At issue is the Virginia state Supreme Court’s decision to throw out the amended congressional district maps that voters just approved—in a referendum that cost the Democrats some $70 million, as they painstakingly played by all the rules to get it over the line. In the immediate aftermath of the ruling, Spanberger offered a limp proclamation, saying that she was “disappointed” by it but that her “focus as Governor will be on ensuring that all voters have the information necessary to make their voices heard this November.”

But it turns out that Spanberger was missing some vital information of her own: a lawful solution that could save the day and uphold the will of Virginia voters. As Quinn Yeargain at The Downballot reported, the state constitution includes a provision that allows lawmakers to change the mandatory retirement age of state Supreme Court justices. The idea Yeargain poses would be to lower the official retirement age to 54 by placing a modification in the annual budget bill that’s due by June 30, pass the legislation, and replace the hack justices—all of whom are older than 54—with seven new ones picked by Spanberger.

“Democrats might prefer other solutions,” Yeargain concluded, “but if they want to see the will of the voters respected in time for the November elections, there are virtually no other options—and none with as good a chance of success as this one.”

Spanberger isn’t going for it. In fairness, as Greg Sargent reported this week, Virginia Democrats like Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell have cited some logistical impediments to the plan, namely a May 12 deadline to finalize the maps in time for early voting.

Yet, wherever the GOP holds the whip hand in the redistricting wars, they are sallying forth without either seeking the assent of voters or showing much concern for procedural deadlines—in some cases, like Louisiana, Republicans are changing the maps right in the middle of ongoing elections. Which makes Surovell’s diffident attitude especially risible: “Wiping out the entire Supreme Court is an incredibly extreme step to take over a decision you don’t like.” This is a hard thing to hear when Republicans are engineering—at warp speed—the wholesale extermination of Black political power in the South.

It’s unsustainable for our democracy to have one party that’s terrified of hypothetical blowback they might receive for violating a norm and one party vandalizing the Constitution with freedom and glee, knowing their political opponents will never force them to incur a similar cost. Democrats spend so much effort on mitigating the hypothetical radical step the right might take in the future that they’re failing to respond to the radical things they’re doing at this moment—to say nothing of the things they’re already speeding to do next. One of those things, by the way, is using the Callais decision to potentially eliminate majority-minority districts in blue states like California—or to potentially create a postelection coup in Congress.

Regardless of whether retiring the current Virginia Supreme Court would result in the electoral maps that voters approved, there are a number of good reasons why state Democrats should do it anyway. Do it because replacing the Supreme Court with one more aligned with Virginia voters will be a gift that keeps on giving. Do it because it will raise the salience of the GOP’s rush to undo civil rights gains. Do it because if the shoe were on the GOP’s foot, they would not hesitate to forcibly retire a Democratic-majority court. Do it because, as Brian Beutler writes, you cannot simply not “respond to an element of a Republican coup d’etat.”

But the biggest reason is that Democrats need to develop an appetite for the kind of hardball politics that the GOP plays. The enormity of the tasks in front of them—reversing a slew of U.S. Supreme Court decisions, rebuilding the federal government, putting Trump and his inner circle in jail—requires leaders who understand the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.

For all the grim news about the redistricting wars, the grimmer failures of Trumpism keep the prospects of winning elections in reach. We should remember that the GOP’s race to create new districts is a product of their failures and unpopularity. And who knows? For all their cracking and packing, Republicans may pay a price for making their own red districts more vulnerable should Trump’s daily misdeeds and the worsening economy touch off a wave election. But those voters—who include suburban moms at No Kings rallies calling for Nuremberg 2.0 and neighborhoods full of ordinary people who’ve put their lives on the line protecting each other from Trump’s ICE goons—will expect their elected officials to take up arms (figuratively!) against this sea of troubles the GOP has unleashed, and bring it to a swift end.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

“But if you don’t have those students—good students, by the way—if you don’t … if they’re good and they want to stay in America, we won’t give them a green card and things like that,” Trump rambled on to Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Friday. “Frankly, I think that it’s good that people come from other countries and they learn our culture, and many of them want to stay here. I think it’s a good thing. Not everybody agrees with me, and it doesn’t sound like a very conservative position. And I’m as conservative—I’m a conservative guy. I’m really a common sense guy, I think, more than a conservative.” 

“People would argue they worry about whether they have nefarious intentions,” Hannity said.

“Sure, I know, and we worry about that, and honestly, you know, they do things to us, and we do things to them. It’s a very fine line, the whole thing with students,” Trump replied. 

NOW - Trump says it's good to have 500,000 foreign Chinese students in the U.S. and for China to purchase U.S. farmland; otherwise, colleges and farm prices would collapse: "I frankly think that it's good that people come from other countries and they learn our culture." pic.twitter.com/3vQDXpjchz

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) May 15, 2026

This triggered a meltdown in MAGA’s considerable Sinophobic wing. “I respect President Trump, but if he brings 500,000 Chinese students to Florida colleges, I will raise tuition on them to $1,000,000/year,” Florida’s racist, groyper gubernatorial candidate James Fishback wrote. “As Governor, I refuse to let the  limited admission spots at our taxpayer-funded colleges be stolen by foreigners.”

“Actually, no, those 500,000 students are by law required to act as spies for China. This is the law in China. If removing them sinks some schools, then they deserve to sink,” MAGA influencer Robby Starbuck opined. “The only Chinese students we should invite are the top 0.001% who we should invite to defect to America. And farmland? Lol. We shouldn’t even let a Chinese company visit American farmland let alone own it. No exceptions. I give the Chinese credit, they would NEVER let Americans own their farmland. America First.”

“Trump says it’s insulting to tell China their students can’t go to our universities, imagine being an American student and receiving a rejection letter while 500,000 Chinese students get in!” former MAGA Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote. “And NO it is not ok for China to buy our farmland!!! And no that’s not common sense!!!”

It certainly makes sense for MAGA to be confused. Letting in hundreds of thousands of international students from the same country our leaders claim to be in a deep political rivalry with is not very “America First” of the president.

The U.S. Department of Labor posted a graphic on X Friday claiming that the prices of “many” goods were falling year-over-year, touting “THE TRUMP EFFECT!”

Independent journalist Justin Wolfers cross-referenced the chart with data from the Consumer Price Index and revealed that the dozen or so products the agency had chosen to highlight were blatantly cherry-picked. 

“You can lie in any language, including charts. But because charts come dressed in the authority of arithmetic, the betrayal often cuts deeper,” he wrote in his newsletter. “And sometimes, the lies are breathtaking.”

Missing from the Department of Labor’s graph are the many, many, many more products that have become more expensive—some by double digits. 

There are the obvious ones: the price of fuel oil has increased by 54.3 percent, and gasoline has increased by 28.4 percent, as a result of Donald Trump’s disastrous military campaign in Iran. 

Other products that have seen double-digit price increases are coffee (18.5 percent), beef (17.8 percent,) and airline tickets (20.7 percent). Computer software and accessories rose 13.9 percent, delivery services by 13.6 percent, and public transportation by 13.7 percent. The price of fresh vegetables grew 11.5 percent, and even the humble hot dog is now 10.7 percent more expensive than it was last year.  

These are just some of the biggest jumps. Wolfers found 238 other products and services that saw price increases in the past year. 

The  inclusion of some products highlighted by the Labor Department are extremely misleading. The price of eggs had already crashed at least 70 percent by mid-September since the highs of March that were brought about by the bird flu outbreak last year. The price of health insurance is not going down because health insurance premiums are increasing as millions could lose access to Medicaid. There are not triumphs of the Trump administration—they’re a smokescreen. 

Americans don’t need to be told that prices are increasing—they can feel it. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly report, released Tuesday, found that inflation rose to 3.8 percent in April, outpacing wages, which grew at a rate of 3.6 percent. 

The 70-year-old opera company departed its longtime home at the John F. Kennedy Center when the president and his allies assumed control of the historic cultural institution last year. Yet the difficult exit has apparently not hurt the company—instead, it is well on its way to a full reinvention, raising questions about whether or not the group needs the $2.75 million federal subsidy and support of the Kennedy Center in order to survive, The New York Times reported Friday.

“We didn’t lose any artists,” Francesca Zambello, the artistic director of the Washington National Opera, told the Times. “We didn’t lose any staff when we rebooted as a new company. Nobody lost a paycheck. Nobody lost their benefits. Everyone has been very united.”

Zambello added that it has been difficult to fundraise and, effectively, create “an opera company out of nothing,” though they have also found “incredible freedom” in the process.

The opera company’s program has shifted. It has more operas scheduled this year than it did during the 2024-25 season, but it will also have fewer performances of each opera.

“This reflects the competition for stages at auditoriums that have already booked shows well in advance,” noted the Times.

The company’s budget has also grown, from $25 million last year to about $30 million next year. That’s due to the additional costs tied to renting venues, and the loss of in-house staff and government subsidies. A $17 million endowment also hangs in the balance.

“We had to increase our fund-raising budget significantly to cover new costs and to account for limited weeks available in new venues, which means fewer revenue-earning performances per production,” Timothy O’Leary, the general director of the opera, told the daily. “Thankfully, we have received leadership support from our board and donor base, as well as a groundswell of new donors from around the country.”

Long before Trump’s meddling, the Kennedy Center was widely considered a premier global arts institution. But since the White House became directly involved in its operations and programming, its normally star-studded lineup has fallen apart.

In December, the president suddenly decided to rename the venerated cultural institution “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,” in a flagrant rejection of the laws that created the center in the first place.

“I just want to say this is a slap in the face to Poland; it’s a slap in the face to our Baltic friends,” Representative and Armed Service Committee member Don Bacon told Politico. “It’s a slap to the face of this committee … “I may not represent 100 percent of people on this committee, but I think I represent the views of the vast majority … We disagree.”

“We don’t know what’s going on here, but I can just tell you we’re not happy with what’s being talked about, particularly since there’s been no statutory consultation with us,” said Armed Services Chair Representative Mike Rogers, suggesting that the move was made without congressional oversight. Although the Pentagon stated that pulling troops was “not an unexpected, last-minute decision.”

Top Armed Service Democrat Adam Smith felt similarly.

“The only answer I’ve got is, ‘Well, that’s what they told us to do.’ Okay, why?” Smith said. “If there’s some strategy behind it, then you guys ought to know and you ought to be able to communicate it to us.”

Poland is the only European country that prefers a U.S. military presence.

Speaking at a memorial service outside the U.S. Capitol for the Fraternal Order of Police’s National Peace Officers, Vance got a quiet reaction to his raving about the Trump administration’s efforts to end cashless bail.

“How about we have a federal government that puts violent criminals in prison, as opposed to letting them out of jail?” Vance said. There was a long, awkward pause, before the quiet members of the audience slowly started clapping.

please clap pic.twitter.com/RkKrK9HAhG

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 15, 2026

It’s possible that the crowd of law enforcement officers and their families are aware that there is no significant documented increase in violent crimes among arrestees out on cashless bail, which allows people suspected of a crime who can’t meet bail to avoid spending time in a cage before they’ve been convicted.

Or perhaps the audience weren’t impressed by how Vance used his pulpit to deliver a political speech.

In honoring the fallen law enforcement officers, Vance took credit for a historic drop in violent crime—when rates were already dropping nationwide before Donald Trump came into office. Experts have said there is little evidence to suggest that Trump has had a significant impact on crime rates.

Still, Vance attributed a drop in violent crime to the Trump administration’s efforts to stop “the tide of narcotics and migrant crime flooding across our borders.” Of course, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born citizens. But this is just the run-of-the-mill xenophobia one can expect from Vance, who has admitted to telling racist lies for attention. And who could forget when he readily put a target on the back of immigrant children?

This painfully cringey racist is the person Trump wants to prop up in 2028, and maybe we should let him. If Vance’s performance Friday is any indication, there may very well be a Democrat in the White House in two years.

Johnson has spent the bulk of his time atop the House dodging attempts by reporters to pin down his opinion on the Trump administration’s various machinations. That remained true during a press huddle Friday, when a journalist asked Johnson about the president’s relaxed approach to safeguarding Taiwan from China’s control.

“Should President Trump have been more committal when it comes to Taiwan during his visit to China?” asked a reporter.

“I haven’t seen—I’ve been really busy the last couple days, so I haven’t seen the exact readout on how that discussion went,” Johnson said. “I heard a couple little comments off-hand of what he said. He feels like they had a very productive meeting, they talked about some really important issues. I’m awaiting a sit-down with him and go through it in detail.”

“We’ve always been concerned and we’ve made America’s interests very clear, our position on Taiwan. They need to stay independent and secure there and we have an interest in that, as does everyone around the world, because of chip manufacturing and other reasons there,” Johnson continued, adding that he couldn’t speak on the topic further because he had not yet discussed it with the president.

It’s remarkable that Johnson—as one of the most powerful lawmakers in Congress—does not feel empowered to speak independently about U.S. policy. Yet it’s perhaps equally alarming that his strategy is to consistently play inept and ignorant as to the White House’s activity, particularly since Trump refused to commit to a planned arms sale to Taiwan after meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Chinese leadership warned the U.S. against supporting Taiwan, promising that doing so would place U.S.-China relations in “great jeopardy.”

“‘Taiwan independence’ and cross-strait peace are as irreconcilable as fire and water,” a readout from the Chinese government stated. “The U.S. side must exercise extra caution in handling the Taiwan question.”

China has reaffirmed for years that Taiwan is an inalienable part of its territory, and that it intends to formally reunite with the island nation. More than 23 million people live in Taiwan, and its sovereignty is highly contested due to a complex history of colonization.

The U.S. has provided material defense support to Taiwan since 1979, when Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act. The law binds the U.S. to resist anything that would jeopardize Taiwan’s national security.

While speaking with reporters aboard Air Force One Friday morning, Trump refused to say whether he would defend Taiwan “if it came to it.”

“I don’t want to say. I’m not gonna say that,” Trump said. “There’s only one person that knows that. You know who it is? Me, I’m the only person. That question was asked to me today by President Xi. I said, ‘I don’t talk about that.’”

“He asked me if I’d defend them,” he clarified. “I said, ‘I don’t talk about that.’”

Trump added that he would make a determination on the arms deal “over the next fairly short period.”

Johnson was not always so hesitant to speak his mind. In October 2023—shortly after he won the gavel—Johnson said that the U.S. should intervene between Russia and Ukraine “because I don’t believe it would stop there.”

Q: "Would the U.S. defend Taiwan if it came to it?"

Trump: "I don't wanna say. I'm not gonna say that. There's only one person that knows that. You know who it is? Me…That question was asked to me today by President Xi. I said 'I don't talk about that.' He asked me if I'd… pic.twitter.com/kYVgMH1hMP

— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) May 15, 2026

“It would probably encourage and empower China to perhaps make a move on Taiwan,” Johnson warned at the time.

An internal ICE memo revealed that staffers are exploring what work can be done at a warehouse near Hagerstown, Maryland, even after a judge blocked construction, The Washington Post reported Friday. 

DHS signed a $113 million build-out and operations contract in March with KVG, a defense contractor with no experience overseeing detention centers, to work on the Maryland facility. The contract could grow to $642 million over the next three years.

Last month, a Baltimore judge issued a temporary injunction blocking the project, arguing that the building’s four toilets and two water fountains were not sufficient to accommodate the estimated 1,500-person capacity. However, earlier this week, officials in Washington County, Maryland, relayed that ICE intended to conduct an environmental assessment on the property, even though the government had initially argued the renovations had no environmental threat.  

This month, ICE officials have also discussed awarding contracts to oversee the construction and operation of warehouses it acquired earlier this year in San Antonio and near El Paso, two people briefed on discussions told the Post. Local officials have raised concerns about the facilities. 

In San Antonio, ICE purchased a warehouse valued at $37 million for more than $66 million. Precinct 4 County Commissioner Tommy Calvert claimed the purchase “reeked of corruption.” In Socorro, Texas, ICE paid a Delaware-based company called El Paso Logistics II LLC  $122 million for a warehouse, infuriating local officials who said they were only notified after the sale. 

The DHS Office of Inspector General announced Thursday that it would investigate whether ICE had purchased the buildings “in a cost-effective manner.” CoStar, the real estate data tracker, found that DHS paid an average of 13 percent above market value for warehouse properties across eight states, the Post reported. 

El Paso is already home to ICE’s largest detention center Camp East Montana, where within the first 50 days of operation, the facility had already racked up 60 federal code violations. Now, Donald Trump wants to build eight more Camp East Montanas—and make them even bigger.

ABC News reports that Trump is likely to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service as part of a new settlement that amounts to one of his most corrupt schemes yet. It would create a new $1.7 billion fund to compensate allies supposedly victimized by the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of the legal system—potentially including the January 6 insurrectionists.

According to ABC, the settlement would create a “commission” with “total authority” to settle “claims” brought by those who allege such weaponization. Per ABC, this not only includes the insurrectionists; it could even settle purported claims by “entities associated with President Trump himself.” By all indications it would operate with little-to-no congressional oversight.

“This is a shocking new betrayal of the Constitution,” Representative Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, told me.

This saga captures something essential about how the political economy of Trumpism really functions. It helps explain why his supporters stick by him through one episode after another of the most corrupt self-dealing we’ve seen from any U.S. president in modern history.

To recap: In January, Trump sued the IRS over an unauthorized leak of his tax returns when he was president the first time, demanding $10 billion in damages. This lawsuit is absurd on the merits, as my colleague Timothy Noah demonstrates, functionally inviting Trump’s own government to settle a lawsuit massively in his favor, a ground-breaking innovation in self-dealing.

Indeed, in recent days, we learned that the White House has entered into talks with the Justice Department—which is theoretically supposed to defend the government against the lawsuit—to settle Trump’s claim. Trump controls the DOJ, so functionally he’s been “negotiating” a “settlement” with an entity he controls, in which that entity would direct taxpayer money to Trump or his associates or pet causes.

Enter this ABC report. The new MAGA slush fund would be drawn from the Treasury Department’s Judgment Fund. That’s something the federal government uses to pay settlements and court judgments, but in this case, Trump would wield quasi-direct control over that money.

That’s because ABC also reports that under the settlement, Trump can remove commission members overseeing the new fund without cause. And it wouldn’t be required to disclose its decision-making involving who gets awarded compensation:

Trump’s proposed commission is expected to be composed of five members who would issue monetary awards based on a majority vote, and the process for awarding money and the identities of the recipient could be kept private, according to sources.

In short, Trump’s own DOJ is reaching a “settlement” with him that sets up a new MAGA slush fund of over $1 billion in taxpayer money. It’s overseen by people who can hand out the loot with no transparency, people whom Trump can fire for any reason—say, for not giving money to whoever Trump wants them to give it to. Including his army of insurrectionists.

In our interview, Raskin pointed out other glaringly corrupt aspects to this. He noted that Treasury’s Judgment Fund is supposed to dole out its settlements and lawsuit judgments in accordance with actually existing court or administrative proceedings involving genuine victims of the government. As Raskin’s staff notes, depending on the details, the relevant agencies and government officials must sign off on these payments, and they’re disclosed to Congress and the public.

But with the new fund, it’s not clear the payments will look anything like this. It appears to transfer control over its payments to Trump alone, Raskin’s staff says, and decouples them entirely from all those agency processes.

“The Judgment Fund exists to settle valid judgments against the United States government,” Raskin told me. Trump and his allies, Raskin said, are “trying to take money from the Judgment Fund while eliminating any controls and oversight” and putting it under Trump’s “direct unilateral control.”

On top of that, Raskin added, this circumvents Congress in another way, since Congress never voted to create a fund structured this way. Which potentially renders it unconstitutional, too.

“Congress never would have passed a $1.7 billion slush fund for his friends—this is completely outside of our constitutional framework,” Raskin said, called this “an outrageous desecration of congressional power of the purse.”

There’s still more. Raskin notes that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits the government from assuming any “obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.” Raskin said that if this fund hands money to the January 6 rioters, Trump will be “using federal taxpayer dollars to compensate people who participated in insurrection.”

If Democrats take back one or both chambers of Congress, Raskin said, they will move to shut down this new fund. And they will seek to compel it to release all the details on any payments it makes between now and 2027.

So even if Trump thinks this fund is handing out money under cover of darkness, these payments might eventually see the light of day. Raskin also said he will invite Republicans to legislate against this fund right now. Let’s see how Republicans defend refusing to act against this.

Ultimately, this story also helps explain the sordid political economy of MAGA fascism. As writer John Ganz has explained, Trump uses the government in various ways to support his coalition’s “material basis.” For instance, the massive scaling up of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Ganz notes, functions as “an employment program for the Trumpenproletarian mob,” as a key component of the “class composition of actually existing fascism.”

This new MAGA slush fund seems very much in this vein, particularly if it hands out payments to January 6 rioters. As Raskin put it to me, Trump and his lawyers “are figuring out a way to refund the January 6 militia, presumably to get them ready for the next round of battle.”

It’s hard to believe that Trump thinks of members of his street thug wing as victims of injustice in any meaningful sense. For Trump, there’s no such thing as justice or injustice. Outcomes reflect power and nothing more—who is winning and who is losing, who is dominant and who is supplicant.

So at bottom, payments from this fund might ultimately serve as a form of coalition management: They’ll keep large swaths of his coalition persuaded that a win for Trump, no matter how illicit or ill-gotten, is a win for them. That his corruption isn’t just in his own interests, but in theirs, too. Because, after all, they’re getting a cut of the spoils.

Jordan was questioned by CNN’s Kaitlin Collins on how the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has negatively impacted U.S. consumers.

“What about his promise in 2024 that if he was reelected, gas would be under $2 a gallon because of his policies?” asked Collins.

“Well, gas prices were coming down until we had to deal with this situation. But, you know, that’s life. That’s dealing with the world and, you know, the world we live in,” Jordan replied. “I think the country gets the fundamental fact – and I know I understand this – President Trump makes decisions that are in the best interest of our nation, 250 years, greatest country in history.”

“But if someone’s listening to you and they were paying $2.98 a gallon gas before the war started, and now they’re paying $4.53, I mean, saying ‘that’s life’ might not, you know, make them feel better,” Collins replied.

“Those are– those are your words. Not mine. I’m saying–”

“No, you said, ‘That’s life’ just now.”

COLLINS: But if someone was paying $2.98 a gallon before the war, and now they're paying $4.53, saying 'that's life' might not make them feel better

JIM JORDAN: Those are your words, not mine

COLLINS: You said that just now. I quoted you. pic.twitter.com/RMWo3sKKtQ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 15, 2026

“This is the situation. This is the situation. They were pursuing a nuclear weapon. They wanted to get there. President Trump said, “I’m not gonna do that.” He ran on that, and he’s taken the appropriate action that I think you want your commander-in-chief to take for the security and safety of America.”

“But he also ran on bringing gas prices to under $2 a gallon.”

“Hopefully, we’ll get there soon. I want– I want gas prices low, too. I mean, we all want gas prices low. Who doesn’t, for goodness sake?”

Jordan’s response was widely ridiculed as a moment that represented the Trump-induced fugue state that many republicans seem to be in, particularly of late as prices get higher and higher with no end to the war in Iran in sight. Just two days ago Vice President JD Vance denied that Trump stated that he didn’t care about Americans’ economic situations “even a little bit” even as there is readily available footage of him saying exactly that.

CNN split screen of Trump saying he doesn’t think about Americans’ financial situation and Vance claiming that Trump didn’t say that. pic.twitter.com/7ACtYu9ImE

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 13, 2026

Three points here. First of all, we should stop quickly to note that it’s sad that it’s come to pass that we just automatically believe a foreign government—and China’s no less—over the president of the United States (sad about him, that is, not us). Second, let’s remember that Boeing is an American company in a deep and sustained crisis that was brought on by basic greed: As David Goldstein explained in Democracy journal in 2024, after its acquisition of McDonnell-Douglas in 1997, the historically proud engineering culture at Boeing was destroyed as the company became more anti-union and outsourced more of its production.

And third, assuming that Trump is lying or at least exaggerating, well, we’ve just learned again for the jillionth time that Mr. Art of the Deal is a total fraud. Let’s review.

• Remember how, in his first term, Trump was going to bring North Korea to its knees? Remember how he consistently heaped praise on Kim Jong Un and his “beautiful vision for his country”? Well, it’s not a “beautiful country” to the people who live there, and meanwhile, its nuclear progress has been steady over the last decade—during most of which, of course, Mr. Art of the Deal has been the president of the United States. Experts think the nation has assembled about 50 warheads.
• Remember also that he was going to solve the Russia-Ukraine war on his first day back in office? In late March, a UN expert testified that the violence was “worse than ever.” We—that is, most decent people—are heartened by Ukraine’s resilience and wowed by its innovative drone technology. But that “we” doesn’t include the president of the United States, who obviously is cheering for his pal Putin—over whom he has zero leverage.
• The 2025 tariff war on China totally backfired. China responded to Trump’s tariffs by limiting exports of rare-earth metals, and Trump backed down. Today, U.S. soybean exports to China are down (they peaked during Sleepy Joe’s “disastrous” presidency), as are auto exports. The first Chinese EVs are landing in Canada even as we speak. These are ultra-luxury cars that sell for $10,000 or even $20,000 less than their American equivalents.
• Speaking of Canada, why isn’t it the 51st state yet? And speaking of Northern annexation, why isn’t Greenland part of the United States yet?
• How’s that world-class Gaza resort coming along?
• U.S. relations with Europe are at an all-time low. And it isn’t because of anything Europe did. Last December, the Trump administration released a security strategy paper calling Europe a bigger threat to the United States than Russia or China because of its progressive social and immigration policies, which threatened the continent with “civilizational erasure.”  
• And finally, of course, there is Iran. The economic impact of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz will be felt for months ahead. The latest wrinkle? In India, where they apparently lap up Diet Coke, there’s a shortage of the beloved elixir because there’s an aluminum shortage (Diet Coke is sold only in cans there). The Middle East accounts for 98 percent of the global aluminum supply. Stock up on that Reynolds Wrap. Joking aside: There are and will be dozens of such shortages, some far more serious than Diet Coke. A UN official told AFP in Paris this week that up to 45 million people in the developing world could face hunger or even starvation because of the global fertilizer shortage.  

All the above adds up to this rather grim reality, contained in a survey conducted by the Alliance of Democracies Foundations and unveiled last week. The United States ranked 128th in how it is viewed by survey respondents across 85 countries. We netted out at -16. That’s behind Russia, Syria, and Myanmar, to name a few notables. But hey, we’re ahead of Iran! By a point.

Trump can fool himself, if he wants to, that Xi Jinping was talking about the Biden years when he referred to America’s decline and the suddenly famous “Thucydides Trap.” But everyone knows the truth. He was talking about the United States in general, under both parties—a country that is by now pretty much owned lock, stock, and barrel by a handful of greedy Robber Barons whom the GOP worships and the Democrats haven’t had the stones to stop.

And he was talking about the United States under Trump specifically. Xi may be a ruthlessly immoral tyrant. But one thing he isn’t is dumb. He sees very clearly what the United States is doing to itself, having reelected a low-I.Q. kleptocrat, adjudicated sex offender, and psychologically damaged sociopath who spends the wee hours firing off batshit tweets and obsessing about a ballroom the way the Sun King did over Versailles. That man, not Joe Biden, is why China now tops the United States in global approval ratings.

The United States always led China in those kinds of polls because at the end of the day we could say well, at least we’re a democracy. The way things are going, we’re not even going to be able to say that soon. But hey, he’s a great dealmaker, right?

The latest Justice Department filing from acting Attorney General Todd Blanche regarding the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s lawsuit against Trump’s ballroom relies on the recent White House Correspondent’s Dinner assassination attempt and other MAGA-friendly arguments that display the deep levels of sycophancy present within the Trump administration.

“The assassination attempts make clear what Defendants have been explaining from the start of the case: Presidents need a secure space for significant events, which currently does not exist in Washington, D.C., and this Court’s injunction stalling this Project cannot defensibly continue. To ensure construction proceeds, and to conserve judicial resources, this Court should immediately issue a ruling indicating that it would dissolve its injunction at once,” the filing reads, noting that Trump’s ballroom will have “missile resistant steel columns, Military grade venting, drone proof ceilings, and bullet, ballistic, and blast proof glass”—which will cost at least $1 billion. They even refer to it as the “Militarily Top Secret Ballroom” and allege that the plaintiffs are only suing because it was Trump’s idea.

“That fact is also relevant to the merits here because it is further evidence that rank political bias led to this meritless, dangerous lawsuit being filed. A bipartisan chorus of legislators, analysts, and media pundits have agreed the Ballroom is needed more than ever. The Ballroom is a gift to the People of the United States and to future Presidents,” the filing continues. “Plaintiff’s frivolous suit should be dismissed, and the Court should indicate that it would dissolve its injunction and allow construction of this vital for National Security Project to be completed without any risk of hindrance.”

Democratic Representative Steve Cohen announced Friday that he will not be representing Tennessee’s 9th congressional district after his term expires due to the state legislature’s recent decision to carve up the predominantly Black and Democratic voting base.

In future, the area will consist of several rural voting areas that are expected to lean Republican.

“This is by far the most difficult moment I’ve had as an elected official,” Cohen said during a press conference at his office.

Currently, Tennessee’s 9th district covers most of Memphis and its inner suburbs. The new map creates three alternative districts in the area, none of which include Memphis proper.

The progressive lawmaker told reporters that he has considered running in one of the other districts.

Cohen was first elected to the House in 2006 and has consistently won re-election ever since. He is the first Jewish person to represent Tennessee, a detail that has sparked criticism from some of his electoral challengers, who have argued that the majority-Black district should be represented by a person of color.

Tennessee state Representative Justin Pearson was aiming to challenge Cohen for his seat before the state passed its new map.

“I have an opponent who’s verbally facile, and can jump around and dance, and things like that, and if somebody thinks that’s who they wanted, that’s who they can have, because I can’t,” Cohen said Friday of Pearson. “I don’t dance anymore, jump around, but I think I was gonna win that race.”

Tennessee passed its maps last week, offering Republicans all nine seats in the House while eliminating the state’s lone Democratic district. Pearson will continue to run in the newly redrawn 9th district.

A recent financial disclosure revealed that the president bought and sold millions of dollars worth of stocks in tech companies and government contractors, including Palantir and Nvidia, NOTUS reported Friday.

On February 10, Donald Trump purchased between $1 million and $5 million worth of stock in Nvidia, a massive AI chip maker. A week later, Nvidia announced a major computer processing power deal with Meta. Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, has spent more than a year cozying up to Trump.

Trump previously purchased between $500,000 and $1 million worth of Nvidia stock on January 6, after clearing the sale of Nvidia’s H200 chips, the company’s second-most powerful AI chip, to China. A week later, the Commerce Department officially approved the sale. This week, after Huang traveled with Trump to China, the Commerce Department cleared 10 Chinese firms to buy Nvidia’s chips—making way for Trump to make millions more.

Also on January 6, Trump purchased between $50,000 and $100,000 worth of stock in AMD, another AI semiconductor company, which was authorized to sell their chips to Chinese customers a week later. Trump purchased at least $740,000 in AMD stock last quarter, according to NOTUS.

In the first quarter of 2026, Trump also purchased at least $260,000 worth of stock in Palantir, a private weapons manufacturer with hefty government contracts and ties to the president.

In January, Trump bought between $65,000 to $150,000 of Palantir stock, and sold between $1.1 million and roughly $5.3 million of it in February. That same month, Palantir won a billion-dollar purchasing agreement with the Department of Homeland Security to use the company’s software to aid Trump’s sweeping deportation efforts.

In March, Trump purchased between $200,000 and $500,000 in Palantir stock. Last month, Trump made a public call for people to buy stock in Palantir—including the stock’s ticker symbol in his social media post—in an obvious effort at market manipulation. A few weeks later, Palantir landed yet another major federal contract.

Trump’s May 14 financial disclosure showed that the president has shifted away from his prior strategy of investing mostly in corporate and municipal bonds, and had made more than 3,600 individual stock and other financial trades during the first three months of 2026.

In a statement to NOTUS, the White House said that Trump and his family were not responsible for their investments, or notified of their trades.

For Trump to get rich off of companies he regulates is insanely corrupt, but not necessarily surprising from the president who runs several schemes to get rich from the Oval Office. That said, Americans should not stand for it, nor for any lawmakers who sit idly by and watch it happen.

Christine currently serves as the assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and as such is one of the top public health officials running the country’s infectious disease policy. Earlier this week, he told reporters in Nebraska that the agency’s response to the dangerous outbreak would be “grounded in science” and “grounded in transparency.”

Yet Christine’s resume seems far and away from that of a typical U.S. health official. While he has some public health experience under his belt, having served as a four-star admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, he has also espoused dangerous far-right beliefs and spread wellness conspiracy theories.

He rebuked coronavirus mandates and spread conspiracy theories about treatment plans that sowed doubt and division over the government’s public health response at the time. He has claimed that the pandemic was a part of a wider government plot to control people, and he skirted questions from the U.S. Senate as to whether or not he would recommend the Covid vaccine to his patients.

The 62-year-old admiral also hosted a YouTube series titled “Erection Connection,” a professional show for other urologists discussing erectile dysfunction.

More than 40 people in the U.S. are currently being monitored in connection to a hantavirus outbreak aboard a Rotterdam-bound cruise ship last month. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday that there are currently no cases in the U.S. and that risk to the general public remains low. Nine cases have been confirmed in connection with the ship.

A Dutch couple were identified by the WHO as the first passengers infected with the virus. It is believed that they were exposed to the virus while birdwatching at an Argentinian landfill. Both the husband and wife died as a result.

“The IRS wrongly allowed a rogue, politically-motivated employee to leak private and confidential information about President Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization to the New York Times, ProPublica and other left-wing news outlets, which was then illegally released to millions of people,” an attorney for the president wrote. “President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable.”

This lawsuit is at best a brazen last-gasp money grab that even Trump himself has even acknowledged, stating candidly that it “sort of looks bad.”

“It’s interesting because I’m the one that makes a decision, right, and, you know, that decision would have to go across my desk,” Trump said late last year. “It’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself.”

While dropping the lawsuit does prevent Trump from using the IRS to pay himself, it still leaves plenty of wiggle room for the president to personally enrich himself, as his super PAC could apply for the weaponization fund just as J6ers or any other far-right wing group can. Trump can also pick, choose, and fire the members of this weaponization committee without cause, forming it in his own image with little to no oversight.

“An insane level of corruption—even for Trump,” Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote Thursday on X. “A $1.7 BILLION slush fund for Trump’s hand-picked stooges to hand money to January 6th insurrectionists and his political allies. Here’s the President’s priority as Americans sell their plasma to afford gas and groceries.”

“Dumocrats. Because they’re dumb, I—they’re dumb. It’s D-U-M. I got rid of the B. So you’re only changing one letter, right? E goes, the U comes,” Trump told Fox New’s Sean Hannity Thursday.

Trump: Dumocrats. They’re dumb. It’s d-u-m. I got rid of the b. So, you’re only changing one letter. E goes and the U comes. pic.twitter.com/KUr1yKC8RW

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 15, 2026

Just a reminder: this imbecile is who represents us on the world stage.

Is it any wonder he’s walked away from a two-day summit with China without securing any significant breakthroughs? Or in negotiations with Iran for that matter, in which Trump revealed Thursday he discards deals from the other side if he doesn’t like the first sentence?

Based on how Trump’s talking, it would be a wonder if he could read much further than that.

No worries though, we’ll just add it to the slush pile of unintelligible things Trump said this year—and pray for peace some other day.

In a new interview between the pair, aired Thursday evening, the longtime face of the conservative news behemoth appeared visibly frustrated and irritated that the president would not directly address the war in Iran.

“Do you think President Xi and China have the ability to influence the Iranians, considering they are one of their biggest customers?” asked Hannity.

“Yea probably but—um, look, he’s not coming in with guns, they’re not coming in shooting,” Trump said.

“I’m not asking—” Hannity interjected. “—Influenced.”

But Trump was keen to switch the topic, reorienting his answer towards the possibility of U.S. oil sales.

“He’s been very good. They get a lot of their oil—40 percent of their oil—from that location. So what has happened, and one thing that I think we’re going to make a deal on, is they’ve agreed they want to buy oil from the United States,” Trump said.

This is one of the few times I’ve seen Hannity frustrated with Trump’s answers.

Hannity: Do you think president XI and China have the ability to influence the Iranians, considering they are one of their biggest customer?

Trump: Look, he’s not coming in with guns.

Hannity:… pic.twitter.com/g98V9aj6wy

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 15, 2026

In another concerning exchange, Trump suggested that he was unlikely to get a clear answer out of Xi on Iran’s nuclear program.

“I don’t think China wants Iran to have a nuclear weapon, either,” Trump said. “I said, ‘They’re stone cold crazy. You don’t need them having a nuclear weapon.’”

“And what did he say?” asked Hannity.

“Well, he’s not going to respond too much, he’s a pretty cool guy. He’s not going to say, ‘Oh, that’s a good point,’” Trump said.

“Do you think he agreed?” pressed Hannity. “What was the impression?”

“I don’t think he wants them to have—no, he would like to see it end.”

Not a definitive answer here from Trump on whether Xi agreed that Iran shouldn’t have a nuclear weapon.

Trump: I said you don’t need them having a nuclear weapon.

Hannity: What did he say?

Trump: He’s not going to respond too much. He’s a pretty cool guy. He’s not going to… pic.twitter.com/nEExeJlUNA

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 15, 2026

Trump intends to amp up pressure on Iran until its leadership caves to his key demand: ending Tehran’s nuclear capabilities. But the reality of Iran’s progress on that front is still murky.

Prior to the war—which never obtained congressional approval—Trump ordered strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear sites, hitting Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan on June 22. At the time, the Trump administration claimed that the one-off air raid had set Iran’s program back by “years.”

Ex-National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent, who sparked a maelstrom in Washington when he resigned over the issue in March, argued in his resignation letter that “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

In the 11 weeks since the war began, the U.S. and Israel have killed thousands of Iranian civilians and obliterated Iranian civilian infrastructure. Fourteen U.S. soldiers have also died in the process, according to CENTCOM.

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

NBC News is reporting that some House Republicans privately admit that Donald Trump and MAGA are now a serious liability in the midterms. They’re in a trap. Republicans can’t decide whether to rely on Trump to turn out his supporters—voters that Republicans very much need—because that risks tying them too closely to the ailing, unpopular president. All this comes as new polling shows that Trump is literally the most unpopular U.S. president ever when it comes to gas prices. It also comes amid new signs that Trump’s corruption is becoming a more central issue by the day.

That GOP trap—whether or not to run with Trump—perfectly captures how the GOP’s uncritical embrace of the president is backfiring in just about every way. So we’re talking about it all with Mona Charen, a writer for The Bulwark, who has a good piece arguing that gas prices and corruption are combining to hurt Republicans in hidden ways. Mona, thanks for coming on.

Mona Charen: My pleasure. Always nice to be with you, Greg.

Sargent: So let’s start with this analysis from CNN’s Harry Enten. Here he’s talking about disapproval of presidents on gas prices. Listen.

Harry Enten (voiceover): Oftentimes when gas prices go up, the president pays a price, but never this much, because we’re talking about a record here. Take a look at this. Highest disapproval on gas prices. Look at this. President Trump, 79 percent. 79 percent of Americans disapprove of him on gas prices. Look, the rest of them you see across the board also reach the 70s, but never this high. This is a record high in terms of looking back at every single president this century.

Sargent: So to quickly recap, Trump’s disapproval on gas prices is 79 percent—higher than any other president. And later in the analysis, Harry Enten notes that 85 percent of independents and even 52 percent of Republicans disapprove. Abysmal numbers. Mona, your reaction to those?

Charen: Yeah, it’s really interesting. And though I’m not usually one to say that the voters are wise and smart—you know, because we’ve had reason in the recent past to doubt that—but in this case, I think it’s pretty clear that voters have this very negative view of Trump’s responsibility for gas prices because it could not be clearer why gas prices are so high. It was this unprovoked war that he chose to engage in that has caused the spike in gas prices. It isn’t some exogenous event.

They gave him a break. They didn’t hold him responsible for the COVID virus. There are many things that they thought were out of his control and therefore they didn’t hold him accountable. But this is so clear. And not only did he launch this war, but he did so without ever making a case for it to the American people, without getting any congressional buy-in, far less a declaration of war. And so, yeah, if it’s causing pain, people know exactly who to blame.

Sargent: There’s a remarkable clarity to this one because in most cases presidents aren’t really to blame for economic conditions. And yet in this case, it couldn’t be clearer. And as you said, I just want to bear down a little more on it.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz—which is where 20 percent of the world’s oil traffics through—is very clearly the reason for the price spikes all around the world. And everybody can see it with total clarity, and you just don’t often get something so clearly cut where a president is so clearly on the hook for what’s happening to voters directly, do you?

Charen: No, it’s such a good point. Because look, life is complicated, and certainly economies usually have many things going on at once. And so you can say, well, what’s causing this slowdown? And it could be many things. It’s usually multifactorial. Is it the Fed? Is it trade? Is it COVID? Is it many, many things.

But in this case, it could not be clearer. And beyond that, it is a violation of Trump’s key promise that he made during the 2024 campaign—that he was going to tackle inflation. Now, of course, his promises were ridiculous. But he did make that claim when he was running, that he would bring down prices across the board. And he has clearly not only not delivered on that, he’s counter-delivered. Prices are up, not down.

Sargent: Well, this all helps explain why House Republicans are growing really panicked. NBC News reports that a House Republican confided to the NBC reporters that Republicans are dubious about the party’s strategy and its slogan, which is, quote-unquote, “MAGA Majority.”

Now that’s supposed to mean the House majority—MAGA Majority—but some vulnerable Republicans don’t like it, according to NBC, because MAGA is toxic and because the terminology centralizes Trump too much. Mona, they finally figured out that Trump is toxic. What do you make of that?

Charen: Well, it couldn’t happen to a nicer crew. No, look, they brought this on themselves. They made their beds. Pick your cliché. This party is Trump’s party. If Trump is popular, they win. If Trump is unpopular, they lose. They have no place to hide. They simply don’t. They have given everything over to him. And so they are completely vulnerable.

Now I should just add a caveat, though, Greg. Let’s face the fact that the Republicans are attempting to cheat their way out of this and they are having quite a bit of success. The combination of the willingness of the legislatures in Texas and other states to gerrymander, the fact that Virginia’s counter-gerrymander has now been ruled unconstitutional by the state court of Virginia—and just FYI, I will just add, though people are saying they want to take this to the United States Supreme Court, I am very dubious that that would go anywhere because state Supreme Courts are almost always held to be the experts on their own state constitutions. The Republicans are now in a position where even though they are desperately unpopular, even though MAGA is toxic, as you say, it is still possible that they could hold on.

Sargent: It absolutely is. As of now, they’re probably going to net at the end of the day around six extra seats due to their redistricting. The analysis that I trust right now, by people like G. Elliott Morris and Nate Cohn, are saying that Democrats have to win the national popular vote by around three points, maybe four at the very outside.

That is really unfortunate and it’s absurdly unfair and disgusting and all the rest of it, but it is doable. Most midterms in memory that have taken place with an unpopular president have delivered a larger win than that. So I really do think it’s possible.

Charen: Yes, I agree. It is possible. It would also be great if Democrats could field candidates who know how to appeal to independents. Because for Democrats to win, they have to win 60 percent of the independent vote, because there are fewer liberals than there are conservatives in this country. And so it’s just a fact of life that Democrats, if they want to win, they have to be able to win over independents—there just aren’t enough Democrats.

So I personally believe that the best way to do that—and I think it’s been demonstrated around the country—is you tailor your candidate to the district and make sure that you have people who are acceptable. You don’t have to give up all your principles. You don’t have to remake yourself into MAGA. But you have to be somebody who doesn’t send independents running for the hills.

There are so many polls, Greg, that show that independents think the Democrats are more radical than the Republicans. I know that’s crazy and I know it’s inexplicable to some people, especially Democrats, but if Democrats want to win elections—and I think we all agree that they really need to, if this republic is going to be anything like what we hope for—they have to figure out how to do that.

Sargent: There’s been a crush of new reporting about Trump’s corruption of late. I just want to point out, independents hate corruption. We just learned some truly shocking news. The New York Times reports that the White House is in talks with the Justice Department in which DOJ would agree to settle a lawsuit that Trump brought against the IRS previously for billions of dollars over his leaked tax returns. Mona, this is an unbelievable story.

