.

Bacon: Great place to end. Astra, tell people where they can find your work—I know you’re on social media and so on.

Taylor: On all of the platforms that are bad. But really, what I want people to do is: If you have debt, or if you consider yourself an ally of people who lack wealth, join the Debt Collective. That’s my top request all the time.

Bacon: Astra, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it. Good to see you.

Taylor: Thanks for having me.

International coverage of the protests in Albania—a country relatively unfamiliar to many in the United States—has focused largely on the environmental concerns being raised by demonstrators, and the projects’ ties to the Trump family. The fledgling Kushner resorts threaten pristine wilderness and critical ecosystems that sustain a rare colony of the world’s largest freshwater birds, endangered Albanian water frogs, and loggerhead turtles. Among the species that stand to be affected are flamingos, whose last remaining habitat in Albania could be threatened by the developments. But the “Flamingo Revolution,” as the wide-ranging, horizontalist movement has become known, is about much more than flora, fauna, or Donald Trump. As Albania vies to become a top tourist destination and a member of the European Union, the ongoing protests aim to do nothing less than upend its political system. “At the core of this protest is not just environmental issues,” said Gresa Hasa, a doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Law and the Center for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz. “This is a fight for freedom and democracy, and a future where the resources and the state works for all of us and not just for some of us, and where we are not excluded from our own beaches and public spaces.”

In addition to halting the developments on Zvërnec and on Sazan Island, protests are demanding the resignation of Socialist Party Prime Minister Edi Rama, who’s been in power since 2013. Demonstrators have also targeted opposition leader and former Prime Minister Sali Berisha. A member of the Democratic Party, Berisha was until last November under house arrest as a result of corruption charges. “It’s called the Socialist Party of Albania,” Hasa clarified of Rama’s party, “but has nothing to do with socialism.” Both he and Berisha have been supportive of the developments in question as they look to cozy up to Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, as a means of endearing themselves to the U.S. president. Last week, the Trump administration lifted restrictions against Berisha imposed by the Biden administration.

Rama has played a more active role. He had a chance dinner meeting with Ivanka Trump and Kushner in southern Albania. Months later, the president’s son-in-law approached him in Davos about investing in his country’s coastline. Rama has championed the project ever since. Just before Trump’s inauguration, the Albanian government granted Atlantic Incubation Partners—a firm linked to Kushner’s Affinity Partners—the status of a “strategic investor.” The Narta Lagoon resort is slated to be officially developed by the Netherlands-registered Zvërnec South Adriatic Development, an offshore trust that reports have linked to Kushner, Qatari billionaires, and a string of questionable characters.  The Sazan Island project is being led by Sazan Real Estate Development LLC. A P.R. agency for that development told Al Jazeera that any investors involved in it were acting “in a personal capacity.” 

The strategic investor designation entitles Atlantic Incubation Partners to expedited approvals, and the Zvërnec project was officially approved to begin construction in January 2025. Demonstrations began locally at the end of May. On May 30, footage showed private guards for Albanian oligarch Shefqet Kastrati—who’s reportedly been working closely with Kushner—beating up activists protesting around the fence protecting the site of the slated development. The images only further inflamed Albanians, and protests spread rapidly.

Since then, the protests have become the largest since the fall of Albania’s Communist government in 1991. Protesters’ demands reflect their long-running frustrations. Besides seeking Rama’s resignation, the Flamingo Revolution is demanding the repeal of the legal framework that allows the government to grant “strategic investor” status to developers. It’s further demanding the withdrawal of a recent initiative to offer generous tax breaks and special regulatory treatment for private development on state-owned land in rural areas. Protesters are also trying to reverse recent amendments to the Law on Protected Areas and the Law on Cultural Heritage, which they argue have streamlined investors’ ability to build on and near important environmental and cultural sites. “This project broke the camel’s back,” Hasa said. Albanians are enraged at “an economic model where political parties and businessmen are so entangled that you cannot figure out where one starts and the other ends.”

Understanding why Kushner’s seaside ambitions have kicked off an uprising in Albania requires a look back at the country’s tumultuous last century. Albania was ruled from 1944 to 1985 by Enver Hoxha, who broke with the Soviet Union over what he saw as Nikita Khrushchev’s insufficient commitment to Stalinism. The country’s increasing isolation—from neighboring Yugoslavia, the USSR, and eventually China—led to mounting economic difficulties in the lead-up to Hoxha’s death and the ensuing collapse of the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania. Like many other formerly socialist countries in the 1990s, Albania underwent a period of rapid, chaotic privatization of state-owned industries as part of a transition to capitalism marked by graft, speculation, and—in Albania’s case—disastrous pyramid schemes. 

Among the most enduring legacies of that period is a controversial 1991 land-reform law meant to redistribute property that had been collectivized under Hoxha. The result has been decades of ownership disputes, including in coastal areas that stand to become more valuable as the country continues to court foreign tourists to its sandy beaches and lush pine forests. Residents claiming land—and without the resources to fight for those claims in lengthy court processes—have been forced to give up their parcels and move away. Conversely, enterprising developers with more cash, including foreign investors and organized crime syndicates enriched by transition-era graft, can falsify documents and contest locals’ ownership claims. 

These legal gray areas have made it easier for Rama to court “strategic investors” like Kushner with the promise of both cheap land and cheap workers; as Rama once bragged to prospective Italian investors, “Fortunately, here we have no trade unions.” Last week, the Democratic Party expressed support for the protests as means of confronting government corruption, and introduced legislation aligning with several of the protesters’ demands. Demonstrators, however, have continued to call for Berisha to be thrown in jail, and to express frustration with the two parties that have dominated Albanian politics and economic development since the 1990s. 