A judge is expected to throw out this lawsuit soon, but the White House is actively trying to get DOJ to settle it in Trump’s favor before the judge acts, before the judge throws this out. How is that different from Donald Trump simply ordering an agency to hand him billions of dollars in taxpayer money? That’s what we’re talking about.

Charen: I mean, it is gobsmacking. And, you know, they want us to be lulled into a kind of hopelessness about all of this. And it’s easy to see how that can happen, but we have to fight it. This is an outrageous theft. He is attempting to raid the U.S. Treasury for billions. Now, I can’t imagine that even his own IRS and his own Justice Department will go for billions, but we’ll see.

As I said in my piece, you can get away with a fair amount of corruption if the economy is really strong and people’s pocketbooks are flush. But when the economy is not strong, and people perceive that you don’t care about them, you’re not interested in what’s happening to their bank account, and meanwhile you are stuffing your pockets with gold bars and garish ballrooms and billions from the IRS—people are then going to be very angry.

I saw this recently in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán, the poster child of the post-liberal movement on the right, everybody’s favorite—certainly Trump’s favorite—dictator. He was quite a dictator, because he was a member of the EU and you have to add that. He wasn’t actually putting his opponents in jail.

But he did engage in flagrant corruption. He did make his allies and his family members and himself wealthy. And he did corrupt the society in many other ways, and people put up with it until the economy started to go south. And then the anger about the corruption really erupted and Péter Magyar was able to make that a very strong campaign issue.

And we’ve seen this in a number of countries, seen it in our own country. I mean, arguably Bill Clinton engaged in really reprehensible conduct as president with women, and people were willing to shrug it off because the economy was roaring. And now, you know, Trump—people knew in 2024 when they voted for him that Trump was corrupt.

I don’t think, you know, except for the MAGA crazies, those independents, those sort of normie Republicans who pulled the lever for Trump—they knew he was corrupt, but they figured, okay, it’s a bargain. We’ll get some corruption, but my bank account will be better. Prices will come down. We’ll get the economy of 2018 back. And he has failed to deliver on his end of the bargain and he doesn’t even seem to care. And that is, I think, going to really kill him. I think this is a huge iceberg that he is sailing right into, this corruption issue.

Sargent: And not only that, the corruption news is multiplying on other fronts as well. We’re hearing that the ballroom is now going to cost a billion dollars. And let’s recall that he unilaterally and probably illegally bulldozed the White House East Wing to build this thing. There are also dubious things going on with the contracting on the reflecting pool project. And then there’s the corrupt lawsuit. I want to get at your point...

Charen: Can we just say one thing real quick about the ballroom?

Sargent: Of course.

Charen: It started out—so he bulldozes the East Wing, which by the way, I worked there in the Reagan administration. I took it personally. It was a beautiful building and it was graceful and it fit in with the whole White House campus. Anyway, without anybody’s say-so, without approval from the planning commission or anybody, he bulldozes that and he says, I’m going to build a ballroom and it’s going to be $200 million and it’s all going to be paid for by contributions from private parties, not going to cost the taxpayers a dime.

Few months later, he says, well, it’s actually going to be much bigger and it’s going to be $400 million, but don’t worry, it’s all going to be paid for by private contributions—which is corrupt enough by itself, right? Because people can buy favors by contributing to his ballroom. But now the Republicans in the Congress, in the Senate, are saying they want the taxpayers to spend a billion dollars on this ballroom. So so much for the taxpayers won’t be on the hook. Anyway, just wanted to get that off my chest.

Sargent: Corruption can be a sleeper issue in U.S. politics in unexpected ways. In 2006, the corruption under George W. Bush and the GOP Congress helped Democrats win both chambers of Congress then. I think corruption was a big reason Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020. Now it’s an issue to a degree I don’t think we’ve ever seen before.

It’s extraordinarily vivid because the combination you brought up of the gas prices and the corruption—it’s very clear right now because things are going to shit all over the place, even as Trump is obsessing over all these corrupt monument schemes in a very public way. It’s not like it’s being hidden. It’s right out in public in just about every conceivable way. That’s new, isn’t it? In some ways.

Charen: Yes. So Trump has really lost his touch, or he just doesn’t care. But the other half of when corruption can come back to bite you—there are two situations as I see it. One is, as I mentioned, when the economy turns south and people’s own pocketbooks are suffering, they become much less tolerant of corruption.

The other is when they do not—so if people think that the stories about corruption are just partisanship, they think everybody does it, and there go those Democrats again, criticizing the president, they’ll criticize him no matter what he does, et cetera. If you can get by on that, then you can slide. But the fact is, it isn’t the Democrats right now who are fronting the corruption. It’s Trump himself and his toadies.

It is Trump who can’t shut up about the damn ballroom. It’s Trump who makes that the centerpiece after the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner—he immediately goes to, this is why we need the ballroom. It is he who keeps talking about his plans to renovate Washington, his plans for the reflecting pool, his plans for a triumphal arch—God forbid.

Honestly, I don’t know, Greg, about you, but I want to go lie down in front of the bulldozers on that one. But he is the one who’s elevating this. I don’t think the Trump of the first term was doing this kind of thing. Back then, it was like signing his name on the stimulus checks and making sure he could claim credit for anything that went to the taxpayer. But this time it’s all about me, baby.

Sargent: Right. The one thing during the first term was you had him essentially booking rooms in his hotel to corrupt sheiks and stuff like that.

Charen: Oh, I’m not saying there wasn’t corruption. There was, but it was quieter. What he’s doing now is like he’s using a bullhorn to draw our attention to it.

Sargent: He absolutely is. Just to close this out, economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who is right-leaning, had a pretty interesting quote to The Washington Post. He said that people inside the White House, Republicans in and around the White House, are growing anxious. He said, “They’re very worried.” And then he said this: “I think there’s no way to sugarcoat that if we don’t get the price of gasoline down, Republicans are toast. It’s really simple.”

What do you think, Mona? Is that how you see this playing out? Is it basically that they’re not going to really be able to get prices down in a general sense and are Republicans likely toast?

Charen: Well, I mean, barring some sort of miracle, it doesn’t seem likely. They always say that prices go up like a rocket and come down like a feather. And so it is hard to get prices down quickly enough. The conventional wisdom is that people make their voting decisions by August of an election year, and pretty much after that it doesn’t much matter—they’ve made up their minds. So we’re in May. Could something happen to bring prices down by August? I’m not going to say it’s impossible. I just think it’s exceedingly unlikely.

As for whether Republicans are toast, I would just say this. In all likelihood, they’re going to have a bad year. Democrats should be doing everything possible to make it a terrible year. But this is going to be a long-term struggle that we are in against illiberalism and quasi-fascism. And it ain’t going to be over in November.

Sargent: Certainly not, for all kinds of reasons. The struggle is going to continue into 2028 in very big ways. Folks, if you enjoyed this, check out Mona’s podcast over at The Bulwark—The Mona Charen Show. Mona, thank you so much for coming on, as always. Great to talk to you.

Charen: Likewise. Great to see you, Greg.

Rising global temperatures and the impacts they trigger—harsher heat waves, stronger storms, and wider spread of infectious diseases—endanger human health in myriad ways. The world’s top medical societies have been sounding the alarm since 2009, when the journal The Lancet called climate change “the biggest global health threat of the 21st century.” Lancet’s 2025 report found that climate change is responsible for “millions of unnecessary deaths a year,” with excess heat alone killing 546,000 people.

The Associated Press and CNN appear to be the first major news organizations to make the climate connection to the hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship that departed Argentina on April 1. CNN reported that hantavirus has long been present in the far south of South America, but its frequency has increased recently in Argentina, where cases “have almost doubled in the past year, with the country recording 32 deaths alongside its highest number of infections since 2018,” according to the Argentine health ministry. Citing local public health researchers, the AP reported that “higher temperatures expand the virus’ range because … rodents that carry the hantavirus can thrive in more places.” A historic drought that drove animals beyond their normal habitats in search of food was followed by intense rainfall. “When precipitation increases, food availability increases, rodent populations grow, and … the chance of transmission between rodents—and eventually to humans—also increases,” Raul González Ittig, a researcher at state science body CONICET, told the AP.

Three passengers on the cruise ship have died from hantavirus, and nine have contracted the virus. The World Health Organization has emphasized that the risk to the general public is very low and there is no danger of a pandemic akin to the Covid-19 contagion that convulsed the world in 2020.

The link between hantavirus and climate change remains far from definitive; more research is needed to determine how large a role climate change played in this particular outbreak. Journalists can help by reporting on this research as it unfolds and asking public officials what steps they are taking to keep communities informed and safe.

Journalists can also alert our audience to a broader warning that scientists have long issued. As recently explained in the Journal of the American Medical Association, higher temperatures allow mosquitoes, ticks, and rodents that carry infectious diseases to spread to previously inhospitable areas, increasing the threat to humans from malaria, cholera, Lyme disease, and other maladies.

Higher temperatures are exactly what the months ahead will bring across much of the Northern hemisphere. This year is expected to be the hottest in recorded history, thanks to an El Niño supercharging global temperatures that are already amplified by climate change. Besides threatening human health directly, this heat will also make drought and wildfires more likely.

Too often, news coverage of extreme weather disasters has been silent about climate change’s role; for example, most reporting on the mega-fires that scorched Los Angeles in 2025 focused on the roaring flames but ignored what helped spark them in the first place. CCNow’s recent white paper on the state of climate journalism applauded AP and CNN for their sustained commitment to climate coverage at a time when “climate hushing” has afflicted many other news organizations, especially in the U.S. That commitment is what enables the AP and CNN to see the climate connection to breaking news like the hantavirus and inform their audiences accordingly. As hotter and more extreme weather confronts much of the world in the months ahead, these AP and CNN stories offer an exemplary model for how all of journalism can do better.

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

“DEBUNKING: The Rich Don’t Pay Their Fair Share”

“The Politics of Conversion Therapy”

Those are real video titles from Make It Make Sense, the Washington Post opinion section’s new flagship podcast, which the paper officially launched on Monday, a day after the media newsletter Status reported that the section had spent $80,000 (!) building out a new podcast studio. The show is hosted in rotation by opinion editor Adam O’Neal, deputy opinion editor James Hohmann, and columnists such as Carine Hajjar, Kate Andrews, Dominic Pino, and Jason Willick. Most of them are recent hires, part of the section’s hard pivot right under Bezos.

After more than 20 episodes since they started posting in late February (and 186 videos on YouTube), the show’s dedicated YouTube channel has … 515 subscribers. The launch trailer is on The Washington Post’s main YouTube channel, which has 2.85 million subscribers. It has 1,400 views. (These numbers are as of Wednesday afternoon and will probably have shifted by the time you read this.)

The new opinion section’s video push is failing publicly, and so are the other billionaire-funded prestige-media operations that share its model. The content is dull. The numbers are microscopic. And the men paying for it have been telling us all along that they don’t care. For all the talk of “the marketplace of ideas,” Make It Make Sense looks like yet another right-wing influence operation that exists solely because a billionaire is willing to subsidize it.

Per Status, the $80,000 was for video gear, not the rest of the studio. The studio itself has wood paneling, a bar, couches, a small framed American flag print on the back wall, and a much larger framed image of a cowboy on horseback behind the hosts’ couch.

Most of the people who used to make video at the Post are gone. The video team is down to three, from about 60 two years ago.

On Apple Podcasts, the show has four ratings, averaging 2.3 stars out of five. The most positive review, per 404 Media’s Jason Koebler, reads in full: “This is bad and the people making it should feel bad.” Spotify users have rated it 2.8 out of five. A video posted Tuesday, shot in the new studio, has 217 views. The videos pulling triple-digit numbers, Koebler reports, are probably mostly hate-watches.

The format is roughly what you’d expect if a print editorial board agreed to film one of its meetings without rehearsing first. The hosts sit on the couch under the wood paneling and the cowboy and just sort of riff at each other. Recent topics include why weed is more dangerous than people think, what the media got wrong about Covid, what to do with racist statues, and why the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker is bad. Koebler transcribed the first 19 seconds of one video. One host gets confused mid-sentence about whether any sitting president has ever attended a Supreme Court oral argument. Another host responds, “I think so. I think.” A third concludes, “This is, uhh, we’ll confirm that. We’ll fact-check that.” Great work, everyone.

And the thing is … the Post had a really good video team. Dave Jorgenson spent six years building The Washington Post’s TikTok presence into one of the biggest in journalism. He left the Post last year to start his own media company, Local News International, which I covered for Depth Perception in December. His personal YouTube channel now has 358,000 subscribers. His TikTok has 318,000 followers. The Washington Post’s TikTok account, per Koebler, has stopped posting original video. It now reshares wire-service footage instead. A former WaPo video journalist, working with a very small team, has built more than 600 times the YouTube audience of the Post’s flagship new opinion show.

On May 4, the Post won two Pulitzers. Status reported that to stream the announcement live from K Street, the paper had to bring back two of the video operators it had laid off in February. Nobody left in the building could run the equipment. They walked past the new opinion studio on their way in.

Bezos laid off the people who win the Pulitzers. He’s funding the people who lose the subscribers.

Traffic to the Post’s website was down 24 percent year over year in March, per TheRighting. The New York Times was down 0.6 percent over the same period. CNN was up 3 percent. The Post is in its own category.

The Post has shed paying subscribers in waves. About 250,000 canceled after Bezos killed the Harris endorsement in October 2024, per NPR. More than 75,000 followed in February 2025, after Bezos announced the section would run on “personal liberties and free markets.” More canceled in the weeks after February’s mass layoffs.

What’s in the opinion section instead: op-eds about the mayor of New York. The editorial board has published more than 10 of them this year alone, per Status. Recent entries: “Mamdani meets economic reality,” “Mamdani shows how to sidestep a $5.4 billion deficit,” and “Zohran Mamdani’s ‘creepy and weird’ attack on success.” One current Post staffer told Status: “There’s this bizarre obsession with Mamdani. We’re not even local.”

Regular readers know I’ve written before about how Bezos has gutted the newsroom his opinion section is now embarrassing. I’m not going to repeat that here.

The Post’s own newsroom is reporting on this. On May 9, the news side published a long piece by Drew Harwell about the Daily Wire’s collapse. Same trend Bezos’s opinion section is part of. Same owner paying for both the autopsy and the corpse.

Daily Wire’s YouTube subscriber count has gone backward or sideways in 15 of the past 16 months, per Social Blade data cited by Harwell. Web traffic to the site fell to half its prior-year level in March 2026. Ben Shapiro’s own YouTube views are down nearly 70 percent since December 2024. The company has cut 13 percent of its staff since the start of this year. Shapiro himself confirmed to Harwell that revenue fell from 2024 levels.

The Daily Wire reportedly spent $3 million per episode on a seven-episode fantasy series called The Pendragon Cycle, per Harwell. Its dedicated YouTube channel has fewer than 1,000 subscribers. In November, the Daily Wire put Shapiro’s face on Times Square billboards to campaign for a Golden Globe podcast award. He wasn’t nominated.

Mitchell Jackson, a journalist turned publicist who represents former Daily Wire personalities Candace Owens and Brett Cooper, told Harwell: “They identify as alternative media, but they want to be old media so bad. They don’t hate Hollywood. They’re mad Hollywood hates them.” WaPo Opinions is the same trick run in reverse. A legacy newspaper section is trying to look like alternative media. Both versions fail. The audience isn’t there for either.

The same pattern is playing out at CBS News. David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance paid $150 million for Bari Weiss’s Free Press in October 2025 to install her at the helm of the network, per Status.

The Free Press itself is the partial exception. Its traffic grew 7 percent year over year in March, the only right-wing news site in TheRighting‘s top 20 to post growth. But Ellison paid roughly 7.5 times its annual revenue for it, and the deal was always about installing Weiss at CBS. Even the success story is funding a failure.

Here’s what Jeff Bezos allegedly told David Shipley, then the Post’s opinion editor, in February 2025, after Shipley warned him that the section’s rightward turn would alienate subscribers, per The New York Times:

“I don’t care.”

Bari Weiss told CBS News staff something similar in January, only a few months into her tenure running the network’s news division.

“Winning isn’t about ratings. It’s about making things that people can’t live without.”

Both are describing the same business model. Audience metrics aren’t part of how the operators are measuring success. The opinion section says its purpose is to defend “personal liberties and free markets,” per Bezos’s February 2025 memo. That premise depends on a marketplace where ideas compete on their merits. Bezos and Weiss have both said, on the record, that the verdict of the marketplace doesn’t matter to them.

The marketplace has rendered it anyway. The Post is down 24 percent. The Daily Wire is down 50 percent. CBS Evening News just posted its worst-ever April in the 25–54 demographic. The men funding all of it could read the numbers if they wanted to.

What’s on the screen, meanwhile, is what they think doesn’t need to work. Four mid-tier opinion writers on a couch under wood paneling and a framed cowboy. Recent topics: hantavirus, pension padding, the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. The trailer view count and the channel subscriber count that you have to do the math to believe.

Nobody is watching. Bezos doesn’t care.

This week, Donald Trump nominated Cameron Hamilton to lead the agency, which has not had a Senate-confirmed administrator since January 2025. If Hamilton’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he was fired a year ago as the senior official performing the duties of administrator of FEMA for saying—shocker!—that the agency should continue to exist. He was replaced by David Richardson, perhaps best remembered for yelling at staff soon after beginning the job and then taking several days to show up to the scene of flash floods in Central Texas that killed more than 130 people last July. Richardson, who happens to be a novelist, resigned after just six months on the job and was replaced by the former government I.T. official Karen Evans, chosen by erstwhile Department of Homeland Security head Kristi Noem. Known internally as “The Terminator,” Evans reportedly acted as a “final gatekeeper” for FEMA funding, according to CNN, in charge of axing grants, contracts, and staff. She’ll now serve as the director of DHS’s waste, fraud, and abuse task force. Her replacement is Bob Fenton Jr., who first joined the agency in 1996 and has led FEMA’s Region 9 office since 2015.

If the White House gets its way, Fenton, a FEMA official with roughly 30 years of experience at the agency, will be replaced by a former NAVY Seal who lost a congressional primary. Meanwhile, FEMA’s associate administrator of the Office of Response and Recovery has made headlines in recent months for claiming to have teleported to a Waffle House in Rome, Georgia. CNN reported earlier this year that Gregg Phillips had repeated teleportation claims on multiple right-wing podcasts, and touted a string of far-right conspiracy theories: that Biden’s DHS conspired to assassinate Donald Trump, that Biden was elected as a result of widespread voter fraud, and that a “Chinese army” would invade the United States. The news outlet NOTUS reported last week that one of FEMA’s most experienced executives—Deputy Associate Administrator Keith Turi—will depart at the start of the Atlantic hurricane season, on June 1.

At lower levels, FEMA remains dangerously understaffed. Sabotaging Our Safety, or SOS—a group of emergency management experts and former FEMA leaders—gave the agency an “F” on preparedness in a recent report. Three out of four top leadership positions remain vacant, the group notes. The regions covering Texas and Louisiana have neither a regional administrator nor a deputy. As a result of firings at the start of the Trump administration, FEMA has its lowest-recorded levels of available field staff. “Leadership positions sit vacant. A tenth of the core disaster response workforce has been eliminated,” SOS writes. “No multi-year strategic plan exists. Training exercises that have taken place every year for half a decade have simply not happened.” These issues came to a head last July. Despite the agency’s claims that, during deadly flooding in Texas Hill Country, a “majority” of calls to the toll-free FEMA Helpline were answered, the Government Accountability Office found that 58 percent of those calls in fact weren’t answered.

The timing of FEMA’s spoliation is less than ideal. Below-average snowfall followed by early, above-average temperatures are predicted to elevate wildfire risk across the Western U.S.; dry conditions in the Southeast—now in the midst of a historic drought—threaten additional dangers there too. Two large wildfires in Georgia have already destroyed 120 homes and scorched 50,000 acres. Smaller fires in Florida have burned up 120,000 acres. As The New York Times notes, timber plantations in the region’s “wood basket” are less likely to initiate prescribed burns that can mitigate wildfire risk by burning through brush that can act as kindling. Hurricanes can also knock down trees, allowing fires to spread more rapidly.

It isn’t only rising temperatures that will rattle the country this summer. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center now predicts a 61 percent chance of an El Niño, a natural weather pattern involving warming Pacific Ocean waters. Scientists with World Weather Attribution predict that human-induced climate change will have more of an impact on this year’s extreme weather than what may well be the strongest El Niño ever.

There have been talks of reforming FEMA to prepare for the future for years, but the reforms the White House is looking to bring about may have the opposite effect. The Trump-appointed FEMA Review Council last week issued a long-overdue final report that has been plagued by accusations of meddling by former DHS head Kristi Noem. Although the report doesn’t recommend scrapping the agency, as Trump has previously suggested, it outlines making it more difficult for states to secure emergency aid while greatly limiting programs to help disaster survivors secure long-term housing and other benefits.

As part of an effort to “return leadership for emergency response and recovery to the States, Tribes, and Territories,” the council proposes raising the threshold for states to qualify for federal disaster assistance by 50 percent, and changing the way those numbers are tallied. As the report itself states, the new standard would exclude 29 percent of the disaster declarations made between 2012 and 2025. That would have saved the federal government $1.5 billion, or less than 5 percent of the direct, likely underestimated cost of the war in Iran so far. While emergency management experts have long pushed for FEMA to be excised from DHS and made into a Cabinet-level position, the report calls for keeping the agency under DHS, as it has been since 2003. The council’s recommendations are nonbinding, and most would need to be legislated by Congress.

States seem less confident than the White House about their ability to take on more responsibility for disaster relief and recovery. Many local governments lack dedicated emergency management offices, and rely heavily on federal resources for critical staffing and training. Brett Compston—the chief of Nevada’s Office of Emergency Management—warned last week that the state faces a “9/11 equivalent” for emergency management as a result of changes happening at the federal level. As Compston noted, 81 percent of his office’s budget comes from the federal dollars, which fund salaries for 84 percent of its staff.

There have been some recent improvements. New DHS head Markwayne Mullins rescinded a Noem-era policy that gave her final say over DHS dispensations of more than $100,000, ascribed with hindering disaster response. Courts have ordered FEMA to appropriate funds through the oversubscribed, congressionally mandated Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program. The administration had previously sought to block much of the $1 billion pot dedicated to helping states, local governments, territories, and tribes prepare for fires, floods, and hurricanes and other hazards.

With FEMA already stretched thin, though, the White House could be poised to further politicize the process of who gets aid. A Washington Post investigation published last week found that FEMA significantly decreased hazard-mitigation grants to Democratic-led states last year, including fire-prone California and Colorado. If he’s confirmed, Cameron Hamilton doesn’t seem likely to “abolish FEMA.” But starving the agency of resources, placing more of the burden onto cash-strapped local and state governments, and withholding federal funds from Democratic governments could make it less and less relevant for millions of people seeking relief.

The Trump Freedom 250 program is embedded with unvarnished Christian nationalist propaganda. It kicks off with a rally on the National Mall called Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving, which bills itself as “part of the broader Freedom 250 initiative.” The event, hosted by a private foundation in partnership with the White House, has been described by proponents as “a major faith gathering” that will “bring together faith leaders, public servants, music, prayer, and testimony to honor God’s hand in America’s story.” In fact, it will bring together leaders and representatives of the narrow but powerful Christian nationalist groups dedicated to replacing American democracy with a (supposedly) Christian autocracy.

Key partners include hyperpolitical pastors like “Let Us Worship” founder Sean Feucht, church-planter and “stadium Christianity” leader Lou Engle, and the televangelist Jentezen Franklin, among other hard-line evangelical leaders. Other speakers include Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Crusader-tattooed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Apart from promising to scare up a handful of extremists from other faith traditions—a torture-defending rabbi is apparently on board—the White House is making little effort to disguise its Christian nationalist agenda. Paula White-Cain, senior faith adviser to the president, said the event “is about the history and the foundations of our nation, which was built on Christian values, on the Bible.” She added, “This is really truly rededicating the country to God.”

It would be more accurate to say that Freedom 250 is fundamentally about rededicating the country to outright corruption. The historical ironies here are enough to burst eardrums. America’s Founders were extremely keen to avoid the kind of extractive and imperial system of government they saw in the British Empire. Trump’s Freedom 250 unapologetically aims to give monarchies of yore some competition. The Freedom 250 program diverts tens of millions in taxpayer funds to a nakedly sectarian and partisan festival. It then goes a step further by inviting corporate sponsors and foreign donors to pony up even more boodle for the show. Talk about moneylenders in the temple: For about $1 million, they can secure invitations to a reception with President Trump. Many, no doubt, are hoping that the money will put them on the administration’s good list—or at least keep them out of the doghouse.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Trump is also proposing to celebrate America’s 250th birthday by offering 250 pardons. What a triumph for the rule of law. The new pay-for-play freedom pardons will no doubt add to a list that includes the people who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, as well as Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former president of Honduras who had been convicted of “one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world.” Leaked audio reveals that Hernandez is presently acting as a field operator for the MAGA administration in Latin America, aiming to destabilize left-leaning leaders in Mexico and Colombia.

But there is a higher order of corruption at work here, not unlike that practiced by the remaining “clean” “conservative” justices on the Supreme Court. (I mean the ones who don’t accept free camper buses, school tuition, and luxury holidays from their conservative patrons.) This is where officers of the United States, even while paying lip service to the Constitution, flout their responsibilities and instead pervert our democratic system for power and aggrandizement. When a political leader directs government to reward a particular band of extremist supporters and disenfranchise the rest of the population, that is corruption, not democracy.

On this semiquincentennial, one might have hoped for some expressions of unity. America’s Founders, after all, prized unity almost too much. That is why they made so many compromises in their quest to create a United States of America. But Freedom 250, like everything Trumpian, is about dividing America, not uniting it. It’s there to tell us that there are “good” Americans and “bad” Americans. The good ones are Bible-believing Christians. The bad ones include media that reported accurately on the fiasco of the Iran war, for example; anyone who criticizes Dear Leader; and, of course, those who fail to adhere to the nation’s supposed founding faith.

America’s Founders understood that the surest way to divide the new nation would be to introduce a national religion into a country that was even then incredibly diverse in its mingling of faith traditions. They may have gotten some things wrong, but on this point they were absolutely correct. This is why Thomas Jefferson famously and correctly celebrated the First Amendment as a means of erecting a “wall of separation between church and state.” Trump and his movement now plan to celebrate the Founders’ achievement by demolishing that wall.

America’s Founders thought it vital to give their new democracy a certain kind of dignity. They rejected the aristocratic pretensions of the Old World but made a determined effort to show that a government of the people could also rise to worthy levels of cultural achievement. The Trump administration is giving us the Ultimate Fighting Championship. The same people who blather on about the glories of Western Civilization now promise to entertain us with the spectacle of bare-knuckled men punching one another in the face on the White House lawn.

We can be sure that the Trump administration and its MAGA supporters will deride critics of Freedom 250 as somehow anti-American. We should not let them get away with it. We should oppose this kind of squalid, divisive festival of grift, not because we despise America but because we continue to support the ideals upon which the nation was founded. Maybe the most American thing we can do in this sad and degenerate moment in history is to find a way to celebrate American principles of equality, pluralism, and justice—independent of this partisan rally, which the present malefactors in government are using to destroy democracy itself.

A big difference is just how prominent Trump is making himself this time around. It wasn’t always headed this way: Congress created the United States Semiquincentennial Commission in 2016, during the Obama administration. In 2020, Trump created the 1776 Commission—an advisory body committed to propagating whitewashed American history—which Biden disbanded on his first day in office in 2021. Trump reassembled it in 2025, more determined to make the national birthday about him, his followers, and their shared visions of the past. While Richard Nixon sought to leverage bicentennial funds to motivate political support in the 1970s, Trump uses the semiquincentennial moment to promote himself. Trump is even attempting to align a semiquincentennial UFC match with his own 80th birthday.

As historian Marc Stein traces in Bicentennial: A Revolutionary History of the 1970s, a national birthday can launch a much broader, more inclusive, and ambitious national project. Yes, the bicentennial too involved politicians advancing their own aims, and it involved selling things, with a proliferation of commemorative objects. But the events and their backlash also helped promote broader goals. Stein writes of the urban planners who sought to direct bicentennial resources toward remaking cities and revamping tourist destinations. He writes of the contingent of the New Left that hoped to rekindle what they viewed as the radicalism of the founders, and of marginalized communities, who mobilized for a reexamination of American history and for reform in contemporary society. Sometimes these groups disagreed about the past and agreed on the future. Sometimes they disagreed about the future, despite shared ideals of the past.

More than the Parade of Sails that glided into New York harbor, the bicentennial was about participating in a democracy and cultivating a reinvigorated sense of the past. In Stein’s accounts of Gay Raiders leader Mark Segal handcuffing himself to a banister overlooking the Liberty Bell in Independence Hall, and of Black and Indigenous activists protesting mistreatment of their communities, he shows how commemorating the past can challenge the present and the future, with depth and force. And in a year when many Americans may turn away from the Trump-infused spectacle of 250th celebrations, Bicentennial also makes the case for engaging with the anniversary and making your own meaning from it.

The official plans for the 200th birthday, headed by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration, or ARBA, included ambitious construction projects, formal events, and public spectacle, from the parade of sails to the Freedom Train, a 26-car train loaded with founding documents and Americana, which chugged its way across 48 states.

Even several years before the anniversary itself, resistance to the commemorations began to take shape. In some cases, plans were interlaced with corruption and self-dealing, as in Philadelphia. Democratic Mayor Frank Rizzo helped Republican President Nixon to win the presidential election in 1972 with his cross-party endorsement. In turn, Nixon promised to give Rizzo’s Philadelphia a central role in the national birthday party. Bicentennial planning threatened to displace Black Philadelphians, with designs to bulldoze Black neighborhoods to make way for a bicentennial world’s fair and urban renewal projects. In response, Black Philadelphians mobilized for representation on planning committees to protect their homes and to add Black histories to the commemorations.

Criticism of the celebrations expanded nationwide. Founded in 1971, the People’s Bicentennial Commission, or PBC, was the largest group of activists who wanted to use the bicentennial to push reform. In December 1973, the PBC disrupted a Boston Tea Party reenactment by staging a Boston Oil Party to protest oil companies and urge Nixon’s impeachment by “dumping empty oil barrels into the harbor.” In April 1975, the 75,000 Americans who attended ARBA’s commemoration of the Battles of Lexington and Concord met tens of thousands of protesters waving flags with antiestablishment messages and shouting, “Who elected you?” at President Ford. The PBC spent July 4, 1975, at the Jefferson Memorial, conferring satirical awards on various ARBA endeavors. They honored the Freedom Train, for example, for “impersonating a museum on wheels,” taking aim at the one-sidedness of the history the train showcased.

Many of the celebrations offered a kitschy whitewashing of the nation’s history. Consider the Wagon Train, where hundreds of thousands of horses carried over a thousand riders on wagons. The wagons were to start their journeys on the West Coast, drive across the country, and arrive at Valley Forge on July 4, 1976, commemorating westward expansion—with little thought for the effects of this expansion on Indigenous Americans. Twenty-four tribes met with the president and with ARBA chair John Warner in Washington, D.C., in 1975 to voice their concerns. After the meetings yielded no concrete changes, the Stillaguamish tribe successfully blocked the Wagon Train for two days, in what Stein calls a “staged confrontation” and newspapers at the time called “a ceremonial interruption.” Federal representatives met with tribal leaders to prevent further disruption, and these conversations eventually led to the Stillaguamish tribe gaining long-awaited federal recognition in 1976.

Indigenous, Black, and other communities would dissent, disrupt, and redefine the commemoration at every turn. Robert Burnette, a Rosebud Sioux man who traveled to Washington with his fellow Indigenous leaders, told Warner, “We’ve never had any of that justice—and now you people want to celebrate?” In a public debate televised on PBS, Ebony editor Lerone Bennett Jr. pointed out that “200 years have passed and we’re not free.”

Marginalized Americans knew their histories and continued to live with the uneven allocation of resources and insufficient representation that have resulted from colonialism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and other bigotry. They saw the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence as an opportunity to protest and to be heard. The results were various and wide-ranging: Sometimes they got a seat at the table, and sometimes they built their own tables, by opening new historic sites and museums, such as Philadelphia’s Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum, co-sponsored by the city of Philadelphia and private donations. Activists protested initiatives that compounded structural inequality, and occasionally, they made progress toward the redistribution of resources. Stein defines all the above as part of the commemoration of the bicentennial.

To mark the semiquincentennial this year, I am currently working on an oral history project with the Brown University Class of 1976. When asked about the bicentennial, most narrators picture the Parade of Sails and the omnipresent Stars and Stripes. If they did not see the ships, or if they do not identify with an ultrapatriotic narrative, the oral history interviewees insist that they themselves were not involved. But Stein’s exhaustive research in national and regional newspapers shows how anyone living and breathing during the era took part.

Americans still “benefit from construction, infrastructure, and transportation projects associated with the celebration,” Stein writes, referring to the creation and endurance of projects such as Philadelphia’s marina, pedestrian quay, and sculpture garden, as well as the city’s Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum and the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History. Americans may bike across the country from Oregon to Virginia on a 4,200-mile trail mapped in 1976, and en route, they may pass many sites successfully recommended by the Afro-American Bicentennial Corporation to be National Historic Landmarks.

Stein also argues that even if they don’t know it, Americans today are also “influenced by social justice coalitions that criticized the official bicentennial, challenged the nation’s understanding of its history, and contributed to the democratization of the US left and US society.” The American Indian Movement’s Trail of Self-Determination, for example, protested centuries of displacement and culminated in meetings with lawmakers. Battles over historical interpretation and inclusion created new venues for Americans to participate in democracy: for example, in 1975, Barbara Cameron and Randy Burns founded Gay American Indians in San Francisco. “What should Indians celebrate?” Cameron asked. “Two-hundred years of broken promises, land theft, genocide, and rape? It is one thing to talk about ‘celebration’ and another to look at the little Vietnam the government has going in South Dakota. We’re going to be demonstrating in Philadelphia in ’76. There are plans for demonstrations at Mount Rushmore. Gay Indians will be there.” Activists built on the bicentennial’s platform to begin revising mainstream American history. Books and miniseries such as Alex Haley’s Roots and Jonathan Ned Katz’s Gay American History carried forward this momentum. (And Stein credits Katz’s book for the growth of his own scholarly field of queer history.) Increasingly, engaging history opened a path to reform contemporary society.

This year many Americans may choose not to take part in semiquincentennial events, preferring to avoid celebrations that bear Trump’s name and face. Like the oral history narrators who picture only Tall Ships, they may feel that they are not involved. But they are: The ways that people engage with their democracy and society will shape the understanding of whoever looks back 50 years from now on the U.S. semiquincentennial moment.

While museums and historic sites provide crucial parts of semiquincentennial programming, they aren’t the only ones that can shape this moment. Stein writes on the final page that we can remember the bicentennial “as a transformative moment when social justice coalitions helped democratize our understandings of the past, present, and future.” This broad interpretation of the bicentennial is both an inspiration and a call to action. Stein’s framing of historical commemoration as an opportunity for change invites Americans to show up to the national birthday party with visions of the nation they want.

Bicentennial dares readers to believe that American independence is worth commemorating, in the face of countless existential threats to the country and to the world. Our presence matters—to help shape the country for the next 50 years. But it’s a precarious work: If nations lasted forever, we probably would not mark their birthdays.

The FBI director reportedly went on a VIP snorkeling trip while on a visit to Hawaii last summer that the bureau stressed was not a vacation. Patel was officially in the state to tour the FBI’s Honolulu branch and meet with local law enforcement, or at least that’s what the bureau’s news releases said.

But the Associated Press obtained government emails showing that Patel took part in the snorkeling excursion, coordinated by the military, near the USS Arizona, which was sunk in the World War II attack on Pearl Harbor. That wasn’t mentioned in the bureau’s public releases, nor was Patel’s return to Hawaii for two days after initially visiting the state.

Snorkeling and diving are usually prohibited around the sunken battleship, with rare exceptions. It’s essentially a military cemetery, as over 900 sailors and Marines died in the 1941 attack by Japan. Most dives either are done by Marine archaeologists or crews from the National Park Service to examine the wreck’s condition, or to inter the remains of survivors of the attack who wish to be laid to rest near their fellow shipmates.

Only a few dignitaries have been allowed to swim at the site since at least the Obama administration, but none of them were FBI chiefs, even though they have visited Pearl Harbor. Patel, yet again, appears to be using his job and access to a private FBI jet to get away with vacationing on the taxpayer’s dime.

Patel has used FBI resources to fly to see his girlfriend sing at a wrestling event and have agents protect her, as well as buy a new fleet of BMWs to ride around in. He went to Italy to party during the Olympics, and drinks so much on the job that he once passed out behind a locked door, requiring “breaching equipment” to get him out. And how many other FBI directors had their own personalized bourbon, and lashed out when it went missing?

Patel appears to think that he gets to party and carry out President Trump’s bidding, such as going after the president’s political enemies and purging agents who don’t toe the administration’s line, even when they are experts on Iran. The list of Patel’s transgressions is long, but he still has a job until his misdeeds outweigh his pro-Trump sycophancy.

The New York Times, citing an internal email, reports that a lawyer for ICE told Kevin M. Bolan, a Justice Department lawyer preparing to appear before U.S. District Judge Melissa DuBose in April, not to disclose an arrest warrant for murder in the Dominican Republic for Bryan Rafael Gomez, an immigrant she planned to release from federal custody.

“Please do not confirm or deny the existence” of the warrant, ICE lawyer Adam E. Mattei wrote to Bolan. “There has yet to be any use authorization for this information.”

After DuBose ordered Gomez’s release, though, the Department of Homeland Security attacked her in a news release as an “activist Biden Judge” for releasing a “violent criminal illegal alien.” DuBose didn’t take kindly to this, issuing an order earlier this month questioning why she was not told about “facts relevant” to the case and saying that the omission “threatens public safety and erodes trust in the rule of law.”

Bolan then apologized in a court filing, saying that ICE had told him to withhold the information for what he thought was a legitimate law enforcement reason. He added that his DOJ colleagues had asked the DHS to take their news release down to no avail. DuBose still referred Bolan for possible discipline, citing a “lack of candor.”

The general counsel for DHS, James Percival, then attacked DuBose in a column for the conservative website The Federalist Tuesday, calling DuBose an “activist” and saying she lacked “any plausible basis to review Mr. Gomez’s custody status.”

The whole thing is part of a pattern, led by President Trump, of government officials denigrating judges who go against the administration’s mass deportation agenda. DuBose, appointed by President Biden, is the first Black and LGBTQ judge to serve on Rhode Island’s federal bench, making her a big target for MAGA. On top of that, the government knowingly withheld information from her, further destroying whatever credibility this administration has left.

U.S. Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks suddenly resigned from his position Thursday following accusations of sexual impropriety. Banks oversaw Donald Trump’s second-term immigration crackdown. The longtime law enforcement professional told Fox News that his resignation was effective immediately.

“It’s just time, man,” Banks told Fox News congressional correspondent Bill Melugin. “I feel like I got this shit back on course, from the least secure, disastrous, chaotic border to the most secure border this country has ever seen. Time to pass the reins.”

“It’s time to enjoy the family and life,” Banks added.

Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott thanked Banks for his service “during one of the most challenging periods for border security.”

But Banks’s sudden departure comes at a curious time, as reports circulate about his penchant for sex workers. Border Patrol employees told the Washington Examiner last month that Banks was “known among colleagues for taking regular trips abroad to engage in sex with prostitutes.”

Banks even “bragged” about his deviant habits with colleagues while in his previous role in Border Patrol, and allegedly paid for sex with prostitutes while travelling across Colombia and Thailand over the course of a decade. CBP reportedly investigated his behavior twice, including last year, but the probe was squashed by former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

Despite Trump having made immigration a key priority for his second term, federal immigration agencies have seen a tremendous leadership shakeup since he returned to office, rattling every component of the country’s immigration system.

So far, the restructuring has ousted Noem and former Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, who was sidelined by the administration after federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis early this year.

And more resignations are on the way: acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Todd Lyons is expected to step down from his position in the coming weeks. He will be replaced by David Venturella, a private prison executive.

The former Fox News host claimed that over the course of seven months, he filmed an upcoming reality television show with his wife and their nine children, called The Great American Roadtrip. His wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, referred to their time on the road as “really wholesome, good family stuff.” 

But Duffy—a multimillionaire with a taxpayer-funded salary—did not pay for the extravagant trip himself. Instead, the money came from a supposedly independent nonprofit, a 501(c)4 called Great American Road Trip Inc. 

In a statement to The New Republic, Duffy’s office described GART as an “independent” entity. 

GART was established around August 2025 by Tori Barnes, reported Forbes Thursday. Barnes, according to her LinkedIn profile, spent nearly two decades working as a lobbyist for General Motors before moving to the U.S. Travel Association.

A Department of Transportation memo dated March 6 described GART as a “multi-platform storytelling initiative” that was launched by Duffy and the Transportation Department as part of a “series of initiatives in partnership with Freedom250 to further contribute to this historic year.” Freedom250 is the Trump administration’s effort commemorating the U.S.’s 250th birthday.

Behind the nonprofit’s funding is a medley of industry giants, including aircraft manufacturer Boeing, carmaker Toyota, and gas giant Shell, all proudly displayed on the nonprofit’s website. Other funders were Google, the cruise company Royal Caribbean Group, United Airlines, Chase Travel, and the U.S. Travel Association, among other companies that rely on the regulatory systems of the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Politico reported Tuesday that sponsorships ranged in price from $100,000 to $1 million.

The reality-TV series was launched in partnership with Fox News, and is set to be released on YouTube in the lead-up to America’s 250th birthday. Not all 50 states will get airtime. Duffy’s multimonth trip hit just eight states: Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, Texas, Arizona, Montana, Massachusetts, as well as Washington, D.C.

In a promotional interview on Fox News last week, Duffy confessed that the trek was his idea.

“I wanted to lean in to America’s 250th birthday,” Duffy said, reminding the panel that he and  Campos-Duffy met on a road trip for MTV’s Real World spinoff, Road Rules: All Stars in 1998. 

“And so over the course of seven months we just kind of found these moments where I might be able to do some work, take the kids with me, do a road trip—and our motto is to love America is to see America,” Duffy continued, “and there’s so much to see in this beautiful country.”

Campos-Duffy later clarified that the straight-to-streaming family vacation emerged out of a prompt from Donald Trump, who urged his Cabinet to find ways to celebrate America ahead of the 250th anniversary.

The adventure has since received enormous backlash, which Duffy has attributed to the “the radical, miserable left.”

In an extensive statement shared with TNR, DOT spokesperson Nathaniel Sizemore affirmed that “no taxpayer dollars were spent on Secretary Duffy’s family,” and that “the Secretary and his family do not receive any salary or production royalties” from the show.

“Further, celebrating America’s 250th Anniversary is part of Secretary Duffy’s official duties, and The Great American Road Trip is one aspect in support of those responsibilities,” Sizemore wrote.

Sizemore’s note also specified that Duffy’s trip occurred over 24 days between September and May, a span of nine months—not seven, as the secretary himself claimed.

The four-page note also included pre-written verbiage about whether the nonprofit’s donors presented a “conflict of interest.”

“There is a formal agreement between USDOT and the non-profit that expressly states the non-profit will not receive ‘any favorable consideration for any future federal financial assistance,’ action, contract, or other financial award,” Sizemore wrote, adding that Duffy’s participation in the project was “approved by USDOT ethics attorneys.”

This story has been updated.

U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles ruled Wednesday that Trump can’t seek discovery based on actual malice from the publication in his lawsuit, calling it “improper” and saying the court couldn’t allow Trump to use the legal process “to help him properly plead his claims.”

“Thus, allowing President Trump to conduct discovery on actual malice, where his initial attempt at pleading a defamation claim fell short, is exactly the type of ‘expensive yet groundless litigation’ the Eleventh Circuit has cautioned against,” Gayles wrote in his ruling.

Trump sued the Journal in July 2025, claiming that the newspaper’s reporting that Trump submitted a letter and explicit drawing to a birthday album for Jeffrey Epstein was defamatory, denying the report’s accuracy. In April, Gayles dismissed the lawsuit, saying that Trump didn’t make a plausible allegation that the newspaper acted with “actual malice,” but allowed Trump the ability to file an amended complaint, which he did.

But now, Trump can’t use the discovery process to gather evidence that the Journal defamed him, although Gayles did leave the door open for him to file another amended complaint. It doesn’t seem likely that he’d succeed a third time, as the House Oversight Committee included the birthday book, complete with the drawing from Trump, in a September release of Epstein materials from his estate in September.

Earlier this week, Trump’s Justice Department subpoenaed the Journal’s reporters over leaks from the Department of Defense related to the Iran war, which its publisher, Dow Jones, said “represent an attack on constitutionally protected news gathering.” The president’s continued attacks on the Journal, as well as any other news outlet that criticizes him, not only violate the freedom of the press but are meritless.

Two of the faction’s biggest names—ex-Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and podcaster Benny Johnson—traded blows online Wednesday, airing one another’s rumored dirty laundry after Johnson attacked Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie.

Johnson had torn into Massie, a longtime critic of the president, over recent allegations that the Kentucky Republican paid hush-money to a former girlfriend, Cynthia West. West claimed that Massie offered to pay her up to $5,000 to drop a wrongful termination complaint against one of his allies, Representative Victoria Spartz. Massie is up for reelection in November, with his local primary scheduled to take place next week. He has denied any wrongdoing.

Johnson dove into the accusation, deriding Massie as a “pig” who has been “squealing” about Donald Trump. Johnson also compared Massie’s fresh scandal to that of Eric Swalwell, whose campaign for California governor imploded last month after he was accused of sexual misconduct and rape by multiple women.

The unforgiving coverage—and inappropriate comparison—did not sit right with Greene. Responding to a clip of Johnson’s show, Greene said: “This is a clinic on how to call out the lies of social media influencers that get paid to spew propaganda.”

Greene added that Johnson had not given her the “courtesy” of asking “if any of these lies were true,” and that she had previously thought of Johnson as a friend.

Johnson hit back at Greene, apparently unmoved by the appeal to their former alliance.

“I know everyone has become very fragile and overly-emotional lately so let me explain this calmly and slowly: I cover trending news topics on my show,” Johnson wrote. “I’m entitled to my opinions on these matters. I serve my audience. That’s my job. And unlike you, I won’t run away from my job when things get tough.”

Greene went back to settle the score.

“You are a LYING scumbag @bennyjohnson and just to be clear we are definitely not friends,” she wrote. “All you cover and elevate are trending LIES. And get paid to do it. Literally the most repulsive level of MAGA.”

The former Georgia lawmaker then suggested that she had heard various rumors about Johnson’s misconduct, including “allegations about young men at conservative conferences,” allegations that he was “paid by Russia and Israel,” and allegations that Johnson “rips off people’s content and articles” and pretends that they’re his own.

“More drama and crash outs. Got it,” replied Johnson, referring to the aforementioned charges as “evidence free slander.”

Judge Mary McElroy of the United States District Court for the District of Rhode Island said that Rhode ‌Island Hospital didn’t have to comply with the government’s subpoena for the medical records of minors treated for gender dysphoria with drugs such as puberty blockers, among other documents. Previously, a judge in Texas had ordered the subpoena at the government’s request.

“DOJ has proven unworthy of this trust at every point in this case. It has misrepresented and withheld information to both this Court and the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas,” McElroy said in her ruling, and accused the government of forum shopping, or choosing a friendly district court to get a favorable ruling.

“It did so in an obvious effort to shield its recent investigative tactics—previously rejected by every other court to review them—from this Court’s review, in favor of a distant forum that DOJ deems friendly to its political positions,” McElroy’s ruling said.

The Trump administration is targeting transgender and gender-affirming care around the country, and has tried to subpoena other medical providers to get the same information, with mixed results. As a result, the DOJ has moved some of its legal efforts to Texas. In this case, another judge intervened to shoot it down, but what will happen next time?

Appearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Turner repeatedly rehashed his issues with former President Joe Biden’s administration, which he claimed accomplished less with a larger budget—rather than provide any evidence of his own work. Lawmakers were fed up.

“What is your record? You’ve had this job for well over a year! I just want to know did you get the number down? Do we have 700,000 homeless still, or is it one million, or one million point five?” New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand asked.

Gillibrand demanded the results of the federal government’s Point-in-Time Count, a yearly report on how many people in the United States are experiencing homelessness. The report is typically released every December. As of mid-May, the Point-in-Time Count for 2025 has not been released.

“I just don’t want to hear what you don’t like about the Biden administration! You’re in charge, you have a vision, let’s see it, let’s see the results!” Gillibrand said.

“I thank God that I’m in charge so we can do stuff different, because the plays that were ran before I got here, they failed,” the former professional football player said. Turner added: “You said I have been here a little bit over a year, but you all had, during the Biden administration, four years—”

“Stop talking about Biden!” Gillibrand interrupted. “Talk about your record!”

Turner proceeded to blame the delayed report on things that had nothing to do with Biden at all, including the 43-day government shutdown that “helps us to not be able to work,” and the “constant litigation” his department was facing.

Gillibrand pressed him to explain how the litigation slowed down his department’s work. Turner replied: “Irregardless of all of that, during the Biden administration, record funding—”

“Oh my God! If you talk about—it’s like, it’s like two children saying I didn’t do it, my brother did it!” Gillibrand said, clearly frustrated.

GILLIBRAND: What is your record?! I don't want to just hear about what you don't like about the Biden administration

SCOTT TURNER: During the Biden administra--

GILLIBRAND: Stop talking about Biden! Talk about your record

TURNER: During the Biden administration--

GILLIBRAND:… pic.twitter.com/E9XZM754nF

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 14, 2026

Washington Senator Patty Murray also pointed out that complaining about Biden had become Turner’s “go-to answer” for every single question. She pressed Turner to explain how he planned to help more people experiencing homelessness by gutting $10 billion from the department’s budget.

Turner replied: “Here’s what I’ll say, in the previous years before we got here, housing affordability was not at an all time high.”

PATTY MURRAY: Your budget cuts housing. Can you help more families with housing with $84b or $73.5b?

SCOTT TURNER: Here's what I'll say. In the previous four years--

MURRAY: Ok. This is the go-to answer for every secretary is to go back to Biden. I'm asking you about your… pic.twitter.com/ZNIwToZnBS

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 14, 2026

Some people in the White House have expressed concerns that Trump’s heavy use of his pardon authority could bode poorly for Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections, and that another batch could be even worse, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

The president is expected to announce the 250 pending pardons on either June 14—his birthday—or the Fourth of July.

“A White House official said there are always conversations about how to best carry out the president’s priorities, but no decisions had been made,” the Journal reported. “Trump is the ultimate decision maker on any clemency-related actions, the official added.”

Many of the pardons Trump has issued since returning to office have gone to his friends and allies. One went to Changpeng Zhao, who pleaded guilty to a money-laundering scheme that made him billions in cryptocurrency. Zhao worked to boost the Trump sons–backed World Liberty Financial crypto group, which many suspect played a role in his receiving a pardon.

Trump also pardoned Trevor Milton, who was sentenced to four years in prison for defrauding investors in his electric truck company. Milton owed his victims millions of dollars in restitution, but it appears he’s now off the hook thanks to the presidential pardon.

Congressional Democrats are investigating whether the pardons to the president’s friends also resulted in a payout for Trump. Lawmakers are looking into whether pardon recipients paid lobbyists, social media influencers, and lawyers, among others, to sway Trump in their favor.

Trump has big, expensive plans for the county’s semiquincentennial. They include a $2 million project to clean the Washington Monument and repaint the Reflecting Pool, an expansive statue garden that will feature 250 life-size statues of American icons, and athletic competitions for high schoolers called “Patriot Games.”

Elsewhere in Washington, Trump is building a $15 million “Triumphal Arc,” and is constructing a 90,000-square-foot ballroom at the White House that is likely going to cost taxpayers $1 billion (against his initial promises that it wouldn’t cost more than $200 million and that it would be entirely funded by private donations).

Meanwhile, the cost of oil and gas is through the roof due to the ongoing war with Iran, which is costing the U.S. roughly $1 billion per day, according to initial estimates by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The average cost of gas nationwide is $4.53 per gallon, with large swaths of the country pushing $5 a gallon, according to the AAA’s price tracker. That’s about 50 percent higher than prices were before the war started. In some areas of California, such as Mono County, fuel costs are above $7 per gallon.

“’Taiwan independence’ and cross-Strait peace are as irreconcilable as fire and water,” Xi said. “Safeguarding peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait is the biggest common denominator between China and the U.S.”

The move doesn’t bode well for the U.S.-China summit, which Trump had said could be “the best summit ever.” The meeting between the two countries’ leaders is supposed to improve trade ties, with several U.S. executives making the trip with Trump.

“Handled well, relations between the two countries can maintain overall stability,” Xi said. “If handled poorly, the two countries will collide or even clash, putting the entire U.S.-China relationship in an extremely dangerous situation.”

Trump didn’t address questions from the press about Taiwan, only saying “Great. Great place. Incredible. China’s beautiful,” after his morning conversation with Xi. The White House’s readout of the meeting didn’t even mention Taiwan.

“President Trump had a good meeting with President Xi of China,” a White House official said. “The two sides discussed ways to enhance economic cooperation between our two countries, including expanding market access for American businesses into China and increasing Chinese investment into our industries. Leaders from many of the United States’ largest companies joined a portion of the meeting.”

This suggests that the Trump administration is taking the issue seriously. In December, the U.S. reached an $11 billion arms deal with Taiwan, which was condemned by China, which has never ruled out invading the island. The majority of Taiwan’s people want things to stay the way they are: neither declaring independence from China nor submitting to Chinese authority. If Xi decides to push reunification, what would Trump do?

Noella Turnage, a former employee of the Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, shared Maxwell’s private emails detailing the extent of her special treatment with CNN’s Erin Burnett Wednesday.

“The food is legions better, the place is clean, the staff is responsive and polite,” Maxwell wrote in an email to her brother, adding: “I feel like I have dropped through Alice in Wonderlands [sic] looking glass. I am much happier here and more importantly safe.”

Turnage was fired for leaking Maxwell’s private emails.

“I never actually laid eyes on Maxwell,” Turnage said, clarifying that she knew about Maxwell’s treatment solely from her private emails. “The things that were being done for her were not common for any of the other inmates, not even the other high-profile inmates.”

Maxwell received more than just better room and board, Turnage said. “The lengths they went to to provide a private visit for Maxwell actually caused visitation to be shut down for the rest of the inmates that weekend,” she said. “They were not able to see their families that Saturday, to make way for Maxwell to see her visitors.”

Maxwell also benefited from having her mail personally handled by the warden. “Which may not sound like a big deal to some people, but the other inmates in that prison, Erin, they have a hard time getting out their regular mail, much less anything needed for court filings and things such as that, so for them to go out of the way to make sure Maxwell had that opportunity is pretty disgusting,” Turnage said.

An inmate at the prison who spoke to CNN said that Maxwell also enjoys “bottled water and clamshell meals delivered to her room.”

Maxwell was mysteriously transferred to the minimum-security prison just days after she provided testimony to then–Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche about her former conspirator Jeffrey Epstein’s relationship with Trump. During her hourslong questioning, Maxwell claimed that Trump never witnessed Epstein’s sexual misconduct—a surprising claim considering their well-documented close friendship.

Lawmakers have described Maxwell’s new digs as “not suitable for a sex offender.”

Perry Bacon: We’re going to have a discussion that’s about democracy, but a little broader than the day-to-day news. And the guests are two political scientists. Lee Drutman is with the New America Foundation, and Mark Copelovitch is at the University of Wisconsin. Lee has done a lot of great work on parties and political reform, and Mark specializes in international political economy. He’s written about Europe and the political parties there, but also does some comparative work comparing what’s happening in the U.S. to what’s happening abroad. So guys, thank you. Welcome.

Mark Copelovitch: Thanks for having us.

Lee Drutman: Yeah. Excited to be having this conversation. Couldn’t be more timely.

Bacon: So I’m going to start with Mark, and I want to talk about—we’re going to define the problem first. And for a lot of New Republic listeners, the problem is the Republican Party—and I think that to some extent as well. But I think we want to get a little bit beyond this. One thing Mark talks about a lot on Bluesky—Mark has a great Bluesky feed, check him out there—is the problem of presidentialism. And explain to people—right now the presidency being a problem seems intuitive if you think about Donald Trump, maybe. But also Britain has a prime minister, and things are not going perfectly there right now either. So explain to me, from a political science perspective, why presidential systems are inherently problematic for democracies.

Copelovitch: Yes. My thoughts on this come from a classic article from Juan Linz, who was a scholar of Latin American politics and authoritarianism. He wrote an article back in the 1990s called The Perils of Presidentialism. And one of the core ideas of it is that presidential systems make it difficult to hold the executive accountable in ways that parliamentary systems don’t.

So you have the separation of powers, and in the U.S. we’re raised as Americans to believe that the branches of government and the separation of powers are good. But one of the things that Linz talked about with presidentialism is it makes it very difficult to remove the chief executive when laws are being broken, crimes are being committed, et cetera. And it creates dual and unresolvable claims to legitimacy.

So if you think about a parliamentary system, you vote—it’s usually proportional representation of some form. The prime minister is within the parliament, and this is what we’re seeing in Britain right now: the main party in government can remove the prime minister.

There can be a vote of confidence, which is usually a simple majority vote, where the coalition says, We no longer support the prime minister, and either there are new elections or you choose a new prime minister. It happens very quickly, and as we’ve seen in Britain, it can happen often—and it can happen for any number of reasons.

The problem in the U.S.—what we’re seeing with Trump—is the only mechanism for removing a president is either the next election or an extraordinary measure that the founders created called impeachment, which has never been successfully used in the entire history of the United States government. And when you directly elect a president, you have these dual claims of loyalty.

In a parliamentary system, you can claim the parliament represents the will of the people, and the prime minister is the leader of the government, but people voted for parties in parliament. When you have a presidential system, people vote for the parliament, but they also directly vote for the president. So the president—and you see this with far-right and nationalist and populist leaders often—they’re representing the people more authentically than the legislature.

So those are the core insights from Linz. And I study international relations and comparative politics, and I think that a lot of what we’re seeing in the United States is the problem of having a presidential system. And even more than that, in the United States, both parties since World War II have really delegated more and more power from Congress to the president, so you have governance by executive order. And we currently really don’t have a functioning Congress. We have extreme presidentialism right now, and the problem of a seeming inability to remove a leader who clearly is breaking the law and violating the Constitution.

Bacon: So Lee, I’m going to ask about the problem you write about a lot, which is—you’ve used this phrase, “the two-party doom loop.” So the question I’m going to ask you is: is a two-party system inherently problematic, or is the way the U.S.’ two-party system has evolved particularly problematic?

Drutman: The way that the U.S. two-party system has evolved is particularly problematic. Now, it’s interesting—Linz wrote that article, “Perils of Presidentialism,” in 1990, and in that article he struggles with the U.S., because he says the U.S. is actually a presidential system and it’s pretty stable. And he says the reason the U.S. is stable as a presidential system is because you have two parties that are basically centrist. So there’s not any real contestation over the direction of policy in the U.S., so you can have a presidential system with a two-party system that is very center-oriented, and that’s probably okay.

Now, it’s interesting—if we talk about presidentialism and PR, there are a lot of Latin American countries that have actually done this pretty successfully for the last three decades. Linz is writing in 1990. Scott Mainwaring, who’s an esteemed comparativist, writes an article in 1993 saying multipartyism and presidentialism is the difficult combination.

Now, interestingly, Scott Mainwaring and I wrote a piece a few years ago in which we looked at the evidence for the last 30 years of Latin American PR plus presidentialism, and Scott changed his views. He actually—PR and presidentialism can work okay under certain conditions. A number of Latin American countries have actually worked reasonably well. And we talk a lot about the decline of democracy, but actually there are a number of pretty successful cases in Latin America over the last 30 years.

So during this period, the U.S. two-party system, which had been very center-oriented for a long time, starts to pull apart. Now, I actually think the way to think about that pulling apart is a collapse of dimensionality—that what we had in the U.S., though we called it a two-party system, was really a multi-party system that was within the two-party system. We had liberal Democrats and conservative Democrats. We had liberal Republicans and conservative Republicans. So something more akin to a four-party system in which you could make different coalitions across different issues. And we divided government for a long time, which was coalition government.

Starting in the 1990s, what happens is the collapse of dimensionality and the pulling apart of those two-party coalitions—a lot of reasons for that, that we could go into. But basically, the problem is that you can maintain a two-party system when the two parties are broadly overlapping and there’s not a real difference between which party gets into power. But as the parties pull apart and elections become narrow and existential and zero-sum, that system breaks down.

A fundamental principle of democracy is that it’s a system in which parties can lose elections. And if you feel like you’re going to have another chance in power someday, and the rules are not going to totally change and shut you out of power if you lose, or your vision of the country is not going to be fundamentally upset if you’re out of power—then it’s an okay system.

If you think that if you lose everything, and the other side is going to try to permanently oppress you—which is what so many people seem to believe in this country, and there’s some evidence to suggest that the current party in power is trying to do that—that makes it hard to have a democracy. You have to believe in the legitimacy of elections. And when that breaks apart, you don’t have a democracy anymore. And that’s the situation that we’re in.

So can a two-party system work? Yes, under certain narrow conditions. However, there was a lot that was left out in that bipartisan compromise. In the 1950s, a lot of political scientists are writing about how the two-party system is just a muddle, and that a lot of the issues that America needs to be dealing with—civil rights, a very important issue—is pushed to the side in order to maintain that bipartisan compromise. And arguably, it is the elevation of voting rights and civil rights in the 1960s that starts to break apart that compromise and create a slow sorting.

It almost feels like in a two-party system, you can either have a broad bipartisan compromise that leaves a lot of people out, or you can have a two-party competition which just creates an existential power struggle—neither of which is great. One of which doesn’t lead to violence at a national level, or leads to subnational violence—you create a lot of subnational authoritarianism in the U.S.

Bacon: So let me zone in on what you’ve written about as the solution, Lee. You’ve written about proportional representation and the idea of multi-member districts. Explain to people what that means specifically.

So I live in Kentucky—just break it down. I live in Kentucky. We have six members of Congress. They’re dispersed around the state—there’s one in Louisville, there’s one in Lexington, and four in the other parts of the state. So we have six members of Congress in our current system: five Republicans and one Democrat. Explain how proportional representation and multi-member districts would look from that perspective.

Drutman: And what percentage of Kentucky voted for Kamala Harris in the last election?

Bacon: Let’s say it’s 35 Harris, 65 Trump. Something like that.

Drutman: Yeah. Okay. So Kentucky would be roughly two-thirds Republican, one-third Democrat. So in a proportional system, that would be two Democrats and four Republicans. But because of the way that the district lines are drawn, Democrats are all pushed into one district, more or less—one safe district for Democrats and five safe districts for Republicans.

Now, what makes that possible? The fact that there are a bunch of different lines that you can draw. Now, imagine an alternative world—perhaps our future—in which Kentucky is just one six-member district. Everybody votes in the same election as you do for Senate, and parties put forward lists of candidates. So Republicans put forward a list of candidates, Democrats put forward a list of candidates. Democrats get 33 percent of the seats—the two most popular Democratic candidates on that list go to Congress. Republicans put forward a list of candidates—the four most popular Republicans go to Congress.

So that’s proportional. That’s what we think of as fairness. You don’t have to draw any district lines, and candidates run on party lists, and parties get representation in Congress in proportion to the share of votes that they get—which is a very intuitive sense of fairness.

And in some ways, it’s the simpler system. When we think of single-member districts as simple, it’s really incredibly complicated the way all these lines constantly get redrawn. And what it also means is that all the votes matter. You get to vote for candidates that are going to go to Congress, so you’re actually helping to elect somebody who represents you.

And maybe there’s actually more than two parties, because there are probably two or three Democratic parties and two or three Republican parties that could run candidates. So rather than having these fights that we’re having within Democratic primaries, or Republicans having within their own primaries—progressives should be their own party. They should be able to run separately from the more classical liberal Democrats, the more business Democrats. Maybe some populist Democrats might run in a separate party.

And they can come together and form a coalition as the Democratic coalition. But right now, I think a lot of people don’t know what the Democratic Party stands for, or who the Democratic Party is. They have ideas of what the Democratic Party should be, but they can’t really vote for those candidates who really reflect their idea of what the Democratic coalition should be.

Whereas if you had a proportional system where, instead of needing to get 51 percent, in a six-member district roughly 16 percent—that would allow two different types of Democrats, or the Democratic coalition, and it would allow different types of Republicans. There are some more moderate, traditional liberal Republicans who don’t have any representation in Congress. I don’t know how many of them are left in Kentucky, but I think there is still some portion of the electorate that is non-MAGA but Republican—doesn’t like the direction of the Republican Party, not Democrats—but might support a more classical Republican Party.

Bacon: Let me ask. Okay—Italy, France, Israel—there are countries that have multi-party systems and, I think, proportional representation, and they’re not all governed perfectly. Why is this inherently better than our current two-party doom loop? Is more parties necessarily better?

Drutman: It is, up to a limit. Now, France is a presidential—well—presidential system. So to Mark’s point about presidentialism. Also, France is not a proportional system. It is a majoritarian, single-member-district system. They use a two-round system which allows for multiple parties.

Bacon: Oh, yes. Sorry.

Drutman: But yes, they have multiple parties. Italy—somehow they muddle through. The Italians have an incredibly complicated system that goes back—yeah, like every election they’re changing it, it’s more majoritarian, it’s less majoritarian. And yet somehow they muddle through.

Giorgia Meloni came to power under this system. She started out as an extremist, but because she had to form a coalition with the center-right party, run independently, she had to moderate. And as she’s stepped up to be a leader, in order to maintain her coalition, she’s had to be a little bit more statesperson-like.

And I think that is one of the arguments—that in a PR system, you can have these far-right parties. Either they get shut out of the government coalition entirely—which has been the case in a number of countries, the AfD in Germany being probably the most well-known example to Americans.

They did pretty well in the last election, but no party is going to form a government with them because they’re too extreme. Now, they are trying to figure out how to become a little bit more mainstream. If they do better, they will—but they will still need the CSU-CDU alliance to form a governing coalition.

Right now in Denmark, there are coalition talks—the right parties may form a coalition. And there’s an immigrant [skeptic] party in Denmark, as there are in many European countries, but they will need to form a coalition with a more center-oriented party if they’re going to form a government.

Bacon: Let me interrupt. There are two points you’re making. One is that if you have more than two parties, you don’t have the sort of existential fight over it. And the second is that if you have to get a majority coalition, you’re going to have to be more moderate—you can’t just win on 25 percent in the primary and then win it all. Is that the basic idea—those two ideas in one sense?

Drutman: And you’re seeing the version of this in the UK right now, where the Reform Party—which is about 27, 30 percent in current polls—could win a majority in parliament in the next election because the UK has a first-past-the-post system.

And it’s worth hanging on Israel for a second, because people will say, Oh, what about Israel? Two things about Israel. One is that Israel has an extreme form of proportional representation, with closed list, and the entire Knesset is one electoral district with a threshold of 3.25 percent.

So that creates a lot of parties. Nobody who’s advocating proportional representation in the U.S. would ever say, We should do the Italian system, or We should do the Israeli system. Those are not the systems that people propose. People are saying, We should look at the German system, or We should look at the Swedish system, or We should look at the Danish system—or some version of that. Those are the better systems.

But of course, if Israel were a two-party system, you could see what the civil war would be like between the liberals and the—you’re already seeing a version of that. And arguably, because there are too many parties, that fragmentation actually congeals more directly into a two-bloc system. Although Israel did experiment with having a separately elected prime minister for one or two elections, I believe, and then they got rid of it. Also, they don’t have a constitution.

Bacon: All right. Let me go to Mark and ask—I assume you agree that proportional representation is a good idea?

Copelovitch: Yes. Yeah, I just wanted to jump in and say there are poorly and well-designed proportional systems. Lee mentioned Germany—the German system is the sort of thing you would think about, with a five percent threshold. You don’t get in if you get fewer than five percent of the vote, so you end up with five or six parties.

Lee mentioned that you could think about the U.S. as having two parties that were really four parties. Germany basically has a two-party system which is six parties. You have the far-right AfD, you have the Christian Democrats, and you have the Free Democrats—who are a low-tax, libertarian, deregulation-type party that’s progressive on social issues. The Adam Smith party, if you want. And then on the left, you have the traditional Social Democrats, the Greens, and now Die Linke, which is the sort of progressive far-left party. Roughly they’re each getting 50 percent of the vote—but the AfD is getting a quarter.

And I’ve said for a long time—you’ve seen me say this on Bluesky—basically the U.S. and Germany have the same distribution of voters in different systems. And the dominant German government for the last 30, 40 years has been a grand coalition of the center-left and center-right—the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats.

If we had what Lee is talking about, which is what I think we should do, we would have ended up in 2016 with a Clinton-Romney grand coalition government. So yeah, you can look at Italy and Israel, and people always bring those up and think PR is bad—but those are badly designed proportional representation systems, in the same way that we have a badly designed presidential system.

Bacon: Let me ask you: what other—we’re talking about reforms we think are ideal. If you had to say, Essential reforms we have to have—PR is one. Is it Supreme Court changes? Campaign finance? What else? If you had to say “we have to do these three things”—PR is one—what are the other two you’d say are essential in the short term?

Copelovitch: So I think about it as there are three big problems. The most immediate thing is we have a completely runaway Supreme Court, which has become a nine-member super-legislature and no longer follows the law or the Constitution. So the most immediate thing is we need to add seats to the Supreme Court and significantly rein in the shadow docket and its powers.

The second is these institutional, legislative, and electoral reforms to have multi-party democracy. I’m very much with Lee—and Lee is the expert on this—in terms of PR plus multi-member districts. I think we should enlarge the House, add states in the Senate—those sorts of things.

The third is the runaway imperial executive. In the area where I see this most—I study international political economy—is on trade policy and tariffs. Both parties from World War II onward delegated more and more power to the president on trade and on other issues.

But they also wrote in these Cold War laws in the 1960s and ‘70s that basically have clauses where the president can invoke a national emergency and then has almost imperial power to do whatever. And no one imagined that a president would abuse it the way Trump is abusing it. That’s the IEEPA, and you hear about Section 232 or Section 122 of the obscure trade laws from the ‘60s and ‘70s. So you basically need to rewrite and rein all of those in.

We have a presidential system. We’re going to continue to have a presidential system. But you can’t have an imperial presidency. Lee talked about the party overlap—the idea of the imperial presidency was predicated on two overlapping parties where stuff had to get done in a big country that’s the global superpower, and sometimes you can’t wait for Congress and the president needs to move relatively quickly.

But now we’re in a world where effectively we have a pro-democracy center-left party and a far-right party. And all these things that you just didn’t do—it turns out they were norms. The president could invoke all these national security clauses, but he never did.

So for me, the order is: nothing is going to get done until the Supreme Court is fixed and reined in. Then you need the multi-party proportional democracy reforms. But alongside that, we’re still going to have a presidential system, and you can’t have the imperial presidency. Maybe one day, if we go back to a world where the parties overlap and everybody is moderate and pro-democracy.

But in the current context and the foreseeable future, you just can’t have those imperial-presidency laws, because Trump has basically shown that they’re giant loopholes—they’re basically get-out-of-jail-free cards. You can invoke them, and then he pretty much can do anything, and Congress can’t stop him.

Bacon: Let me ask Lee then asking another question—what would your three be? PR is one, and then are there two others, or is PR just the thing we need to focus on right now?

Drutman: I would say PR plus fusion voting for the single-winner offices. Now, fusion voting is where multiple parties can endorse the same candidate. New York has had it for a long time. In the 2024 presidential election, you could vote for Kamala Harris on the Democratic line or on the Working Families Party line. And the Working Families Party is a vibrant third party in New York.

Mostly they endorse the Democrats, but they organize, they do the things that a party is supposed to do. And actually, we just put out a great paper at New America on the Working Families Party as an associational party, by Tabatha Abu El-Haj, who’s a great election law scholar of parties. And they’re doing the things that parties should do.

Bacon: Let me drill down. What you mean is: for Senate, governor, president—things where you can only elect one person—you should be able to choose the party by which you’re voting for the person, which again communicates there’s a difference between a progressive Democrat and a moderate one, even if they’re both voting for Harris, right?

Drutman: Exactly. So you say, I want Harris to know that progressives support her, and 20 percent of her share is coming from progressives. And in a lot of presidential PR systems, what you effectively have is pre-electoral coalitions—parties come together to agree on the same presidential candidate, and they often signal the coalition that they would like to have.

I think this is a way to do that—it’s a way to keep the smaller parties active in the single-winner election. So I think that combination is actually really important. If you just do multi-party elections for the House and then not for the Senate, you lose some of the benefits of multipartyism. And having it for the president would be great.

I agree with Mark—we should think about ways to deal with the Supreme Court. Some of it could just be limiting what the Supreme Court is going to rule on and creating supermajority standards for overruling legislation. An idea I like is judicial sortition—that all of the associate justices get randomly selected to be a nine-member, or maybe it should be a 15-member, court each term.

So you don’t know what the court is going to look like, so you don’t bring litigation. And then each court selects the docket for future courts, so they don’t know what the court is going to look like. I think that would create an element of randomness that would stop some of the litigation and would bring a diversity of views to each term.

I think the disproportionality of the Senate is a big issue. That’s a harder thing to deal with. You can add some states if you want to play political hardball. Think about ways to maybe make the Senate a little less powerful. Again, Germany did something interesting—they had basically a deal where their upper chamber, the [Bundesrat], had fewer things in its jurisdiction, in exchange for giving the states in Germany—Germany is also a federal system—a little bit more autonomy.

I think we could think about some way to clarify some roles of federalism by giving states more autonomy on certain, particularly fiscal, issues and maybe limit some of the role of the Senate. Ideally, the Senate maybe should just do foreign policy, mostly. But that, again, is a big thing.

I do think we need to tackle campaign finance, and I think it should be public funding for political parties in a multi-party system.

I think we’re at a moment—and I’ve been hearing this from a lot of different people—after Callais, I think a lot of people realize that this is really a moment for a new reconstruction of American democracy. The old system is dead. It’s broken down, and everything’s on fire. But at some point there will be a clear landscape to build something new. And it could come as early as 2029. This is really a moment for a wide scoping of: what is the promise of American democracy, and how do we make that real?

Copelovitch: Definitely. It feels like something has shifted—that we’re having this conversation, and people are not saying, Oh, you’re extreme outliers to be considering these things anymore. It feels very different than, say, 2020 or 2021 where we are now.

Bacon: So now we’ve got half an hour in. I’m glad we laid out these solutions. Now I get to the part I think about the most, which is: how do we get these—these are big ideas, changing how Congress works, changing how the presidency works.

My inclination is that a Democratic Party trifecta is more likely to do these things than a Republican trifecta, as we can discuss. But I think that’s probably the best chance we have to do this stuff—in 2029, if the Democrats control the Senate, the House, and the presidency, there’s some chance they might try some of this big stuff you guys are talking about.

But to get there, we’re about to have a national presidential campaign, a Democratic primary, where 15, 20 people might run. This could be the time for a big national conversation about big ideas—but maybe it’s not. So I want to ask, starting with Mark and then going to Lee: do we want Pete Buttigieg or Kamala Harris or Josh Shapiro or Andy Beshear or anybody else—do we want them to talk about these kinds of reforms on the campaign trail in the next year?

The positive would be obviously: running for president is about talking about ideas and what you do as president, so of course they need to talk about this. The other argument would be: one, having the Democratic candidates talk about these ideas might polarize them, make them more “political” and partisan, and might make Republicans and independents even more resistant to them.

And two, it might be that voters don’t care about these ideas—because we always hear voters care about the economy—so a candidate running on democracy or these reform ideas is asking to lose. And so we might want to hope the person runs on affordability and then does these reforms in 2029. Talk about that—do you want the candidates out there discussing these kinds of issues next year?

Copelovitch: I do, and I think it’s essential. The big cleavage in the Democratic Party right now is this—and you can think about it as fight or not, or you can think about it as kitchen-table issues versus democracy.

But look, the way I think about it is: I’m old enough to remember the George W. Bush administration, and then Obama winning, and then Trump getting elected, and then Biden. And the way I think about it is we’ve run the experiment twice—that the Republican Party is going to moderate, and we’re going to get through these problems. I don’t think it’s polarization—I think one party has become a far-right party. And we’re going to get through these problems by the Democrats governing well and fixing the economy?

Obama spends all his political capital on healthcare—hugely important issue, but there was nothing left in terms of political capital on any institutional reform. Biden spends all his political capital on fixing the economy. Doesn’t get credit for it—fixed the economy better than any other country in the world in the wake of COVID. No political capital or interest in doing the institutional reform.

So for me, it’s: we know the outcome, which is you don’t get rewarded for just governing well and focusing on affordability or kitchen-table issues. And meanwhile, the Republican Party has gone further and further right. Whatever overlap we still had between the two parties clearly no longer exists anymore. You can see that with Callais, you can see that with everything else going on with Trump.

And I also think, in standard American politics, you basically have time before the midterms with the trifecta to do one thing and do it well. So if the Democrats don’t do it right away—and it’s not ready to go, and they haven’t laid the groundwork on the campaign trail for this is why the institutions are broken, and here are the big reforms—I also think all of the policy issues that people care about follow from fixing the institutions. And I don’t know how to convey that to people—I try to do that as a teacher and political scientist.

But if we had multi-party democracy and we had either a Clinton-Romney coalition, or a sort of center-left multi-party coalition that looked like the Greens and Social Democrats in Germany or something like that, you would get the policies on abortion and climate and funding education—pick your issue that you think is important.

Basically, the policies that Bernie Sanders supports are closer to what 70 percent of Americans want than the policies that Donald Trump supports, and we have institutions that don’t reflect that. So if you fix the institutions, people are going to get the policies that they want. If you keep trying to ram the policies through the current anti-majoritarian, anti-democratic institutions, the Democrats will fail, and then people will punish them electorally again.

Bacon: Let me follow up and push you a little bit here. Cory Booker is literally already running on exempting a large number of people from paying taxes. Chris Van Hollen is doing a similar plan. I assume JD Vance will have a plan like that too.

So Andy Beshear comes in and talks to us, and he says—and Mark, you say to him—Andy Beshear says, These guys are running on reducing taxes drastically for human beings in America, putting money in their pockets, and you want me to run on proportional representation. Are you asking me to lose? How is that going to be a viable plan? Talk about that.

Copelovitch: Look, I’m not a politician, so I don’t know how you sell it. But the problem with the Beshear view or the Booker view is it reminds me of the first Democratic primary debate in 2020. If you go back and remember that, everybody went down the line and talked about their perfect universal healthcare plan that they were going to pass, with no discussion of the fact that they were all dead on arrival in the Senate—even if the Democrats controlled the Senate.

So Cory Booker and Chris Van Hollen, and maybe Andy Beshear, are going to promise people a European social-democratic welfare state, and also promise that half of the households in the country are never going to pay income tax. And also tell people that the debt is too high, because we’re now at 100 percent debt to GDP. And I could give you my international political economy argument of why that’s irrelevant, but I won’t now.

But you’re actually setting yourself up as Democrats for a recipe for failure and a political backlash, because you can’t get these policies through the institutions. And if you could, we can’t pay for them. And everybody’s then going to be upset that you promised them the moon and you can’t deliver.

So I don’t know how to sell the institutions, but all it does is set the Democrats up for further electoral disappointment down the line—either we can’t get the stuff done, or people say we can’t afford it.

And I think Obama and Biden made this mistake—the Bush tax cuts can be rolled back, but only for people who make more than $400,000 or $250,000, and—

Bacon: I didn’t mean to bring us into the tax part. That was not the question. The question was the proposed—I agree, those tax plans are not great. Lee, but I think—

Copelovitch: It fits in. Which is: it’s not just can we get the policies through the institutions, it’s also that all the things that are kitchen-table issues that we say we want to do something about—you have to convince Americans that we’re going to be able to pay for them. So I do think it’s a double whammy.

Bacon: Lee, talk about my question—do you want to hear the candidates talk about these kinds of reforms? Should they be talking about these kinds of reforms on the trail next year?

Drutman: Yes, but they should talk about them as part of a story. Politics is about storytelling. It’s not about a bullet point of “what I’m going to do for you.” Here’s my policy on this, here’s my policy on this. Nobody cares about your policy plans.

People didn’t get excited about Barack Obama because of healthcare policies. They got excited about Barack Obama because of who he was and the story he told about America. It was a story of uplift, it was a story of hope, it was a story of change. These are the universal themes of successful political campaigns—you tell a story.

It’s classic storytelling, right? We’re in the middle of the story. This is the point at which all hope feels lost, and now here’s the story of uplift. The story of uplift is: the promise of American democracy is great. We have fallen down on that. It has been corrupted by evil Trump people, by greedy corporations, tech oligarchs, by corrupt politicians. When I become president, we’re going to end the gerrymandering wars. We’re going to make American democracy responsive to its promise. We’re going to give people a reason to vote. We’re going to make elections matter. We’re going to make your voice matter. And then the list of policy solutions fits into that story.

But I really am so confused by this view that has taken over a lot of smart folks in Democratic politics, which is, Oh, we’re just going to have a checklist of poll-tested policy positions that don’t fit as part of a story. What is the story of we’re going to give this tax cut to this group that they’re not going to notice? The—like the Biden—Oh, we’re going to do all these programs.

Bacon:. Let me stop you there to ask, though. There are—Zohran Mamdani told a story—but the story was about affordability. So I agree that you should not go on stage and read your policy plan. But let’s assume there are two people telling a story. One is telling a story about affordability, and one is telling a story about these reforms—about democracy. That does seem to be challenging for the person doing a story about reforms, I would say.

Copelovitch: The story about reforms, though, isn’t “here’s reforms.”

Bacon: I’m agreeing that you should not list the—let’s move past me.

Copelovitch: The story about reforms is corruption and what they—and look, if you want to go down the list of candidates, the guy who’s doing this is Ossoff. When you see Ossoff speak, it’s what Lee was saying: the system is corrupt, it doesn’t represent you.

And there are crimes being committed, and people need to be held accountable. So yeah, you need a story about the institutional reforms, but they’re not mutually exclusive.

The system is corrupt, and you can do the populism thing also about regular people getting ripped off and all the policies are bad. But—it’s not just say, Here’s why proportional representation and fusion voting are good. It’s in the context of: the things we think American democracy is supposed to represent are not being represented anymore.

Bacon: Let me follow up and ask, though. A campaign is about going to Iowa, but it’s also about talking to editorial boards, talking to people like me. Should Andy Beshear, on his website, have Here is my plan for proportional representation—or not? Because at some point, you’re going to have to release some ideas. We don’t have to talk about them on the stump, but should the ideas be out there in some way?

Copelovitch: Yes.

Drutman: Yes.

Copelovitch: And my view is yes. You said people don’t understand this and they’re not demanding it, but people don’t follow politics closely—they respond to what’s put out there. As a political scientist, my view is people don’t understand these things, but they would if politicians talked about them. It’s not—I give the average voter a lot more credit than I think a lot of politicians do.

You could talk about Supreme Court reform—Callais makes that really easy now. The gerrymandering thing—and we’re back to Jim Crow—makes all the stuff about PR much easier to talk about now. And Trump running amok on policies with war and trade makes reining in the executive—it feels a lot easier to make that case now.

And I think, yes, on your website, if you’re a politician and you’re running for president now as a Democrat, it can’t just be the checklist of policies, like Lee was saying. It also needs to be, And here’s how we’re going to fix this stuff, which is going to require changing things in ways that we as Americans have been uncomfortable with for the last 50 years.

The other thing about modern American politics is—and I don’t know how we got here—we changed our institutions all the time until about the 1950s. We added states all the time. We changed how voting happened all the time. We delegated trade authority from Congress to the president—we did all these things all the time.

And we got at some point in my lifetime as an adult into this idea that the institutions are cast in amber and we can’t change them anymore, which is the most ahistorical part of the whole American democratic experiment. We used to do this stuff all the time. We should be able to do it again.

Bacon: Yeah. Go ahead. Lee—what about the polarization thing? If having the Democratic candidates talk about here are my ideas, or if in some way it’s clear that proportional representation has become a Democratic idea, advanced by Democratic candidates—does that make it harder to convince the rest of the country that it’s a good idea for the country?

Drutman: It depends how you talk about it, to some extent. You can talk about it as this is the thing to keep Democrats in power, or this is the thing to end the gerrymandering wars. And if you say, Americans are sick and tired of the gerrymandering wars, Americans are sick and tired of the two-party system, Americans want more options—then that’s a way to sell it more universally.

And any issue that becomes prominent in American politics is going to be polarized, because we are in a hyper-polarized time. The only issues that are unpolarized are the issues that nobody talks about. There’s a secret Congress where you can do bipartisan stuff if you want to do something that nobody in The New Republic is ever going to write about—a very niche issue.

If you want to fix something on copyright for songs on streaming services—yeah, sure, you can do that, that can be bipartisan. But as soon as you talk about something like how we do elections in this country, that’s going to be partisan.

Now, there’s a way in which you can talk about this as: it is good for people who don’t feel represented by the current Republican Party, even though they’re not Democrats. You might not support this because it seems like a Democratic issue, but it could be a 60, 70 percent issue. And all Republicans in Congress vote against it because, of course, they have to.

But then it changes the rules, and some of them could actually run under this system as the type of Republican that I think they thought they were going to be when they got into politics before Trump took all the energy.

You can imagine John Thune running as a different type of Republican. You can imagine a bunch of Republicans who have lost in the last several cycles running as different types of Republicans under a system in which they can run as a center-right party. Right now, there’s one path to get elected as a Republican, and that’s kissing the Trump ring.

Copelovitch: There’s a Cheney-Kinzinger party that gets 15 percent of the vote or something like that and is part of a coalition government.

Bacon: So the last question is: let’s imagine a scenario—Democrats win the House, Democrats win the Senate, Democrats win the presidency. They can do some kind of political reform bill. Politicians don’t tend to want to take away their power, and what we are calling for in a certain sense is: the Democratic Party should win an election, win all these states, spend all this money, and then come into power and create new parties to disempower itself, functionally—to give Americans more choices, to imply that the Democratic Party is somehow not properly governing the country, and therefore we should give other parties a chance. I’m having a hard time imagining the current Democratic Party House members—I know some of these people—doing that. So is that fanciful, or do you—that would require a level of patriotism that I would love to see but I’m skeptical of. Reassure me that these people can do that.

Drutman: There’s the simple self-interested argument that you can make to Democrats, which is basically: the cost of ruling—if you win the trifecta in 2029, the cost of ruling is going to come at you hard and fast. You will lose the midterms, because every party in power loses the midterms. You can’t solve the affordability crisis with enough force and energy to actually make a difference. And people are mostly voting for Democrats in the current elections because they’re anti-MAGA, not because they are pro-Democrat. So Democrats will lose, and then the Republicans will rewrite all the maps in the census year, and things will get a lot worse. So that’s one argument.

But also—do elected Democrats want to be in this world of perpetual redistricting? Do they want to be in this world of perpetual gerrymandering? And do they think of themselves as Democrats, or would they rather think of themselves as progressives or moderates?

There are a lot of factions within the party that are warring against each other. Wouldn’t you rather, if you’re a moderate Democrat, say, Look, I’m the moderate Democrat. You want the crazy communist lefties? Go vote for them, join their party. Or the progressive Democrats say, I’m progressive. You want the corporate Democrats? Go vote for them. We’re different parties, and we can work together, but we want to empower you, the voters.

Members of Congress like being in Congress—although increasingly they don’t, even though they go. There’s going to be a lot of turnover in Congress. A lot of people are retiring. And the idea that you represent a meaningful constituency in an age of perpetual redistricting is just harder and harder to sell.

Sure, any reform takes power. But if I’m Hakeem Jeffries, the sell I’d make to him would be: Look, you preside over a coalition, and you can hold together that coalition for two years at best under the current system. You might be part of a coalition that has power longer if you allow the different pieces of the coalition to run independently. And you support a reform that Americans would be super enthusiastic for, because Americans have been screaming in every single poll. Do you want more parties? Yes—70 percent. Do you think the system needs fundamental change? 80 percent.

Copelovitch: Yeah. I’d also go back, Perry, to something Lee said before. He brought up Adam Przeworski’s—a scholar from NYU—classic definition of democracy: a system in which parties lose elections. And the thing that you’re bringing up—that we fear designing ourselves out of office—is predicated on all parties believing in losing elections, and that regular democracy is going to continue into the future.