In recent years, smaller parties have sprouted up in an attempt to pose alternatives. Redi Muçi was elected to Parliament last year, as a member of the left-wing Lëvizja Bashkë—the Together Movement, in English. The party formed out of student protests that were violently repressed by Berisha’s government in 2011, and another wave of demonstrations against educational reforms in 2018 and 2019. As Muçi points out, popular frustrations with both Rama and Berishi have been fueled by rampant corruption and the rising cost of living in one of Europe’s poorest countries. 

“Practically the whole Albanian economy has been directed toward the construction industry and tourism,” he told me. “The fuel that pushes this through is money laundering from drug traffickers. What has been happening along the Albanian coastline, but also in the capital city and elsewhere, is money coming from investors that hide behind shell companies that pour huge sums of money into the country through the construction, and which has made the city of Tirana an unlivable place” as public spaces are turned into enormous private developments backed by shady investors who drive up property prices through speculation. In rural areas, especially, he added, there are “investors who come from God knows where to build these huge resorts, destroying nature and ecosystems and habitats, as well as taking away property rights for local communities.”

A bipartisan push to turn Albania into a prime destination for real estate investment has seen rents skyrocket as foreign investors snap up properties for short-term rentals and glorified safety-deposit boxes, making housing prices “utterly unaffordable” for ordinary renters, Muçi said. A report from the nongovernmental organization Transform Europe found that the average price per square meter of housing in Tirana reached approximately $1,700. The average salary was less than $800; housing prices that year grew more than twice as much as wages. The combination of rising costs and low purchasing power has made Albania’s capital more expensive than Rome and Barcelona. A significant part of that, the report adds, is likely the result of money laundering: 32 percent of homes sold in 2021 were acquired by nonresidents. As of 2023, 33 percent of Albanian residencies—and more than 17 percent in Tirana—remained unoccupied.

While rising tourism has been a boon to the country’s economy in aggregate, the jobs created in the tourist sector tend to be poorly paid and vulnerable to exploitation. Migrant workers making just 700 euros (around $812) a month for grueling 12-hour days in restaurants and hotels have had their passports confiscated by employers as soon as they land in Albania. Lëvizja Bashkë is pushing for the state to direct investment toward more productive sectors that can create year-round, broader-based economic opportunities and prevent the rapid emigration of young Albanians seeking better-paid job prospects abroad. 

Protests may already be bearing fruit. Politico noted still unconfirmed reports that Kushner’s Affinity Partners had withdrawn from at least one multibillion-dollar resort project. That may not stop the demonstrators. Rama seems worried. The European Commission warned his government to “act without delay” to stop any prospective violations of the bloc’s environmental rules—or endanger Albania’s bid for EU membership. Under mounting pressure, Rama has accused protests of being the product of foreign meddling by “enemies of Israel and Albania,” and complained that marches were causing tourists to cancel their reservations to visit the country. 

The image of nefarious foreign actors sowing chaos bears little resemblance to the images being broadcast from the streets of Tirana and elsewhere, of peaceful parades with areas for kids to sit and draw. “You have grassroots left-wing movements, LGBTQ+ activists, environmental movements, representatives of all four major religious communities, and conservatives,” Hasa said. “You even have individuals who are right-wing, or a little bit far right.” Muçi agreed. “In such big numbers, you have people there from all walks of life, beliefs, and ideologies,” he told me. What unites them, he said, “is this call for a new Albania—for a different kind of politics that is not the one represented by Rama and Berisha.” 

It’s no secret that the Trump family has been eager to make itself richer while the patriarch occupies the White House. Here in the U.S., awareness of these activities hasn’t yet made much of a dent in Trump’s grasp on power. Abroad, however, it may help bring down politicians who thought they could use that grift to their advantage. Let’s hope Americans take note. 

The perils of social media notoriety—and the dangers of dishonesty—also figure in Early’s feature directorial debut, Maddie’s Secret, an homage-slash-send-up of 1980s TV movies set in the present. The film takes its cues (and its title) from Kate’s Secret, a corny 1986 NBC production starring Meredith Baxter as an aerobics instructor struggling with an eating disorder (the film was considered a landmark for portraying bulimia on prime time; “I didn’t know if I wanted to be the one throwing up on television” the actress told the Los Angeles Times on the eve of her premiere). Early’s eponymous heroine, Maddie, is a wannabe barefoot contessa whose Instagrammed kitchen vignettes unexpectedly go viral, transforming her pretty much overnight into a big-time (though reluctant) foodie-chic influencer.

The stress of keeping up appearances—and the specter of imposter syndrome—triggers Maddie’s long-submerged and potentially lethal bulimia: the secret she’s keeping unsafely at the risk of esophageal rupture or cardiac arrest. On the eve of a particularly important meeting with network executives on a restaurant-based reality show called The Boar (one vowel away from you know what), Maddie falls ill and gets checked into a hospital in-patient program. There, amid fraught group therapy sessions and dark nights of the soul, she’s forced to come to terms with her appetite for self-destruction.

On its surface, Maddie’s Secret doesn’t scan as a comedy. But its surfaces, all stilted line readings and redolently cheesy dramaturgy, are what’s funny about it. They belie but don’t blot out the essential empathy on display here; these ostensible alienation effects are really gestures of solidarity, offered by a filmmaker working outside the studio system (and getting away with an uncompromised vision as a result). Far from mocking his heroine’s plight, Early uses the camp strategy of placing everything on-screen in playful, flamboyant scare quotes—the characters, the situation, the dialogue—in order to speak a kind of humane truth about how certain physical and psychological frailties get packaged within pop culture. The sheer artificiality of Maddie’s Secret is the realest thing about it.  