And it feels different now. We’re in a moment where we’re watching [a return] to Jim Crow, and the Republicans are trying to tilt the playing field to the point that they might be in power—nobody’s in power forever—but basically all the time. And so it just feels to me, again, there’s a moment now where more people realize that politics-as-usual—we don’t want to consider any of these institutional reforms because that’s how politics works, as you were describing it—that’s going to be hard to change for sitting elected politicians.

But if you do think, for the party in the medium term, what would it mean for the Democrats to be in government in coalition and get the policies that the party claims it wants? It’s actually a rational calculation to think about institutional reforms, even if that means in the next election, instead of winning 52 percent of the vote, you might win 33 percent of the vote. The policies that are part of the party platform that you say you’ve been fighting for forever—you would accomplish them in a coalition government. I don’t think that’s going to appeal to every politician. But—

Drutman: But who’s the “you” in that statement? Because what is a party? It’s a label and a collectivity—but it’s a bunch of individual politicians and groups and voters who might—what, the 33 percent? It’s not that the Democratic coalition will get 33 percent. It’s that the Democratic coalition might actually get more votes, because they could actually expand if they add more parties to that coalition.

Copelovitch: This is where I think the German analogy is very good again. You could imagine the three parties that replace the Democrats might actually get more votes than the single Democratic Party—

Drutman: I’m sure they would. And they could build a supermajority coalition under certain circumstances. And again, there are a lot of these policies that are 65 percent policies. But we have a system in which a minority that is well-placed as a plurality of a plurality can get total control over our government, which is a real flaw in our system.

Copelovitch: And a nine-member super-legislature that can veto what makes it through the other two legislatures.

Bacon: And speaking of that—do we know what Samuel Alito’s views on proportional representation are? Do we know what his views are on multi-party democracy? Is it possible we pass this reform and they immediately strike it down? Lee, you’ve been studying this more—is that a possibility?

Drutman: It’s possible. I spent a lot of time advocating for proportional representation, and I will say, in the wake of the Callais decision, this is the first time that anybody has ever suggested that proportional representation would get struck down by the court. So yes, you can draw some—I don’t know what the argument would be. It’s not an argument that any election law person has ever raised. But you can’t rule out anything—

Copelovitch: I do think the sequencing thing is important, though. That’s why we were talking earlier—I think fixing the Supreme Court has to be right away. For precisely this reason: if we’re at the point of speculating that institutional reforms passed through Congress might be overruled by the Supreme Court, then we have a massive problem of separation of powers and a runaway institution.

Drutman: You have a voting rights law that was on the books for a long time, and all of a sudden that’s unconstitutional. The U.S. Congress has been regulating—using its Article I, Section 4 powers to regulate how it does elections—for the entire history of the republic. And is Congress now going to say that it doesn’t have that power anymore? And come up with some cockamamie reading of Article I, Section 4 that it only applies to such and such because such and such originalist theory thought only white men could vote—and therefore, to be truly originalist, only propertied white men over the age of 25 should vote, because that’s the true originalist view? Is that where we’re going with it? I don’t know.

I agree there are a lot of reasons to do Supreme Court reform. The court has basically disqualified itself from the role of being the Supreme Court, in my opinion—and I think the opinion of a lot of folks. And I think this is something that is a real live question among the people who will have the pen in 2029. I think presidential candidates should talk about it. I think some ideas are better than others.

But this is a moment that we’re in—these next few years—in which there’s going to be a lot of space for exploring what the reconstruction of American politics should look like. And I think it needs to be comprehensive. You get one chance to do this, and if you don’t do it right, it’s 20 years of misery.

Copelovitch: Yeah. And again, I would say, as we were talking about before, and as a political economy scholar—this is not mutually exclusive with the kitchen-table and affordability stuff.

The reason the economy is being driven into the ground and is a total mess is the runaway executive and the failure of Congress to act and the corruption. And so for me, those things go together—they’re two sides of the same coin.

Bacon: You’re both rejecting—you’re both saying my “affordability versus democracy” framing is wrong. Basically, that’s a false choice.

Copelovitch: I think that’s the debate that’s going to happen, and I think we have a sense of which candidates or potential candidates would be on which side of it. And I think it’s a false dichotomy.

Drutman: Yeah. I agree. You can talk about both. And you can link them as part of the same story—that this is the corruption of the American ideal. I just don’t know what the affordability policy story is that you would tell. I’m going to get into office and put price controls on everything?

Bacon: Cory Booker is literally saying, I will cut off your taxes if you make less than X amount of money—I forget the amount right now. But they are saying—Katie Porter, a lot of people are saying, You will not pay taxes if you’re a police officer, a teacher, a firefighter. That’s what they’re all saying. These are not great ideas—I’m just saying these are the ideas.

Drutman: And I feel like they’ve been roundly rejected by even the people who you would think would support them—even the popularism crowd has rejected these ideas for the most part.

Copelovitch: No. And this is—I think the only good thing to come out of the wildly illegal and unconstitutional DOGEing of the country and the government is it’s made people aware of what government actually does. Suzanne Mettler at Cornell has written about the submerged state—people don’t realize all the things the federal government does. And so if you’re telling people we’re going to defund the government by nobody paying income taxes, people have already started to realize what defunding and dismantling the government means in terms of public services.

So if you do think in terms of popularism or affordability—on some level, I think people are a little bit more aware of what the government does in the economy than they were a decade ago, for horrible reasons. But again, I think that factors in: yes, we would all like our taxes to be lower, but at the same time, if you’re telling me that then the government can’t afford all these things that I want, I’m not sure politically if that’s the right way to go.

Bacon: Guys, great conversation. I want to give you room—I know we’re at an hour here. If you have any final thoughts, I want to give you room to give them.

Drutman: I just want to emphasize that I think this is a real moment in which a lot of folks—not just us, but a lot of folks with real authority to do something—are really thinking big. And these conversations are really important. This is a moment in which a lot is possible, and we should really think big.

And I get frustrated when people say, Oh, this is a 30-year project, or something—because that’s just giving up on it. This is a unique moment. This is the moment in which we can do big change, because there is an appetite and hunger for it. The American people are screaming for it. Our institutions are fundamentally broken. And this is a moment when there is a demand and a necessity for some real leadership—and I’m starting to see it emerge.

Copelovitch: Yeah. I would just come back to the historical and comparative points that I was making earlier. I think it’s crucially important—and Lee is right, this is the moment—and I’m glad we’re talking about it here.

But I think, historically, as part of the project of American democracy completing Reconstruction—we’ve done this before, regularly, in previous eras. And it is a deeply American thing to keep updating our institutions, regardless of what the originalists say about what the founders intended. That’s a historical thing in American politics.

But the other—as an international relations and comparative person—is that we have a sense as Americans that we’re exceptional, that we’re the paragon of democracy, and our institutions are better than everybody else’s. And I think the thing is, as we were talking about Germany and other cases: other countries do representative democracy better than us in terms of institutions.

And we should learn the lessons of 300 years of what we know about institutional evolution of democracy. Nobody emulates and designs the U.S. Constitution in the 21st century. They look to other models. And as we’re thinking about fixing our problems, that comparative analysis—and a little bit of getting over ourselves as Americans—is important. Other countries actually do some things better. They do some things worse. But we actually need to look at those possible models of parliamentary democracy elsewhere as things that we as Americans might actually want to emulate.

Drutman: We’re the best country in the world. We should have the best political institutions.

Copelovitch: Yeah. And what the best ones are in 2026 is not what they were in 1787.

Bacon: It’s a great place to end on. Lee Drutman, Mark Copelovitch—you can find both of them on Bluesky. Very insightful political scientists. This was a great conversation. We’ll have more of these. Democracy reform is going to be a big theme for Right Now, so we’re going to have these guys back and others to talk about these kinds of issues. Guys, thanks for joining me. Great conversation. Good to see you.

Copelovitch: Thank you so much for having us. Take care.

Speaking on Fox News’s Hannity Wednesday, Graham presented his own vision for the outcome of Trump’s two-day summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The South Carolina Republican said that China should cut off the “worst people in the world,” referring to Russia and Iran, and join America’s efforts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and stop the fighting between Russia and Ukraine.

“If you help us, I will be very grateful. If you don’t help us, and you continue to prop up these regimes, I will do business with you on Monday, and put tariffs on you on Tuesday,” he said.

Lindsey Graham threatens to put tariffs on China:

If you don’t help us, I will put tariffs on you. pic.twitter.com/ZiYpvgtITO

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 14, 2026

In order to force Xi to drop his buddies, Graham said he would introduce legislation to allow Trump to place tariffs on China for buying Russian oil. China is the largest buyer of Russia’s coal and crude oil exports, and of Iran’s oil exports.

“The only thing China respects is strength,” Graham said. “So, when this [summit] is over, if they’re still doing the same damn thing with Iran and Russia and we don’t punish China, we’ve made a mistake.”

The real mistake would be implementing more tariffs, which would only cause more economic strain for average Americans, who are already suffering from skyrocketing inflation caused by Trump’s military campaign against Iran. A fresh round of tariffs on China would also surely disrupt the only economic indicator that Trump actually cares about: the U.S. stock market.

Graham has continually tried to insert himself in negotiations with foreign countries. Speaking to Pentagon officials earlier this week, he tried to undermine Pakistan, a key mediator in the ongoing negotiations between the U.S. and Iran.

The Florida Democrat has been missing in action for weeks, according to her documented voting record. She has so far failed to address her nearly four-week absence, though her team has been busy keeping her social media active and curated.

Some of the account’s posts seem designed to trick people into thinking that Wilson is still out and about. In one bizarre post circulated earlier this week and flagged on X by Capitol Hill correspondent Jamie Dupree, Wilson’s team reused photographs of her from an October event, in an attempt to suggest that the lawmaker was still mingling with her constituents.

Wilson is a member of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, as well as the House Committee on Education and Workforce. Both committees have held several hearings since April 17, though the 83-year-old doesn’t seem to appear in video footage of any of them.

Wilson represents Florida’s 24th congressional district, which encompasses the Miami-Dade area and Broward County. She has held the seat since 2013 and is up for reelection in November. The area has a solid Democratic advantage, according to an analysis by the Cook Political Report.

That might be enough to hand Wilson another two-year term—if opposition wasn’t coming from within the party: Christine Sanon-Jules Olivo, a small-business owner with ties to the NAACP, is running to unseat her in the district’s Democratic primary, scheduled for August 18.

Wilson is not the only member of Congress to recently disappear without explanation, however. Last month, there was a significant stir over the prolonged, inexplicable absence of New Jersey Republican Representative Thomas Kean Jr. Journalists, his constituents, and Republican allies in the tristate area attempted to contact him for weeks, trying to glean an answer from the AWOL politician.

Nothing worked until House Speaker Mike Johnson phoned him in late April, learning that Kean had been struggling with an unspecified “personal health matter.”

Kean is still not back at work.

The unfairness created by Republican gerrymandering in states across the country ahead of the midterm elections is the latest sign of the deep flaws of the American political system. In the latest edition of Right Now, political scientists Lee Drutman of the think tank New America and the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Mark Copelovitch say that the United States needs to look abroad for models on how to better run a democracy. Both say that it’s critical that the U.S. adopt proportional representation and multimember congressional districts. That would make gerrymandering obsolete and foster the creation of a multiparty system, which both Drutman and Copelovitch agree is essential. Copelovitch says that the strongest democracies tend to have a prime minister chosen by parliament, not a president, because presidents often assert too much power. Since the U.S. is not likely to get rid of the presidency, Copelovitch argues that it’s critical that true limits are enforced on presidential power. He also says that adding justices to the Supreme Court is essential, because the current justices are hyperpartisan and too power-hungry. Copelovich says that judicial reform is also important because the current high court might strike down proportional representation and other necessary reforms. Drutman and Copelovitch say that the 2028 Democratic presidential candidates should emphasize democracy reforms on the campaign trail. They say questions about whether Democrats should focus on democracy or affordability are a false choice. Economic and democratic issues are connected, the two scholars argue, because our current system is too broken to deliver strong outcomes for our citizens.

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

Republicans are growing increasingly frustrated with Donald Trump’s war with Iran. Three GOP senators just voted with Democrats to stop the war, and numerous news accounts report that GOP cracks are growing. This comes as an extraordinary New York Times exposé shows that Trump’s war has been substantially less successful than he and Pete Hegseth have claimed. Meanwhile, Republicans are running away from Trump’s bizarre tirade yesterday, in which he admitted he isn’t concerned with how inflation from the war is impacting ordinary Americans. Here’s the bottom line: all signs are that this will get substantially worse politically for Trump and the Republicans.

So we’re checking in with Nicholas Grossman, a professor of international relations who has a new piece for MS Now, arguing that the economic fallout from the war is only just beginning. Thanks for coming on, Nick.

Nicholas Grossman: Hi, thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Sargent: So let’s start with the news from the U.S. Senate. Three Republicans joined with Democrats to support a resolution that would end the war in keeping with the War Powers Act, which requires a congressional vote after 60 days have passed. The three senators are Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Rand Paul. As Politico reports, there’s new frustration and deepening divisions among Republicans over this. Nick, what’s your reaction to all that?

Grossman: I’m not surprised that some of them are starting to move away from it because the economic liabilities and associated political liabilities are rising. The senator who ended up making the vote fail was John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, which is unfortunate. So it was a 50-to-49 vote. If he had gone the other way, it would have passed.

But also, the War Powers Act—the way that they’re acting now is a sign of America’s democratic backsliding, of shifting power towards the executive branch. And this actually happened in Trump’s first term because the way the War Powers Act is supposed to work is the president is allowed to use force in an emergency or self-defense without Congress’s permission. And then if he doesn’t get congressional permission in 60 days, it automatically ends.

And what happened in Trump’s first term is when the U.S. was supporting Saudi Arabia’s campaign against Yemen, against the Houthis, and doing things like midair refueling—so actually directly involved, not just, say, sending weapons—the Senate passed a resolution saying that Trump had to stop that. He vetoed it, which is not supposed to be the way it goes. And then there were enough MAGA loyalists in Congress to prevent a veto override.

So already the War Powers Act is not really acting like it’s supposed to. But now, when we have Congress trying to assert itself, I think that would be a positive thing. More of this power is supposed to be in Congress and it would be positive if they can get a resolution saying that we assert our power under the War Powers Act. I don’t know if Trump would listen, but even so it would be a good step.

Sargent: Well, it would be a good thing, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen anytime soon. Trump, meanwhile, is very rattled by any hint that the war isn’t going as well as he’s claimed. He erupted on Truth Social saying this: “When the fake news says that the Iranian enemy is doing well militarily against us, it’s virtual treason.”

Trump continued that the media is aiding and abetting the enemy. And he called the media “American cowards that are rooting against our country.” He called them losers, ingrates, and fools. You know, Nick, it’s going to be harder for Trump to continue claiming that anyone who questions his war is a traitor when even Republican senators are now doing so, right?

Grossman: It makes it more politically difficult. And also just the objective reality of it makes it really difficult, because Trump seems to be approaching the war as if the goal is to get the U.S. media to speak positively of it, or to successfully lie to the American people—as if lying to the American people is his most important foreign policy goal. Whereas the realities of the war are going to continue whether or not he gets the U.S. media to say differently.

So Iran has weapons. They are able to fire them to block the Strait of Hormuz. That is creating massive shortages in things like oil and gas and fertilizer and other essentials. Those will damage the economy. It doesn’t matter what Trump is able to bully the media into doing. And yet it seems like that’s his priority—as if he can somehow, “virtual treason” is such a great term for it, as if this is all a virtual reality, a reality show. Whereas it’s clearly not real treason. But if he can shape the narrative—it’s not going to make the situation better.

Sargent: Well, it’s a sign of political desperation. He knows it’s going badly and his only hope is for the media to stop informing the American people of it.

Grossman: Yeah, that shows a desperation about the politics because the facts of the war are just so bad.

Sargent: Not only that—the tweet looks even more ridiculous when you consider this New York Times report, which used leaks from senior officials to demonstrate that Iran has access to nearly all of the 33 missile sites it maintains along the Strait of Hormuz. The Times reported also that Iran has 70 percent of its pre-war missile stockpile. Nick, this is a disaster.

I’ve made this point on here before, but in addition to the content of the leaks, which is bad enough, it’s also devastating for Trump that top officials are doing the leaking of this kind of thing, because it shows that there’s really serious dissent inside the administration about how this is all going. What do you make of all that?

Grossman: It’s not at all surprising that people inside the U.S. intelligence community and inside the U.S. military are leaking information to the American people because the war was a really bad idea in the first place. It was bad in ways that were widely foreseen—that have been foreseen for really years. In particular, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been advocating U.S. war on Iran since he was first prime minister in the late 1990s, and Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden all turned him down. It was only Trump that in this term was willing to do it. And in doing so was not really articulating any type of strategic goal.

He moved around so many times and eventually settled on something that was pretty small, which was degrading Iran’s missile program and degrading so that they would have fewer missiles. And even that is not any sort of strategic victory. All it would do, at absolute best, is set them back, where they would then have greater incentive to build up weapons and to possibly go for a nuclear weapon and to build up their missile stocks.

And now we find, not too surprisingly either, that it’s not true. And that’s because Iran has been—and I’m very frustrated by this—but Iran has been fighting a lot smarter than the United States. In the beginning, under the American and Israeli assault, they reduced the amount of launches that they were doing.

They more or less turtled and kept a lot of their capabilities in reserve so that they could do things like continue to block the Strait of Hormuz, as they did when the U.S. briefly tried that failed attempt that they called Project Freedom to get ships through it. And it’s not working.

That’s because Iran retains its military capabilities and because they prepared to fight the United States, where it looks like the Trump administration prepared to do something quick and easy and get praise for it. And that situation in Iran was always much more difficult than they appreciated.

Sargent: And you sort of see this same mistake being duplicated over and over by Donald Trump. It’s almost like he’s caught in this weird mental loop. He just keeps tweeting over and over, if Iran doesn’t do what I say, then the bombing will really start. And it’s a little hard to keep escalating that. We were sort of treated to the comic spectacle, I guess comic isn’t quite the right word, of Donald Trump threatening to obliterate Iranian civilization entirely, which would have killed 90 million people.

And then when that didn’t bully Iran into opening the Strait of Hormuz, he said, well, I’ll tell you what, the bombing is going to really start. Like, how can you actually top obliterating Iranian civilization? You can’t. And so you can sort of see that we’re trapped in this fun house where Donald Trump won’t learn the lesson that force by itself can’t solve the problem, right?

Grossman: It’s not even force by itself—it is threats that he’s trying to solve the problem with. One of the problems of this war is, while it was never a good idea in the first place, Trump did not deploy the type of force that would be necessary to accomplish it—they just thought bombing from afar. And the thing about bombing from afar is it has literally never won a war, ever. Bombing on its own—you can damage some stuff, but you can’t really win big concessions from a country.

And so the U.S. didn’t put things like the large invasion army that Bush did to invade Iraq. And Trump seems to be thinking that we’re in this cycle where he does these big, over-the-top threats and that doesn’t cow Iran. And then he quickly reverses course and lies that there’s been some great progress in talks and maybe jawbones the markets—gets stocks to rise, gets headlines saying that there is peace imminent or progress in talks or anything along those lines. And then those things collapse because the Iranian position has not changed. It is based on the hard realities of the war—what they control, the fact that they can block the Strait of Hormuz, and that the U.S. needs it open.

And so Trump is in the situation where his only two options are a humiliating surrender that leaves Iran decently stronger than it was before—getting to charge tolls for all these ships that used to be able to go through freely—or a military escalation. And he’s clearly afraid of that. And really he should be, because there is no good military option. More bombing won’t do it.

He’s already killed the Ayatollah’s family—his father and daughter and mother—killed a lot of the leadership, killed a lot of the people who were more pro-negotiation inside Iran. They have empowered Revolutionary Guard hardliners, and those hardliners can see that they have a strong military position and want to get something out of it. So bullying won’t do it.

And then even trying to do something like invade the ground around the Strait of Hormuz would be very militarily costly, difficult, risky, and has no end game.

Sargent: The problem of trying to do a regime-change war with boots on the ground looks even less appetizing now that we’ve learned that Iran still has a whole lot of its capability.

Grossman: And for a ground invasion, those capabilities would multiply, because then if there are U.S. troops on Iranian soil, there are a lot of different ways that Iran could get to them that they don’t currently.

It’s worth noting that with the Project Freedom idea, U.S. destroyers did shoot down the projectiles that Iran shot at them. So a big weapons platform is able to do that. But putting boots on the ground—they are a lot more vulnerable. It will definitely lead to American casualties if they do that. And that will not only most likely not resolve the war—in fact, it would probably end in a more costly humiliation—it also adds to the political liabilities, the domestic political liabilities.

Which, already given that the war is so unpopular—even at the start, it was the most unpopular war since we have been measuring these things, since World War II. More unpopular than Iraq at the start. More unpopular than Obama’s intervention in Libya, you name it. Then with the economic costs mounting, trying to sell the lie that this is already over and he’s already won and it was such a great job and the Iranians are giving him everything—you can’t sell that lie if you have to go and escalate to putting troops on the ground. So he really is stuck. He’s gotten the U.S. into a terrible position and there is no good way out.

Sargent: Republicans also have an additional problem here. On Monday, as everyone has heard by now, Trump admitted that he doesn’t think about the economic impact of his war on Americans at all when thinking about the situation. Let’s listen to how Republicans tried to spin their way out of this. Here’s JD Vance.

Reporter (voiceover): Do you agree with the president’s position that Americans’ financial situations should not be a consideration in that decision-making process?

JD Vance (voiceover): Well, I don’t think the president said that. I think that’s a misrepresentation of what the president said. But look, I agree with the president that Iran should not have a nuclear weapon.

Here’s Mike Johnson.

Mike Johnson (voiceover): I don’t know the context in which he made that comment, but I can tell you the president thinks about the American financial situation. I talked to him on average twice a day, sometimes three or four times a day.

Here’s Senator Roger Marshall.

Roger Marshall (voiceover): I would have to find out the context of it. I’m sorry.

Here’s Senator Cynthia Lummis.

Cynthia Lummis (voiceover): Did he say that? Yeah, I don’t have a comment about that. Mostly because I think he actually does care.

Sargent: Nick, I’ve got to say, a lot of them are claiming they don’t know the context, but the context is not exonerating in the least, is it?

Grossman: No. And it’s a very typical Republican move to pretend that they haven’t heard what he said or that they don’t understand the context as a way to try to duck being tied to it or some responsibility for it. But the weird thing about this one is—while I think it is almost certain that Trump personally does not care about the finances of the American people except in a way that it might be a political liability for him, which of course he thinks he could lie his way through and just say it’s great and that it’s not an issue—I think that one’s actually tied up in his understanding of and misunderstanding of negotiations, and why he was berating the media.

Iran’s leverage over the United States comes from the economic damage that it’s causing. And when asked, effectively, so does Iran have leverage over you because of all this economic damage, he very quickly defaults to, no, no, no, I don’t think about that, I don’t care about it. But in the process, it’s probably revealing some of his personal beliefs and looking absolutely terrible politically, given that prices are rising in various ways.

Gas prices—this is one of the only times in history where the gas price rise is directly the fault of the president and is very easy to understand as the fault of the president. And that statement from Trump seems like it is tailor-made for Democratic ads.

Sargent: Okay, Nick. So what do you predict is going to happen in the end here? It sure looks like Donald Trump is going to have to accept something soon enough. We’re stuck in this dynamic where he’s only willing to accept something that looks like he’s pulled off this world-historically stupendous accomplishment. And yet at the same time, he can’t actually get such an accomplishment out of the situation.

So he just keeps lying his way through it and bluffing his way through it. But at some point, he’s going to have to accept some sort of deal with Iran, right? What does that look like potentially? And how bad does the economic situation get in the United States in the long run after that?

Grossman: So he’ll probably have to accept something at some point, although he always could try for a military gamble to attack them, or to either follow through on some of these threats, or who knows, escalate all the way to a ground invasion. I find it almost impossible to try to predict which one of those he’s going to do.

But what I can tell you is that the pressure is mounting. So this is a hard calendar. It is not something you can lie your way through. It can’t be bullshitted away. The ships that came out of the Strait of Hormuz have reached their destinations. They have unloaded.

The result now is kind of like a shell game where companies and countries are drawing down on their reserves. And they’re able to keep the price of oil from spiking and to keep some of the commodities flowing. But that is going to run out.

And in not that long—a lot of the oil analysts I read seem to think it is probably sometime in June where those resources are being depleted, that they’re being drained, the storage at the fastest rate in history. And all of this adds up to an oil shock that is larger than the one in 1973, when OPEC put the United States under an oil embargo in response to the U.S. supporting Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

And that set off a recession that lasted over a year. It saw big stock market declines, although interestingly, the stock market didn’t really decline until after that embargo was lifted. And so what that suggests is that a lot of these things are being strung along for now.

And even one crazy one—I saw this line from JPMorgan that their latest guidance on the oil market is that they expect this to be solved by June, kind of because it would be stupid if it weren’t. And the problem is that the people running the United States are not acting smartly. They’re acting quite stupidly in this.

And so the pressure will continuously mount on Trump. And he’s going to have to either do something that is so clearly a surrender to Iran that gives Iran some sort of concessions, and gets maybe a fig leaf of Iran kind of promising to restrict their nuclear program in ways that are less than the JCPOA—the nuclear deal that Obama negotiated and that Trump tore up without cause and let Iran out of nuclear restrictions in exchange for nothing, which set us on this path to war or nuclear Iran.

So yeah, I mean, I really wish that there was a way I could say, this is the way it’s going to end up, but it’s just a terrible position. There’s no way out. And he doesn’t seem like somebody who is willing to accept something that will be so widely acknowledged as a loss that cannot be spun away.

Sargent: You know, Nick, it just seems like the built-in dynamics of this situation are really formidable and terrible in every conceivable way. The only way out is going to be the midterm elections. And even that might not help that much. Unfortunately. Nick Grossman, awesome to talk to you as always. Thanks for coming on.

Grossman: Thanks so much for having me.

The creator of Claude is known for issuing such omens; as Axios notes, Anthropic’s “identity is wrapped around warning the world about AI risk.” But it’s hardly alone. OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, also regularly sounds the alarm. At the same time, these companies are raising capital at historic levels to fund their work and enrich themselves. The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that OpenAI recently allowed current and former employees to sell up to $30 million worth of shares. More than 600 people jumped at the chance, and together they made $6.6 billion.

The contradictions surrounding AI have become impossible to ignore. The companies building it warn about catastrophic risk while simultaneously speeding up deployment, competing to dominate what we’re told is the most consequential technological transformation in history. Every player in the race, including governments, which are rushing to integrate AI deeper into military, educational, and administrative systems, publicly acknowledges the challenges and the dangers, and none can afford to stop.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s essay “The Adolescence of Technology,” published in January, is a masterpiece of the form. Drawing on Carl Sagan’s Contact, he frames our current moment in AI as humanity’s defining crossroads. He claims we are at the turbulent threshold between the civilization we have and the one we might become, facing five categories of existential risk: rogue autonomous AI systems, misuse of AI for mass destruction, authoritarian capture of AI for political control, economic disruption, and extreme wealth concentration. He also foresees cascading indirect effects we cannot yet expect.

Seventeen days after the essay was published, Anthropic raised $30 billion in new funding, bringing its valuation to $380 billion. And last week, the same day as Axios’s scoop, the Financial Times reported that the company is looking to raise tens of billions more this summer, with an eye toward a $1 trillion valuation—which would top OpenAI’s $852 billion valuation.

That juxtaposition is not coincidental. “The Adolescence of Technology” is not just a warning; it’s a pitch deck too. This technology is the most consequential in human history is both a caution and an investor’s dream. We are the responsible ones is both a moral claim and a competitive moat. China is catching up is both a geopolitical concern and an argument that makes the next funding round feel patriotic.

Amodei acknowledges the danger that AI is such a glittering prize that humanity may be incapable of imposing meaningful restraint upon it, and he seems to recognize the potential for social unrest as it displaces workers and concentrates wealth. But his proposed remedies are modest. He is on record advocating for transparent legislation, constitutional AI training, interpretability research, industry coordination, and progressive taxation. These are all reasonable measures, but they are not the response of someone who genuinely believes we may be one or two years away from systems capable of destabilizing civilization.

It would be easy to dismiss this as hypocrisy, except the situation is more structurally tragic than that. Even if the people pushing AI on the world wanted to stop, the system cannot allow it. Employees will defect to competitors. Valuations will crater. Investors will sue. China will continue regardless. Everyone in the AI race understands the dangers. Rational self-interest, aggregated across all players, produces a collectively irrational and potentially catastrophic outcome.

The Manhattan Project analogy is instructive here, but as a warning rather than a parallel. Oppenheimer and his colleagues built the bomb under direct government control, with a defined wartime enemy and a defined end point. After they built the bomb, the project ended, and many of those scientists spent the rest of their lives advocating for arms control, openly wrestling with the moral consequences of what they had created.

The AI race has none of those constraints. There is no coherent governing oversight, no defined enemy beyond commercial competitors, and no end point. And certainly, no public moral remorse for what has been unleashed. Instead, the technology has assumed a life of its own, self-accelerating with each generation and increasingly involved in building the next. We are not simply inventing a tool but constructing systems intended to speed up their own development indefinitely. We are sprinting toward a cliff.

Meanwhile, the physical world imposes constraints that much of the rhetoric surrounding AI conveniently minimizes. Large-scale AI systems already place extraordinary demands on energy infrastructure, water usage, semiconductor supply chains, and electrical grids. The utopian vision of AI eliminating disease, poverty, and war requires energy abundance, global infrastructure, and governance frameworks that do not exist.

The contradictions persist because modern technological culture treats acceleration itself as proof of legitimacy. That something can be built becomes evidence that it should be built, and speed substitutes for wisdom.

In Candide, Voltaire’s protagonist endures every conceivable catastrophe, including war, earthquake, enslavement, and the systematic destruction of everyone he loves. Throughout the novel, his tutor, Pangloss, insists with each fresh horror that all events unfold according to rational design in “the best of all possible worlds.” Pangloss never abandons this conviction, even while reality demolishes the idea that grand theoretical optimism has any purchase.

Pangloss represents the theorist who endlessly explains why the system must continue despite the visible suffering it produces. He is every modern technologist insisting that temporary disruption, inequality, or social instability are unfortunate but necessary transitional costs on the road to a transformed and better future. The optimism is sincere. The catastrophes it glosses over are real. And the prescription to trust the process because we are the responsible ones is precisely the grand theoretical framework that Voltaire spent his life attacking.

Voltaire’s target was not optimism alone. It was the human tendency to subordinate lived experience to grand explanatory systems. The conclusion of Candide is famous precisely because it refuses both utopian optimism and nihilistic despair: “Il faut cultiver notre jardin” (We must cultivate our garden). This line is often misunderstood as a retreat from public life, but that interpretation misses the deeper argument. Voltaire does not advocate disengagement from reality, but reengagement with it. The garden is not an escape; it is a rejection of grand systems, and a refusal to hand over moral agency to those who run them.

The mythology surrounding AI depends heavily on the idea that history now unfolds beyond ordinary human participation, that the future belongs primarily to the engineers, executives, investors, and geopolitical actors competing to shape it. Everyone else is positioned as a spectator, consumer, or eventual casualty.

Voltaire rejects precisely that kind of surrender. Tending the garden means being attentive to the concrete world immediately in front of us: the human beings affected by decisions, the institutions being reshaped, the labor displaced, the environments consumed, the civic structures weakened, and the psychological habits being altered by systems advancing faster than public understanding. This will neither stop the AI race nor magically solve structural problems, but it’s the only meaningful antidote to systems that increasingly reward acceleration detached from human scale.

The danger posed by AI is not only technological but philosophical, encouraging a view of humanity in which optimization replaces judgment, scale replaces intimacy, and inevitability replaces politics. That is why the response cannot simply be more acceleration managed by supposedly enlightened actors, nor resignation to the idea that systems have grown too large for human judgment to matter.

Voltaire understood that the gap between the world as theorized and the world as experienced is where most human suffering occurs. The AI industry increasingly lives inside that gap. The garden, at least, remains a place where reality still answers back.

Before proceeding, let’s catalog Trump’s three personal financial claims against his own administration. 

The first two are administrative claims under the 1946 Federal Tort Claims Act that Trump filed with the Justice Department after his first term ended. An administrative claim is not a lawsuit against the government; it’s an attempt to extract financial compensation from the government under threat of litigation. 

Trump’s first administrative claim, filed in 2023, concerned the FBI’s supposed tortious conduct in its Russiagate probe. Trump’s second administrative claim, filed in 2024, concerned the FBI’s supposed tortious conduct in its Mar-a-Lago document search. Trump sought $115 million for each of these claims—$230 milliion total—to cover compensatory and punitive damages. He continued to pursue them after he reentered the White House in January 2025, even though he was now negotiating with his own Justice Department. Neither claim is yet resolved.

Trump’s IRS lawsuit differed from these by interposing, inconveniently, a party who is independent from Trump—namely, a district court judge. The judge, Kathleen M. Williams, was elevated to the bench under President Barack Obama, but it’s hard to see how even a Trump-appointed hack could view favorably a president suing his own Justice Department (unless, of course, that judge sat on the Supreme Court). On April 24, Judge Williams pointed out that “although President Trump avers that he is bringing this lawsuit in his personal capacity, he is the sitting president and his named adversaries are entities whose decisions are subject to his direction.” She therefore ordered both the Justice Department and Trump to produce, by May 20, memoranda addressing “the issue of whether a case and controversy exists in this matter.” 

I can’t imagine that either party is eager to write such a memorandum. Instead, the race is on to settle before May 20. And whaddya know, the parties turn out not to be very far apart, even though Trump’s case would be weak even if he weren’t president. (More on that here.) 

According to Andrew Duehren and Alan Feuer of The New York Times, a settlement is in the works that would drop any IRS audits of Trump, his family, or his businesses. One advantage to this approach is that it would spare Trump having to pretend he’ll donate the proceeds to charity. Since nobody knows what the penalties from such audits would be, nobody can pinpoint such a settlement’s monetary value. On the other hand: Do any such audits still exist, and, if they do, is there any chance they’ll be resolved during Trump’s presidency? Even if the answer to the first part of that question is “yes,” the answer to the second part is surely “no.” So perhaps what Trump’s lawyers seek instead is some sort of indemnification against future IRS action akin to the blanket immunity the Supreme Court gifted him in 2024. 

If any adversarial relationship exists in this lawsuit at all, it’s probably between Trump and his own lawyers, because he has a well-documented tendency either to fire them or to refuse them payment. Given such tensions, I’d  guess the two unnamed sources who described this possible settlement to the Times were floating it as a trial balloon, not to the public but to Trump himself. Will Trump go for a settlement in which no money changes hands? Very possibly not; he really likes money. It would be very like Trump to grouse that his Justice Department settled Russiagate lawsuits from Carter Page and Michael Flynn, each for sums reportedly in excess of $1 million, but that the IRS wouldn’t do the same for him. And I’m the biggest victim of all!

On the other hand: If the IRS were to audit Trump’s tax returns rigorously, the likelihood is he would end up owing quite a lot. In 2024, the Times calculated that just one of Trump’s apparent violations would, if he were held accountable, cost him a penalty in excess of $100 million.

If Trump agreed to settle, could Judge Williams block the settlement? Judges do occasionally invalidate court settlements, and there would be excellent reason to do so in this case. But what’s Judge Williams’s next move? If she throws out the lawsuit, or if Trump voluntarily withdraws it, it’s not clear anything can stop the IRS from settling with Trump at that point, except possibly another lawsuit brought on behalf of taxpayers arguing that Trump’s in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses. 

But as I’ve complained before, nobody seems to want to file emoluments clause lawsuits against Trump these days. That’s because, when Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington tried that during Trump’s first term (over crimes that now seem quaint), the Supreme Court sat on the case until Trump left office so it could declare the issue moot.

When Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency in 1974 rather than face likely impeachment over his Watergate crimes, everybody said “the system worked.” The trouble with Trump’s presidency, which entails much worse crimes, is that the system doesn’t work, or anyway isn’t working now. Which leaves people like me little to say except: Mayday! I repeat. Mayday!

While this response is unsurprising, the conversation surrounding it has revealed a significant shift in Republican views of prospective nominees. The conservative legal movement finally caught the car in Trump’s first term and secured a supermajority of right-wing justices willing to impose their vision on the country. But under Trump, the movement has so thoroughly radicalized itself that even solid conservatives like Justice Amy Coney Barrett supposedly can’t be trusted. Conservatives’ refrain for decades had been “no more Souters,” referring to Justice David Souter, a George H.W. Bush appointee who drifted leftward after joining the court. Now, even though they voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, gut the Voting Rights Act, kill the administrative state, and many more longtime conservative goals, the call has shifted to “No more Souters. No more Robertses. No more Barretts.”

Skirmishes are now breaking out over which judges are the true heirs to “heroes of the republic” Alito and Thomas, and even some of Trump’s most extreme lower court nominees are taking heat. Consider Fifth Circuit Judge Andrew Oldham. Oldham is a Federalist Society favorite whom Trump nominated to the country’s most MAGA-influenced appeals court during his first term, and as expected, the judge has turned out to be an aggressive culture warrior and Trump stalwart widely discussed as a potential future Supreme Court nominee. Oldham has built his reputation on extreme opinions attacking administrative agencies, voting protections, abortion rights, and immigrants, often in rhetoric designed more to provoke than persuade. Oldham pushes such far-right legal ideas that even the highly conservative Supreme Court regularly reverses his opinions as steps too far.

Despite Oldham’s clear record supporting right-wing priorities, conservative commentators have called him a “meh in robes” and said that his potential nomination doesn’t even pass the “laugh test.” Many prefer Oldham’s Fifth Circuit colleague Judge James Ho. Ho’s jurisprudence—and even more, his public commentary—have made him a favorite among the conservative legal movement’s most combative voices. They see Ho as a champion advancing their broader political and cultural agenda who revels in “sticking it to the libs.”

With a straight face, Ho has written actual judicial opinions including warnings against a “woke Constitution,” the idea that anti-abortion physicians can sue over the “aesthetic injury of abortion” because fetuses “are a source of profound joy for those who view them,” and a version of great replacement theory where “adversaries … weaponize mass migration to harm America.” Ho’s appeal to the MAGA legal movement lies precisely in his willingness to turn the bench into another front in the broader political war. They are not satisfied with just winning—they want champions willing to fight dirty and rub it in.

That helps explain why the movement Trump unleashed increasingly seems incapable of accepting anything less than Ho-style bombast from its next Supreme Court nominee. The Federalist Society, which guided the movement for decades, was more aligned with the establishment Republicanism that MAGA strangled. It managed to ride the tiger of Trump’s first term and cap off the conservative takeover of the courts, but it has fallen out of favor with Trump and his adherents aligned with Trump’s maximalist (read: unconstitutional) approach to his second term. The confirmations of Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Barrett—once seen as the culmination of decades of organizing—have produced impatience rather than satisfaction. If anything, they have intensified the sense that more is possible, and therefore more is required.

Republicans no longer even pretend that this is a debate about judicial philosophy in the traditional sense, but Democrats have been incredibly slow to accept the openly cynical view of courts as centers of political power. For years, Democratic officials have treated Republican objections to court reforms like expansion, term limits, and jurisdiction stripping as good-faith concerns about institutional stability, where playing hardball would risk blowback.

But the blowback is already here. When even judges like Andrew Oldham are considered potential Souters, it is clear that there is no limiting principle. Progressive legal organizations and law professors have spent years developing concrete proposals to respond to exactly this moment. Even Bill Kristol, a longtime fixture of the conservative movement, has called for “ruthless” court expansion. A fundamental question for Democratic nominees up and down the ticket in 2026 and 2028 needs to be what they will do about the courts. What is the left’s version of “no more Souters”?

Honestly, there are many answers to that question. Democrats cannot keep treating the judiciary as a sacred institution while Republicans treat it as a captured one. The conservative legal movement has spent decades building structural advantage, and it has largely succeeded. Countering it will require using every legitimate institutional lever available to dismantle that advantage: expanding capacity where the courts are artificially constrained, imposing enforceable ethics rules on a judiciary that has largely exempted itself, reconsidering jurisdiction and tenure in light of modern polarization, and refusing to preserve procedural norms that only one side respects. If one party is openly playing to dominate the courts indefinitely, the other cannot treat “balance” as something that will reemerge on its own. It has to be rebuilt, deliberately and unapologetically, through power.

This is a far-fetched idea, to say the least. Venezuela has no interest in voluntarily becoming a U.S. state, as its acting President Delcy Rodríguez told reporters on Monday. “We will continue to defend our integrity, our sovereignty, our independence, our history,” she said, adding that Venezuela was “not a colony, but a free country.”

U.S. forces managed to infiltrate the country and arrest former President Nicolás Maduro earlier this year, which led to Rodríguez’s interim presidency. Trump suggested in January that the U.S. would play some kind of administrative role over the country after capturing Maduro, but no such direct control appears to exist. Venezuela retains every functional attribute of sovereignty.

I would welcome anyone to join the United States, so long as they do so freely, voluntarily, and democratically, and so long as they agree to live under the Constitution and its principles. I would not support the forcible annexation of any country or territory to the U.S. under any circumstances. If the Trump administration sought to seize any territory by force or coercion, the next Democratic president would be legally and morally obligated to return it to its previous status.

For that reason, it is worth thinking through the legal and constitutional implications of annexing Venezuela, Greenland, or even Canada—especially since they are not favorable to the Trump administration’s other political, social, and cultural priorities. The United States has not annexed a significant portion of foreign territory within living memory. While Alaska and Hawaii were admitted to the Union in 1959, they had already been organized U.S. territories long before statehood.

It is crucial that Trump specified that Venezuela would become the fifty-first state, not an incorporated territory or some insular possession. (He may be unaware of those options.) Some U.S. acquisitions have not resulted in statehood. After the Spanish-American War, for example, the United States took possession of a medley of former Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific. None of them have become U.S. states.

The U.S. had no plans to hold Cuba long-term, and the island nation gained formal independence in 1902. The Philippines would only obtain independence in 1946 after decades of colonial rule. Puerto Rico and Guam remain under U.S. control to this day. Though Puerto Rican independence and statehood are often alternatively discussed on the island and in D.C., Congress has taken no steps down either path—and in the case of Puerto Ricans, the matter is the subject of heated internal debate.

Trump’s described outcome—that the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela immediately becomes a state—most closely resembles that of Texas, whereby a fully independent nation was admitted to the Union without first being a territory. But it is unclear whether Trump has considered the full implications of statehood for Venezuela. The first and most obvious consequence is political representation. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that roughly 32 million people live in Venezuela, which would make it the second-most-populous state in the Union, behind only California.

For clarity’s sake, let us imagine that Venezuela is formally admitted into the Union on January 1, 2027, by a joint resolution of Congress. At that moment, the U.S. state of Venezuela is instantly eligible for representation in the U.S. Senate. The state government in Caracas could fill these new vacancies through whatever method it prescribes by law until the next election cycle, as authorized by the Seventeenth Amendment.

Venezuelans would not have the chance to vote for both senators automatically in the next election. When Alaska joined the Union in 1959, its two senators-elect flipped a coin to decide who would be the senior senator and who would be the junior senator. Bob Bartlett won the toss and had to run for reelection in 1960, while his colleague Ernest Gruening waited until 1962.

Even this small addition would change some of the basic math of the American legislative process. A happy coincidence of the last 60 years is that the Senate has had exactly 100 members. Two additional members would raise the filibuster threshold, which is pegged to three-fifths of the Senate’s membership, to 61 votes. Sixty-eight senators would also be required to meet the two-thirds threshold for certain votes, like overriding a veto or convicting an impeached official.

What about Venezuela’s representation in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College? That is a trickier question. Every other state automatically obtained its House representation as soon as it was admitted to the Union, which also determined its number of presidential electors. Nevada famously sent its state constitution to D.C. by telegraph—the longest message of its kind at the time—rather than mail so Congress could approve it a few days before the 1864 presidential election.

I mentioned earlier that the Census Bureau estimates that 32 million people live in Venezuela. But that number is only an estimate at best: Venezuela was obviously not part of the 2020 census, and the country does not appear to have conducted its own census since 2011. There is no evidence that Venezuela’s scheduled 2021 census took place, whether due to the pandemic, political instability, or some other reason.

Congress could theoretically legislate that Venezuela would receive a certain number of House seats upon admission until the 2030 census, at which point it would be counted and reapportioned normally. This method was first adopted in 1845 when Congress admitted the Republic of Texas to the Union. Texas had been a short-lived breakaway state from Mexico and conducted no census of its own. Congress instead declared that the state would be admitted “with two representatives in Congress, until the next apportionment of representation.” It received the same number of seats after the 1850 census, so lawmakers had made a pretty good guess.

Suppose that Congress, at Trump’s behest, made a similar guess here. Each House seat currently represents an average of 761,000 people after the 2020 census. As a result, one would expect Venezuela to temporarily receive roughly 42 House seats for the 2028 and 2030 House elections. That would amount to the second-largest delegation in the chamber and be greater than the combined House delegations of Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana. Under the Constitution’s formula for the Electoral College, Venezuela would also receive 44 electoral votes in the 2028 presidential election.

Imagine the political power shift that such a large voting bloc would create in the nation’s capital. The House is already narrowly contested between Democrats and Republicans; those lines are expected to harden by the recent surge in partisan gerrymandering in recent years, and especially during the last two years. Venezuelan House members would effectively decide the passage of most existing legislation. If they sided en masse with one party or another, they would be granting it an extraordinary governing margin. If Venezuelan representatives voted as a national bloc, they would be the decisive factor in nearly every legislative debate.

That power would extend to the executive branch, as well. The state of Venezuela would also be automatically entitled to votes in the Electoral College to choose the next president in the 2028 election. Under the Constitution, each state has a number of electors equal to its representation in the House plus its two senators. With roughly 44 electoral votes up for grabs, how Venezuelans vote could effectively decide Trump’s successor in the White House.

After the 2030 census, Venezuela’s statehood would have dramatic consequences for existing House delegations. The Constitution allows Congress to decide the number of House seats. While Congress used to update that number after almost every census to reflect the nation’s growth, the Apportionment Act of 1929 ultimately capped the House’s size at 435 members.

For the first four years of Venezuelan statehood, the House’s size would temporarily expand to 477 members under the math I outlined above. This would follow the precedent set by the admissions of Alaska and Hawaii in 1959, which expanded the House to a record 437 members until the 1960 census. But unless Congress passed a new Apportionment Act during that span, the House would automatically shrink back to 435 members after the 2030 census.

That shift would shrink each state’s delegation proportionate to Venezuela’s population, even before factoring in the decade-long population shifts between the states. A Republican lawmaker from Texas or Florida who voted to admit Venezuela in 2026 might find themselves without a seat in 2032 without losing a single election. Even Democrats in California and New York would likely find themselves with more representatives than seats.

Of course, it is possible that Trump and his allies would not follow past precedent to the letter. The Constitution does not obligate Congress to provide for House representation for newly admitted states between census counts, even though Congress has invariably done so. But even this would only delay the inevitable. After the 2030 census and the reapportionment that followed, no matter what, the state of Venezuela and its citizens would be entitled to full political representation in the federal government.

I say “citizens” because, if Venezuala were annexed and admitted into the Union, that is what its residents would become: full-fledged citizens of the United States, with all the powers and protections that come with it. In every instance where the U.S. has acquired territory from a sovereign nation, U.S. citizenship has followed it.

In 1819, for example, Spain ceded what is now Florida to the United States in the Adams-Onis Treaty. One of the treaty’s provisions held that the state’s current inhabitants “shall be incorporated in the Union of the United States as soon as may be consistent with the principles of the Federal Constitution, and admitted to the enjoyment of all the privileges, rights, and immunities of the citizens of the United States.”

Florida, however, did not join the Union until 1845. The state’s population remained too low to meet Congress’s usual standards for admission, only crossing the informal 50,000-person threshold after the 1840 census. Sectional disputes over slavery also played a role: Florida’s admission as a slave state was paired with Iowa’s entry as a free state to preserve the antebellum balance of power.

Even before Florida’s formal admission to the Union, however, its Spanish inhabitants had become American citizens. In 1828, the Supreme Court heard a case involving an esoteric admiralty-law dispute from a local court in what was then the Florida Territory. As part of its decision, the justices considered “the relation in which Florida stands to the United States.” Chief Justice John Marshall concluded along the way that Congress could properly naturalize all of Florida’s Spanish inhabitants through the Adams-Onis Treaty.

“This treaty is the law of the land, and admits the inhabitants of Florida to the enjoyment of the privileges, rights, and immunities of the citizens of the United States,” he wrote in American Insurance Company v. Canter. “It is unnecessary to inquire whether this is not their condition independent of stipulation. They do not, however, participate in political power; they do not share in the government till Florida shall become a state.”

Marshall’s caveat that the court need not decide whether they would be citizens “independent of stipulation” is constitutionally interesting. At minimum, the chief justice was suggesting that Spanish Floridians may have automatically become U.S. citizens by virtue of the territory’s acquisition by the United States. In that case, the stipulation merely confirmed for Spain what was already the law of the land, so to speak.

Unless the Supreme Court abrogates birthright citizenship in the next few months in Trump v. Barbara, every child born in the state of Venezuela after January 1, 2027, would instantly become a U.S. citizen upon birth. I would argue that the existing citizens of any country annexed by the United States automatically become U.S. citizens, as well, under the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause.

That reading would reflect the settled practice of the U.S. government before the amendment’s ratification. The Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo, which transferred most of what is now the Western United States from Mexico to the U.S. government in 1848, set a one-year deadline for inhabitants of the newly acquired lands to choose whether to stay or leave. As a fail-safe, it declared that anyone who stayed in the newly acquired lands “without having declared their intention to retain the character of Mexicans, shall be considered to have elected to become citizens of the United States.”

When the United States purchased Alaska from the Russian Empire in 1867, the treaty ratified by the Senate declared that the “inhabitants of the ceded territory” were free to return to Russia within three years. Those who stayed, aside from the Alaska Natives, “shall be admitted to the enjoyment of all the rights, advantages, and immunities of citizens of the United States, and shall be maintained and protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty, property, and religion.” (Alaska Natives later received U.S. citizenship through the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.)

Extending U.S. citizenship to Venezuelans would have profound implications for the national budget, for programs like Social Security and Medicare, and for every program that distributes funds through state governments. I could not even begin to calculate the fiscal impact. About 770,000 Venezuelan citizens already live in the U.S., according to a 2023 report, though that number may have changed since then thanks to the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

The irony of all of this annexation talk is that the Trump administration has gone to great lengths to remove Venezuelan immigrants from U.S. soil. Last year, it even invoked the Alien Enemies Act to accelerate the deportation process for tens of thousands of Venezuelan nationals inside the U.S. Trump and his top officials have sought to reduce the U.S. immigrant population through mass deportations and aggressive campaigns to deter migration. Their all but stated goal is to substantially reduce the number of nonwhite Americans in the United States.

Trump’s proposal to annex Venezuela and admit it into the Union would run counter to this policy program, to say the least. Though its people would not technically be “immigrants,” Venezuelan statehood would dwarf any previous immigration flow into the United States, creating upward of 33 million new U.S. citizens in a single move. For that reason, it is worth treating Trump’s “fifty-first state” suggestions as unlikely to happen—even if it is fun to imagine how much Stephen Miller would hate it.

South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster is planning to call state legislators for a special session, local TV station WIS-10 reports. A spokesperson for the governor told the outlet Wednesday to expect “something” on Thursday regarding an announcement, the same day that the state’s legislative session is scheduled to end.

The South Carolina Senate voted down a resolution Tuesday that would have made a special session possible, making an executive order from the governor the only possible way for one to be called. On Tuesday night, McMaster posted on X, “The General Assembly still has two full days in which to finish its important work, including giving full consideration—as sought by the people—to the important question of redistricting.

“I urge the General Assembly to finish its work according to the U.S. and South Carolina constitutions and the best interests of the people,” McMaster’s post said.

Meanwhile, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp on Wednesday called for a special legislative session June 17 to redraw the state’s congressional map, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. While Kemp has already ruled out changing the map in time for November’s midterm elections, the governor is hoping to get the map redrawn before November’s gubernatorial elections.

Republicans in Georgia hope to improve on their 9–5 advantage in the House of Representatives, while South Carolina has one Democrat, Representative Jim Clyburn, versus six Republicans. If these efforts are successful, the two states would join Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida in marginalizing the political power of their Black populations.

The lawsuit points to the Miami Dade College Board of Trustees and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis selling a three-acre plot of land in the middle of Miami to Trump’s foundation for just $10—when it’s obvious that the land is worth millions.

“With its waterfront views and central location in bustling Downtown Miami, the [Miami Dade College] Parcel would likely sell for over $300 million on the open market, according to local real estate experts,” the lawsuit reads. “But President Trump paid nothing for it.” Litigants also stated that the library would disrupt their lives and contribute to traffic and noise pollution.

Another point of contention in the lawsuit is that Trump has already publicly stated that he doesn’t even want to use the library for its intended purpose—he wants it to be a hotel.

“[The land] is no longer available to serve MDC’s student community and Downtown Miami,” the suit reads. “Instead, the land will house a Trump hotel that brings riches to the President.”

This lawsuit comes just a month after The New Republic reported that four massive companies with loyalties to Trump—Meta, X, ABC, and Paramount—all pledged tens of millions of dollars toward the library. Now the slush fund that money went into is nowhere to be found, adding yet another level of scrutiny to a project that isn’t even off the ground.

And on top of all this, the renderings for the Trump Presidential Library are gaudy, gratuitous, and ugly. AI-generated concept art shows an ostentatious skyscraper in downtown Miami with at least two massive gold statues of the president, massive outdoor patios with palm trees, full-size planes and fighter jets inside, a large ballroom, a replica of the Oval Office, and of course gold everywhere and on everything.

At a press conference, Vance was asked whether he agreed with Trump’s position that Americans’ worsening financial situations should not be a consideration in the decision-making process on Iran.

“Well, I don’t think the president said that,” Vance said. “I think that’s a misrepresentation of what the president said.”

Reporter: Do you agree with the President’s position that Americans' financial situations should not be a consideration?

Vance: I don’t think he said that. (He did). I think that's a misrepresentation of what the president said. pic.twitter.com/jZUAJXUFQV

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 13, 2026

Let’s be super clear: It wasn’t a misrepresentation. When asked Tuesday whether Americans’ worsening financial situations motivated him to make a deal with Iran, Trump replied: “Not even a little bit.”

“The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran is they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation, I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all. That’s the only thing that motivates me,” Trump said.

Trump on Iran War:

Reporter: What extent are Americans’ financial situation motivating you to make a deal?

Trump: Not even a little bit. I don't think about Americans’ financial situation pic.twitter.com/TJ94pGpqD8

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 12, 2026

Rather than indicate any daylight between the president and himself, Vance decided to lie about quotes on the public record. The vice president is just one of many Republicans who have been sent scrambling to clean up the president’s careless remarks. House Speaker Mike Johnson once again played the amnesiac earlier Wednesday when asked about the president’s shocking statements.

Trump has insisted that the economy is in great shape. In reality, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly report, released Tuesday, found that inflation rose to 3.8 percent in April, outpacing wages, which grew at a rate of 3.6 percent.

Meanwhile, new polling from CNN shows that Trump’s net economic approval rating isn’t just bad—it’s one of the worst of all time. A whopping 77 percent of Americans blame Trump for increasing the cost of living in their community, up 37 percent from 2024.

NOTUS reporter Reese Gorman witnessed the entire exchange as the younger Paul, who introduced himself as the Kentucky senator’s son, accosted Lawler regarding Representative Thomas Massie’s primary election next week in Kentucky.

Paul was seated at the establishment’s bar a couple of seats away from Lawler and Gorman, and interrupted a conversation between the two to tell Lawler that if Massie loses, it will be because of “your people.”

Lawler replied, “Your people?”

“Yeah, you Jews,” Paul said, to which Lawler remarked that he isn’t Jewish.

“Oh wow, I’m so sorry for calling you a Jew,” Paul said. The senator’s son then went on a rant against Jewish people, calling them anti-American and claiming Lawler and his “Jewish supporters” served Israel over America. Lawler argued with Paul and defended his support of Israel, telling him that he was antisemitic.

Paul then accused Jewish Republican megadonor Paul Singer, who is funding an anti-Massie super PAC, of serving “Israeli interests, not American interests.” A pro-Massie super PAC, Restore Freedom PAC, has run an ad with a picture of Singer in front of a rainbow Star of David titled “LGBTQ Mafia.”

Paul also told Lawler that he “needs to watch more Tucker Carlson,” and defended his father and Massie as the only legislators who care about the U.S. Lawler ultimately decided to end the conversation, telling Paul, “Well, you just seem to hate Jews, so there’s no point arguing anymore.”

This prompted Paul to wave his finger at Lawler and say, “Don’t put words in my mouth, Mike Lawler, I never said that.” Paul then complained about Lawler’s position on state and local taxes, and Lawler told him to “Please leave us alone.” The senator’s son then gave Lawler the middle finger, then apologized for being drunk and left, but knocked over his barstool and tripped over it in the process.

The whole exchange was pretty embarrassing for Paul, and he’s now put his father in the awkward position of having to apologize for his son’s rude behavior. Massie, a libertarian ally of Senator Paul, has often clashed with President Trump, who is backing his primary opponent. The younger Paul did not do him or his father any favors Tuesday night.

The final vote for Warsh was 54–45, mostly along party lines. Only Senator John Fetterman broke ranks and voted alongside Republicans to confirm Warsh.

Warsh is everything Trump wants in an appointee. He’s handsome and wealthy—the richest Fed chair ever, in fact—but most of all, he’s willing to do whatever the president wants.

During his confirmation hearings last month, Warsh assured lawmakers that he would “take [his] responsibility to be an independent leader of the Federal Reserve very seriously,” and claimed the president had never “asked [him] to predetermine, commit, fix, [or] decide on any interest rate decision in any of our discussions, nor would I ever agree to do so.”

But that was a lie. Trump confirmed to The Wall Street Journal in December that he’d pressed Warsh on whether he could trust him to support interest rate cuts if he were chosen to lead the central bank. When Senator Ruben Gallego cornered him on this point during the confirmation hearing, Warsh complained about journalistic standards.

It’s no secret that Trump has been desperate for the Fed to lower interest rates, in the hopes of boosting his party’s chances in the midterm elections. He has repeatedly attacked outgoing Chair Jerome Powell for refusing to cut rates. And Trump has no qualms demanding loyalty from those he installs, such as the conservative Supreme Court justices he won’t stop harassing.

The confirmation of Trump’s newest sycophant signals the destruction of the Fed’s independence.

“These fraudulent health care providers are getting rich by giving people medications they don’t even need,” Vice President JD Vance announced at a press conference Wednesday afternoon. “We want California to get serious about this fraud.”

Vance argued that states around the country were paying the cost of California’s allegedly blind eye, though California Governor Gavin Newsom vehemently denied that the administration’s attack had anything to do with fraud.

“We hate fraud. But that’s NOT what this is,” Newsom wrote in a statement on X. “Vance and Oz are attacking programs that keep seniors and people with disabilities OUT of nursing homes. Pretty sick.”

Newsom further claimed that rising costs related to California’s In-Home Supportive Services, or IHSS, which provides more than 730,000 low-income, disabled residents with home-based care, had ultimately saved the federal government money.

“Why has IHSS grown in California? It’s simple: Because California is keeping more people OUT of far more expensive nursing homes!” Newsom wrote.

The Trump admin has singled out California as the “ground zero” of health care fraud, as the government aims to strangle Medicaid funding around the nation. Vance’s announcement follows actions taken weeks prior by the federal administration that suspended the licenses of 447 hospice facilities and 23 home health agencies around the Los Angeles area, on suspicion of fraud.

Vance also said that his anti-fraud unit would “very aggressively encourage states to take Medicaid fraud more seriously” and would soon be issuing letters to all 50 states “that will require them to show that they are aggressively prosecuting Medicaid fraud in their states.”

“And if they don’t, we are going to turn off the money,” Vance noted.

This story has been updated.

It was the first time the Senate has voted on a measure to end the war in Iran since the conflict crossed the 60-day deadline. After that point, the War Powers Act requires the president to withdraw his forces unless Congress declares war or approves an extension. The motion failed by a single vote, at 49–50.

Three Republicans—Senators Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and Rand Paul—broke with party leadership to support the measure.

It should come as no surprise that Fetterman was the sole Democrat to vote against the measure, as he’s expressed outspoken support for acting against Iran, which he called “the real enemy, the real threat, the real danger.” But in siding with Republicans (and Israel), Fetterman is acting against not only the will of his party but the wills of his constituents. A March poll found that Pennsylvania voters held a -16 net disapproval rating of America’s recent military strikes in Iran.

Trump has reportedly ordered Republicans to attempt to sway Fetterman to switch parties to help retain the GOP’s fragile majority in the Senate. Fetterman claimed he’d make a “shitty Republican,” while Trump has called the Pennsylvania centrist his “favorite Democrat.”

The FBI now has a team of special agents willing to pursue political targets identified by the Trump administration, NOTUS reported Wednesday.

The unit is reportedly referred to internally as the “payback squad,” though a senior FBI official told NOTUS on background that no team had been created with that name. The official noted, however, that bureau personnel are most likely referring to a specific effort undertaken by a group titled the Director’s Advisory Team, which was created in 2025 to “[get] to the bottom of some abuses of power” that allegedly took place during previous presidential administrations.

One current government official told the outlet that the team has been tasked with building cases similar to the one developed against former FBI Director James Comey, who was indicted by a federal grand jury in April over an Instagram post that the White House interpreted to be a threat on Donald Trump’s life.

A current law enforcement official told NOTUS that the team is composed of people who “know what they’re signing up for” and have taken rotational shifts at an off-site location unaffiliated with established FBI field offices.

The senior FBI official said that the unit team was “detached” from the FBI’s Washington Field Office and has recently added more agents out of New York.

It’s not the only major shift taking place at the bureau in order to abet Trump’s aims: More than 6,000 FBI agents were diverted to handling “immigration-related matters” last year, effectively redefining the agency’s work in the process.

The immigration operation is similar to restructurings taking place at other major agencies as the Trump administration’s agenda supersedes and even undermines their long-term missions. The Department of Homeland Security has had to divert resources in order to abet Trump’s deportation plans, and the Department of Defense shifted billions of dollars to fund Trump’s border mission.

The Justice Department has also dropped thousands of criminal cases in an attempt to funnel its efforts—almost singularly—toward convicting immigration cases. Altogether, the chief law enforcement agency ended some 23,000 criminal cases in the first six months of Trump’s term, including investigations into terrorism, white-collar crimes, and drugs, while prosecuting 32,000 new immigration cases.

The shift in priorities is an indication that “making America safe again” is not necessarily as much of a goal for the current administration as Trump has promised. At the president’s direction, federal authorities have arrested thousands of noncriminal immigrants across the country, despite repeated pledges that the deportation purge is focused on the “worst of the worst”—such as “murderers, pedophiles, rapists, gang members, and terrorists.” Meanwhile, America’s law enforcement authorities are being tasked with persecuting his political enemies.

Burgum was testifying before the House Natural Resources Committee, and exposed himself under questioning from Democratic Representative Jared Huffman, who brought up energy projects in Nevada.

“All of these projects you’re describing in Nevada have one thing in common—when the sun goes down, they produce zero electricity,” Burgum said, going on to say that other forms of electricity generation would still be needed with solar power and that it is unreliable. Huffman then made a cheeky remark to the committee chair, Republican Representative Bruce Westerman.

“Mr. Chairman, I request unanimous consent to enter in the record this amazing new technology that apparently the secretary is unaware of: It’s a battery. China’s figured it out. That’s why they’re cleaning our clock on clean energy. But I want to enter that into the record,” Huffman said, to a smirk from Westerman.

BURGUM: When the sun goes down, solar produces zero electricity

HUFFMAN: I want to enter into the record this amazing new technology that apparently the secretary is unaware of -- it's a battery pic.twitter.com/tPmRhmtnA9

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 13, 2026

Burgum replied that China being the world’s largest emitter should be part of that submission, to which Huffman replied that China produced “far more clean energy.” Westerman then intervened to end the repartee.

Burgum, formerly the governor of North Dakota, has extensive ties to the oil and gas industry. He shares President Trump’s hostility to cleaner forms of energy, and doesn’t publicly object to Trump’s contention that climate change is a “con job.” But at the very least, Burgum should know that solar energy is aided considerably by battery storage.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, as well as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, are slated to speak at “Rededicate 250: National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving,” which is partly funded by taxpayer dollars set aside for the country’s 250th birthday celebrations.

The other speakers are overwhelmingly Protestant Christian, with notable exceptions being Catholic leaders Bishop Robert Barron and Cardinal Timothy Dolan, as well as Rabbi Meir Soloveichik. The Reverend Paula White-Cain, President Trump’s spiritual adviser, said in a webinar about the event on April 28 that the festival “is about the history and the foundations of our nation, which was built on Christian values, on the Bible.… This is really truly rededicating the country to God.”

White-Cain, who has compared Trump to Jesus, added that the celebration would not include leaders “praying to all these different Gods.”

“We are focusing on our heritage as a Judeo-Christian nation,” Brittany Baldwin, executive director of the White House’s 250 Task Force, also said in the webinar. “We worked very hard with the faith leaders we trust … to ensure that we hear their concerns and we have the right focus for our community of believers, across the country. So I think if you do see another religion represented, it would probably be in a modest way.”

The taxpayer-funded event seems to be at odds with the First Amendment to the Constitution’s establishment clause, which is supposed to guard against a state religion, and has senior members of the government participating. White-Cain’s involvement suggests that the festival will be full of reverence to Trump, even if he isn’t there. Considering that Trump just celebrated a golden statue of himself at his Florida estate that is definitely not an idol, the event seems a little hollow too.

Earlier this year, ICE head Todd Lyons announced that the agents would be present at the World Cup just for security, not enforcement. Now, Los Angeles’s World Cup hosting committee can’t even promise that—despite requests from FIFA President Gianni Infantino and strike threats from food and beverage workers, a group that is more likely to be subject to an ICE raid.

“We are working very closely with them to make sure they’re just focused on us, providing us a safe and secure event and nothing else,” committee head Kathryn Schloessman said. “But having said that, I am not the ultimate decision-maker on that.”

ICE’s presence and potential for raids may very well create an absolute nightmare for the U.S., host cities, international fans, and the countless migrant workers behind the scenes.

Donald Trump’s executive assistant Natalie Harp is the woman behind his overnight Truth Social sprees, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. Through twilight-hour shifts, Harp has created the impression that the president never sleeps and is instead spending his should-be bedtime obsessively retweeting baseless conspiracies about the 2020 presidential election and Fox News headlines about his purported popularity among the American public.

The 34-year-old aide supplies the president with stacks of printed-out drafts and awaits his approval before hitting post, sources told the Journal.

Her work has included posts that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, and an AI-generated image of Trump as Jesus Christ. Trump took down both posts after they spurred immense public backlash. In the former instance, Trump claimed he did not see the section of the video that racistly mocked the former president and first lady. A White House official blamed the mistake on an editing error.

The frustration lies partly in the perceived chain of command: Harp does not share her drafts with anyone else in the White House but the president, claiming that she works for him and only him, reported the Journal. That’s prompted tensions between Harp and some of the federal employees affected by her incendiary writing, such as the chief of staff’s office.

In a statement, White House communications director Steven Cheung affirmed the president’s reliance on Truth Social as his primary mode of communication with the American people, yet declined to comment on how the office crafts them.

“Truth Social has never been hotter, and it’s because President Trump offers his unfiltered and direct thoughts to the American people, without the biased media taking him out of context,” Cheung said. “We don’t discuss internal deliberations of how the process works, but no other social-media tool has been more effective than Truth.”

During an interview with Breitbart editor in chief Alex Marlow last week, Sebastian Gorka, the pugnacious far-right influencer angling to be the next head of the National Counterterrorism Center, was asked whether he considered right-wing extremism a threat.

When Marlow asked if there was a threat of “right-wing terror,” Gorka claimed that there were not “comparable trendlines to violence on the right” as on the left (a favorite right-wing talking point). But he then name-dropped two of the highest-profile right-wing figures—who also happen to be MAGA defectors.

“We have to have an effective, accurate snapshot on who are part of the conservative movement today, because I would say to you I’m not sure that Nick Fuentes or Tucker Carlson are conservatives,” Gorka said.

“If you are lauding Sharia law, if you are saying that there are Muslim states that seem to be better qualitatively than America in terms of freedom and prosperity, I’m not sure that means you’re part of the conservative movement. So if you remove those individuals and you understand that they’re not conservatives, what’s left?”

To be clear, Carlson did not laud sharia law. Rather, he claimed that Western cities were degrading from “self-hatred,” while Eastern cities were fostering “stability” and “hospitality,” and were “tolerant of diversity.”

As independent journalist Ken Klippenstein pointed out Tuesday, none of this actually has to do with extremism at all: Carlson and Fuentes are being called out because they criticized Donald Trump over his reckless military campaign in Iran.

Carlson has been arguably more antiwar than many establishment Democrats, calling Trump’s Iran war “the single most foolish thing any American president has ever done.” Fuentes has urged against the strikes, and claimed the U.S. has “lost decisively,” having failed to achieve any of its objectives.

More to the point, both figures have been critical of Israel. Fuentes is a straight-up Hitler-loving neo-Nazi, while Carlson is an openly racist conspiracy theorist who also criticizes the U.S-Israel relationship and the ongoing atrocities in Gaza.

Both figures retain immense influence among the conservative population, but in diverging from MAGA’s full-throated support of Israel, Fuentes and Carlson have landed themselves among the ranks of people the Trump administration seeks to target. The two men definitely stand out: The administration has described other domestic terrorists as “anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”

This story has been updated.

A whopping 77 percent of Americans blame President Trump for increasing the cost of living in their community, up 37 percent from 2024. Seventy-five percent of Americans feel that the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon that Trump started has had a negative impact on their financial situation. And just one out of four Americans believes that the recent developments in the stock market that Trump touts incessantly have had any real impact on their lives. And even fewer approve of how he’s handled inflation—the very issue that helped vault him back into office.

“These are the ugliest numbers I have ever seen on inflation … the five worst polls ever, for any president—they all belong to Donald John Trump, and they have all occurred within the last month,” CNN’s Harry Enten said on Wednesday. “Promises made by Donald Trump—in the minds of the American people—are not promises kept by Donald Trump.”

This comes just a day after the president so indignantly proclaimed that he didn’t care about the financial struggles of Americans “even a little bit.” Those numbers, combined with the president’s complete detachment from the economic realities of Americans—many of whom voted for him—point to an uphill battle, at best, in the upcoming midterm elections.

Enten: "It's not just one poll. The five worst polls ever for any president on inflation, they all belong to Donald Trump and they have all occurred in the last month. What we're talking about here is the worst numbers ever. Joe Biden isn't in there. Jimmy Carter isn't in there." pic.twitter.com/HEb6no6arn

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 13, 2026

The New York Post reports that CBS editor in chief Bari Weiss gave Netanyahu, wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes, a choice between the show’s longtime correspondent Lesley Stahl or the network’s chief Washington correspondent, Major Garrett. Netanyahu chose Garrett, who doesn’t work for 60 Minutes.

Stahl had reportedly spent months trying to land the interview with Netanyahu, only to have Weiss, a self-described “Zionist fanatic,” book Netanyahu herself and give him his pick of interviewers. Status reports that this did not go over well with 60 Minutes staffers including Stahl.

“Bari did what she had to do to secure the interview,” an unnamed source told the Post. “Bibi’s office picked Major over Stahl.”

Ever since she was named editor in chief, Weiss has directly intervened in programming and journalism decisions at CBS. She pulled a story about Venezuelan migrants whom the Trump administration deported to El Salvador’s CECOT last year, and recently chose not to renew the contract of the journalist behind the story, Sharyn Alfonsi.

Last month, Weiss meddled with another CBS show, CBS Sunday Morning, making last-minute script changes and edits on a story about Israeli archeological digs in the West Bank. One of the story’s subjects, cultural heritage researcher Zaid Azhari, later complained that his interview was “selectively edited to falsely portray me as someone who erases Jewish history.”

Journalism appears to be taking a back seat to ideology at Bari Weiss’s CBS, and her pro-Trump and pro-Israel views are becoming a staple of the network’s coverage. The White House, as well as the Israeli government, are liking what they see.

On Tuesday, Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton wrote in a letter that “members of the Democratic Caucus will receive individual letters removing them from all standing committees and subcommittees of the House, except where membership is required.” He justified this blanket censure by referring to their protest, stating that the Democrats “aimed at disrupting the democratic and legislative processes and creating disorder on the House Floor.”

The GOP is responding to Democrats protesting being wiped off the map by ripping away the last bit of representative power they had, all while scolding them for “instigating and encouraging disruptions … in coordination with paid protestors and attendees,” and using “prohibited props and noisemakers on the House Floor.”

“Speaker of the TN House Cameron Sexton just removed me and every Democrat—and therefore every Black elected official in the state legislature from any committee we served on,” said Representative Justin Pearson, who was at the forefront of last week’s protests. “This move strips nearly 2 million Tennesseans from the representation they deserve in TN state [legislature].

“I just got an official letter from Speaker Cameron Sexton stripping me of all my committee assignments for protesting their white supremacist agenda.… Just as my white Republican colleagues chose racial retaliation against Tennessee’s Black voters, the Speaker of the House is now choosing retaliation against a Black lawmaker for standing up against their Jim Crow racial gerrymander,” Representative Justin Jones wrote. “His assault on our democracy is not about me, but silencing the voices of the people who democratically elected me, the 70,000 people who call District 52 home.

“For refusing to play along, Democrats are now being removed from committees.… The real disorder is not passionate dissent on behalf of Tennesseans whose voices are being silenced,” House Minority Leader Karen Camper said. “The real disorder is a legislature that increasingly believes rules only apply when convenient and democracy only works when they get the outcome they want.”

Multiple groups have begun legal action against the newly drawn Tennessee map.

The Virginia Republican was completely mum Tuesday as MeidasTouch asked several point-blank questions related to her recent endorsement of a radio host saying Jeffries had “cotton-picking hands.”

“Representative, do you have anything more to say after agreeing with racist comments made by a radio host?” asked the reporter.

Silence.

In another exchange, the MeidasTouch reporter asked if Kiggans would resign for agreeing with those comments, and the Republican briskly walked away.

Reporter: Do you have any more to say after agreeing with racist comments made by a radio host?

Kiggans:

Reporter: Will you resign for agreeing with those comments?

Kiggans: pic.twitter.com/fc3F5fMJfE

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 13, 2026

Kiggans has faced immense blowback since she appeared on Richmond-based radio commentator Rich Herrera’s show Monday to discuss the state’s hotly contested congressional maps. The since-deleted interview flew off the rails when Kiggans emphatically concurred with Herrera after he referred to Jeffries as a slave.

“He spent $20 million-plus on our redistricting debacle we had. He now is talking about ... firing our Supreme Court justices,” Herrera said of Jeffries. House Majority Forward, a nonprofit connected to Jeffries, spent roughly $40 million on the redistricting effort.

“If Hakeem Jeffries wants to be involved in Virginia politics, then I suggest he ... leave New York, move down here to Virginia, run for office down here, you can represent us,” Herrera continued. “If not, get your cotton-picking hands off of Virginia.”

“That’s right. Ditto. Yes. Yes, to that,” Kiggans replied.

The term “cotton-picking hands” is heavily rooted in the history of U.S. slavery, literally referring to the Black men, women, and children who were forced to pick cotton.

Kiggans is up for reelection in November. One of her opponents in the race, former Representative Elaine Luria, wrote Monday evening that “the racist comments proudly endorsed today by Jen Kiggans ... are disgusting and beneath any elected official.”

In a statement on X Monday night, Kiggans claimed that she did not agree with the host’s remark and that it was “obvious” she was responding to the larger argument about Jeffries’s involvement in the redistricting effort. She argued that the nationwide political rebuke was “precisely what’s wrong with Democrats.”

“Every lie and distortion is intended to distract from getting their hats handed to them and the Virginia Supreme Court’s clear message: stop trying to rig our elections,” Kiggans wrote. “Democrats are trying to destroy Virginia’s court because they disagree with it. THAT is the real danger to our country.”

Christie Stephenson, a spokesperson for Jeffries, derided Kiggans Tuesday as an extremist who endorses “disgusting, vile and racist language” and “pretends to be a centrist.”

“The voters of Virginia will hold her accountable at the ballot box in November,” Stephenson said in a statement shared on X.

The staffer approached McConnell after the Kentucky Republican attempted to preemptively conclude the hearing Tuesday, during which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Dan Caine testified about the Pentagon’s behemoth budget request and the war in Iran. The staffer explained that some senators still needed to ask questions, and his directions were audible on the microphone.  

McConnell: I’m going to ask Senator Murkowski to wrap up. Thank you all for being here

Staffer: Baldwin, Shaheen, and Kennedy still have questions pic.twitter.com/S2z9Kv3OUI

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 12, 2026

“The guy that came up to Mitch McConnell today when McConnell thought the hearing was over, and started speaking in his ear for Mitch to belatedly introduce some other people, all Democrats and, by doing so, made Mitch look foolish and completely out of it, should be immediately fired,” Trump posted on Truth Social early Wednesday. 

“This was a case where Mitch wasn’t confused, he just didn’t understand why he was being asked to do something when it was too late, and people were wrapping up to leave—They wanted to go home.”

The remaining senators were Democrats Tammy Baldwin and Jeanne Saheen and Republican John Kennedy.

Clearly, someone—likely not Trump—had done some research on who the staffer was: Robert Karem. Although the president called him a “Never Trumper,” it seems Trump nominated Karem to serve as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs in 2017. Karem currently serves as majority clerk for the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on defense.

Now, Trump accused Karem of “grandstanding,” adding: “FIRE THE BUM!” Trump seems to have taken a page out of Elon Musk’s book by targeting specific government workers on whom to unleash his most crazed followers. 

The vice president said the November midterms would come down to one big issue. “It’s fundamentally, do you want people in Washington, D.C., who fight for you, who fight for the people of this district, or who fight for corruption and fraud?” he said.

It might seem surprising, given President Trump’s rampant and ever-expanding corruption, that Republicans think this is a winning issue for them. But much anti-corruption messaging depends on how voters define corruption and who they think is responsible for it. Republicans for years have been pointing fingers at the poor, people of color, urban residents, “welfare queens,” and immigrants. Vance stuck to that message in Iowa because it resonates with rural voters and the kind of persuadable voters the Democratic Party needs to win back. So the Democrats have work to do in redirecting anger over political corruption toward other, more credible targets that will also resonate with these voters.

To lay out his case that Democrats are the corrupt ones, Vance recalled February’s State of the Union speech, in which Trump asked the politicians in the chamber to stand if they agreed that “the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.” Vance said in Iowa that no Democrats stood. “They didn’t care about you. They didn’t care about the people of this district. They didn’t care about the farmers or the factory workers or the people who actually make this country run,” he said. “Because now we have, in Washington D.C., a Democrat Party that is so focused on illegal immigration, that is so focused on people who don’t have the legal right to be here, that is so focused on fraud because so many of their friends get rich from fraud that they forgot to look after you.”

Vance defined fraud as people misusing government programs, and related false stories of “Somalian fraudsters” using programs they weren’t eligible for. “We had let fraud become so rampant in this country that people were able to get rich, not by creating something amazing, not by employing something, not by building something beautiful with their hands,” he continued. “They were able to get rich by defrauding every single person in this room. And they were taking money that should go to America’s low-income families, to America’s elderly, to people who are struggling in our communities. They were stealing it out of their pocket and stealing it out of your pocket so they could get rich.”

This is not true, of course, but it draws on some beliefs many key voters already have. United Today, Stronger Tomorrow, an organizing group that works in the Inter-Mountain-West region, has been conducting a rural listening tour and released findings last month that show why this could be effective messaging in many parts of the country. In focus groups and conversations, according to the report, “concerns about corruption and self-enrichment were among the most consistent points of agreement across participants in our research.” And these rural residents said Republicans and Democrats alike were guilty of it. “There’s a deep, deep anger towards both political parties, and political institutions generally,” said David Dodge, who leads the project.

But here’s the rub: 58 percent of them said Democrats were the most corrupt, versus 47 percent who said the same about Republicans.

Interestingly, despite their anger at politicians and the U.S. government today, these people also expressed faith in the idea of American government more generally. “Even though they are deeply distrustful of the system working as it should, there was really strong support for our Constitution,” Dodge said. “It is this founding document that can get us out of the darkness that we’ve kind of found ourselves in.”

This suggests that voters might put faith in politicians who make appeals to constitutional ideals and a deep-seated sense of American identity—which perhaps was Vance’s intent with his nativist comments in Iowa. The idea the real corruption in the U.S. is among everyday people applying for and using taxpayer-funded programs is widely believed in rural communities but also in many communities across the country. When the progressive group Way to Win tested messages on corruption in surveys with voters in key Sun Belt states, it found that messages about government fraud and overspending outperformed messages about campaign finance and other reforms.

Vance’s focus on the midterms as an election that will fight “corruption” shows that Republicans continue to realize something about rural voters and swing voters that Democrats don’t: Just because voters are unhappy with Trump doesn’t mean they’ll actually vote for Democrats. The deep mistrust in what the government is doing and who it supports can be directed wherever politicians are willing to point, and politicians who are in favor of government spending and government programs are vulnerable to the charge that they’re up to no good. Vance, who has presented himself as an avatar of rural, blue-collar voters, understands that people who feel like they work hard and struggle to get ahead are eager to find villains, and that a skilled politician can direct their frustration more easily than the truth can.

Some Democrats are working to counter Vance’s distorted message. In his Georgia reelection campaign, Senator Jon Ossoff has described the corruption of the Trump administration in relatable terms, accusing the president and his family of raking in billions “from foreign princes” while “rent, power, groceries and health care have all hit all-time highs this year,” as he said at an event in Augusta last month. “While you pay more for everything, the first family’s wealth is growing by billions of dollars—because they’re crooks, and everybody knows it.”

Trump’s corruption has also become a focus in the House, and many congressional Democrats have signed a pledge to support campaign finance reforms to keep big money out of politics and ban members of Congress from trading stocks while in office. They’ve also launched an Anti-Corruption and Democracy Reform Task Force, which isn’t likely to inspire voters who are wary of the federal government’s effectiveness.

To be successful, Democratic candidates will need to tell voters a compelling story, as Ossoff does, connecting corruption to some of the hardships American families are facing. It also might require Democrats to embrace some policies elected officials don’t like, like term limits, and supporting challengers who attack the establishment. “It’s not going to be enough to just say Republicans are bad on corruption, or Trump is bad on corruption,” Tiffany Muller, the president of End Citizens United, the group that organized the pledge, told HuffPost earlier this month. “We need to have a much more proactive message.”

Cindy Burbank actually campaigned on exiting the race. The retired pharmacy technician easily won over the state’s liberal voters Tuesday evening, securing 89.2 percent of the vote and every region of the state sans one rural county in a primary match-up against anti-abortion pastor Bill Forbes.

Forbes was accused of being a covert Republican, “planted” in the Democratic primary by Senator Pete Ricketts in order to give the incumbent an advantage come midterms.

While Burbank earned the state Democratic nomination, she was never the party’s favorite. Instead, knowing they would have little success on the ballot against an incumbent Republican, Democratic party leaders chose an unexpected third option: endorsing Dan Osborn, a mechanic and former labor union leader running as an independent.

“William Forbes is not running to serve Nebraskans. He is running to trick voters,” Nebraska Democratic Party Chair Jane Kleeb said in March. “The Nebraska Democratic Party made a deliberate, principled decision not to field a candidate in the U.S. Senate race.”

Ricketts has denied any association with Forbes.

Osborn’s odds in a match-up against Ricketts are surprisingly good, Democrat-aligned polls indicate. The lone question for Democrats heading into Tuesday’s primaries was how the party could avoid a three-way split between Ricketts, Osborn, and a candidate on their own ticket. Enter: Burbank.

“I don’t wanna split the ballot,” Burbank told The New York Times via text message after her win. “I have no expectations of being able to win in November.”

After the race, Burbank told the times that she was “kinda disappointed” by her overwhelming success Tuesday evening. The race was called just six minutes after polls closed, which Burbank joked had taken “all the fun out of it.”

In another message, asked if she hoped Ricketts would also drop out, Burbank wrote: “That would be such sweetness.”

Burbank was initially stripped from the ballot by the GOP secretary of state due to her unorthodox plan, but she sued the state and ultimately had her ballot access restored.

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 just got hit by some really terrible inflation numbers, and boy is he in a rage about it. He erupted at a reporter for asking a reasonable question about prices, seethed at another reporter over his ballroom, and made an admission about ordinary Americans’ economic pain that was incredibly self-damaging. Yet we’re in a split-screen moment. Trump’s inability to resolve the Iran fiasco means his travails with inflation will likely keep getting worse. But we’re also seeing GOP chances in the midterms rebound significantly due to redistricting. So we’re working through all of this with Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, who’s been arguing for months that Trump’s political problems on the economy predate the Iran war and won’t be fixed if the war ends. Simon, always good to have you on.

Simon Rosenberg: Greg, it’s always great to be with you.

Sargent: So we just learned that consumer prices spiked big time last month, much of it driven by energy prices rising due to Trump’s war. The consumer price index is up 3.8 percent in April relative to last year. That’s up from 2.4 percent before the war. But even if you take out volatile food and energy costs, prices still rose by the same amount. Simon, your quick reaction to all that news?

Rosenberg: Yeah. I mean, look, Trump’s tariffs and his broader economic strategy had already caused the economy to slow, job growth to slow, and inflation to reignite prior to the war. And the more data that we’ve gotten, the more it’s clear he took an extraordinary risk by engaging in this war, given that things were already heading in the wrong direction in the economy, which we also saw in his polling data.

And now we’ve had a couple months of postwar data and Trump’s polling numbers are collapsing even further. His economic ratings are going down. We have the lowest consumer confidence recorded in 65 years. And the inflation numbers are ugly. And so it’s pushing him and his party further and further away from the electorate.

Sargent: Absolutely. And Trump knows he’s in trouble on all this. He was asked about all of it by a reporter and he lost it. Listen.

Reporter (voiceover): Mr. President, you promised to bring inflation down. It’s now at its highest level in three years. Are your policies not working? What’s happening?

Donald Trump (voiceover): My policies are working incredibly. If you go back to just before the war, for the last three months, inflation was at 1.7 percent. Now, we had a choice. Let these lunatics have a nuclear weapon. If you want to do that, then you’re a stupid person. And you happen to be. I mean, I know you very well.

Sargent: Simon, I was unable to determine who this, quote-unquote, stupid reporter is. But what’s funny here is his anger over being asked whether his policies are to blame. You could not ask for a clearer example of a president actually being to blame for economic conditions. It’s never this clear—tariffs, immigration, the war. The connection is absolutely inarguable. Your thoughts on that?

Rosenberg: Costs are up because of him. And I think the reason this has hurt him so much in the polls is that he promised otherwise. He promised to lower everybody’s prices and costs and to make lives better for everybody. And he’s done the exact opposite. And I think that’s part of the reason that he and his party are paying such a heavy price right now in polling.

In economic terms, he’s done all these things, including cutting health care, that have hurt working people. And he gave himself a massive tax cut. And if you look at the tariffs, the tariffs are clearly part of a strategy to shift the tax burden in the United States from wealthy people to working people. And so it’s literally the case that he’s done a series of things that have done enormous harm to working people, farmers, small business people—and done a whole series of things to enrich himself and other wealthy people in America. It’s about as clear-cut as you can get, Greg.

Sargent: Well, look, you’ve been a Democratic strategist for a long time, and for Democratic strategists like yourself, one of the things about Trump has always been that he’s really hard to hit on the economy. He’s a billionaire, but he just comes across to a whole lot of people out there—especially low-information voters—as some combination of an economic populist [and] as someone who’s not like other Republicans on the economy. He very consciously distanced himself from other Republicans on the economy in 2016, sort of did the same again in 2024.

That plus the kind of deep cultural penetration of the image of Trump as this can-do guy who snaps his fingers and makes things happen—he’s never been easily pilloried as a plutocrat. But now it sort of seems like precisely because of that, we all have a tough time getting our heads around the idea that maybe Donald Trump is perceived as out of touch on the economy. And he is perceived that way.