The first time we see Maddie—played by Early wearing a blonde wig and prosthetic breasts—she’s bouncing her way through sunny Los Feliz to what sounds like a synth-thetic cover of Hot Fudge’s “You Keep Me Hanging On.” The risks here are real, and they’re spectacular; like much else in Maddie’s Secret, Early’s performance—all fluttering eyelids, wan smiles, deep-chested breaths and a mild vocal fry seemingly derived from the Aaron Spelling Televisual Universe—is suspended between deadpan rigor and earnest expressivity. To paraphrase Sontag on camp, Maddie is very much “a woman” in quotes, but she’s also an intrepid, endearing, and desirable heroine whose talent is emphasized alongside her decency, and whose pain is never played for laughs. Early’s decision to cast himself—inspired by the legendary drag queen Harris Glenn Milstead—feels like an unveiling of aspirations and influences from the bad-taste extravaganzas of John Waters to Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls to the postmodern brinkmanship of Todd Haynes, whose shadow falls over Maddie’s Secret and then some. 

Todd Haynes’s controversial 16 mm short Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) used a series of strategically carved Barbie dolls to dramatize the singer’s battles with anorexia. The film’s miniaturized melodrama style invited pearl clutching while winning critical plaudits. Haynes was inveighing against the kind of prime-time docudrama dreck that sought to reduce artists and celebrities to their afflictions. Maddie’s Secret isn’t as stark or as confrontational as Superstar, but it’s obviously a spiritual descendant of sorts, adopting a hyper-specific form for the express purpose of demolishing it. Early’s mash-up of allusions and straight-up see-what-sticks goofiness is novel, like a bold combination of Haynes (whose critically acclaimed movies are often very funny) and the deadpan alt-comedy pastiche master David Wain, venerated by creators of Early’s generation for superbly skewering glossy, popular genres like summer-camp sex farces or big-city rom-coms. (A corny portmanteau for those in the know: Wet Hot May December.) But Early isn’t simply cracking in-jokes; instead, he’s inviting fellow campers and normies alike to revel on his particular, slippery wavelength.   

“I swear to God, Maddie, it’s like you’re out of some modern-day fairy tale,” says Deena (Kate Berlant) to her work bestie as they clock in for dishwashing shifts at the premium cooking brand GourMaybe. The avidity of the line reading is amusing in and of itself while establishing the very real—and inherently perilous—happily-ever-after stakes of the narrative to come. Like most princesses, Maddie is a bit oblivious: She can’t tell, for instance, that Deena regards her as her own personal thirst trap, an infatuation that manifests in increasingly aggro-platonic postures. The more that butch lesbian Deena brags about her other sexual conquests, the clearer it is she wants to stick her tongue down her hetero pal’s throat—a shameless genre cliché that Early and Berlant take giddy pleasure in pushing to the breaking point. The pair have been working together for more than a decade now in shorts and sketches, and their chemistry is positively pharmaceutical; Berlant, who’s got a touch of wild genius, weaponizes her lanky limbs and angular jawline every time she walks into frame, as if Deena were trying to puncture the invisible bubble of the friend zone with her body.

Deena is transparently jealous of Maddie’s sweetly and sweatily ursine husband, Jake (Eric Rahill), the main beneficiary of his love’s off-the-clock cooking talents. “Did you throw away the mango pickle from the Indian we ordered?” Maggie asks after sashaying home, one of many delectable lines that turn the low-hanging fruit of TV-movie dialogue into gourmet fare. Another one, after Jake gently suggests uploading footage of Maddie’s culinary skills to the cloud: “I just wanted to make my husband some dinner, and now I’m in postproduction.”

Maddie won’t cook or eat meat, because of a childhood trauma around food and body image. “The camera adds ten pounds,” chides Maddie’s mother, Beverlee (Kristen Johnson), when her daughter calls her to talk about the possibility of her becoming a brand ambassador for her company—a “Gourmaybe Girl.” Early’s stricken reaction shot on the other end of the phone—blue-hued in the moonlight, and held for an extra beat beneath a tinkling piano score—perches firmly at the precipice of winking excess without tipping over. Every aspect of the film exhibits this level of discipline, from the writing and directing and acting to the mise-en-scène; the wonderfully stylized cinematography is by Max Lakner, who keeps floridly color-coding the characters’ psychological states. We get blood reds and deeper purples; enveloping shadows and ring-light halos; ghostly window reflections and heart-to-hearts. The food that Maddie prepares looks variously appetizing and ersatz depending on whether we’re in her home kitchen or at the fluorescent Gourmaybe offices. There are plenty of less stridently artificial movies that could benefit from a small fraction of such expressivity.

As the plot develops, Early includes all kinds of superfluous shtick, like interludes in a queer-dance group that are basically an excuse for cast frolicking on the clock. Still, he keeps an admirably tight handle on the various character dynamics, including Jake’s yearning to become a father, a plan held in check by Maddie’s mommy issues. Crucially, Early refuses to trivialize Maddie’s recovery in the hospital scenes, even as he populates the ward with killer supporting performers like Vanessa Bayer and Leah Hennessey. Sad moments are played straight, despite the absurdist flourishes around them, as when another patient, Connie (Hennessey), eulogizes a fellow patient who didn’t make it: “Your existence was inconvenient to me because you were the living embodiment of the parts of myself I’ve tried to obliterate.” Simple tear-jerking is easy, but the articulation of genuine angst—especially in this context—takes real sensitivity and nerve. For anyone who might still be disoriented by the way Maddie’s Secret plays with tone, the eulogy sequence wipes the smirk off the movie’s face—or their own—once and for all. 

Early’s softheartedness is winning, but he’s hardly edgeless. Besides working through his nostalgic ambivalence for the shock tactics of Kate’s Secret and its ilk, he’s taking aim at the lifestyle-brand fakery of GourMaybe and its craven head honcho, Zach (Connor O’Malley), who addresses his staff megalomaniacally, like a true believer. “Play nice, we’ve got content to make,” he bellows, with O’Malley torquing his delivery as if he knows the line is destined for future screencap-meme status. It’s telling that a comedian like Early, who developed his skills and following in an extremely online setting, would cast the internet in such ambivalent terms; crucially, Maddie’s catharsis bypasses the zone of public performance altogether. 

The question of whether Maddie will get another chance to be famous for her cooking is one of several loose ends that Early leaves conspicuously dangling; others include the fate of her marriage to Jake (Rahill is given plenty of directorial leeway in a part with more bruised dignity than expected) and Deena’s mental health (Berlant is intrepid enough to survive being the only member of the cast treated in the end like a cartoon character; the movie loses a bit of spark when she’s sidelined in the home stretch).

The abruptness of Maddie’s Secret’s ending is in sync with its TV-movie inspirations, but it also underlines Early’s desire to create something stranger and more bracing than expected; to swap out a benign, crowd-pleasing sort of cognitive dissonance for a sometimes disorienting ambiguity. Maddie doesn’t hold onto all of her secrets—she can’t—but she’s still finally a woman of mystery. The highest compliment that Early can be paid is that even when the movie ends, Maddie seems to exist beyond the final (freeze) frame.

The most noteworthy part of Parsons is probably the industrial park next to it. At 14,000 acres, Great Plains Industrial Park dwarfs its home city in both size and economic impact. The area was an Army ammunition plant until 2005, when, in an atypical move, it was shut down and donated to the local government. “It was like turning the keys of a Ferrari over to somebody that has a learner’s permit,” park director Brad Reams joked.

Today, Great Plains is a manufacturing hub leased by powerful companies in the energy, engineering, and transportation sectors. While the park’s board of directors is appointed by county commissioners, it doesn’t use any taxpayer funds, and generates its own private revenue, at which it is apparently quite good.

“We have about $12 million in assets,” Reams said. “We lease about 4,000 acres for agricultural purposes. We lease buildings, over two million square feet … for warehousing for various goods and services. We have 26 miles of rail that we lease out to a rail company.”

Ammunition manufacturers Day & Zimmermann also lease land there; the explosive thuds from weapons-testing projects can irritate nearby homeowners. Still, Parsonites are proud of the park. “It was a place that helped in the Korean War,” Joe Beachner, who has spent his whole life in the city, said. “Something that helped our economy.”

But last December, something changed. The Parsons Sun had it first: a deal struck between industrial park board members and the nuclear company Deep Fission. A first-of-its-kind nuclear reactor was coming to the park. “I saw it on Facebook, and I thought it was a joke,” Marjorie Reynolds, a home nurse who lives in the area, said. The public was not informed before the deal was completed: Even county commissioners were only told “a week or two” prior, according to Commissioner Terry Weidert. “They just announced it in the newspaper December 4, like it was a done deal,” anti-nuclear activist Ann Suellentrop said. “So arrogant and so dismissive of the public.”

Park officials said they could not inform the public because they were under nondisclosure agreements with Deep Fission and the Department of Energy. “You’ve got intellectual property that … they like to keep under wraps,” Reams said. “If you’re the DOE, it’s a national security risk. It’s an energy project that has national implications.” Zaleski concurred, arguing that the agreement with Deep Fission was a standard one. “That’s just how the cookie crumbles in this industry,” he said.

Holger Meyer, a particle physics professor at Wichita State University with a background in nuclear energy, said the public should have been informed regardless. “There sometimes are good reasons for the desire for nondisclosure agreements,” he said. “But this isn’t something that just impacts the land it is on. It impacts the entire county—the entire region.… There is obvious public interest.”

It didn’t matter. Five days later, park officials, executives of Deep Fission, a smattering of locals, and roughly 40 TV stations gathered in the park for a groundbreaking. Parsons may not have liked it, but it was going nuclear.

Founded three years ago, the California-based start-up Deep Fission was thrust into prominence last August, when its reactor project became one of 11 selected as part of Donald Trump’s “Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program.” The pilot program, created by executive order, fast-tracks the companies’ ability to receive commercial operating licenses. The stated goal at the time was for three reactors to achieve criticality by July 4, 2026; one already has, and the DOE claims two more are on track. Deep Fission is not among them.

This rapid schedule is possible in part because Trump has overhauled the Nuclear Regulatory Commission since the start of his second term, relaxing regulations and inspections to meet demand from data centers. In May 2025, the president ordered the theoretically independent NRC to submit to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, and cut the annual hours spent on nuclear inspections by an estimated 38 percent. Hundreds of staff members have since departed the agency, and the two remaining Democrats on its board have expressed fear they could be fired after Democratic Chair Christopher Hanson was canned last year. Suellentrop warned that the NRC will be “gutted” if Trump continues to get his way. “The DOE will rubber-stamp whatever he wants, and to hell with people’s safety, their health, the environment,” she said.

Hanson declined to comment on his firing and whether he was worried about the NRC under Trump, but posited that a reduction in NRC inspection time was fair. “The industry does have a really strong track record of sustained operational and safety performance,” he said. “I’m not going to second-guess what the commission’s done.”

For advocates of Deep Fission, the government’s promotion of the project is evidence of its safety. “The federal government isn’t desperate enough for nuclear reactor projects that they’re going to take a flyer on somebody,” Reams said. “It’s just not worth it.”