Rosenberg: Yeah. I mean, and I think your analysis is correct. In the 2020 election, despite the fact the economy was in the toilet when Trump ran for reelection, Trump beat Biden with voters who said the economy was the number one issue by 81 to 18. And he also beat Biden by more than 10 points on the question of who would be better for the economy. Biden won the election because of COVID, but even though he had crashed the economy, his economic numbers stayed unbelievably high in the 2020 election. So yes, you’re right.

And I think in 2024, part of what gave that extra veneer of this idea that if you want to make more money, you go with Trump—which I think was very important, particularly in the Hispanic community and with younger voters who had just been through COVID and were worried about their economic lives—he also had Elon Musk and the tech bros right there to give that additional imprimatur of the people who were creating wealth and prosperity in America who were now on his side. And it was a very powerful kind of branding thing that he did. It’s all unraveled now.

And you’re seeing this gradually. And what happened is, about a month or six weeks ago, you started seeing polling where Democrats were more trusted on the economy, more trusted on inflation, on fighting for working people. And now in CNN, Democrats had significant leads in all those measures, as opposed to just being up by a couple of points.

I don’t know the trajectory of this, but I think we cannot underestimate the importance of what’s happening with inflation right now. It is spiking at extraordinary levels. And the reason why it’s breaking into Republican Party circles is that gas prices really matter for Republican voters, given that they live in more rural areas, they drive bigger cars. And so now this is crashing deeply into the MAGA world and it’s breaking through the bubble. And that’s why you’re seeing his numbers come down even further.

Sargent: I want to get to the question of Democrats and the economy in a bit, but first let’s listen to more of Trump. A reporter asked him to what degree Americans’ financial situation shapes his thinking about Iran. Listen.

Reporter (voiceover): When your negotiating with Iran, Mr. President—to what extent are Americans’ financial situations motivating you to make a deal?

Donald Trump (voiceover): Not even a little bit. The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran—they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing. We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.

Sargent: This is going to end up in a lot of Democratic ads. Note the claim that he doesn’t think about Americans’ financial situation even a little bit. Simon, this is somebody who is absolutely convinced that he and Republicans are politically untouchable on the economy, someone who thinks his ability to control what Americans think of him and the GOP is absolute. And I think there’s a real serious hubris at work here, kind of rooted in what we were just talking about, which is that for years, for cycle after cycle, he was untouchable on the economy—and he still thinks he is, right?

Rosenberg: Well, and they also have said that they think the war is just going to end magically, right? Just the way that COVID ended. He kept saying COVID is just going to end one day. The war is just going to end and things are going to snap back to the way they were. And I think that is the widespread belief in the Republican Party now, that this is a temporary blip. And yet what we’re seeing in the inflation data in this report is that—remember, energy inflation is different than food inflation or different than other inflation because it affects anything that is transported. That also goes up in price.

So it’s like a multiplier through the economy. It’s not just a singular pillar of inflation. And you’re starting to see that impact, for example, on food prices. Trump and the Republicans I think are in a place of extraordinary denial and magical thinking about the depth of the hole that he’s digging for them right now because of the war.

Sargent: Well, not all the data shows that unfortunately, and I want to get to that. We have this new CNN poll, which does contain brutal news for Trump and Republicans. Trump’s approval on the economy is down to 30 percent among Americans—the lowest ever from either Trump term. Seventy percent disapprove. Among independents, it’s 21 percent approve to 79 percent disapprove—that’s just extraordinary.

Meanwhile, nearly two thirds of Americans say Trump’s policies have worsened economic conditions in our country. Abysmal. And yet the CNN poll has the generic House ballot matchup at Democrats up only three points. Simon, that could be wrong—the polling averages have Democrats leading by five or six points. But still, how do you square those findings? Where are you on the claim that we keep hearing, that Democrats are underperforming in the generic ballot given Trump’s extraordinary unpopularity?

Rosenberg: I think the generic ballot has been all over the place. I mean, to be fair, there were three polls taken in the last few weeks that had the generic ballot up high single digits and double digits for the Democrats. It’s been more choppy and bouncy than I remember in recent election cycles. But certainly, look, in a potentially wave election—which we may be in—there are two different dynamics, right?

You can win an election just on voters being sick of the party in power and have the election that you want to have. And we’ve been having test cases around the election in all these special elections and other elections over the last 16 months. And things have been going very well for Democrats.

But obviously it would be better if we also had a short, clear agenda about what we would do when we got back into power. And I think that agenda is available to us. Things like we would get rid of the tariffs, which would lower your prices, right? We would restore some of the health care cuts so you can afford health care again. These are not complicated things that we can run on that are necessary things for us to do.

And my hope is that House and Senate Democrats come together around a simple agenda of things that we’ll do when we get back into power. As we did, for example, in the 2006 midterm—we had “Six for ‘06,” which was the plan that Pelosi put out, the six things that Democrats committed to do. There are different schools of thought in the family about this, but I’m in the camp that I think it would be smart for us to put out a simple, clear agenda about how we’re going to make people’s lives better and then fight like hell when we’re empowered to implement it.

Sargent: You just brought up the tariffs and Democrats and I want to home in on that for a second. This is something you’ve talked about as well. Obviously health care—Democrats feel really comfortable running on. We almost joke about it all the time at this point. But tariffs, less so. You do see some Democrats attack the tariffs and Democrats have been pretty good in some of these congressional votes. And yet you don’t hear that many Democratic candidates in tough races—tough House districts or tough states—really going hard at the tariffs, which is just mystifying to me.

Here’s my fear about that, Simon. I fear that a lot of these Democrats see these tariffs as somehow economic populist and therefore a little bit untouchable—that these Democrats fear that Trump is speaking to an authentic sentiment in the electorate that’s pro-tariff and anti-alliances and anti-globalization and anti-trade. And I think Democrats have to get over that. The tariffs are a fucking disaster. They caused the inflation and Democrats shouldn’t be afraid of saying that. Your thoughts on that? Am I right or wrong?

Rosenberg: You know, it’s like most times when I join you—you raise interesting and complicated things. I do think I’ve been a little surprised that Democrats have put a lot more energy into the health care discussion than tariffs and inflation, particularly given what Trump promised, and particularly given that we know that inflation hurt Biden in 2024.

But I will say that I’ve interviewed most of the battleground-state House and Senate candidates in the last couple of months. And the first thing that comes out of their mouths is tariffs and higher prices. And I want to just make sure your listeners are aware that in these races, here’s what they’re working with as candidates.

All these incumbent Republicans voted for the tariffs and higher prices and challenges for small businesses and farmers. They voted for the war, which further increased gas prices and other prices. They voted for the health care cuts—which is, every day that we get closer to the election, those cuts are going to be more biting in every one of these districts. They all voted to fund ICE at unprecedented levels without any reforms. And they voted to cut taxes on the wealthiest people while raising them for middle-class people.

I’ve been doing this a long time—34 years full-time—and I don’t know that we’ve ever had so much to work with. And because, to your point, Greg, I don’t know that we’ve ever seen a party so avowedly plutocratic and unconcerned with the welfare of regular people as we’re seeing right now in Trump’s second term.

Sargent: Well, I’m really heartened to think that you think some of these Democrats in tough races are engaging on the tariffs. You mentioned a little bit earlier that Democrats are leading on the economy in polls. I agree that that’s an important thing—that it’s actually something of a milestone to have Democrats favored or more trusted on the economy than Republicans. But—and I want to ask you about this—I think the data is a little bit less conclusive than I’d like it to be. You sometimes see polls with Republicans up.

And for that to be happening at a moment like this—when again, the case is so clear that Trump’s policies are to blame for economic conditions being so abysmal—for that to happen amid something like that is a little disturbing to me. And I wonder candidly, Simon, how much do you worry about the state of the Democratic brand right now? Obviously it’s not where it needs to be. Let’s face it. So where are you on all that?

Rosenberg: Yeah, no, I agree. Let me make three points about what I think is going to happen with the brand. One is I think the further we get away from the election, the sort of ugly hangover from what happened in 2024 will be more in the rearview mirror and it’ll be less of a drag on us. Second is that we’re not running as a party brand. We’re running candidates. And when candidates actually are running against Republican candidates, we’ve been way outperforming the current fundamentals of the election.

And that’s because when it’s an actual Democrat and an actual Republican and not the abstract brand, we’re doing much better. You also see that in a lot of the House polling—when you actually name the House candidate, our numbers get a little bit better. And then the third thing is, yes, I think it would be better for us as a national party to have a simple agenda. But what’s going to happen is that the candidates in these races are going to be running on a simple agenda, whatever it is, whether the national party does or not.

Sargent: Here’s more of Trump. Here he starts talking about his ballroom being under budget. And then a reporter says the costs have doubled. Listen to what happens next.

Donald Trump (voiceover): We’re right now on budget, under budget, and ahead of schedule. You doubled the size of it, you dumb person. You are not a smart person.

Sargent: Simon, just to close this out, one thing I don’t quite get is why isn’t there more discussion of what a political disaster the ballroom is for Trump and Republicans? We just learned that vulnerable Republicans don’t even want to vote for the thing, which is pretty staggering.

It’s not often that Republicans break from Trump. And here, on something like the ballroom, even though there was an alleged assassination attempt and even though the entire right wing used that assassination attempt as propaganda for the ballroom—none of it worked, and Republicans are running from the project. That’s a political catastrophe for them, though.

Rosenberg: Look, I think Trump goes to China in a few days and he’s going to go there in a very weakened position. His tariffs—I mean, the economy, the data on the economy is terrible. His economic program clearly isn’t working. His war has failed. His tariffs, which were a central bludgeon he was using against the Chinese, were just declared illegal for the second time.

He’s falling asleep regularly, looking like an old man who’s ready to move on and do something else. Once it becomes clear and understood by all that this war was a failure—as opposed to, like, people, you know—and it did enormous harm to our economy and to our standing in the world, it’s going to further drive Trump away from the American people.

So listen, I am optimistic by nature. I think if you’ve been in politics for a long time, you have to constantly—you have to believe that you can make things better, right? That you can improve people’s lives, that you can improve the standing of your party. And I think that right now, the stench of failure around Trump is actually getting far more powerful than any sense that they’re in any kind of recovery right now. And if we put our heads down, I think we can have the election that we all want to have.

Sargent: Simon, great to talk to you as always.

Rosenberg: Greg, great to be with you. Thanks for your incredible hard work. The hardest-working man in show business. I’ve been calling you that for years.

Sargent: I wish I could say that that isn’t true, Simon. Thanks for coming on.

Rosenberg: Take care. Thanks, everybody.

These images say a lot about the state of AI and creative work. They foreground the kind of proud, amoral acts of copyright infringement, or at least copyright edging, that sustain companies from OpenAI to Anthropic. They apply a warm and friendly filter on a technology whose promise is the total transformation (and possible inadvertent annihilation) of society. And, more than that, they appropriate the work of an artist who is repulsed by the rise of this technology: In a clip from 2016 that’s been in active circulation online in the past few years, Miyazaki famously said he was “disgusted” by AI animation. “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself,” he said.

[Blank] meets [blank] or [blank] in the style of [blank] has become the signature grammatical structure and logic of genAI content: “Seinfeld in the style of Hayao Miyazaki …” But that prompt format is age-old: It’s been the structure of the Hollywood elevator pitch since forever. And, in TV’s private equity era, it’s become the rigid refrain of the risk-averse executive. The creative logic of an increasingly derivative media environment mirrors the corporate logic of an industry rooted in derivation. In many ways, the imaginative grammar of genAI itself descends from this lowest-common-denominator vision of art practice.

Recently, it’s been tempting to point this out when a thinly, cynically conceived show flops. This show feels like a ChatGPT prompt! But it’s also true that many of the greatest TV writers now working have been forced to adapt their skills to this combinative mode, to become prompt hackers. Severance is The Office meets Lost. Andor is The Wire in the style of The Mandalorian. Simple ways to make risks look safe, to make a complicated idea seem easier to swallow. Culture right now, we are often told, is stuck, directionless, stale, deliberately stagnated, preprocessed. On TV, this looks like the constant churn of reboots, religious fidelity to existing IP, algorithmically synthesized protein bars of content.

Sometimes, though, a show comes along that’s such an extravagant bespoke amalgam of forms, such a whirligig of influence and reference that all of its overlapping echoes turn into a single, caterwauling, startlingly new sound. Welcome to Widow’s Bay, which feels a lot like somewhere you’ve never been before.

The easiest way to describe Widow’s Bay, now on Apple TV, is that it’s a New England Gothic Parks and Recreation. The show’s creator, Katie Dippold, in fact spent years chronicling the municipal bureaucracy of Pawnee, Indiana, and has gone on to work on a string of action comedies from The Heat to the gender-swapped Ghostbusters reboot. But that combination of references doesn’t quite sum up this show. It’s also The Andy Griffith Show by way of Twin Peaks. Possibly it’s The X-Files in the style of Veep. Is it Stranger Things meets The Lowdown? Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark? if it was written entirely by Matthew Weiner in dream sequence mode? Damon Lindelof’s Goosebumps? Stephen King’s The Good Place? Rob Reiner’s Halloween?

The point of listing all these references is to say that, while attentive viewers will surely notice them bobbing and weaving through this show’s 10 episodes, Dippold and her writers are never beholden to them, never seemingly constrained or confused by this revolving door of contrasting tones and styles. Indeed, the most impressive part about Widow’s Bay—to my mind, the sole contender for best new show of the year at this point—is how in control it is. It takes a formula that’s optimized to produce the smug smirk of recognition, the comforting thrall of nostalgia, the feeling of a successful Easter egg hunt, and, instead, surprises us again and again.

Widow’s Bay is a small island off the coast of New England. Neither a tourist trap nor a luxury destination, it’s mostly the home of a salty crew of townies who make up its rotting driftwood foundations. Mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys) is something of an outsider, a mainlander, who married a native Widow’s Bay woman in his youth and stayed. When we meet him, he himself is a widower whose rambunctious, stir-crazy son Evan (Kingston Rumi Southwick) wants nothing more than to leave the island behind forever. For reasons both mundane and mysterious: He can’t. Tom is trying as hard as he can to turn Widow’s Bay—too late—into the kind of bustling coastal destination that his son might be proud to call home, but he is beset on all sides by the locals who hate him (he ran unopposed), the City Hall staffers who don’t respect him, and the powerful occult forces of ancient evil that lurk deep in the heart of the island. The show is Jaws, from the perspective of the mayor of Amity Island.

Widow’s Bay is a horror-comedy that manages to be both an incredibly funny and dense laugh-out-loud joke machine and a genuinely scary and menacing fright fest. Neither generic marker takes precedence over the other; they are mutually, ecstatically intertwined. It’s an incredibly difficult tonal balancing act, and one of the thrills of the early episodes is watching the show’s writers and directors pull it off with such aplomb. The major obstacle to Tom’s dream of turning Widow’s Bay into the next Martha’s Vineyard is that the island is obviously, excessively cursed. Demons, ghosts, witches, zombies, serial killers, unholy monsters, natural disasters, haunted houses, haunted hotels, haunted bookmobiles—Widow’s Bay has it all. And while visiting tourists are charmed by the deep well of island lore and superstition (an early plot point is Tom’s successful campaign to get The New York Times to run a glowing travel feature about Widow’s Bay), locals know it to be more than folksy legend.

So, the show’s horror aspects provide the madcap “situations” for its sitcom aspects to feast upon. And they do. One episode is an extended, slapstick final girl chase sequence performed with perfect comic precision by Kate O’Flynn, who steals every scene she’s in; another episode is a supernatural, shipboard Jaws homage that unfolds with the farcical rhythm of Frasier.

In an early standout episode, Tom spends the night as a guest at the island’s haunted inn to prove to the islanders that it isn’t haunted, occasioning a cascade of brackish humor and jump scares. There are faintly audible screams coming through the vents in his room; the man in the hotel welcome video wanders off out of frame never to return; Tom befriends the affable traveling businessman in the room next to his only to be stalked and attacked by him later.

The show’s writers are adept at sight gags, and the hotel is stacked to the ceiling with them. At one point, Tom picks up a dusty board game from an ancient-looking cupboard. The cover simply says TEETH, and when he opens it, the box contains only a single pair of pliers. Every joke in this show feels handcrafted, a box with something startling inside. The viewer, then, is encouraged to pay extra attention to the surroundings, scanning for what’s hidden in every frame—the same way, incidentally, that you might watch a horror movie.

Is it yet too banal an observation to say that the fatal flaw of AI-generated content is its lack of humanity? [Blank] in the style of [blank] is an equation, not an idea. The resulting products might be diverting or clever or even lovable, but they are, at the same time, cold, lifeless, inhumane. The same can sometimes be true of creative works built on that model. To conceive of a television show or a film as a mere contraption, the network of references as a kind of electrical wiring, is to miss the point—the conscious or unconscious act of recognition, on the part of the viewer, a spark. The prompt format can be helpful as a marketing tool to describe a work of art; it is deadly to conceive of one that way.

Widow’s Bay might well have been a chilly recitation of recognizable images and forms if it hadn’t been for the care of its writers, the virtuosity of its directors (from TV visionary Hiro Murai to buzzy auteurs like Ti West and Andrew DeYoung), and, most of all, the miraculous intercession of its casting director. O’Flynn as Tom’s socially inept right-hand woman is the show’s secret weapon, ably dropping deadpan one-liners. Stephen Root does what he does best as an old salt, and so does the incredible character actress Dale Dickey. Kevin Carroll, as the skeptical sheriff, is a welcome sight since his days on The Leftovers (another show whose crackpot depiction of grief is detectable as DNA here), and you know a show is working with a deep bench when the legend Jeff Hiller is just hanging around in the background.

But the thing that makes all of this hold together is Matthew Rhys, giving what’s easily his best performance since his Emmy-winning turn on The Americans. TV writers and filmmakers have struggled to figure out how to harness his uniquely charismatic qualities in the intervening years. He’s been cast for his soft menace and smothered rage (The Beast in Me, Death Comes to Pemberley), and he’s been cast for his hapless depressive manner (Perry Mason, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood). But these casting decisions somewhat misremember what was so great about his performance on The Americans. Yes, he could be menacing, and yes, he could be depressive. But he could also be very, very funny. Much like his prestige TV contemporary Elisabeth Moss, Matthew Rhys has had a hard time getting cast in comic roles, despite the fact that his ability to seamlessly cross-fade between comedy and tragedy, between sitcom dad and killer, was what defined his early breakout. Widow’s Bay is a show built around that ability to switch between modes. It’s an ingratiating, instantly unmissable performance, an actorly feat of alchemy, a hilariously, terrifyingly human thing.

Let’s agree from the outset that California’s top-two primary, also known as a jungle primary, is not the only reason this year’s governor’s race is a mess. We start with the problem that the candidates have all, in some way, come up short.

Until last summer, the Democratic smart money was on former Vice President Kamala Harris. For Harris, running for governor would have been a sensible move—certainly more sensible than running again for president. But in July, Harris removed herself from consideration. That cleared the path for Representative Eric Swalwell. Swalwell was well on his way to becoming front-runner when allegations of rape and other sexual misbehavior compelled him to drop out of the race and resign from Congress. Much of Swalwell’s support then swung to Xavier Becerra, who was health and human services secretary under President Joe Biden. That took many of Becerra’s former colleagues in the Biden administration by surprise, and four of them, speaking not for attribution, told Politico last week that Becerra is kind of an empty suit.

Democratic former Representative Katie Porter rode high in the polls for a while, but lately she’s been slipping. Porter got caught on one video being verbally abusive to a staffer (“Get out of my fucking shot”), and on another berating a CBS News reporter in Trumpian fashion (“I feel like this is unnecessarily argumentative. What is your question?”). The other top-polling Democrat, billionaire former hedge fund manager Tom Steyer, has lately been gaining support, but billionaires are in pretty bad odor these days. (To read my contribution to the billionaire-bashing literature, click here.) Cal Matters reports that Steyer is “on track to run the most expensive gubernatorial campaign in California history.”

I also feel duty-bound to report that Democratic former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who placed third in the 2018 gubernatorial primary, is running again this year. But he’s been polling at 1 or 2 percent, which is very painful to watch.

If the Democratic field is weak, the Republican field is (much like the Republican Party itself) a catastrophe. Swalwell’s departure reduced but didn’t eliminate the risk that a Democratic split would cede the two top spots to Republicans Steve Hilton, a former Fox News blowhard previously known as British Prime Minister David Cameron’s “pint-sized Rasputin,” and Chad Bianco, a Covid-mandate-defying sheriff of Riverside County who recently declared himself “very proud” to be a past member of the Oath Keepers, a paramilitary group implicated in the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Hilton is endorsed by Trump and holds the lead in most polls. The likelihood that at least one of these extremists will end up in the general election makes a mockery of the principal goo-goo argument for the jungle primary, which is that it’s supposed to weed out extremists.

The top-two primary system is—as so many California ballot propositions turn out to be—a solution in search of a problem. Its roots, ironically, lay in the highly partisan 2003 recall election of California Governor Grey Davis, which invited voters to choose an alternative candidate, Democrat or Republican, on a single ballot. Davis was recalled, and the actor and bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger was voted in to replace him largely on the basis of name recognition. Schwarzenegger’s single-ballot victory predisposed the Governator to favor Proposition 14, the 2010 ballot measure that ushered in the single-ballot top-two system. “That’s how I got elected,” Schwarzenegger told NPR, “because I appealed to Democrats and Republicans, independents ... everybody.” Actually, the way Schwarzenegger got elected was that a very combative car-alarm magnate named Darrell Issa, later a Republican member of Congress, spent $2 million to throw Davis out of office (and early on hoped to replace Davis himself).

Since Schwarzenegger, a fairly moderate Republican, was elected on a nonpartisan ballot, he figured that single-ballot primaries would keep California from electing extremists in the future. But California hadn’t elected many extremists to statewide office before Schwarzenegger. Indeed, during the previous half-century, the only extremist elected California governor had been Ronald Reagan (1967–1975), and once he entered office Reagan’s extremism went into hibernation; Governor Reagan raised taxes and signed a pro-abortion bill into law well before Roe v. Wade. (The Gipper was much more conservative later as president.) I omit Pete Wilson (1991–1999) because Wilson was the opposite of Reagan, an extremist conservative governor elected as a moderate. It’s hard to remember now, but during his 1990 campaign, Wilson’s conservative credentials were called seriously into question.

Even if you dispute the foregoing analysis, you’ll surely agree that when Schwarzenegger campaigned for Proposition 14, he wasn’t thinking, “Let’s head off extremists like Ronald Reagan and Pete Wilson.” The fact that most Republican and Democratic party leaders very sensibly opposed Prop 14 enhanced its appeal to voters, and the measure became law.

One of the arguments for open primaries is that they increase participation, but in 2018 Jamelle Bouie argued in Slate that this hadn’t happened in California. “Because there are no parties choosing nominees,” wrote Bouie, “top two is essentially the first stage of the general election—with much lower turnout because of its timing in June.” A June 2023 report by the nonprofit Unite America Institute disputed this. I have no idea who’s right. But that same report’s conclusion that California’s top-two primary reduces polarization looks pretty silly right now given Steve Hilton’s strong performance in the polls.

It’s important to remember that when newspaper reporters and political scientists talk about political polarization, they are mostly talking about Republican extremism. Yes, Democrats have lately shifted a little bit to the left, but Republicans spent most of the past 40 years shifting ever-more rightward, and in the age of Trump, Republicans have adopted a nonideological thuggish authoritarianism best described as Whatever Donald Wants, or WDW. Because Trump has systematically purged the GOP of any conservative or moderate who resists his authoritarianism, the Republican Party has become the WDW Party. With Trump’s ever-declining approval rating down to 38 percent, the best way for Democrats to win is to make clear that they oppose the WDW Party. Jungle primaries are bad at accomplishing this.

Strangely, Republicans are better able to grasp the value of single-party primaries. Louisiana, which had a jungle primary similar to California’s, passed a law in 2024 eliminating it for congressional and state Supreme Court elections (while preserving it for statewide and state legislative races). Republicans don’t especially like open partisan primaries, either. I’m of two minds about these. Open partisan primaries free voters from the requirement that they be registered with the party holding the primary, allowing a Democrat, say, to vote in a Republican primary. I find that part a little screwy. But I see the benefit in inviting independents to participate in open primaries, and I have no difficulty believing that doing so increases overall voter participation, which is a very good thing. Republicans not being great fans of voter participation, South Carolina and Colorado Republicans recently sued to go back to restricting primary voters to registered Republicans.

The good news is that Democrats are starting to wake up to the problems inherent in top-two primaries. Rusty Hicks, chair of California’s Democratic Party, recently called for the elimination of California’s jungle primary, and Steven Maviglio, a Democratic consultant, recently proposed a statewide ballot initiative to “Undo the Top-Two.” It’s too late for 2026, alas, but moving forward it looks as though Democrats will do a better job of protecting their blue-state majorities.

I wanted to start by talking about one of the most controversial—maybe the most controversial—things about Bob Dylan: his voice. It is one of the most derided and mocked singing voices of all time, but I was really heartened reading your book to find that you are also a fierce defender of Dylan’s singing. 

There are still people in the comments section on YouTube who say, “This guy can’t sing! He has no voice!” I describe it as an “iron ore bucket voice.” It’s a rasp, but it’s a really human rasp. There’s no other voice like it. I’ve found that, strangely enough, there’s a region in what is now Russia—it was once Poland—where violinists like Jascha Heifetz came [from]. The only violinists in the world who could make their instruments talk like a human voice come from this region. And I have a feeling that far back in the past there was a Dylan [ancestor]. On the other hand, there are some really cruel things that are said about Dylan’s voice that just don’t understand that melodious bluebirds singing is not what he’s after. 

I sometimes joke that there are only really three covers of Dylan songs that are as good as the originals and only one that really surpasses it—Jimi Hendrix’s version of “All Along the Watchtower.” But it’s always struck me that more talented singers approach Dylan’s songs differently than he does. 

Before I heard Dylan sing a song, I heard Joan Baez’s cover of “Boots of Spanish Leather.” What a beautiful song—talk about remorse and regret. It’s funny, there were a lot of lefties who left the city and started giving me Weavers albums, things like that. Joan was not really particularly a leftie, but she came along with that. So I heard a lot of Dylan before I heard Dylan. That song in particular struck me dead. 

But what makes Dylan Dylan, he doesn’t go for these big brass cymbal-crashing anthems—he sings to another person, not to the whole wide USA. 

And the voice to me is utterly sincere, even if the persona also isn’t. 

He does have this thing about authenticity and sincerity. I think he’s a metaphysician. When he keeps telling me or telling everyone, “That person [Bob Dylan] doesn’t exist; I’m not there, etc., etc.,” it’s like a metaphysical trick to be able to say this is the first time I’ve sung it. Those people in the past don’t exist. You get the refreshment of authenticity every time. I don’t know if he believes it, but it kinda works. 

You mentioned listening to Baez and the Weavers covering Dylan. What are your early memories of Dylan himself? 

I lucked out and heard his August ’65 performance at Forest Hills, where he debuted “Desolation Row.” There was a song that no one has ever done. I called it a “funeral march for Western Civilization” [in the book]. Romeo and Juliet, Cinderella, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot.… I was just stunned by something completely new. 

There were rumors that they were booed. I was there. The band was not booed the way they were in Newport. People in New York City are more sophisticated than these folkie rubes at Newport. 

I know the first time I heard “Like a Rolling Stone” I thought, “Oh my god, he’s speaking to me.” And “Like a Rolling Stone,” I think is great because it’s both about the princess who loses everything and the greatness, in a way, of being out on your own. You only learn something by being out on your own. 

The so-called “Dylanologists” come in for a lot of deserved scorn, but I do think a lot of the songs are less complicated than people make them out to be. 

In his post-Jesus period, he did a lot of songs that were disconnected, [with fragmented phrases], you couldn’t make plain sense out of them. And then someone told me a story about when he had a movie contract and all these movie people—supplicants—came to see him saying, “What do you want, Bob? What do you want, Bob?” He would take out a cigar box and turn it over and dump it out so there was a snowflake storm of little cuttings, pieces of paper, stuff like that. It suddenly occurred to me that they were unified in some way by his consciousness. For some reason, every little bit meant something to him. He just put them in a song even if it didn’t make sense to anyone else; it made sense to him. The box become sort of famous. I first figured this out when I was trying to figure out the song “Things Have Changed,” which had 11 different voices. 

Twelve—at least that’s what you say in the book. 

They’re not connected, but it seemed to me that they were connected in his mind—that it all made sense to him. Someone once talked about the one consciousness of Dickens, how everything in Dickens in some way related in some way to everything else even if it didn’t make complete sense. There’s one consciousness of Dylan—in his mind, it’s all related. I think of John Ashbery and the abstract expressionists who don’t make sense to anyone but themselves—but they do in some beautiful way. 

It’s genius, I suppose. 

I find when I talk to people who are geniuses that they all say that they have some system they hang onto. It’s really not true. It’s really their own genius and talent, but they want to give people something they can hang onto.

He always surprises you with what he can do with words—and music. It’s really interesting to me that he claims he’s not a melodist, that he has no real ability to come up with melodies—that he just steals from old music, old folk songs—and comes up with something great and immortal. 

One of the things that frustrates me is when people reach for descriptions of Dylan that omit the music—that he’s a “poet.” But he isn’t! He’s a songwriter. That strikes me as being at the core of what actually makes him great. I think a hyperfocus on his lyrics—in my opinion at least—often obscures more than it reveals. 

That’s very true. But I also think that if you stripped away the music and you compared it to what passes for contemporary poetry you would find that his work outdoes [it]. Why is it that contemporary poetry has never really grabbed anyone, really? Dylan managed to grab not only hundreds of thousands of people here but all over the world. That talent is unique. I don’t know of anyone who has that talent. 

I can’t speak for the poets, but it is true that his written work—Chronicles, especially, but also the Nobel Prize lecture—is often extraordinary. 

The Nobel Prize really makes you work! He had to write a lecture about what books influenced him as Mr. Nobel Prize in literature. He told them Moby-Dick and The Odyssey. 

And All Quiet on the Western Front, which you write about.

[In my book], I was searching for what made Dylan Dylan—the dark, sarcastic, sardonic Dylan. The enemy of propriety, of official civilization. He said [in the Nobel lecture that] as a youth he read All Quiet on the Western Front and that it convinced him that civilization is a morass of butchery and that all the philosophers—Aristotle, Plato, Socrates—did nothing to protect us from the horror that we allowed ourselves to fall into. People wonder what Dylan’s so upset about. Why isn’t he nicer? In my book I find it almost impossible to separate who Dylan is and who Erich Maria Remarque is in the trenches. I lose track of it. He writes his most ferocious prose or poetry, whatever you want to call it, [on that subject]. I think I set out in writing this book in some way to find out what made Dylan Dylan, and I think curiously, unexpectedly, All Quiet on the Western Front really is the source of his dyspeptic view of civility.  

From the very beginning, he always seemed intertwined with literature and literary sources as much as he was with the folk tradition—Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, whatever. 

I have a chapter title, “Dylan’s Argument With God.” I think a very serious but not advertised part of his sensibility is this theodicy. The epigraph of my book is, “God said to Abraham, ‘kill me a son’ / Abe said ‘man you must be putting me on.’” This is like the fundamental basis of both Christianity and Judaism, the sacrifice of Isaac—a defense of child murder. I go off into an attack on Kierkegaard, whose Fear and Trembling is a defense of the absurd leap of faith that allows Abraham to just about put the blade to Isaac’s neck until God, who is a prankster, almost, [stops him]. 

You interviewed Dylan during one of those arguments—on the Warner Bros. backlot, right as he was converting to Christianity. What was that like? 

He was having a lot of trouble. His marriage was breaking up. He had thousands of feet of film [he had shot for Reynaldo and Clara]. He hated me when I called it a “conversion”—well he didn’t hate me, he objected to me. But that was I think driven by his anger at the Old Testament God for failing to lift a finger to rescue his—capital H-i-s—people from the Holocaust. Not that the New Testament God did anything, either. But nonetheless, he was brought up as a Jew and taught that the Jewish God was all powerful, had superpowers, was just, was loving—and yet abandoned a million and a half children in the Holocaust. 

I think a turning point in my thinking about theodicy and this book was my interview with a guy named Yehuda Bauer who was at that time recognized as the foremost historian of the Holocaust. He was a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He said this thing I still can’t get over. He said, why do I need this God, who allows the Holocaust, who has superpowers and does nothing—he is either Satan or a nebbish, meaning a fool.

I talked to allegedly pious and brilliant Jewish theologians—Emil Fackenheim being one of them; Yitz Greenberg being another. Yitz Greenberg was the source I believe of Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People. This was a pretty bad thing. Basically, Yitz Greenberg’s answer was, “Well God did nothing, but he was a presence there.” I remember Yehuda Bauer saying, “I don’t need a presence, I need someone to rescue my people!” 

You make a pretty provocative argument about the song “Mississippi,” arguing that it’s—at least in part—a song reckoning with his Christian period. 

He put three versions of that song on [The Bootleg Series Vol. 8—Tell Tale Signs]. The line that I think was the turning point was in the refrain: “Stayed in Mississippi, just a way too long.” I think it’s him saying, “I stayed in this Christian mishegoss just too long.” He also says, “You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way.” That’s the thing—I think he came back more than all the way. 

“Mississippi,” for what it’s worth, is my favorite Dylan song, and I think it’s his best one. It’s certainly one of the best songs ever written about regret. 

I have a line in my book—Dylan owns regret. His songs of regret are some of his most beautiful. From the beginning, “Girl of the North Country”—he regrets the fuck out of this. He does another on Blood on the Tracks—“If You See Her, Say Hello,” which is, again, a post-breakup song where he just wonders if it’s possible that something can happen to bring them together again. 

Remorse in particular is his emotion. 

His roughly 2,500-acre farm in Highland, Kansas, in the northeast corner of the state, functions because of the equipment in this room. A machine to Neibling’s right facilitated movement of harvested crops into specific grain bins, while one to his left controlled the drying of corn, a necessary preparation before it could be sold. The office has another purpose: It is where Neibling calculates how to keep his family-run farm afloat.

Soybean farmers have been hit particularly hard during President Donald Trump’s second term. The global trade war the president launched shortly after returning to office last year resulted in massive retaliatory duties on U.S. commodities from a number of major consumers, notably China. The Iran war has only made things worse: The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a vital global shipping channel, in March led to a massive spike in oil and fertilizer costs.

When I spoke to him on an exceedingly windy day in late March, Neibling described the current economic situation for farmers as “tough” more than a dozen times. That situation is often compounded by the president’s chaotic social media announcements, which can move billions more or less instantaneously. “It seems like we’ve got a market around tweets sometimes,” said Neibling, who is the president of the Kansas Soybean Association.

Some farmers say the situation is more severe than the 2018 trade war with China in Trump’s first term, when Kansas farmers alone lost nearly $1 billion in sales of soybean and sorghum, another major crop in the state.

In the first eight months of 2025, soybean exports to China had fallen to around a quarter of what they were the previous year, and from the end of May through November 2025, the United States exported no soybeans whatsoever to China. Brazil, the largest producer of soybeans in the world, now provides the vast majority of China’s soybeans.

“We’ve seen soybeans become much more of a geopolitical pawn than a trading discussion, than a market discussion,” said Jonathan Coppess, an associate professor of law and policy at the department of agricultural and consumer economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Soybeans aren’t simply a commodity in Trump’s second term—they are a crucial front in a global trade war and a key part of a grinding fight with China that will shape the future of geopolitics. Family farms like Neibling’s, moreover, offer a window into the costs and consequences of the president’s economic and foreign policy for regular Americans. Prices are rising for everyone, but farmers have been hit particularly hard. For them, the global is now local. The decisions made by the Trump administration may be temporary, but their consequences will be lasting. They are already devastating.

Despite their unhappiness with Trump’s trade policies, many farmers haven’t lost their trust in him. This is in line with attitudes toward farming itself, which is an exercise in optimism amid myriad adverse conditions. Similarly, there’s a prevailing hope that the White House and Congress will address farmers’ needs in the long term—even if all evidence points to the contrary.

Farmers have always struggled with the impact of political turmoil. Older farmers speak about the economic stresses they felt nearly half a century ago, during the Carter and Reagan administrations. The 1980s were defined by a full-blown agriculture crisis that resulted in a dramatic loss in farmland value, mass foreclosures, corporate consolidation, and rural flight.

Supporting American farmers through federal subsidies has been a priority for the federal government since the Great Depression. Cognizant of farmers’ importance to the economy and as a voting bloc, even the Trump White House has attempted to insulate farmers from the full impact of its trade war. Last December, the administration announced the distribution of $12 billion in onetime payments to farmers. Around the same time, roughly $11 billion was dedicated to the Farmer Bridge Assistance Program, which particularly targeted corn and soybean farmers. Kansas received $888 million in payments through this program, the third-highest amount of any state; as of April, the state had received $773 million in payments.

The farmers with whom I spoke in late March described the aid in existential terms. “Right now, my financial projections for the year are to break even, and that included the aid payment. Without the aid payment, I basically would have been looking at a loss of that same amount,” said Ryan Johnson, referring to the amount of the per-acre payment rate offered by the Farmer Bridge Assistance Program. Johnson is a corn and soybean farmer in Berryton, roughly a 15-minute drive south of Topeka.

Soybean farmers have received massive subsidies in recent years. Coppess, for instance, noted that the massive payments farmers received in the wake of the 2018 trade war were followed by significant Covid-era assistance. In 2020 and 2021, the U.S. Department of Agriculture provided roughly $31 billion to offset losses for nearly one million producers across the country. In recent years, farmers have been able to rely upon the expectation that they will receive generous government assistance.

But simply distributing payments during times of hardship—in amounts that may not even fully cover the depth of losses—will in the long-term “create a situation that allows us to kind of not make tough decisions or have difficult conversations,” said Coppess. The farmers I spoke to recognized that, in the long term, economic aid is unsustainable. “I kind of view it as filling your gas tank. You can take that money, it fills your gas tank, but immediately you start [pumping] from that gas tank. And then, unless you have the markets in place to keep it full, it runs out,” said Scott Gigstad, the chair of the Kansas Soybean Association.

Many of them believe that Congress has shirked its duty by not passing the Farm Bill, the massive omnibus legislative package that governs agricultural, nutrition, and conservation policy and delivers subsidies to farmers and food assistance to those in need. (Roughly 80 percent of the Farm Bill is devoted to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, the program formerly known as food stamps.) The most recent Farm Bill expired in 2023, and Congress has simply extended its provisions in subsequent years without updating or expanding it.

The result, Coppess said, is a situation in which the federal government was essentially treating farmers as “pass-through entities”: The aid it delivers is immediately transferred to landlords, multinational fertilizer and chemical companies, and seed companies.

“We’re going into this planting season,” Coppess said, but nothing has been done to fix the larger problems farmers are facing. “We haven’t tried anything—[just] talk about more payments and complain about the fact that costs stay high,” he said.

Making a onetime payment to farmers can help keep them afloat, but it won’t solve the larger economic and geopolitical issues created by tariffs and international conflict. Other countries’ loss of faith in the United States as a trading partner won’t be addressed by offering money to producers when they can’t sell their goods internationally. Coppess compared the Farmer Bridge Assistance Program to a painkiller, treating a symptom, not an underlying cause.

“Going forward, making payments will make it all worse,” he said. “You sort of use payments when you expect to get back to normal. There may not be a back to normal in this situation, in which case payments are really problematic.”

Still, frustration with Trump’s trade policies does not necessarily translate to disapproval of the president himself. Initially skeptical of Trump, Johnson voted for a third-party candidate in 2016. But he found the president’s first term to be “effective” and supported him in the 2020 and 2024 elections. Today, he said he was “generally” pleased with Trump’s second-term performance, adding that he was “shocked by how much [Trump] accomplished” last year.

Joe Newland, who is the president of the Kansas Farm Bureau, is less enthusiastic but still supportive: He’s “probably not [supportive of] 100 percent [of Trump’s actions], by any means—maybe not 75 percent.” But he believes that administration officials working on trade are “some of the best minds that we’ve had in probably many years.” There has been some recent good news. Last fall, China also pledged to buy at least 12 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans in the final two months of 2025, and at least 25 million metric tons in each of the three subsequent years—although these levels are lower than what China has imported in years past.

“Do we have his ear all the time? No. I mean, nobody does, let’s face it,” Newland said, referring to Trump. “But if you have the Cabinet’s level ear, that’s huge.”

The president has reneged on some signature campaign promises, such as not entering any new international conflicts, and ensuring lowered gas prices. But Nick Levendofsky, the executive director of the Kansas Farmers Union, observed that Trump was honest about his intention to implement higher tariffs throughout his 2024 presidential campaign, and that farmers knew what was coming down the pike.

“Trump has always said that he’s going to do tariffs, you know, and we’re going to get into a trade war. If there’s anything he didn’t lie about, that’s it,” said Levendofsky.

The journey from harvested soybean crop to oversize jug of vegetable oil in the pantry is long and meandering, involving careful timing and precision planning. It also includes regular field trips to local grain elevators, which store and occasionally process the grains and negotiate large bulk sales, essentially acting as a middleman between producers and buyers. Thousands of pounds of soybeans will cascade from the bottom of an 18-wheeler truck into a pit with an overwhelming clatter reminiscent of being trapped in a gigantic rainmaker, from whence they will be aptly elevated into huge multistory silos. 

Selling commodities is somewhat akin to a futures contract on the stock market—that is, farmers agree to a price with a grain elevator before transporting the product. Farmers already have a “limited window to manage risk” when writing contracts, said Johnson, who worked as a financial adviser before entering agriculture.   

“Politics can go back and forth, and if prices are a manifestation of politics, then you have to take advantage of the opportunities when they’re given to you, because sometimes those opportunities don’t last very long,” said Johnson. This is true of fuel and fertilizer purchases, as well. Tom Giessel, who farms around 950 acres of wheat, corn, soybeans, and alfalfa in Larned, western Kansas, recalled a recent conversation with a local seller about purchasing urea, a nitrogen compound used as fertilizer. The dealer gave a price for the urea, around $860 a ton. When Giessel asked how long that price would be stable, the dealer responded: “Thirty minutes.”

The tariffs and the long-term consequences of the war in Iran are not the only Trump administration actions affecting farmers. Farming has been plagued with labor shortages, particularly for manual work, in recent years, positions that are frequently filled by migrants. The Trump administration’s crackdown on legal and illegal immigration—as well as difficulty reforming the H-2A visa program, which supports bringing agricultural workers to the United States—has exacerbated those shortages.

Even Trump’s cuts in foreign aid have affected farmers. Giessel called the functional closure of USAID, an agency that helped provide food assistance across the world, a “gut punch.” USAID was a major purchaser of grain sorghum grown in the state through the Food for Peace program.

Kansas produces more than half of the world’s sorghum. Without a buyer, millions of pounds of milo were left on the ground in 2025, with no place to store them.

“There are literally mountains of grain sorghum out here piled on the ground,” said Giessel.

The upshot of this uncertainty for younger Kansas farmers is a persistent sense of dread. “The pressure on them is so great. ‘Am I going to be the generation that loses the farm?’” explained Newland. “Dealing with the weather, dealing with commodity [prices], dealing with the government, with the bank—there’s so many different things that’s weighing on them.”

Indeed, over the years, farming has increasingly become an old-timers’ game. The median age of farmers is 58, and in 2025, 40 percent of U.S. farmland was owned by farmers aged 65 and older.

Around 15,000 farms nationwide closed in 2025, including 700 in Kansas, which also saw a 10 percent increase in Chapter 12 bankruptcy filings, designed for family farmers and fishermen. Such challenges can weigh heavily on young farmers. Newland knows of half a dozen suicides within a 30- to 40-mile radius, most recently a 22-year-old who lived nearby.

The economic instability of the current moment could also lead to greater corporate consolidation of farms—as more producers retire, their buyers may be larger companies rather than family members or new entrants into the industry. Even as the number of farms has decreased in recent years, the size of the remaining farms has increased, indicating consolidation of land into larger operations.

Meanwhile, many of the old-timers are thinking of throwing in the towel. “A lot of these guys are wanting to get out of this, because they’ve been through a lot of hard times over their lifetime, and now it’s like, ‘OK, I’m done with this,’” said Levendofsky.

But many, like Neibling, are determined not to give up, no matter how bad things are. “I don’t want to say it’s in your blood, but it’s in your blood. You know, it’s just like there’s that draw to the ground that you’ve been connected to,” he said. “There’s so much pressure on us anyway; there’s so many things that we can’t control that we’re dealing with on a day-to-day basis.”

He added: “It’s tough right now.”

The case against climate-centric messaging usually leans on years of fairly consistent polling. Relatively large segments of the population remain concerned about climate change but prioritize other issues at the ballot box. The point was reiterated earlier this year by the centrist Searchlight Institute, in a report urging advocates and elected officials not to focus on “climate” over more salient topics like affordability and lower energy prices: “While battleground voters overwhelmingly agree climate change is a problem, addressing it is not a priority for them.” Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego has similarly argued that talking about climate change turns voters off, so candidates are better off steering clear. “Honestly, it’s just so loaded,” he told Politico recently. “If our goal is to bring down our carbon footprint—try to restrain climate change—we need to win. And focusing on words versus outcomes, I think, is a real good pathway to losing.”

The terms of this debate are confusing. At the most basic level, climate change describes the effect of rising global temperatures caused by the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In U.S. politics, however, “climate” has become a stand-in for everything from tax credits for solar panels to hurricanes, the Green New Deal, disaster relief, ending fossil fuel extraction, multilateral processes, fuel efficiency regulations, and federal funding for certain kinds of scientific research—a long, disparate list encompassing both the problems caused by climate change and a variety of solutions for mitigating, adapting to, and dealing with it.

Those advising Democrats to stop talking about climate often point to its prominence during the Biden administration. Democrats, however, have talked relatively little about climate change itself over the last decade. Even the barrage of ambitious climate plans proposed during the party’s presidential primaries in 2020 mostly focused on the promise of an exciting suite of green technologies to create jobs, outcompete China, reindustrialize the Midwest, and reduce emissions. And this was only part of the promise of Biden’s American Jobs Plan, which—thanks in large part to Joe Manchin—became the much smaller and more energy-centric Inflation Reduction Act.

There are historical reasons why Democrats started talking about climate change in this limited way, which are too numerous to get into here. The short version is that by 2018, when Democrats won back the House of Representatives, the “climate” had become a shorthand in Washington for Democrats trying to put some kind of price on carbon aimed at reducing the biggest polluters’ emissions. Many of those attempts failed. In large part, those failures were the result of a full-frontal assault by polluting interests like the Koch brothers to turn “climate” into a strictly partisan matter and electorally sanction Republicans who dared to talk about it. Democrats consequently stopped trying to pass climate policies through Congress for the better part of a decade. When progressive climate groups and congressional candidates turned electeds proposed a Green New Deal, enterprising Democrats flocked to Green New Deal–ish proposals as a vehicle to tap into a genuine global zeitgeist: a widespread desire to mitigate the mounting threat of climate change.

Under Joe Biden, “climate” was broadcast as a means to several ends. Committed climate hawks in the White House pushed for rapid emissions reductions. Progressive economists saw green manufacturing as a jobs and regional development program with significant benefits for supply chain security. Foreign policy hawks treated green industrial policy as a way to “win” against China—which handily dominates supply chains for solar and E.V.s—and reassert U.S. leadership on an important global issue after four years of losing credibility under Trump.

The Biden administration did plenty of good, quiet work to address the realities of rising temperatures, but its public messaging on climate centered on attempts to inflate green asset values, i.e., use modest public funds to spur on massive private-sector investments in wind, solar, electric vehicles, and other lower-carbon technologies. As I wrote about at length last year, that strategy worked pretty well on its own limited terms. Voters mostly didn’t notice, though, and the Trump administration has now dismantled many of those policies, including the clean energy–focused portions of the Inflation Reduction Act.

The so-called “climate hushers” are right about some things: The particular way that party candidates and lawmakers have talked about climate over the last several years clearly hasn’t furnished them with electoral majorities. It doesn’t seem to be a huge factor in the party having lost them, either. Democrats won in an election year where “climate” was a big talking point for candidates, including Biden; they lost an election where they barely mentioned it.

By my lights, part of the confusion in this debate seems to be that climate change isn’t a political issue so much as the context in which politics happens. Whereas virtually every major political issue is on some level affected by the effects of rising temperatures—often dramatically so—“climate” is treated as a niche concern.

Political pollsters accordingly survey voters about climate change alongside a slew of other relatively discrete issues. They don’t typically ask them about capitalism, for instance, and for good reason. Capitalism isn’t a traditional political issue so much as the foundation of—conservatively speaking—most issues that voters care about, from inflation to wages to health care costs. Climate change is likewise already shaping everything from housing and insurance markets to migration. That’s because we live in a world where capitalism and climate change are now structural features of existence. In the United States, at least, discussions of structural forces as such tend to be pretty academic.

It’s instructive, actually, to compare discussions of climate change and capitalism. Putting aside any deeper connections between the two, the analogy offers a different way for politicians to treat “climate.” Socialist politicians—who are typically anti-capitalists—tend to start from first principles. They don’t ask voters to support them because they are socialists; they don’t ask them to believe in socialism or oppose capitalism. Successful socialist politicians, such as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, stick to issues that people in their districts care about, like making life more affordable and expanding public services. There are of course other socialists who debate whether this approach represents a betrayal of socialist values. But a key factor in the relative success of socialist politicians over the last decade has been a willingness to speak concretely and with conviction about their plans for improving the lives of ordinary people. Importantly, they also don’t shy away from the label. Mamdani ran and won with the enthusiastic backing of New York City’s chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. “I will govern as a democratic socialist,” he said proudly in his inaugural address. “Call it Pothole Politics. Call it Sewer Socialism,” he wrote this week on social media, announcing that his administration had closed an inherited $12 billion budget deficit. “It’s government that delivers for the people who make this city run.” 

To govern according to their principles, socialist electeds find common cause with non-socialists who support things like taxing the rich and bolstering collective bargaining rights. One needn’t identify as a socialist to support the things that socialists do. Figures across the political spectrum frequently voice their disagreements with the worst excesses of capitalism, like extreme wealth inequality, wage theft, and insider trading.

Republicans have their own version of this. Even though a majority of voters in the U.S. (54 percent) hold positive views of capitalism, successful right-wing candidates by and large do not campaign explicitly as capitalists. Some might flaunt their credentials as successful businessmen or their commitment to “free market principles,” but capitalism itself remains a somewhat abstract concept for people who haven’t spent their careers writing about its merits. Republicans are frequently eager to draw attention away from their fringe-y, extreme capitalist economic views and toward so-called cultural issues precisely because things like giving tax cuts to the rich are so unpopular; 64 percent of registered voters disapprove of how Trump is handling taxes. Democrats wary of being accused of being socialists may well be more likely to self-identify as capitalists than their opponents. Days before the 2024 election, Kamala Harris took the time to assure voters, “I am a capitalist. I am a pragmatic capitalist.”

So should Democrats campaign on climate change? They arguably shouldn’t make canvassers knocking doors ask prospective voters if they believe in climate change. Advertising oneself as primarily a “climate candidate” probably isn’t a great strategy. “Fight climate change” is as intangible a message as “fight capitalism.” Although, as an eco-socialist, I agree with the need to do both, I also don’t think those slogans are especially helpful for building the durable, hegemonic majorities necessary to accomplish those goals.

Avoiding that kind of rhetoric is very different from being cowed by the right into pretending that climate change doesn’t exist. The reality of the climate crisis is that it’s strengthening the deadly heat waves, storms, and fires that are saddling people across the country with higher electricity bills and insurance premiums. The Iran war has been a sobering reminder that the fossil fuel economy isn’t a great deal, either. Contra Trump, so-called “energy independence” hasn’t freed drivers from having to pay higher prices at the pump. Showering coal, oil, and gas CEOs with even more giveaways won’t make your commute less expensive anytime soon, or stop automakers from charging exorbitant fees at the dealership for useless features.

You don’t need to know a great deal about atmospheric science to understand that summers are getting hotter, and—if you live somewhere like New Orleans—that the seas are rising. A few years ago, a friend in the Bay Area recounted sitting with her newborn in the bathtub to keep cool as temperatures reached into the 100s—highs that have been so rare there that many homes don’t have air conditioning. Going outside wasn’t an option because nearby wildfires were making the air dangerous to breathe. Leaders should help accurately interpret these phenomena rather than pretend they’re tragic isolated incidents. The right’s alternative is something we might call the climate politics of fools: blaming the deadly and disorienting effects of climate change on Jewish Space Lasers while defunding FEMA, and then, when utility bills soar in a heat wave, scapegoating solar panels and wind turbines.

Populist policies to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis are thankfully pretty popular. They’re also too big—and too threatening to elites—to be quietly enacted by politicians claiming their only concerns are affordability and lower energy prices. Keeping people safe in a climate-changed world means fighting with Republicans and the monied interests that pay the GOP to defend their interests: a blank check to extract fossil fuels and accumulate wealth indefinitely. Denying the realities of a warming planet by keeping certain words out of your mouth won’t make the powers that be look the other way.  

In a post on X, RNC Chairman Joe Gruters posted an audio clip where he said, “We’ve already deployed field staff and we’ve hired state directors and election integrity directors.”

The RNC is already on the ground, deploying staff in 17 states, registering voters, and aggressively fighting to win in November - and we will not stop until we do. pic.twitter.com/JST67wTFLa

— Chairman Joe Gruters (@ChairmanGruters) May 12, 2026

Gruters didn’t name the states but said that the effort was part of the Republican Party’s plan to hold onto Congress for the 2026 midterm elections.

“We focus on the big picture. We focus on winning. We have a plan. We’re executing the plan,” Gruters said.

Meanwhile, speaking to the press Tuesday, President Trump said he’d “do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections,” in response to a question on whether he’d deploy the National Guard or ICE to voting locations in November.

Q: Would you send the National Guard or ICE to voting locations in November?

TRUMP: You know what? I'll do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections pic.twitter.com/pGsRtg9ZSY

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 12, 2026

It’s a disturbing thing for Trump to say, just two days after he called for an “Election Integrity Army.” In a Truth Social post, Trump claimed that Republicans had one in 2024 “in every single State to preserve the sanctity of each legal vote” and attacked Democrats for forming their own elections task force led by former Attorney General Eric Holder.

“​​We will be doing the same again in 2026, but it will be much bigger and stronger. All Americans should have their voices be heard by casting a vote. Be assured this Election will be fair! President DONALD J. TRUMP,” Trump posted.

It appears that the RNC has heard Trump loud and clear, and is taking action. It’s on top of everything else the Republican Party is doing to meddle in the midterms and beyond, from mid-decade redistricting that disenfranchises Democrats and Black Americans to spreading election-denial conspiracies from 2020. It has even installed election denialists in local governments and election boards across the country.

Deploying ICE agents or National Guard troops at the polls seems to be a ploy to frighten people of color from voting, and is unprecedented. It appears that the midterms are shaping up to be a tense battle in more ways than one.

Journalist Pablo Manríquez asked multiple GOP senators about the president’s comments about 90 minutes after he said them—plenty of time for members of Congress to react.

“What do you think of Donald Trump saying he doesn’t think about the finances or the financial situation of the American people?” Manríquez asked Senator Cynthia Lummis.

“Did he say that? I don’t have a comment about that, mostly because I think he actually does care,” she replied with a laugh, claiming that the president didn’t mean something he doubled down on publicly.

Republicans already being pressed on Trump’s comments:

PabloReports: What do you make of Trump saying that he doesn’t think about the financial situation of the American people?

Senator Lummis: Did he say that? I don’t have a comment because I think he actually does care. pic.twitter.com/BzptOHbOc9

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 12, 2026

Senator Roger Marshall, also smiling, refused to answer as well, claiming he didn’t know the “context” of the comment. And Senator Susan Collins stated she didn’t see the president’s comment at all.

Republican senators already dodging questions on Trump’s statement:

PabloReports: Any comment on what Trump said? He said he doesn’t think about the finances of the American people.

Senator Roger Marshall: I would have to find out the context. I’m sorry. pic.twitter.com/FoFfmoZZs6

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 12, 2026

Another Republican reluctant to comment on Trump’s statement:

PabloReports: Any comment on Trump saying he doesn’t think about the financial situation of the American people?

Senator Susan Collins: I didn’t see that. pic.twitter.com/wGqJAmiHyt

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 12, 2026

For the record, Trump’s comments were crystal clear.

“When you’re negotiating with Iran, Mr. President, to what extent are Americans’ financial situations motivating you to make a deal?” a reporter asked Trump before he left for China on Tuesday, alluding to the skyrocketing inflation caused by the fallout from the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon.

“Not even a little bit,” Trump said. “The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran is they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation, I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all. That’s the only thing that motivates me.”

Trump traveled to China Tuesday for a two-day summit with President Xi Jinping, accompanied by more than a dozen American entrepreneurs—including his own son—each hoping the president will clear the way for them to make even more money.

Among those aboard Air Force One Tuesday were the president’s son Eric Trump and his wife, Lara. While the White House has claimed Eric is attending the trip in a “personal capacity,” isn’t this the exact same thing Trump railed against former President Joe Biden doing with his son Hunter? 

As executive vice president of development for the Trump Organization, Eric Trump has helped to net lucrative real estate deals across Europe and the Middle East that directly benefit his father. Eric and Don Jr. recently merged their publicly traded golf course holding company with Powerus, a Florida-based drone company, with the goal of filling the gaps left by the Trump administration’s ban on Chinese drones. They also recently won a government contract of an unknown value.  

The Trump Organization does not currently have any upcoming real estate projects in China, but during Trump’s last term, China and its state-owned entities paid a whopping $5.5 million at vacation properties owned by the president’s family—far more than any other country.

Other CEOs who are planning to travel with Trump include Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple’s Tim Cook, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, and Boeing’s Kelly Ortberg, as well as officials from Meta, Visa, Mastercard, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, GE Aerospace, Cargill, and Illumina. The group also included CEOs from major semiconductor manufacturers Qualcomm, Micron, and Coherent. 

As a precondition of their selection, each company was tasked with developing a “tangible ask” that promised a concrete outcome, one source familiar with the matter told Reuters. For example, Musk is reportedly looking to acquire $2.9 billion of equipment to build solar panels and regulatory clearance for Tesla’s self-driving assistance system in China, the world’s largest auto market. 

Reva Goujon, a geopolitical strategist at Rhodium Group, told Reuters that aside from Boeing and Cargill, which are involved in purchase agreements, the rest of the cabal of wealthy entrepreneurs is there to deliver demands on critical input supply. “This could help the U.S. administration’s messaging that to even ​be able to discuss a board of investment, China needs to be a reliable investment partner and not weaponise supply,” he said. 

Also included in Trump’s caravan is director Brett Ratner, who directed Melania’s Trump’s vanity-project documentary that turned into a box office flop. Ratner will spend his trip scouting locations for Rush Hour 4, which was greenlit at Trump’s demand, according to the New York Post.

It was the bureau chief’s first time back on Capitol Hill since The Atlantic published multiple bombshell reports detailing how Patel’s alleged substance abuse and his unexplained absences had alarmed officials in and out of the agency.

But the topic was apparently still too hot for Patel to handle come Tuesday. In one particularly heated exchange with Senator Chris Van Hollen, Patel resorted to a barrage of lies and mockery in a futile attempt to deflect from his issues.

“You have publicly denied those allegations and filed a defamation lawsuit, so today as you testify before Congress, is it your testimony that those allegations are categorically false?” asked Van Hollen.

“Unequivocally, categorically false,” Patel said.

“So there have been no occasions in your tenure when FBI personnel were unable to promptly reach you?” pressed Van Hollen.

Patel insisted that federal employees have been able to reach him at any hour of the day. But the line of questioning flew off the rails when Van Hollen asked for confirmation that there had been “no occasions when [Patel’s] security detail had difficulty waking or locating” him.

“Nope, it’s a total farce, I don’t even know where you get this stuff, but that doesn’t make it credible because you say so,” Patel deadpanned, slowly blinking his eyes.

“I’m not saying it, Director Patel, it’s written and documented—” Van Hollen said, when Patel interjected: “You are literally saying it.”

“No, I am saying that these are reports, Director Patel,” Van Hollen clarified.

“Unlike baseless reports—the only person that was slinging margaritas in El Salvador on the taxpayer dollar with a convicted gangbanging rapist was you. The only person that ran up a several thousand–dollar bar tab in Washington, D.C. … was you,” Patel said, referring to when Van Hollen visited Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland constituent who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador’s mega-prison by the Trump administration last year, to advocate for his release.

“This is the ultimate example of hypocrisy. I will not be tarnished by baseless allegations … by the media,” Patel shouted.

“Director Patel, come on. These were serious allegations that were made,” Van Hollen said. “The fact that you mention that indicates you don’t know what you are talking about.”

WOW -- Patel snaps at Van Hollen and attacks him with debunked smears, saying, "the only person that was slinging margaritas in El Salvador with taxpayer dollars with a convicted gang-banging rapist was you" pic.twitter.com/CFNpGOU7YU

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 12, 2026

The man who pledged to fight for unseen Americans by lowering prices and ending endless wars isn’t doing either, and remained adamant that he’s still on the right path forward when asked about it on Tuesday.

“When you’re negotiating with Iran, Mr. President, to what extent are Americans’ financial situations motivating you to make a deal?” a reporter asked Trump before he left for China on Tuesday, alluding to the skyrocketing inflation caused by the fallout from the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon.

“Not even a little bit,” Trump said, shockingly out of touch even for him. “The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran is they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation, I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all. That’s the only thing that motivates me.”

Trump on Iran War:

Reporter: What extent are Americans’ financial situation motivating you to make a deal?

Trump: Not even a little bit. I don't think about Americans’ financial situation pic.twitter.com/TJ94pGpqD8

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 12, 2026

ABC News’s Karen Travers asked Trump to clarify his comments. The president doubled down.

“Did you say earlier that the only thing that matters to you when it comes to Iran is the nuclear weapon? You’re not considering the financial impact of this war on Americans?”

“The most important thing by far, including whether our stock market … goes up or down a little bit—the most important thing by far is Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon,” Trump replied.

“What about the pressure on Americans in crisis right now? What they’re paying for food—”

“Every American understands.… They just had a poll, like 85 percent … they understand that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. If Iran has a nuclear weapon the whole world would be in trouble. Because they happen to be crazy,” Trump said. “When it’s over, you’re gonna have a massive drop in the price of oil.… Oil is gonna drop, the stock market’s gonna go through the roof, and truly I think we’re in the golden age right now.”

Reporter: Did you say you're not considering the financial impact of this war on Americans?!?!?!

Trump: The most important thing is Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.

Reporter: What about the pressure on Americans right now?

Trump: EVERY AMERICAN UNDERSTANDS. They just did a… pic.twitter.com/B27qXqisZr

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 12, 2026

These are gift-wrapped, made-for-midterm-attack-ad comments, and the political sphere reacted as such.

“Another absolutely horrendous quote that will be shoved down Republicans’ throats during the 2026 midterms,” podcaster Tommy Vietor wrote.

“If it wasn’t the the post world war 2 order and our whole damn democracy at stake you’d really have to laugh,” The Bulwark’s Tim Miller opined on X.

“Trump just admitted what we’ve known all along,” Representative Adriano Espaillait commented. “He does not care that Americans can’t afford to live.”

As of May 12, nearly every poll shows that the majority of Americans oppose the war on Iran.

At a lunch with Senate Republicans Tuesday, Secret Service Director Sean Curran offered up a detailed outline of how the agency planned to use the $1 billion Republicans requested to implement “security adjustments and upgrades,” including those related to the ballroom’s construction. 

The White House said it wants $220 million for hardening security at the White House, including “bulletproof glass, drone detection technologies, chemical and other threat filtration and detection systems.” Republicans’ request had specified the money could go to “above-ground and below-ground security features” as part of Trump’s so-called “East Wing Modernization Project.”

A gentle reminder: Trump originally pitched that his ballroom would cost just $200 million total, which is less than the hardening costs alone. The funding for Trump’s ballroom was originally sourced from a cabal of private donors—many of whom had hefty government contracts. Now it will drain $1 billion out of taxpayers’ wallets, as well.

The request also contained another $180 million for an entirely new visitor screening facility and $100 million for security at high-profile events—ostensibly held at Trump’s behemoth venue.  

In addition, it contained another $500 million to specifically bolster the Secret Service, including $175 million for Secret Service training “in the modern threat environment, $175 million to improve security for protectees, and $150 million to fund the Secret Service’s “work to country drones, airspace incursion, unmanned systems, biological threats, and other emerging threats through investments in state-of-the-art technologies.”

The original budget was proposed as part of a $72 billion package to fund agencies under the Department of Homeland Security, including ICE and Border Patrol. The Secret Service was already appropriated $3.5 billion in fiscal year 2026, a $192 million increase from 2025. 

Trump’s 2022 suit targeted former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former FBI Director James Comey (amongst others), claiming that they had participated in a broad racketeering conspiracy to create false allegations that his 2016 presidential campaign was tied to Russia. A district court dismissed the case in January 2023.

But the frivolous legal attack wasn’t just struck down in court—it also netted Trump and his personal attorney, Alina Habba, a nearly $1 million sanction. In November, Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judge William Pryor Jr. upheld the fine and noted that “many of Trump’s and Habba’s legal arguments were indeed frivolous,” echoing a lower court’s findings that Trump had made a “malicious prosecution claim without a prosecution” and a “trade secret claim without a trade secret.”

It’s been half a year since then, and on Tuesday, the Eleventh Circuit declined another opportunity to rehear Trump’s case.

Six of the 12 judges on the panel were Trump appointees. None of them sought a vote to rehear the case.

The next stop on this component of Trump’s retribution campaign would be the Supreme Court, if Trump intends to push the legal case to its very end. It’s unclear how the nation’s highest judiciary would vote, though in the last handful of weeks the court has made some wildly controversial decisions related to gerrymandering and voting rights that lawmakers, political commentators, and even members of the court have argued placed Trump’s interests above the parameters of the law.

Makary is resigning from the agency after clashing with President Trump over vaping and other policy decisions, and his possible firing was reported last week by The Wall Street Journal. Trump was reportedly upset that Makary wouldn’t approve menthol, mango, and blueberry vape flavors from Glas because they would appeal to young, underage users. Trump promised to “save vaping” on the 2024 campaign trail.

Trump refused to say whether he fired Makary Tuesday, telling reporters on the White House lawn, “I don’t want to say, but Marty’s a great guy.

“He’s a friend of mine, he’s a wonderful man, and he’s going to be off, and the assistant, the deputy, is taking over temporarily, until we find—everybody wants that job. It’s a very important job. Marty’s a terrific guy, but he’s going to go on and he’s going to lead a good life,” Trump said. “He was having some difficulty. You know he’s a great doctor, and he was having some difficulty, but he’s gonna go on and he’s gonna do well. Everybody wants that job. Everybody.”

Q: "Did you ask Marty Makary to resign, sir? Or did you fire your FDA commissioner?"

President Trump: "Well, I don't want to say. But Marty's a great guy…He's going to be off, and the assistant—the deputy is taking over temporarily…Everybody wants that job." pic.twitter.com/8PJF9UTEjj

— CSPAN (@cspan) May 12, 2026

Makary was also criticized privately by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who questioned his management skills and was considering scaling back his role last year.

Under Makary, the FDA has faced heavy criticism for seemingly embracing anti-vaccination policies, and many staffers have left the agency or been laid off. The turmoil at the agency has alarmed pharmaceutical executives, public health experts, and medical professionals.

Trump has shaken up health care positions in his administration lately, naming former deputy surgeon general Erica Schwartz to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and nominating Fox News contributor Dr. Nicole Saphier as surgeon general last month.

Schwartz appears to be a conventional choice, while Saphier appears to fit the conservative MAGA mindset. Which direction will Trump go in for his next FDA commissioner?

This story has been updated.

In a court filing last week, Leo Garcia Venegas said that on the morning of May 2, an unmarked SUV blocked him in his driveway at his home in Silverhill, Alabama. Before Venegas could produce his REAL ID proving his citizenship, two ICE agents pulled him out of the truck he was driving and arrested him. In the filing, Venegas said he was driving his brother’s truck because his broke down.

When ICE approached the truck, Venegas, remembering his previous arrests, tried to quickly prove that he’s a citizen, but the agents didn’t give him a chance even though he was holding his ID.

“Still without asking me a single question or issuing any lawful commands, the officers pulled me out of my car, tackled me to the ground, and shackled me around both my arms and legs,” Venegas said in a sworn declaration. “The officers did not listen when I said I was a citizen and they showed no interest in looking at my Alabama Star ID, even though it is a REAL ID issued only to people who can prove their lawful status.”

Venegas’s declaration said that he was shackled for 15 minutes while the agents digitally verified his identity, but he said they didn’t ask him any questions.

“At no point prior to physically detaining me did the officers ask me any questions about my identity, my citizenship, or my immigration status,” his court filing said. “They did not ask me to step out of the car. They did not even look at my ID before using physical force against me even though I had it in my hand.”

Venegas is the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit against DHS over their immigration enforcement policies, and he was detained twice last year in raids on construction sites he was working at, despite having his REAL ID both times. That may be on purpose, as a DHS official said in a declaration as part of Vargas’s lawsuit that “REAL ID can be unreliable to confirm U.S. citizenship.”

Bizarrely, DHS denies detaining Venegas, saying in a statement that “Leonardo Garcia Venegas was NOT detained last week. On Saturday, May 2, ICE conducted a routine vehicle stop on a car registered to an illegal alien. After Venegas’ identity was established, he was released.”

In October, a ProPublica investigation found that ICE had detained at least 170 U.S. citizens in raids or at protests, in some cases blatantly violating the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution by using excessive force and detaining people without probable cause. The agency has also been caught lying about the U.S. citizens they’ve detained and how they have treated them. Venegas alone has had three bad interactions with ICE. How many others are suffering?

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Dan Caine and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth were questioned about their half a trillion dollar funding request for the Iran war at a Senate Appropriations hearing on Tuesday, two weeks after Trump told Congress that the conflict was “terminated.”

“General Caine, the president has claimed on several occasions over the past couple of months that the war is over, the conflict has been concluded. What were the goals of the U.S. conflict in Iran, and have we achieved them?” Senator Dick Durbin asked.

The general couldn’t offer a straight answer.

“Well, sir, I’m gonna be mindful of my need to maintain trust with a variety of stakeholders in the job that I’m in, which includes you, the American people, the Joint Force, and the president.… Only our political and civilian leaders set the national military objectives,” Caine replied, refusing to answer the question directly. “I’ll defer to the secretary and the president on other strategic objectives, but that’s what we’ve been focused on, sir.”

Durbin: "The president has claimed on several occasions over the last few months that the war is over, that the conflict has been concluded. What were the goals of the U.S. conflict in Iran and have we achieved them?"

Gen. Caine: "I'll defer to the secretary and the president." pic.twitter.com/9dzVLnJjNW

— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) May 12, 2026

“Do you feel that the situation in the Strait of Hormuz indicates a victory on our side?” Durbin continued.

Caine once again deferred to the president, refusing to call upon his years of military expertise to give a simple judgment call on a question the entire world knows the answer to.

“Sir, only political leaders decide victory or defeat, and I’ll leave it to them to opine on that. They are the ones who invoke or stop the use of military force.”

“Well, let me put it in strictly military terms,” Durbin said. “Can you explain to the American people, who are facing these gasoline and diesel oil prices, what is going on in the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran—which was attacked by us—seemingly has the Strait of Hormuz at a standstill, with 1,500 tankers waiting for either permission or peaceful circumstances to navigate?”

“Militarily, it’s a case where Iran is choosing to hold the world’s economy hostage through their use of military power across their southern flank,” Caine replied. “And so I would encourage Iran to reconsider that. And I would encourage those allies and partners who have an opportunity to come assist with that tactical problem to do so.”

That answer certainly does not indicate victory.

Durbin: "Do you feel that the situation in the Strait of Hormuz indicates a victory?"

Gen. Caine: "Only political leaders decide victory or defeat. I'll leave it to them to opine on that…It's a case where Iran is choosing to hold the world's economy hostage." pic.twitter.com/EoI5hefx8l

— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) May 12, 2026

Brian Driscoll was a decorated FBI agent with 18 years at the agency under his belt before he was offered the bureau’s number two job at the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term. A clerical error would ultimately place Driscoll at the top of the agency, making him the bureau’s acting director—an oversight that wasn’t corrected until the Senate confirmed Kash Patel at the end of February.

Driscoll wasn’t keen to take the reins of the FBI but told CNN Tuesday that he agreed to take the job after he was informed it was between him and a political appointee.

Yet as the weeks bore on, the questions he fielded from incoming Trump officials began to concern him. They inquired about his political affiliations, who he voted for, when he began supporting Trump, and if he supported a Democrat in recent elections.

Patel was more blunt. The onboarding wouldn’t be an issue so long as Driscoll wasn’t active on social media, didn’t donate to the Democratic Party, and didn’t vote for Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, Driscoll recalled Patel saying.

“It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up,” Driscoll told CNN.

Driscoll met with Patel after the latter had been confirmed. Patel flatly said that “the FBI tried to put the president in jail and he hasn’t forgotten it,” Driscoll recalled.

The issue came to a head two weeks after Trump’s inauguration. When the White House demanded the names of some 6,000 bureau staff who were involved in the January 6 probe, Driscoll refused, sparking accusations from then–Justice Department official Emil Bove that there was “insubordination” among the FBI’s leadership.

Driscoll said that when he confronted Bove about the need for a list, Bove blamed it on “cultural rot in the FBI.”

“I was telling them this is wrong,” Driscoll told CNN.

Driscoll was fired months later, in August, but the purge hasn’t quieted down for those left behind at the bureau. The agency, according to Driscoll, is still focused on punishing or removing any FBI agents who could be perceived as threats to the president’s agenda, at the White House’s behest. That includes sacking employees who were involved in investigating the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, as well as employees involved in Trump’s classified documents probe.

Driscoll is one of three former senior FBI agents who have sued the Trump administration for firing them as part of a “campaign of retribution.” That lawsuit is ongoing.

During a meeting of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee regarding the Pentagon’s outrageous $1.5 trillion dollar budget request, Graham became visibly frustrated when speaking about a CBS News report from the day before that Pakistan had quietly allowed Iranian aircraft to park at its military bases, potentially to shield them from U.S. airstrikes.

Graham pressed the Joint Chiefs of Staff chair, General Dan Caine, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on whether they believed that was consistent with Pakistan’s role as a mediator between the U.S. and Iran. Both military leaders refused to weigh in.

“I don’t want to get in the middle of these negotiations—” Hegseth said, and Graham exploded.

“Well, I do! I want to get in the middle of these negotiations!” he said.

“I don’t trust Pakistan as far as I can throw ’em! If they actually do have Iranian aircraft parked in Pakistan bases to protect Iranian military assets, that tells me we should be looking maybe for somebody else to mediate. No wonder this damn thing is going nowhere!”

a frustrated Lindsey Graham to Hegseth and Caine: "No wonder this damn thing is going nowhere!" pic.twitter.com/LEdIGxuiRZ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 12, 2026

Graham indicated Monday that his beef with Pakistan was mostly related to his loyalty to Israel. “If this reporting is accurate, it would require a complete reevaluation of the role Pakistan is playing as mediator between Iran, the United States and other parties,” he wrote on X. “Given some of the prior statements by Pakistani defense officials towards Israel, I would not be shocked if this were true.”

It’s not clear what statements he was specifically referring to, but Pakistani officials have strongly condemned Israel’s continued strikes in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran.

Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs denied CBS’s reporting in a statement, calling it “misleading and sensationalized.”

“The Iranian aircraft currently parked in Pakistan arrived during the ceasefire period and bear no linkage whatsoever to any military contingency or preservation arrangement,” the statement said. “Assertions suggesting otherwise are speculative, misleading, and entirely detached from the factual context.”

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Asim Munir, the leader of the Pakistani military, have emerged as key negotiators through the extended and tenuous ceasefire. A resolution to the talks remains out of reach, as Trump declared Sunday that the latest terms Iran offered were “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!”

There wasn’t even supposed to be a contest, thanks to independent populist Dan Osborn running for the Senate. The Nebraska Democratic Party planned to endorse his candidacy this year due to his strong performance in 2024, when he came within seven percentage points of defeating incumbent Republican Senator Deb Fischer and outperformed Kamala Harris’s 21-point loss to Donald Trump in the state.

But then 79-year-old pastor William Forbes entered the race. While Forbes is a registered Democrat, he’s voted for Trump three times and attended a Republican training event earlier this year. Nebraska Democrats were understandably worried, so now retired pharmacy tech Cindy Burbank is running against Forbes.

Burbank said that if she wins the primary, she’ll drop out and endorse Osborn so he has a clear field to take on incumbent Republican Senator Pete Ricketts, whose family is worth billions. Not surprisingly, Republicans are crying foul, calling Burbank’s candidacy a coordinated and unfair means to prop up Osborn.

Republican Secretary of State Bob Evnen tried to kick Burbank off the ballot in March, but she successfully sued to stay on. Burbank also paid the filing fee for a third-party candidate, Mike Marvin, of the Legal Marijuana NOW Party.

Osborn is an Omaha union leader who became popular during a 77-day strike at a Kellogg’s cereal plant in 2021, catapulting him to fame and his strong showing in 2024. A former registered Democrat, he ran as an independent that year in part due to the party’s struggles to convince voters in the Great Plains, and pledges not to caucus with either party if he wins this time around. He’s behind Ricketts by only one percentage point in recent polling.

“The national Democratic brand is toxic among voters in states like Nebraska in the sense that it’s very much identified with the coastal liberal elites on a whole host of issues,” Mark P. Jones, a political science professor at Rice University, told USA Today. “Nebraska Democrats are adopting this sort of plan B strategy, which is to not run a Democratic candidate at all.”

Will Nebraska voters be able to figure out what’s going on? If Forbes wins the primary, he could siphon away votes from Osborn in November and help Ricketts to victory. If Burbank wins, Nebraska Democrats have to get the word out that she’s supporting Osborn. All of this could easily go wrong.

On Tuesday, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, filed a lawsuit against the Department of the Interior in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, following unanswered Freedom of Information Act requests filed back in February for records regarding the public funds being used for Freedom 250—the organization overseeing everything from setting up the Grand Prix around the National Mall to Trump’s independence arch. The Department of the Interior never responded to the requests, and now PEER’s lawsuit claims that our money is being used with “with no transparency, no accountability, and no guardrails.”

“America’s 250th anniversary celebration is supposed to be an occasion for strengthening public trust in our democratic institutions, not eroding it,” PEER’s executive director, Tim Whitehouse, said in a statement on Monday. “In contrast, Freedom 250 is a privately managed slush fund.… It epitomizes what is wrong with politics today.”

PEER alleges that the Trump administration is using Freedom 250 to redirect $100 million in taxpayer funds from America 250 without congressional approval, mix private funding and public taxpayer money without oversight, sell “access to President Trump” for up to $2.5 million, solicit foreign donations, and more. PEER also accuses the DOI of pressuring workers to use Freedom 250 branding in their official email sign-offs, which could violate the Hatch Act.

The Trump administration has yet to comment on the lawsuit.

All three of the court’s liberal justices dissented against Monday’s order, but Justice Sonia Sotomayor penned the counterargument. In five concise pages, Sotomayor flamed her conservative colleagues for the ruling, arguing that it was “inappropriate” for the court to alter the state’s voting lines mere days before the primary. She noted that Alabama had already been found to have violated the Fourteenth Amendment by intentionally diluting the votes of its Black voters.

“The Court today unceremoniously discards District Court’s meticulously documented and supported discriminatory-intent finding & careful remedial order without any sound basis for doing so and without regard for the confusion that will surely ensue,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, noting that the decision will “cause only confusion as Alabamians begin to vote in the elections scheduled for next week.”

The high court’s order will allow Alabama’s GOP leaders to redraw electoral boundaries, offering a path for the party to eliminate one or both Democratic seats in the House and potentially imperil Democratic Representative Shomari Figures.

The ruling was made possible by the court’s decision to gut the Voting Rights Act late last month.

Black voters in Alabama had fought for years to have their voices heard, navigating the legal system to carve out another Black-majority voting district in the red Southern stronghold.

“We are witnessing a return to Jim Crow. And anybody who is alarmed by these developments—as everybody should be—better be making a plan to vote in November to put an end to this madness while we still can,” NAACP National President Derrick Johnson said in a statement to the Associated Press.

Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of the New Republic show Right Now. I’m joined by two great political scientists. Hakeem Jefferson is at Stanford University. Jake Grumbach is at the University of California, Berkeley. It’s afternoon for them, just barely—they’re on the West Coast. I’m glad they’re joining us today.

These are two people I really enjoy talking to, but we’re talking to them at a time that’s not that great. Literally about an hour ago, Tennessee voted to eliminate their majority-Black congressional district. You’re seeing Alabama, South Carolina, a bunch of states talking about doing that after the Supreme Court ruling last week further gutting—almost invalidating—the Voting Rights Act. We’re going to talk about the fallout from that and what it means for Black representation. Thanks, guys, for joining me.

Hakeem Jefferson: Glad to be here, Perry.

Bacon: Hakeem, just talk about that first of all.

Jefferson: Out of the gate, man. Out of the gate. Go ahead.

Bacon: The question I want to ask you all specifically is: Alito, Roberts, and the Supreme Court are basically saying that Black people are Democrats, so gerrymandering is about partisanship, and so it’s fine if we get rid of all the Black congressional districts because those are just Democrats, and the Republicans won the majority in those states, so they get to draw the lines. Why does it matter that Black representation goes down in these states?

Jefferson: Thanks for having us, again, Perry. Jake had some insights that I thought were just right on the money in the piece he wrote—so I’ll let Jake talk about the foolishness of the court’s thinking when it comes to partisanship and race, given what we political scientists and the broad public know about the overlapping nature of partisanship and race in the U.S. I’m going to let Jake set the groundwork for that.

But at the top: The Voting Rights Act is perhaps the most effective—if not one of the most effective—pieces of legislation in the country’s history. The post–Civil War amendments were meant to enshrine these rights for Black folk. But across the American South in particular, there were these attempts to burden the franchise for Black people. The Voting Rights Act comes along and helps to ensure that Black people get to enjoy access to the ballot without the burdens that lots of local jurisdictions tried to put in front of them.

I’ve been reading this work by political scientist Katherine Tate. She, early on, was thinking about: What’s the reason we might care about Black political representation? What does it matter?

So we have these expectations that Black representatives—who descriptively represent Black constituents—might have preferences, might have priorities that differ from their white counterparts. We might expect, for example, that if Black representatives have life experiences that align with Black constituents, they might prioritize issues related to criminal justice. We might remember, for example, the leadership that many Black representatives had in the aftermath—this will sound long ago—of Trayvon Martin’s death at the hands of George Zimmerman. It was Black representatives who really put out the clarion call about whether a young Black man wearing a hoodie should confront death in the way that Trayvon did.

We might have expectations that Black members of Congress are going to be better advocates for issues like criminal justice or for various redistributive programs.

You see in the Senate, for example, Black women holding Secretary Kennedy’s feet to the fire when it comes to access to vaccines or Black maternal health.

We might expect that descriptive representation comes with some substantive purchase. So the decline of Black representation is not only a slap in the face to the progress made for multiracial democracy, but we might worry that it will come with some substantive declines for issues that Black folks care about and that matter to them materially.

Bacon: Let me follow up on one question. Today, the district that was eliminated is in the Memphis area. The representative’s name is Steve Cohen. He is not Black. So talk about that—just help explain why that’s a loss as well.

Jefferson: So when Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, we talk about Black folks having the right to select representatives of their choice—that choice needn’t be a descriptive member of the group. It’s often the case that Black folks who are voting for members of Congress, given residential segregation and the like, perhaps that choice would be a Black representative. But sometimes the choice is to have somebody who has substantive priorities and interests that are aligned with theirs.

In the context of American politics—I’m sure Jake’s going to lay out even more eloquently—that means, for many and most Black folks, having the opportunity to vote for a Democratic politician and having substantive numbers such that their support for that candidate can get them over the finish line. But it’s a really good opportunity for Jake to lay out even more clearly the way that partisanship and race are so intertwined in American life.

Bacon: Go ahead, Jake.

Jake Grumbach: Great to be with you guys. Thanks, Perry, for organizing this conversation. Always great to be along with a friend and collaborator—and, unfortunately, at an inferior school slightly to myself—Hakeem Jefferson. But otherwise, excellent to see you.

Just to continue on Steve Cohen in Tennessee as a candidate of choice of a racial minority group—that is central to Voting Rights Act Section 2, which just got cut in Callais by the Supreme Court. The idea of a candidate of choice—it can be like a proxy. It’s more likely to be a member of that racial minority group. But Steve Cohen is a long-serving, popular representative with a majority-Black constituency. He’s an Eastern European Jewish guy in ethnic background. But you should quickly YouTube him.

Bacon: Just hear his voice.

Grumbach: Yeah. That dude is Memphis. You could be like, “Oh yeah, 8Ball & MJG, and Three 6 Mafia, and Steve Cohen.” It actually—

Jefferson: He spent time around some Black people.

Grumbach: Yeah. He’s a candidate of choice in this way of the Black community of the district.

But taking a step back here—Hakeem spoke about the Voting Rights Act as one of the most effective pieces of legislation in American history. It’s also the culmination—like Hakeem mentioned—of the enforcement of the Reconstruction Amendments after the Civil War: the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Thirteenth Amendment: ban on slavery. Fourteenth Amendment: equality under the law, which is really codified in the Civil Rights Act of 1964—

Jefferson: And importantly, birthright citizenship.

Grumbach: And birthright citizenship! The Fourteenth Amendment says, unlike the Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court before the Civil War, which said Black people can never be citizens, this says you’re a citizen when you’re born in the U.S. And citizens and all people on U.S. soil are entitled to equality under the law, to due process, jury of your peers—your people have to be able to serve on juries too. That sort of equality under the law, which was violated by Jim Crow—eventually the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ends that.

The Fifteenth Amendment is no ban on voting on the basis of race or previous condition of servitude. And the Jim Crow voting laws violated that.… The 1965 Voting Rights Act—the crown jewel of the civil rights movement—actually enforces the Fifteenth Amendment, and to some extent the Fourteenth Amendment as well.

That said, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has different sections. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act was the pre-clearance section. This said: Former Jim Crow areas—counties and states—if you’re going to change your voting laws or redistrict, you’re going to have to pass that through the U.S. Justice Department. At the time under Obama when this is being litigated, it’s Eric Holder as attorney general. He gets to say, You’re thinking about changing your voting laws? Is this going to suppress votes? Is this some small version of Jim Crow? You have to review this with us.

The 2013 Shelby County Supreme Court decision ends Section 5 with a similar logic. John Roberts says basically: Racism’s over, Section 5 is done, no more pre-clearance. We see a wave of election law changes by state legislatures and the changing of voting procedures—purges of voter rolls. The things you know as voter suppression in the 2010s come after the Shelby County decision.

But then Section 2: the vote dilution provision. That’s mostly about redistricting, and it’s been interpreted in subsequent judicial opinions. There’s a standard, and that standard is what we talked about—racial groups, particularly racial minority groups, have the ability to select their candidates of choice, and they’re not blocked from voting, registering to vote, and then voting for those candidates of choice. And then the district system is not set up in a way to constantly have a racial majority group—usually white people, but it depends on the place—block those candidates of choice through overwhelming voting against them, either at the primary or general election, such that those candidates of choice of the racial minority group get to be in office. That is the standard of Section 2. The Supreme Court in Callais ended that.

What are the long-term ramifications of ending Section 2 here, when we think about redistricting? Partisan gerrymandering—a state legislature who controls districting—this is very unique in the U.S. system. State governments draw districts and determine voting laws for the most part within the Voting Rights Act, whatever the Supreme Court says is allowed of something like the Voting Rights Act, which is Congressional legislation and the Constitution. That’s unique—around the world, it’s usually the national government that regulates voting and elections and districting, not states. But states do it.

Partisan gerrymandering has long been legal. You can actually say, We are setting up this map to maximize the seats from my party and minimize the seats of the other party. The only thing you couldn’t do is racially gerrymander. If in that partisan map, racial minority groups are a coherent community that vote cohesively for candidates of choice, that repeatedly choose candidates that they support in majorities—those candidates have to be able to take office. You can only partisan-gerrymander so much.