But others warned against such implicit trust. Meyer said “industry interest” was behind the Trump administration’s embrace of nuclear power. “Environmental regulations are being dismantled in all areas,” he said. “It’s clear that nuclear safety isn’t prioritized by the Trump administration.” Kent Rowe, a retired professor of aeronautics and anti-nuclear activist from near Parsons, stated that the Deep Fission project was “a scheme to bury [reactors] haphazardly and worry about consequences later.”

A March letter signed by 11 state attorneys general condemned the DOE for creating an exemption allowing certain nuclear projects to skip previously mandated environmental reviews. Paul Gunter, director of the group Beyond Nuclear, said he was concerned the exemption would allow Deep Fission to bypass proper safety measures.

“There should be no question about whether or not a novel nuclear technology without a designed reactor containment system can avoid an environmental review for potential severe accidents and the long-term consequences,” he said. When asked whether Deep Fission would indeed be exempt from the review, a DOE spokesperson said, “No determination has been reached.”

While the other nuclear companies in Trump’s pilot program are working on more or less traditional reactors, Deep Fission is getting weird with it, forecasting a reactor it has described as both “discreet” and “bespoke.” A laudatory Forbes profile on company founders Richard and Liz Muller outlines the plan: “Drill a 30-inch-diameter borehole a mile into the earth, fill it with water, then insert a teeny-tiny nuclear reactor that will boil the water at the bottom and send it up a separate pipe to run a steam turbine. Each hole will generate 15 megawatts, enough to power 12,000 homes.” (The profile fails to note some less savory details from Richard’s past: He was a vocal global warming skeptic until 2012, and has been criticized for taking research funding from the oil and gas tycoon Charles Koch.)

A small, scalable reactor is Deep Fission’s Theranos-esque goal, perfect for supporting Silicon Valley’s new obsession: AI data centers. Seventy in-house reactors can power one data center, according to Forbes. Deep Fission has been open about a desire to “meet the explosive demand for power from artificial intelligence” with a system “designed to scale modularly.” They have already seduced the likes of Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, who owns an 8 percent stake in the company.

Speed is one of the company’s core tenets, which is concerning to some critics. Deep Fission’s website proudly states its reactors take an “estimated six months” to build, and the company told Parsons in December it aimed to have a test reactor running by July. “We have to build fast enough to meet data center demand before they decide to go with something else,” Liz Muller told Forbes.

It turns out, though, that building a nuclear reactor is quite difficult. The company now will not say when its test reactor will be ready, and is unsure on whether it will be able to open a commercial reactor at all. Deep Fission recently completed a test well in Parsons 6,000 feet deep and eight inches in diameter. That may sound impressive, but it’s far smaller than the mile-deep, 30 to 50 inch–wide borehole that will be needed for the real thing.

While a white paper sent to the NRC gives insight into the proposed reactor blueprint, Deep Fission’s design is not final yet. The company has not submitted a preliminary safety analysis to the DOE, nor applied for the NRC license it will need to sell energy, according to federal officials. Deep Fission declined to speak with The New Republic for this piece, with vice president of communications Chloe Frader citing the “active registration process.”

Reams said Deep Fission was never going to hit the deadline it set for itself. “I think even if it had gone perfectly, they probably wouldn’t have hit July 4,” he said. As to why the company may not be selling its energy anymore? “They weren’t sure [of] all the P’s and Q’s that they had to make sure were covered,” Reams said. “It’s been a learning process for them.”

Parsons, according to Reams, is a tough ol’ place, the sort where residents don’t freak out about advanced new tech. “There’s a certain panache,” he said. “There’s not a lot of sky-is-falling mentality.”

But some have been vocal in their opposition to Deep Fission, particularly Reynolds, who founded a local group called Prairie Dog Alliance for the express purpose of fighting the development. In a matter of months, Reynolds has assembled a hodgepodge of community members, among them farmers, business owners, activists, and professors. (Suellentrop, Meyer, Rowe, and Gunter have all been in contact with the group.) Prairie Dog Alliance now boasts over 500 Facebook followers and about 15 members who attend regular meetings.

Some locals say Prairie Dog represents the majority opinion. Librarian Heather Fouts estimated that “at most 25 percent” of residents support the nuclear project. “I would say most of Parsons is against the reactor,” echoed Beachner, who recently joined the group. “But I also feel … nobody believes they can do anything.” In contrast, Zaleski and Parsons Sun editor Hannah Emberton cast Prairie Dog as a vocal minority.

The group forced a public meeting with Deep Fission in March after rejecting private talks. There have been a handful of meetings since, but Prairie Dog still wants more transparency. Member Jill Blankinship said the March meeting was “turned into a meet-and-greet”; at a later May in-person meeting where company officials took questions, participants were made to write them down ahead of time. Deep Fission also promotes a “community advisory group” in Parsons, which has no public facing presence at the moment, though Deep Fission says has met twice.*

“It’s very difficult for us to get any information,” Reynolds said. “I might as well beat my head against the wall.”

Prairie Dog has a list of concerns: Could the high temperatures of the underground nuclear reactor disrupt the rock? (“There’s going to be a lot of water around it to keep it at a pretty good temperature,” Reams said. “And the rock that’s down there that level is granite. It’s not going to do a whole lot to granite.”)

What about the ammunition testing going on nearby? A division of Day & Zimmermann, in fact, is leading the construction of the Parsons reactor. (Reams said such testing is “several miles away” from the site of the reactor, and there is “constant communication” about risks.)

What about the natural gas in the area? “There is a lot of danger, especially with the larger boreholes, of hitting natural gas reserves,” Reynolds said. “The closest house to the borehole they’re drilling right now—you can stand on his porch or his yard and see the drill rig—he has natural gas wells on his property.” Reams disputed this, saying there are no natural gas reserves near the project. There are no active wells on park property, though the site is in a part of Kansas listed in federal geologic assessments as potentially containing undiscovered gas.

The biggest concern among residents is simply how the reactors, and the waste they leave behind, will affect Parsons over time.

To cool one Deep Fission reactor, water from industrial park treatment plants will flow within the mile-deep borehole at a rate of about a gallon per minute, Reams said. More reactors—not to mention the data centers they aim to attract—will require far more water taken from the nearby Neosho River. “Water is the issue nobody’s talking about enough,” Meyer said.

Deep Fission is also drilling its boreholes at the edge of the Roubidoux aquifer, an underground water source that’s part of the larger Ozark system. While Parsonites get their drinking water from nearby Lake Parsons, the Ozark system is used for commerce, farming, and rural water districts all over the shop. “If something did happen, there’s potential that it could contaminate groundwater, which then contaminates the Neosho River, which goes … all the way down to Oklahoma,” Blankinship said. “Thirty-six towns, all kinds of people.”

Reams said that the reactor cores will be placed below the groundwater, and that the pneumatic drilling pushes the groundwater away before it is sleeved by cement and metal. “You’re encasing it in complete concrete and a mile of water,” Zaleski added. “Why hasn’t natural gas or oil that is drilled all over Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas ruined any aquifers?”

There’s also the issue of nuclear waste. Deep Fission’s founders said in April they wanted to just abandon their spent fuel rods underground after each reactor’s six-year lifespan. “Instead of pulling them out of the hole, they’ll pour in a mix of cement and rock to seal it all in place,” the Forbes profile states happily. Activists called the idea dangerous. “The abandoned oil wells are enough trouble here in Kansas,” Meyer said. “We don’t need abandoned nuclear reactor wells on top of that.” Rowe scoffed at the idea that the nuclear waste wouldn’t affect the rock over time: “How could it not, if you’re going to leave that radioactive material down there that’s enriched to 5 or 6 percent?” (Deep Fission has told the NRC it is using uranium enriched at “less than” 5 percent.)

A month after the Forbes piece, Deep Fission seemingly changed its tune. Chief Operating Officer Mike Brasel said in a May public meeting that the company will only leave spent fuel underground temporarily and that “we do not plan on disposing fuel down in that hole.” While the federal government is “contractually required to take the fuel,” Brasel said, Deep Fission aims to have a recycling or disposal facility in place before its boreholes begin to collapse in “40 to 50” years.

By then, things could already be going very wrong. Reynolds’s doomsday scenario is that radiation poisoning of the city’s soil and water will turn Parsons into something akin to Picher, Oklahoma, a small town 35 miles away. Once a bastion of lead and zinc mining, the town underwent dangerous corporate practices that caused irreconcilable environmental damage to the land; Picher was soon declared uninhabitable, and the municipality was officially dissolved in 2013.

In the event of a disaster, Deep Fission is seeking liability insurance under the Price-Anderson Act, which indemnifies the company in the event of a nuclear accident, providing costs fall above a certain threshold. “They’re going to … look for being indemnified from an accident that they’re saying will never happen,” Gunter said. “That’s a clear no-confidence vote.”

City officials, though, are growing fed up with all the perceived fearmongering. “All they want to do is make noise,” Zelenski said of Reynolds’s group.

If Deep Fission receives the federal go-ahead, it wants to build more than one measly reactor. The company is leasing 100 acres from the park, after all, and Reams said the board will accept as many reactors as it can get. In the future, hundreds of boreholes and little reactors could dot the plains. City and company officials suggest that nuclear energy could revitalize Parsons, a town that has seen its population dwindle since the Army jumped ship. Brasel claimed the test reactor would create 30 to 40 jobs, during a public meeting, and that the number could be “in the 700s” as the company expands.

“Good paying jobs are what we need in Parsons,” the mayor at the time, Verlyn Bolinger, said at the December groundbreaking. Zaleski agreed, arguing that Parsons needed more people in high-income positions, rather than mass employment. He welcomed the idea of data centers flocking to town to suck up the nuclear energy, calling them “absolute necessities to run our country.” But residents aren’t sure they’ll be the ones getting those lucrative jobs—if in fact they exist at all. “AI data centers and this nuclear thing is going to bring nothing for jobs other than short-term construction,” Beachner said. “I don’t see this as being a long-term project that actually helps us.”

There is a fatalism to Prairie Dog’s protestations. While Deep Fission is behind schedule and remains tied up with the DOE, both advocates and opponents of the reactor expect the thing to switch on eventually. The company is digging two new test wells in the next few weeks; after that, a test reactor will come online. “It’s probably going to happen no matter what we do,” Blankinship said. “We can’t control it. At least we know we tried.”

Like all battles worth a damn, the battle over the backyard nuclear reactor centers around power. Atomic power, community power, the power of the river and the aquifer and the earth. The process of generating nuclear power begins when a single neutron is flicked into a chunky uranium atom, causing the uranium to split. Steam fills the room, red lights turn on, turbines begin to spin. An almighty energy is created—not by the combination of these entities, but by one of them falling apart.

* This article originally conflated two separate public events as a single one. It has also been updated to reflect that the community advisory group has met twice.

Trump gloated that a deal to end the war was complete on his 80th birthday on Sunday. “I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and, simultaneously herewith, authorize the immediate removal of the United States Naval blockade,” he wrote on Truth Social.

But despite the president’s insinuation that he had just created peace and opened a vital trade route with one social media post, the deal isn’t actually done. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that Trump is actually hoping to open the Strait and finish his peace deal on Friday. Trump appropriately backtracked in comments to reporters. “Ships are starting to go out now, and on Friday it will be completely opened,” he said.

And Trump may still be promising a shorter timeline than he can actually achieve. Senior U.S. officials told reporters on Monday that it could take over two weeks for the strait to fully open. The officials also said the text of the deal between the U.S. and Iran would be released by Wednesday—Trump said he expected it to be released Friday.

But the inconsistent statements don’t end there. While the White House has been saying for weeks that Iran won’t get financial relief until it dismantles its nuclear capabilities, Trump said on Sunday that the nation will be allowed to export oil and open its ports immediately after the peace deal is signed. Iran has alleged the deal will give it a whopping $12 billion in relief before negotiations even begin, and that the U.S. has agreed to support reconstruction efforts worth $300 billion down the line. American officials have denied this.

Trump’s contradictory messaging, as well as his perceived reconciliation with Iran, has annoyed Netanyahu—one source told the Journal the Israeli leader is seeking a meeting with the president ASAP—and Republicans back home, who have criticized the president’s refusal to release the details of the peace deal he claims is complete.

“If you want people to stop speculating about the [Memorandum of Understanding], release the MOU,” Fox News host Mark Levin wrote on X. “Don’t brief a few anointed ones to control the narrative and expect everyone else to sit silently. That’s not how our country works.… Controlling the narrative can only last so long.”

The editors of National Review, a conservative magazine frequently critical of Trump, chimed in with an op-ed titled, “Release the Text of the Iran Deal,” lambasting the president for the disparities between his public statements and those from Iran.

“There is the possibility that Trump would return the U.S. to Obama’s failed Iran deal that Trump rightfully tore up in his first term, which would have all the makings of a humiliation after all of the president’s tough talk,” the piece reads.

No less than James Lindsay, an author and mathematician who made a name for himself posting far-right conspiracy theories on social media, called the agreement a “very bad deal built on a very fundamental misconception.”

President Trump said on Monday that “the deal is already signed and the strait is already partially opened,” referring to the Strait of Hormuz. “Ships are starting to go out now, and on Friday it will be completely opened.” But senior U.S. officials told The Wall Street Journal at the same time that it could take over two weeks for normal shipping traffic to resume in the strait. On top of that, a spokesperson for the Iranian Foreign Ministry said that a “maritime service fee” would still be charged for ships traversing the strait.

Those same U.S. officials also said that the full text of the deal would be released within two days, contradicting Trump, who said he expected the full text of the deal to be released by Friday.

A major sticking point for Iran, the end of Israeli strikes on Lebanon, is being disputed by Israeli officials. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Monday that the Israel Defense Forces wouldn’t withdraw from southern Lebanon, and far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said that “Israel is not subordinate to the United States, and we are an independent and sovereign state.”

“We must not withdraw from any territory that our fighters have occupied and cleared of terrorist infrastructure,” Ben-Gvir added. Trump already criticized Israel on Sunday for airstrikes on the southern suburbs of Beirut “on a special day when we are so close to a Peace Deal with Iran.”

Trump and Vice President JD Vance digitally signed the tentative deal on Sunday, and a formal signing ceremony is scheduled to take place in Switzerland on Friday. But no U.S. allies in Europe, or the G7, have seen the full text, nor has Israel or anyone in Congress. Their objections could still hamstring the agreement, especially if Trump has made unacceptable concessions.

A top Alaskan election official ruled Monday that a man sharing the same name as Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan is ineligible to participate in the Last Frontier State’s Senate primary in August.

In a letter addressed to the challenging Sullivan, Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher wrote that his declaration of candidacy was “not filed in order to declare an actual good-faith candidacy for the office of United States Senator, but was instead filed with a purpose to confuse or mislead and to thereby compromise the ballot’s fairness or neutrality.”

Beecher said she had reached that conclusion based on evidence that the 69-year-old retired teacher had “never used” the moniker Dan Sullivan and had similarly “never before professed” a Republican Party affiliation.

“Indeed, I conclude that the preponderance of the evidence is that you chose this new nickname and party affiliation because that name and party affiliation happen to be the name and party affiliation of another candidate in the race,” Beecher wrote.

She added that he had 30 days to appeal the decision but noted that ballots for the August primary would be printed on June 28, a timeline that will likely shut him out of the race altogether.

The new Sullivan filed to run as a Republican in the Senate primary last month, days before the filing deadline. State Republicans have since argued that Sullivan worked with Democrats to cook up the scheme, accusing him of attempting to snatch votes from the two-term senator in a flagrant bid to aid Mary Peltola, a former U.S. representative and the leading Democrat on the ballot.

In a social media post Sunday, Sullivan said he believed he “met the qualification” to run.

“I entered this race because I am unhappy with the 12 year record of the current Senator and I feel we need a change,” he wrote. “It’s that simple.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is looking to schedule an immediate meeting with Trump, likely back in Washington, a person familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal Monday.

There is just no way that Netanyahu is thrilled about Trump’s plan to stop bombing Iran, something the Israeli leader has been dreaming about for decades.

It was Netanyahu who pulled the United States into this “joint” conflict, selling the narrative that Iran was building nuclear weapons—even when U.S. intelligence confirmed there was no imminent threat. In the early days of the war, Secretary Marco Rubio admitted that the U.S. went to war because the administration “knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces.”

If Trump ends the war now, Netanyahu won’t walk away with anything. It’s unclear what the exact terms of the peace deal are—or whether any firm commitments have been made at all—but the U.S. has failed to satisfy Israeli objectives to execute regime change, undermine regional militias, or significantly upend Iranian missile production.

It’s also not clear what this deal will mean for Israel’s military campaign in Lebanon. On a phone call Monday, U.S. senior officials made clear that an Israeli withdrawal was not a condition of the deal, and that if Iran was not able to control Hezbollah, then Israel would have the right to respond.

Israeli officials were quick to condemn Trump’s deal with Iran, The Washington Post reported earlier Monday.

Itamar Ben Gvir, Netanyahu’s national security minister and an influential far-right leader, slammed the deal on social media. “Trump’s agreement does not bind us. Israel is not subject to the United States, and we are an independent and sovereign country,” he wrote on X. Of course, Israel’s and U.S. military efforts are thoroughly linked.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, another far-right member of Netanyahu’s coalition, said that Trump’s agreement was “bad for Israel and the entire free world. Period.”

In spite of the GOP’s well-worn insistence on federal frugality, some conservative lawmakers are suddenly in favor of the Trump administration’s reported plan to provide hundreds of billions in reconstructive aid to Iran.

In an interview with Fox News Monday, Florida Representative Brian Mast defended the expense on the basis that “we destroyed so much.”

“OK, maybe they do end up getting $20 billion, let’s say—we’re still $300 to $500 billion ahead considering we destroyed their Navy, destroyed their Air Force, destroyed all those nuclear facilities I already spoke about, their steel manufacturing, their drone manufacturing,” Mast said.

“We destroyed all that, and closed their ports,” he added. “We’re pretty far ahead.”

Rep. Brian Mast: "Ok, maybe they do end up getting $20 billion, let's say. Let's say we're still $300 to $500 billion ahead considering we destroyed their navy, destroyed their air force ... "

(So American taxpayers paid both to bomb Iran and then for Iran's reconstruction ... ) pic.twitter.com/kYNSNs4zhu

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 15, 2026

The White House and Tehran have already signed a peace deal, though the exact specifications of the agreement have not yet been revealed (and are still being hashed out). The final draft reportedly proposes the immediate reopening of the Strait of Hormuz under Iran’s direction, a commitment from the U.S. not to interfere in Iranian affairs, and a reiteration of Iran’s commitment not to produce nuclear weapons, echoing language included in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, according to a senior Iranian official who spoke with Reuters.

The most contentious point of the plan, however, is a reported $300 billion reconstruction fund, as well as billions more in unfrozen Iranian assets and forfeited sanctions—all of which will be bankrolled by U.S. taxpayers.

That’s nearly 160 percent of the financial investment that the U.S. has put into Ukraine since Russia attacked it in 2022. That sum hovers around $188 billion, according to the U.S. special inspector general for Operation Atlantic Resolve.

Speaking with the media with French President Emmanuel Macron Monday, Trump was struggling to keep his eyes open as Macron praised the developments on peace with Iran, even as Macron often turned to Trump to acknowledge his efforts.

get a load of Trump's drowsy body language during this Macron meeting pic.twitter.com/gQkFjUlXDb

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 15, 2026

Later, appearing outdoors with Macron and his wife, Brigitte, Trump looked tired and his right hand appeared swollen and discolored.

check out how swollen and discolored Trump's right hand is pic.twitter.com/jU6QNgIJpa

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 15, 2026

The UFC event lasted until well after 1 a.m. early Monday morning as fireworks went off over Washington, D.C. Trump headed to the G7 just hours later, meaning his only time to sleep (aside from the nap he took during the UFC fight) would have been on Air Force One as it flew to France. As we learned from Secretary of State Marco Rubio earlier this month, Trump is up at all hours of the night and usually doesn’t sleep much on plane flights, either.

This and jetlag likely exacerbated his tendency to fall asleep even during normal workdays. Trump is clearly not well, and holding an excessive birthday party (sorry, a “Freedom 250” event) until the wee hours of the morning didn’t leave him at his best to meet with Macron. If this is what the public is seeing, how much worse is Trump doing in private?

Newsom released a video statement saying he’d been added to Trump’s “hit list,” claiming that federal investigators had launched a probe into him because he was considering a presidential run in 2028.

“In recent days, federal agents have knocked on the doors of family, friends, and former employees. Not because they found a crime. Because they are simply trying to find one,” Newsom said.

“They’re demanding records. They are abusing the grand jury process. Digging through years and years of random documents,” Newsom said. “Donald Trump isn’t just coming after me because of my mean tweets. He’s coming after me because I am considering running for president.”

Newsom claimed that federal investigators were also investigating his wife, actress and activist Jennifer Siebel Newsom, “who has done nothing wrong, other than having the temerity to advocate for what she believes in.”

There are actually several ongoing investigations related to Newsom, a source familiar with the situation told Semafor’s Shelby Talcott. The investigations reportedly involve his wife’s taxes and his chief of staff Nathan Barankin. Those did not originate from the main DOJ but stem from Sacramento, involving whistleblowers, according to the source.

This revelation comes a year after Trump threatened to have Newsom arrested, amid an escalating feud about the president’s illegal deployment of National Guard troops in Los Angeles.

Trump has bragged about his supposed “right” to weaponize the Department of Justice, and openly directed the DOJ to investigate his political enemies New York Attorney General Letitia James, Senator Adam Schiff, and former FBI Director James Comey. All of those cases crashed and burned.

Trump had also been investigating former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, although he dropped the case in order to get Powell’s replacement approved by the Senate. It’s not clear that the administration won’t resume targeting Powell.

And just a week ago, Vice President JD Vance referred Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to the DOJ for a criminal investigation into allegations of fraud.

This story has been updated.