The Voting Rights Act Section 2 blocks the extent to which you can gerrymander, by saying, Black, Latino, Asian American, Native Americans in cohesive communities have to be able to elect their candidates of choice. With that falling away, what we now have—especially in the South—is that you can fully do Republican gerrymanders without having to think about the many hundreds of thousands and millions of Black voters electing their candidates of choice. This allows more extreme Republican gerrymanders, and it’s going to allow more extreme Democratic gerrymanders in blue states.

That’s the outcome, and the biggest casualty is Black representation. For the parties, it’s going to mildly help Republicans, but Democrats can gerrymander more effectively too, now, so it’ll even out a little. The big casualty is Black representation—to some extent Latino representation in other parts of the country, but mostly Black representation in the South is the casualty here for the long term.

Bacon: Let me follow up on the blue state part. I don’t think I fully understand. Explain how blue states could reduce Black representation. Is that what you’re saying? Explain that a little bit.

Grumbach: Yeah. In blue states there’s less racially polarized voting because the racial groups tend to vote more similarly. There are still racial differences in voting in blue states, but in a state like Illinois, Black and white libs—they vote more consistently. There are still big differences, like Hakeem said—different priorities. But it’s not as different as when you go to a Deep South state, where it’ll be 90 percent of white people vote one way, 90 percent of Black people vote another way.

In a state like Illinois or California or Massachusetts—Black people in Martha’s Vineyard—that is not how racial voting works in the Northeast or West Coast or Midwest. That’s not how Detroit looks. Even in the South—urban white people in Atlanta are not voting 90 percent against the Black people, and Black people are not voting 90 percent against those.

What I mean there is: If you wanted to maximize the number of blue seats in a state, what you want to do is get every [district] to have 51 percent blue voters and make the Republican voters have no ability to set seats. What that does is chop up cohesive racial groups more than you otherwise would.

It’s nothing as significant as the hit to Black representation in the South. But we will see a little bit of an increased ability—we’ll see how Democrats play this and how the maps end up. But the idea that now you don’t have to worry about racial minority groups just opens up the types of maps you can draw on the basis of partisan goals.

Bacon: So the Supreme Court is ignoring race, or prioritizing partisanship? … Are they pretending race doesn’t exist, or are they saying party is the thing that divides us today?

Grumbach: That’s right. Hakeem alluded to this. A big part of the logic of the ruling is they’re saying: To prove vote dilution under the Voting Rights Act, it’s going to be a near-impossible standard. You’re going to have to say, in places where it’s just Democrats or just Republicans, we have to find that the white and Black people and Latinos and Asian Americans and Native Americans vote systematically differently—including in general elections.

In the South, that’s basically saying you have to hold constant control … and find systematic racial differences in voting even within the same party, in places that are very polarized by party and also by race, like in the Deep South. That’s basically going to say: You found the two white libs in some Deep South county that tend to vote with the Black people in a Democratic primary, and because they’re voting with the Black people, we have to ignore all the 90 percent of white people voting against the Black candidates, because they’re from a different party.

The logic is wacky, but you can see where it comes from. Their theory is that somebody votes on the basis of race or on the basis of party, right—and that historically, there are partisan forces and there are racial forces. But this is a pretty common misconception. In people’s own development of their own politics—when you were growing up and coming of age politically and deciding which party do you think represents you more—maybe there’s a lower-level office, you don’t really know what the comptroller does, but you see a “D” or an “R” next to their name—how did, in adolescence, you come to think of which party represents you better? It has something to do with race, civil rights, the legacies of the parties representing different racial groups. Race and party are not this separate thing. Race drives how the parties organize themselves and how people identify with the parties.

It’s not a “control for party” story—it’s that party is a mediator, or an intermediate step between [race and voting behavior]. For that reason, this “control for party” thing—sadly, I, like other political scientists, have really played into that—is a fundamentally problematic and just fallacious way to think of the process of partisanship and race throughout history, or within individual decision-making models.

Jefferson: We see it in all the structural ways that Jake has laid out in terms of vote choice. We also see it when we try to explain party ID. If you were to run some attitudinal models and you’re just trying to explain variation in Black partisanship or white partisanship, on either side, you’re going to see relationships between that partisan outcome and racial attitudes.

In the case of white Americans—imperfect though it may be—one of the things that will consistently help you explain white support for the Republican Party or for the Democratic Party is what they think about Black people. What we scholars call their racial resentment attitudes. And on the side of Black folks, one of the consistent predictors of Black support for the Democratic Party is identity centrality—that is, how important is being Black to their identity?

It provides some empirical support for this point that Jake was making.… People sometimes try to oversimplify Black support for the Democratic Party, as though Black folks aren’t making a real, calculated choice here between two imperfect options. But when many Black folks think about their support for the Democratic Party, it is because they perceive that, though imperfect, it is the party that most advances Black interests.

We’ve seen declines in the level of Black support for the Democratic Party. But these Black folks still aren’t overwhelmingly running to identify as Republicans. If anything, they’re putting the Democratic Party ID on ice, because many of them—especially some young people—are concerned that the party is not advancing Black interests. We can’t think about partisan choice, or outcomes related to partisan choice, without thinking about race—even as the Supreme Court in all of its decisions these days wants to convince us that race doesn’t matter. All of the survey evidence and the like that we have would suggest otherwise.

Grumbach: In the Trump era … it wasn’t not surprising that Trump got more Latino voting. He got maybe 45 percent of the Latino vote. It’s not not surprising that Black support for the Democratic Party in 2024 is at 90 percent, whereas for Obama it was in the mid-90s. There are some fluctuations. And it is interesting that white support for Trump is at 60 percent, whereas in some elections white people supported Republicans at the high 60s. But think about a 60–40 election. If a president won 60–40, you’d be like, That’s the landslide of the century.

A 20-point gap? … The levels of actual racial sorting in the electorate are actually high in raw terms. Even though it’s interesting that the presidential candidate who said Mexicans aren’t bringing their best and were criminals and rapists got a solid 45 percent of the Latino vote—that’s important to understand. At the same time, 55 to 45 is a big gap. It’s still a very racially sorted electorate.

And furthermore, what Hakeem said that’s so on point is: Even if there was a little bit of de-racialization in the electorate, with racial groups not being quite as sorted into the parties as before, it’s still very sorted. Racial attitudes are more predictive now than ever. Latinos who voted for the Republican Party recently tend to be the racially conservative Latinos. The most predictive thing for naturalized immigrants that became U.S. citizens and now vote—the most predictive survey question is the racial resentment index.

Saying, Hello, new Asian American voter, naturalized Latino American—what is the most predictive attitude? It’s: Do you think Black people are poorer than white people because they’re lazier and don’t work as hard, or because of discrimination? Your answer to that question is the most correlated with your vote choice. Racial attitudes are more related to vote choice, even as groups change.

And when people are shocked by that and saying, But more Latinos voted Republican in 2024 than before, so it’s not about race—I’m like, You haven’t met a lot of people of color if you’ve never heard people of color say other people of color are lazy. Especially a different group of color. I’m like, You’ve never been in the barbershop. That is just so central to how people organize their thoughts about society—even people of color.

Jefferson: Totally.

Bacon: Looking forward, I want to drill down a little bit. It is likely the case that we’ll have a House majority that the Democrats control in November. We’ll also have Tennessee have zero Black representatives, South Carolina maybe with zero, Alabama down to one, Louisiana down to two. So what does it look like?

On some level, it’s better.… Black people support a Democratic House—let’s put it that way. On the other hand, Black representation will go down. So Hakeem, talk about that: If we have a Democratic-controlled Congress that has fewer Black members, no James Clyburn in leadership, but it’s still a Democratic majority Congress—what is the difference? How is it different than it would be if … Section 2 were still in place?

Jefferson: One of the things that we know from the descriptive representation literature—not to hawk the book again, but I’ve been reading it, so it’s top of mind, but it’s a little dated now, and I don’t have evidence from more recent years about this. One of the things that Tate observes in this work, Black Faces in the Mirror—which is, talk about relevant, about Black representation—one of the things that she observes in the second part of the book, where she’s thinking about Black evaluations of Congress, is that Black people have slightly more positive views when they’re represented by Black electeds.

I want to caveat that by saying I don’t know if this holds up in the contemporary era. But that’s what we know from the descriptive representation literature: People perceive institutions as more legitimate, as fairer, as more likely to give them outcomes that they desire, when they have descriptive representatives.

I do want to caution—this is a group of us who like some complexity and nuance—that descriptive representation isn’t the end-all, be-all of what people need. It is not the case that mere descriptive representation gives good material outcomes. I live in Palo Alto, not too far from San Francisco, with a district attorney who is a Black woman who very proudly supports tough-on-crime policies and the like.

But what we will observe is a continued decline in Black people’s perception of the legitimacy of political institutions—namely Congress—as their representation declines. And at some level we’ll observe this in the levels of advocacy we observe.

Bacon: Is your family in the Clyburn district?

Jefferson: Yes.

Bacon: What does that look like? Whether you like Clyburn or not, he is a Black voice for that community. What do you think the impact of that loss is? He is likely to lose—potentially his seat is gone as well.

Jefferson: I have so many memories of Jim Clyburn being very present. His sister-in-law, for a small time, was my piano teacher. I quit piano, though. He was recently on campus, and he and I took a photograph together. The way that this stuff works on the ground is people just know the guy. I don’t think that people are following all the machinations of what he’s up to, but they perceive—and I think they’re right about it—that they’ve got a powerful representative who has a drawl that is familiar to them, who just by sense of his similarity has their interests at heart.

I think we forget that people contact their members of Congress for any number of things, and the perception that one can be in touch, that one can reach out when they’re struggling with the ordinary stuff of life—I don’t know that we have great evidence of this empirically, but you might expect that that declines when the person is different from you, even if that person has otherwise similar preferences.

Symbolic representation and descriptive representation—we shouldn’t put all of our weight on it. But we know the way that people think about their citizenship, the way that people think about their place in a broader polity, is in part a function of how much they see themselves represented in the governing bodies of society. A Congress that has fewer Black representatives—fewer people who look like Jasmine Crockett or Jim Clyburn—is a Congress that will have an even tougher time convincing Black folks that it’s a legitimate political institution that is advancing democratic goals. Small-d democratic goals.

Bacon: So we’re in gerrymandering season right now. Jake, are you back?

Grumbach: I’m back. I want to talk about Black representation, on Hakeem’s last answer.

Bacon: Say it again?

Grumbach: My iPhone overheated, but I would love to jump in on Black representation.

Bacon: Sounds good. Then we’ll move on to something else. Go ahead.

Grumbach: When we think about the Congressional Black Caucus and Black representation in Congress right now, we have to think about the triumphs and the serious limitations.

So the triumphs first. On my mom’s side of the family, my grandfather was the editor of the Chicago Defender—the preeminent Black newspaper [in the] mid-century. Getting Thurgood Marshall onto the Supreme Court under LBJ was the triumph of his life. Reporting on it and being a hack hounding LBJ and the Democratic Party through the Black press to get Thurgood Marshall on the court—that was everything.

And Black congressional representation represented the end of American authoritarianism and apartheid in the South—to have majority-Black areas, states that are 30, 40[-plus] percent Black, get their first Black representation since Reconstruction, since the northern Union military under Lincoln occupied the South and said, You have to allow Black voting for those 12 years. This is a triumph.

To this day, that generation in my family is very interested in descriptive representation—and it is a triumph. They remember the days before that, where even Bill Clinton in 1992 going on Arsenio [Hall] was a big deal. It was so new to be represented as your whole person in that way. Culturally, linguistically, the idea that Black people are human beings too and deserve representation—this was so basic, such a triumph.

And then I’ve got to say the limitations, though. Like Hakeem said, descriptive representation is not a perfect predictor. Clarence Thomas was a key figure behind the rollback of Black representation, period.

It’s not a perfect predictor. It’s actually quite an imperfect predictor. And the Republican Party has changed a lot. They know this, and they’ve run an increasing number of MAGA Black candidates that Black people do not vote for, but it scrambles the brains of descriptive representation differently.

Second, young Black Americans are not as interested in descriptive representation as the Boomer and Gen X generations were—and beyond that, the Silent Generation and returning Black veterans. That’s in part because they see the parity in representation. Now, Black representation in Congress is proportional to the Black population. It’s a triumph. But it has not delivered material equality. The racial wealth gap is greater than it’s been in centuries.

This is the precarity of the Black middle class—the fact that the 2008 financial crisis destroyed half of Black family wealth. Things like war and imperialism that young Black Americans see, and they see a similar logic of racial hierarchy in imperialism and colonialism around the world. This is a reason why age polarization in Democratic Party primaries is big among Black voters. Young Black voters and older Black voters vote very differently in Democratic Party primaries, and we need to listen to these young Black people who were very central in Black Lives Matter and have a different orientation. It’s a different wave of Black politics.

The third thing is—we have to be real about this—the Congressional Black Caucus … Black Representatives are 10 of the 15 oldest members of Congress. They have very serious health issues, and they do not have successors. Even if the Voting Rights Act Section 2 stayed and they had these Black districts, many of these members of Congress—I don’t know what happened. There is not a generation lying in wait that they have cultivated, and it’s in some cases become a very personalistic fiefdom in a safe district that is not always aligned with the interests of the Black community more broadly.

Black Americans are the most—you’ll get this twisted, because people try to do this bait and switch in punditry; they’ll say white self-described liberals or white Democrats are sometimes to the left on policy issues of Black Americans. But it’s only if you subset white people. Like, If you pull out the leftmost white people, they are somehow to the left of all Black people on average!

But if you actually look at racial groups in the U.S., Black people are the leftmost on every issue—criminal justice on downward. We have to remember this—Paul Frymer’s book, Uneasy Alliances, was about this; Black people being a captured constituency in the Democratic Party. That’s why swing voters are doubly valuable in these states. But a Black voter whose choice is Democratic Party or bust is not a credible threat to the party in the same way.

This is a thing where we actually have to demand the most from Black representatives and not give them a pass because of descriptive representation. This is a moment where, with gerontocracy and with aging leadership and a new authoritarian moment, we have to ask these representatives to really step up.

Jefferson: And step down.

Bacon: We’re in a gerrymandering festival right now where Virginia moved to make eight of nine districts Democratic, even though it’s a closely divided state. Florida’s going to be 24–4 [Republican]. Tennessee will be 8–0 or 9–0 [Republican]—I’ve forgotten which one.

Are we saying that a Democratic-gerrymandered state and a Republican-gerrymandered state—are we saying that what happened in Tennessee is different than Florida or Virginia because they’re killing off Black districts specifically and targeting them? Is that qualitatively different for you all than what’s happening in, let’s say, Montana—if they gerrymandered an all-white Republican state, or a Democratic state—is this fundamentally different because of the majority-Black districts and the history we’re talking about?

Jefferson: This is more in Jake’s wheelhouse, but I’ll just say this quickly: We signed on—what feels like a long time ago—to public letters. We led public letters in support of legislation that would just weaken this ability to do this gerrymandering, period. No one thinks that this is good for democracy to have this kind of gerrymandering happening, whether it’s happening from Democrats or Republicans.

So I just want to put it on the record that my own politics—and if I recall, because Jake signed on and helped to lead the letter-writing campaign to convince Democrats to advance this legislation—Perry, I think that we’re in a bad equilibrium for democracy. This kind of tit-for-tat, what game theorists would have expected. I’ll just put it on the table: I don’t think that the argument is that any form of this is good for democracy. But I’ll let Jake take the particulars of the question.

Grumbach: So HR 1—that big democracy reform in the Democratic Congress, the post–AOC Squad election [in] 2018 comes in. Their first piece of legislation—that’s why it’s called House Resolution 1—was a democracy reform: the John Lewis Voting Rights Act stuff, stopping voter suppression, more resources for election security, and a ban on partisan gerrymandering. Because Congress can just say, No state can draw districts in a partisan way that’s unfair to voters of both parties. That’s obviously good.

But without that, you don’t want one-sided warfare. An arms race where both sides are doing it gives an incentive for both sides to say, “Let’s both stop this with new rules on both of us.” So still support that—that’s coming back into the agenda. At the same time, I will say, yes, there’s something different historically.

Partisan gerrymandering is incredibly consequential. Some post-Dobbs decisions that allowed states to ban abortion—those abortion bans in some states are only sustainable because partisan gerrymandering gives a minority of voters, typically in more rural areas, the ability to set the majority of the state legislature over the will of a pro-choice majority of voters in order to ban abortion. That’s an example of the consequentiality of partisan gerrymandering. It makes policy in the state more out of step with the will of the majority. Very important.

At the same time, there is something—given the long struggle over American democracy—that has been centrally about Black representation and voting rights. Black Americans have been the vanguard. Any push for democracy in the U.S.—the vanguard has been a Black democracy movement.… The Voting Rights Act Section 2 benefits all types of groups.

Just like the Civil Rights Act benefits white women and all types of things. Black American movements … if you survey Americans, the only constituency who place a priority on things like voting rights and the rules of the game of democracy as an issue in and of itself—not just to get better gas prices and stuff—it’s Black Americans.

There is something really special and really consequential about ending that Voting Rights Act triumph of Black representation that paid off. This is no ordinary love. Sade was like—these Black movements were really about—it’s not an ordinary movement. It’s actually a movement that translates into gains in democracy and equality for everyone, and that’s a kind of unique thing in world history. That’s why every movement around the world emulates the Black American civil rights movement of the mid–twentieth century.

Jefferson: As Jake was talking, I was thinking about a conversation that Jake and I had just this past Friday in person, where we were thinking about the magnitude of the efforts to undermine and to walk back this kind of progress that we know is targeted at weakening Black political power.

We’re in an industry and a discipline that at times has seemed to lose focus on that as the objective. Political scientists have often fallen prey to these arguments about, Does voter ID do this thing, does it affect turnout of that thing? The bigger goal has always been to undermine Black political power. Of course, we hear some scholars, often scholars of color and Black scholars in particular, using that language to describe these efforts, small though they sometimes seem.

But what this moment really forces me to think about is how to talk about what it is we’re observing. Jake is exactly right—this is such a clear attempt to undermine Black political power. When we think about it that way, asking, Does a voter ID law impact turnout? just seems like the wrong question. The attempt to suppress Black turnout in the first place is part of a larger package of a long-standing attempt to undermine Black political power. If anything, I hope the moment gives to scholars and practitioners a different vocabulary—maybe an old vocabulary—to describe what these folks are up to.

Bacon: Let me close with this subject. You both talked about this idea of Black political power, and we are watching a Supreme Court, an administration—we’ve had five years of this. The question I’m getting at is: It’s not that I don’t view this as a partisan project at this point, if only because I watched so many universities eagerly kill off any diversity initiatives they had—they seemed like they almost wanted to, on some level. I watched how many liberal columnists were eager to attack Ibram Kendi and pile on.

If you all are saying we’re seeing a pushback against Black political power, isn’t that going to win, because it includes all white Republicans and most white Democrats? Or a lot of white Democrats. I’m concerned that all racially conscious policy is being eliminated, and I don’t see that ending, because it seems like that is supported by all Republicans and many Democrats.

Jefferson: We’re in a long winter. This is a long winter of racial backlash at all levels, across any number of institutions. And Perry, you’re right to put your finger on it that yeah, you see a lot of white liberals who might push back against the most egregious forms of this racial backlash. But we should be attentive to the places of agreement between otherwise liberal white people and white conservatives when it comes to race—so often in the language of racial preference, or racial advantage, or the perception that Black folk and other racial minorities are getting goods they shouldn’t get.

What it demonstrates is what Black people and people of color broadly know, if only by way of experience, which is that race is one of these peculiar areas where things like liberalism can fall by the wayside. It does mean that you’ve got this weird coalition of folks who are at least on the fence about how explicit the remedies for racial oppression ought to be. That does make me nervous. If we were to advance legislation in Congress, most white Democrats would support legislation that protected Black civil rights and Black voting rights. But it is telling that among the white public, race is this area where you see some degrees of compromise that might worry us.

Grumbach: Thinking about the ups and downs in history of this—including since the Voting Rights Act—is very instructive. The Civil Rights Act—in the ’70s, the stories of the attempt to actually integrate schools, including in the North through that implementation, was different than the Civil Rights Act in theory—Black people can join the schools.

That’s one. Then we had actual affirmative action and affirmative action debates, including quotas and actual saved spots—like the equivalent of handicapped parking spots, but for Black people or for women or for Native American individuals. That was battled over. Then it wasn’t quotas—that was ruled unconstitutional. It became about: Can you take into account things like racial experience, identity-based experience in a setting—getting into schools or jobs or things like that, or preferential contracting in public contracts?

All of these things have been battled over. The thing that we mistook is: There are some things that won’t backslide that far. Sure—affirmative action, you can try that, that’ll fall back, whatever. The basics of the Voting Rights Act, especially Section 2—that was not something I had on my bingo card. Whereas we had seen a lot of backlash to the equivalent of much more materially substantive DEI—essentially real affirmative action.

In this racial backlash that we’re in—this anti-wokeness, and all this stuff within firms, within law schools, all types of institutions—the first thing is that whatever racial progress was made in 2020 has rolled back. That’s one thing, and I think that’s a big thing. We didn’t know—I didn’t think—it would backslide this far.

Jefferson: Yeah, I was about to say: Who’s included in this “we”?

Bacon: Are those things related, though? Once you have … like, isn’t John Roberts and Alito saying, Oh good, since white liberals no longer care about diversity anyway, we can go a little further? I know they want to just strike the Voting Rights Act down—they’ve wanted that their entire lives. They’re not denying that. But—

Jefferson: I will say—but Jake, one second—’cause Jake and I agree on about 98 percent of everything, so we need a little bit of friction here. And so I’ll gin up some friction only to say that this is the natural, logical end state. All of this is about power—which I know my brother Jake understands.

The DEI walkbacks, the fights over all this stuff in places like the ones we inhabit—universities—the fight over the 1619 Project. I’m not saying anything that Jake doesn’t already know. But all of those fights—sometimes as silly as CRT, as silly as they appear—they’re about discursive power, they’re about social power, they’re about power in the boardrooms.

And the Voting Rights Act and the like are just about a different domain of power. But for me, the through line is that this is always a question of who gets to wield power in a given domain. And so when we see all these white folk—including some white liberals—saying, Yeah, get rid of all this talk about diversity and all this stuff about Black people and all this, it’s a logical next step that they are not as on board as we might want them to be with the ascension of Black political power.

And there’s nothing that enshrines the right of Black people to wield political power in this country more than the Voting Rights Act. And so this is just a natural end state of this hellscape of trying to advance white political power at the expense of Black political power. That was my ginning up a fight with my brother Jake, who agrees with everything I just said, of course.

Grumbach: Yeah, I would say to this—I like that take. I think one is—I do think in woke 2.0, understanding that people of color—like, I think this is a conversation we’ve also had, Hakeem—you can define white politics as including non-white people too. In this way, that’s one way to square that circle. And I do think it’s worth thinking about that.

And I also think in this—like, the white liberal in mind I think you’re painting is the one that symbolically was supportive of some stuff that was convenient but doesn’t actually want any material changes to anything, and has a signaling sort of thing, a sign of In this house, blah blah blah, but doesn’t actually want to live next to Black people, doesn’t want to have their kids go to school with Black people, doesn’t want to do all that.

I also think, when we think this through, that has taken over. Where I’ve seen, actually—when you go to different parts of the country, those places that are much more racially sorted, like I talked about—those blue areas where our viewers and listeners tend to be in metro areas—when you get outside there, I saw what it was. When you go to places in the Deep South, where if it’s not MAGA and it’s political, it’s all Black people. And you see a white person—that white person is in a different place. It’s just really interesting. And I’ve come to more recently think how different it is.

I’m from the Bay and live in the Bay Area—and how different that politics is, where white politics is very clear in those areas, and you’re betraying white politics by going there—in a way that in these sort of liberal metros, it’s not the same. So it’s just a broader context of where we’re at now.

Jefferson: I think that’s right, Jake.

Grumbach: And building—and these, how these coalitions are built and things like that, and how we understand these racial coalitions—I think that’s just important. And I think right now, racial politics—the real thing is racial politics is just incredibly predictive.

There are some ironies of this time period. The racial resentment index—you talked about that the Democratic Party got more left on a lot of things over the 2010s. Race being one of them, and civil rights. But also, to some extent, Biden was more pro-labor and things like that. And affluent white liberals voted in larger numbers in the suburbs. It’s a very interesting thing.

And there’s a lot of signaling and not substantive depth to this. But also—it’s just, we’re in a fascinating, uncertain moment. This wasn’t to push back on anything Hakeem said, as much as to just say: the future is going to be very interesting.

Jefferson: I agree with you on this.

Grumbach: Electoral politics is very volatile, and we don’t even know how—to the extent they’ll do some real backsliding on these next elections going forward, and we don’t know the districts yet.

And Louisiana—like Perry said earlier—Louisiana is canceling an ongoing election with tens of thousands of votes already cast, to redraw its districts, eliminate a Black district, and redo the election with less Black representation. This is so volatile. I want to send that message too—we have a lot to do.

Jefferson: I agree. And an image that I saw yesterday that heartened even this skeptical and cynical soul is in Tennessee, where you saw images of all of these white folks marching—I believe it was up the statehouse steps and that sort of thing. I think this point about volatility is so key, Jake—we just don’t know how this stuff is going to play out.

One of the things that I will say is, it’s so interesting to observe—you’re talking about some of this older leadership and the like, in these different periods of American history. It is so interesting if we think about the march that got us—at least played an important role in getting us—the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Another feature of the Black politics canon that we’ve both alluded to is just the way that political incorporation has changed the nature of how Black politics is expressed. And I already hawked Katherine Tate’s Black Faces in the Mirror, but the other book that I’m looking at on my desk is her book From Protest to Politics—what it means that Black people and Black political elites have been so incorporated into party politics, and how it just changes the nature of the way that Black people demand rights.

And so that’s all to say: the Supreme Court just undermined, just defamed the crown jewel of the civil rights movement—the 1965 Voting Rights Act. If we were at a different period of time, Black political elites would have responded, I think, differently. You would have seen a much more animated response. And I think one of the things that has really stood out to me is that—and of course, I’m exaggerating perhaps for effect—but what stood out to me in the aftermath of this severely consequential decision from the court, that is so about race and Black political power, is just the weakness of Black political elites in this moment. You just don’t—and maybe I’m looking for something that mirrors the—

Bacon: What do you mean?

Jefferson: Here’s what I mean, Perry—and maybe I’m looking for something that mirrors more the moment out of which the Voting Rights Act came, and maybe that’s a foolish thing to look for. But I think I’m looking for something, and I’m just at my core an ordinary person out in this political world. I think I do want greater expressions of anger and calls for mass political organizing, and for a political project. And maybe I’m looking for that from the wrong people—perhaps this is the role of ground-level activists and not the work of Hakeem Jeffries or the Black Caucus.

But I think I’m looking for something, Perry, that just sounds different, that sounds more urgent, that sounds like it understands how critical this is. And again, I’m not saying that they haven’t expressed anger, disappointment, disbelief. But I think I am looking for something that sounds the alarm a bit more than what I’ve heard—and perhaps I’ve just missed it. But I think I am looking for something that sounds a little more like: this is a five-alarm fire emergency, and we should all be in the streets like yesterday. I think that’s what I’m looking for.

Bacon: I know we’re getting to the end here, and Jake’s got to go, but let me make two points in response to that. The first one is—and I think Jake got at this a little earlier—the Black politicians are now embedded fully in a Democratic Party hierarchy, and the Democratic Party decided the last five years that talking about race is bad. They decided there was a backlash to BLM—not sure if that’s there. They decided that Kamala lost in part because she’s Black. So I think that’s part of it—the—

Jefferson: Political incorporation, yeah.

Bacon: Yeah. And the other part is, I would distinguish between—Fair Fight Action, Black—there are groups, Sherrilyn Ifill—if you distinguish between—when I look for Black leadership today, I don’t listen to Kamala Harris and Barack Obama. I’m not sure—that was maybe too blunt, but in a certain sense, or Clyburn. The people who can speak on Black interests in a more direct way are often not prominent Black members of the Democratic Party.

Jefferson: And that is telling, I think. I think that’s a telling point, Perry. I’ll let Jake give the last word.

Grumbach: No, I think—I’m in no huge rush—but Hakeem, I think that was so on point. What it speaks to me is the civil rights movement. Yeah, we think of Martin Luther King in his 30s—but that’s pretty young. And also it’s a student group—it’s SNCC, exactly. And students, whether it’s Freedom Riders from the North or Southern students who went to rural Black schools and Rosenwald schools in the rural South—this is a different youth-led movement. And now the relationship between youth and protest politics is very different. There was a youth-led movement the past few years. The Democratic Party and liberal institutions joined in crushing it. It is a signal that that style of youth politics—that may be unwieldy and is not incorporated into these institutions—is not friendly.

And the—the movie Selma makes LBJ seem like such a hard-ass: This damn Martin Luther King again. And that’s partially true. But it is this symbiotic relationship where—Obama said it too—”Pressure me,” right? Politicians have a different role than movement leaders. And I think we’re in a moment of social media, nationalized politics, and a different relationship between youth and social and institutional trust that really needs to be rectified. I think older generations in institutions need to think hard about: you want to come down on this protest because you don’t like it here, but you’ll need youth protests very soon to protect institutions like the Voting Rights Act.

Then the last thing I’ll say: in this new era of nationalized politics and social media, where people do not think in terms of their district representative in the same way—except the older ones, like Hakeem’s point about Clyburn being around—that’s true. I’m from San Francisco, where Nancy Pelosi—it’s, yeah, you don’t really think—for me, Nancy Pelosi is not like she’s Frisco like me—like, I really think of her—

Jefferson: Let me flex—I’ve been to the Clyburn fish fry. I’m telling you.

Bacon: That is a flex. I like it.

Grumbach: And what I’m saying is there’s a different relationship to district representation across the board now, which demands new institutions.

So the Voting Rights Act Section Two going down is absolutely the biggest deal—tragedy, period—for Black representation. But there already was writing on the wall that we needed a new model of representation that’s about coalitions, not your individual district representative. And that’s because in national parties, when you’re in the minority—I talk about Ketanji Brown Jackson as this. This is the Ketanji Brown Jackson theory here: she is probably the most brilliant Supreme Court justice maybe ever—certainly in my lifetime—reading these dissents. Does her role on the court actually matter compared to some replacement in the six–three minority? Yeah, her dissents are so fire, but it would really be different if you had a five–four majority she was on.

So it’s become more true that it’s not about the individual representative. Ruth Bader Ginsburg retiring—she’s an inspiration to women and second-wave feminism. That’s not a big deal if you actually lose Roe and you actually just lose, right? It’s the same in state legislatures and in Congress. And for that reason, we need a new model that will be faithful to all coalitions—a one-person, one-vote standard, like the Voting Rights Act is about. But in this new era—the Voting Rights Act was in a different, depolarized era where there were Northern pro-civil rights Republicans. This is not the era anymore.

A new model will be about the one-person, one-vote standard in coalition—something like proportional representation that says it’s not about just being represented by an individual. We need to think about percentages of Americans—Americans want this direction, that direction. That would actually make Black people not a captured constituency within the Democratic Party, but actually pivotal in coalition. Say, we actually on this issue can coalition here, on this issue coalition there. That would be a different model that would match the times we’re inside. Encourage everybody to think about reforms Congress can do—like multi-member districts for proportional representation—to break out of this idea that your personal representative is the main thing, when actually what matters is who controls the levers of government right now.

Bacon: It’s a great conversation. I have three threads of other conversations I want to get into, but we’re going to stop here. We need to get Deva Woodly, for sure, because I think she has some good insights on what we’re talking about here. Hakeem is at Stanford—he’s on Bluesky, though, if you want to hear some great insights about politics and race and the connections. I think Jake is on both X and Bluesky, and also writing a lot for the Adam Bonica blog—what’s that called?

Grumbach: Data for Democracy.

Bacon: Data for Democracy. Which is an excellent data journal, yeah. With Bonica. And generally, just a lot of writing.

Grumbach: Thanks so much, Perry.

Jefferson: May I just flag one thing, Perry, for your audience? On May 18th—I’ve been talking a lot about Katherine Tate’s work—on May 18th it’ll be available for streaming on Zoom while it happens, 4:00 p.m. Pacific Time. I’ll be in conversation with Katherine Tate, who literally wrote the book on Black representation—why it matters and the like—and Corey Fields, who has done some really amazing work thinking about Black Republicans. And so if you’re interested in that, just Google—I’m sure it’s easy to find—”Black Politics and American Democracy, Stanford.” You should be able to find it. I’ll send the link to Perry so that he can add it to the comments. All right.

Bacon: Thanks, guys. See you soon.

Jefferson: Thanks, Perry. Be well.

Grumbach: Take it easy.

During a hearing at the House Appropriations Subcommittee Tuesday, Undersecretary of Defense Jules Hurst faced a brutal fact-check on the Pentagon’s supposedly $29 billion war.

Late last month, the Pentagon testified that the estimated cost of the war so far was $25 billion. Now Hurst claimed it would cost $24 billion to replace and repair the U.S. munitions stockpile alone.

Hawaii Representative Ed Case pointed to a CSIS report from April 21 that estimated the aggregate unit cost of replacing and repairing seven precision systems to be $25 billion.

“Does that sound about right? I mean, you’re projecting everything at [$23 billion],” Case said.

“That number sounds a little high for me, for that stage of the war,” Hurst said.

Case asked how much it would cost to replace the 39 aircraft that have been reportedly lost since the beginning of the war. Hurst said that “repair on aircraft is something that it is very hard to calculate” but that an estimate had been included in the total cost. One might imagine it would be wildly expensive to “repair” planes that have been completely destroyed.

Hurst said that the estimates for the cost of fuel were included in the Pentagon’s operations and maintenance cost, but not the cost of repairing U.S. military bases in the Middle East.

“We have a lot of unknowns there, we don’t know what our future posture is gonna be. We don’t know how we construct those bases, and we don’t know what part our allies or partners could pay into our MILCON costs,” Hurst said.

At least 16 American installations across eight countries have been struck as part of Iran’s retaliatory strikes against the U.S. and Israeli military onslaught. It was previously reported that 13 U.S. bases in the Middle East had been rendered all but uninhabitable, forcing U.S. military service members to work remotely from hotels and office spaces.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly report Tuesday showing that inflation rose to 3.8 percent in April, a higher rate than wages, which grew at 3.6 percent. The price of oil is a big reason why, as it is up more than 70 percent since January thanks to the Iran war. As of Tuesday morning, the average national price for a gallon of gas is $4.50.

The worst is still yet to come, though; the full effect of high gas prices will not affect everything else for a few more months, according to Citigroup, who told its clients Monday that “energy costs likely would not start to feed through to core goods prices for at least a few more months.”

Meanwhile, a new CNN poll shows that 70 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, with 77 percent of Americans (and a majority of Republicans) saying that the cost of living has gone up in their community. Only a third of Americans approve of how Trump is helping the middle class, 26 percent of Americans approve of his performance on inflation, and just 21 percent do on gas prices.

According to the poll, Democrats are trusted more on the cost of living, helping the middle class, and inflation. But on the economy overall, almost a third of Americans don’t trust either party. Trump and his fellow Republicans may be in trouble during November’s midterms (barring the effects of redistricting), but Democrats will have to show that they can fight to improve Americans’ economic conditions.

The women, along with Congress members and other witnesses, will be offering testimony at a House Oversight field hearing regarding just how Epstein was able to secure a deal that allowed him to leave jail for hours at a time during his 13-month sentence for soliciting prostitution, even as allegations of his abuse of underage girls gained steam.

“For some reason, they allowed a predator to go loose for many, many years,” Florida Congresswoman Lois Frankel said. “Probably hundreds of young women were sexually abused because of the way this case was handled.… This is an opportunity really to put some focus back where it started.… Maybe to get some answers from some of the folks as to why this miscarriage of justice occurred.”

The hearing, organized by House Democrats, is set to begin at 10 a.m.

Representative Jen Kiggans appeared on Richmond-based radio commentator Rich Herrera’s show Monday to discuss the state’s hotly contested congressional maps. But the since-deleted interview flew off the rails when Kiggans emphatically concurred with Herrera after he referred to Jeffries as a slave.

“He spent $20 million-plus on our redistricting debacle we had. He now is talking about … firing our Supreme Court justices,” Herrera said of Jeffries. House Majority Forward, a nonprofit connected to Jeffries, spent roughly $40 million on the redistricting effort.

“If Hakeem Jeffries wants to be involved in Virginia politics, then I suggest he … leave New York, move down here to Virginia, run for office down here, you can represent us,” Herrera continued. “If not, get your cotton-picking hands off of Virginia.”

“That’s right. Ditto. Yes. Yes, to that,” Kiggans replied.

The term “cotton-picking hands” is heavily rooted in the history of U.S. slavery, literally referring to the Black men, women, and children who were forced to pick cotton.

Kiggans is up for reelection in November. One of her opponents in the race, former Representative Elaine Luria, wrote Monday evening that “the racist comments proudly endorsed today by Jen Kiggans … are disgusting and beneath any elected official.”

“I grew up in the South. I know what these racist dog whistles mean,” Luria added.

The number two House Democrat, Minority Whip Katherine Clark, called on Kiggans to resign shortly after clips of the interview were made public.

In a statement on X, Kiggans claimed that she did not agree with the host’s remark and that it was “obvious” she was responding to the larger argument about Jeffries’s involvement in the redistricting effort. She argued that the nationwide political rebuke was “precisely what’s wrong with Democrats.”

“Every lie and distortion is intended to distract from getting their hats handed to them and the Virginia Supreme Court’s clear message: stop trying to rig our elections,” Kiggans wrote. “Democrats are trying to destroy Virginia’s court because they disagree with it. THAT is the real danger to our country.”

By Tuesday morning, the radio interview had been taken off Apple Podcasts, as well as the host’s YouTube channel.

Kiggans’s comments come at a volatile time in U.S. history. Late last month, the Supreme Court effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act by ruling that Louisiana’s congressional maps amounted to unconstitutional racial gerrymandering since they included two Black-majority voting districts.

This story has been updated.

Trump posted more than 55 times in just three hours on Monday night, unloading a ton of conspiracy theory content targeting former President Barack Obama, peppered with videos of Black people causing mayhem.

Trump’s onslaught began by claiming that Obama had attempted a coup and boosting a call to “arrest Obama the traitor.” He then posted months-old coverage of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s claims that the Obama administration had pushed the “lie” that Russian President Vladimir Putin preferred Trump over Hillary Clinton to win the 2016 election, which was something Putin has openly admitted.

As Trump continued to post, his allegations got increasingly outlandish. The president shared posts claiming that Obama made $120 million from Obamacare and accusing Obama of “the most heinous crimes committed in American history,” including wiretapping Trump Tower. Other posts mentioned figures such as Senator Mark Kelly, Clinton, and Jack Smith, but Obama’s name appeared over and over again.

After about half an hour of nonstop posting, Trump interrupted his screed against his political enemies to share a video that appeared to show young Black people stealing from a convenience store. “This is why the convenience store chain ‘Wawa’ is closing stores one after another,” the post read.

Then Trump posted another video that purported to show a Black woman working for DoorDash picking up an order, only to be discovered eating the food in her car. “Always scheming,” the post read.

The president also shared a video of a Black man purposefully knocking over a waiter’s tray in a restaurant. “I wouldn’t call him a man,” the post read. “A real man would never disrespect another person like this. I’ll call him what he is, a POS!”

Trump resumed his political posting, sharing a video in which right-wing lawyer Mike Davis called Obama a “demonic force.”

This wouldn’t be the first time Trump’s social media spiraling has taken on racist overtones as he targets Obama. In February, the president shared a video on Truth Social that ended with a short clip of the Obamas’ laughing heads superimposed on the bodies of apes.

Trump continued his deranged posting into the night, and then resumed it when the sun came up. He posted Tuesday morning about a fictional “Federal Victory Note” currency that had his face on it, an AI-generated meme about “Hakeem ‘Low IQ’ Jeffries,” and another AI image of Obama, Joe Biden, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi swimming in a sewage-filled Reflecting Pool.

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

The cult-like defenses of Donald Trump have taken a truly creepy turn of late. Trump fell asleep at an event and the White House’s spin in response went truly off the rails. Trump floated an insane proposal involving Venezuela that drew a deeply strange defense from a spokesperson. And in one telling moment, the spokesperson was so eager to fluff up Trump that she accidentally delivered a harsh talking point against him. But when you watch all this madness, you can sense something dark underneath it. All these sycophants are plainly aware that Trump is going to be passing from the scene very soon. And it’s very hard to see what’s going to fill the vacuum within the GOP and the right wing that this will leave behind.

Virginia Heffernan, a writer for The New Republic, has a great piece that plumbs deep into the MAGA psyche for clues to the state of our country. So we’re talking about all this with her today. Virginia, nice to have you on.

Virginia Heffernan: Good to see you again, Greg.

Sargent: Let’s start with an extraordinary exchange on Fox News. The screen is showing oil prices soaring while an anchor asks White House spokesperson Anna Kelly to comment on high gas prices. She launches into this.

Anna Kelly (voiceover): Let me be very clear. Iran has been incredibly decimated, militarily. Their navy is at the bottom of the ocean. The ballistic missiles are destroyed. Their production facilities are demolished. Now they’re being totally crippled economically by the weight of Operation Economic Fury. So the president is not in a rush. He has all the cards at his disposal because he knows that Iran is getting weaker and weaker by the day while the United States is getting stronger and stronger.

Sargent: So note how spokesperson Anna Kelly says Trump is not in a rush—he’s not in a rush over these gas prices. Virginia, what I find so striking here is that the instinct is to go full cult and portray Trump as wielding total mastery over events, and accidentally she creates a potent talking point against him. Your thoughts on that?

Heffernan: We’ve talked a lot about a dictator and how he was going to be a dictator on day one. But he’s a king now. He’s an emperor. It’s something more than a dictator, because a dictator is trying to figure out how to govern. But an emperor who—any word against him constitutes what the Anglo-Saxons used to call lèse-majesté. You know this expression? It’s like the Thai king still—lèse-majesté is a particular offense of “injured majesty” against the king. It’s exactly the opposite of American principles of free speech, so much that saying anything—saying oil prices are going up, or saying that Trump fell asleep, or even registering the evidence of our own eyes—is seen as wrong.

Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you, I love the distinction between dictator and emperor, but I’d probably go with “despot” in the end.

Heffernan: Yes. Tell me what despot buys you that the other words don’t.

Sargent: Despot sort of conveys this ailing, angry, sunsetting figure. And the ailing despot image seems to capture him at these weird events where all his sycophants have to suck up to him while he’s falling asleep.

Heffernan: This sounds a lot like a late-stage cult, like the Moonies, when originally you have Reverend Moon making claims about the world that are somewhat liberating to participants. And then soon after he just feels persecuted.

Then you just turn entirely to: We have to protect the leader. “No kings”—maybe “no despots,” “no tyrants” is the right thing for us to be thinking right now, because—he’s not talking about building a wall. He’s not talking about outrageous policy, women’s reproductive rights. He’s so far beyond that. The ship has sailed—even whatever he ran on last time. He’s not even talking about trans figures and athletes in sports. He’s talking about himself and his own majesty.

Sargent: Right. I want to bear down on the fact that there’s a serious situation underneath that weird Fox News moment. Trump and the GOP are getting some redistricting wins and those are serious. But the underlying brutal situation remains.

Trump can’t seem to get Iran to agree to a deal. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. That’s having a crippling impact on the global situation. By every indication, Trump and the GOP are poised to pay a major political price for that. Can you talk about that? Anna Kelly has no way to explain the actual situation that makes any sense to anybody.

Heffernan: You think of Pam Bondi, RIP, who responded to quite meaningful exposure of Trump along every axis by saying, “The Dow is at 50,000, right?” It just doesn’t track. The defense is always either to attack the questioner—we see Pete Hegseth do this on Iran—and when there’s no excuse for Iran, they just say, The Manchurian Candidate, he is the finest man I’ve ever known. He is magic. He can do no wrong. If he did it, it’s right.

Sargent: Trump apparently fell asleep at an event on Monday and Reuters had this absolutely crushing image of him—eyes closed—that was tweeted out by a Reuters reporter. The official White House rapid response feed responded: “He was blinking, you absolute moron.”

The rage is the thing here, Virginia. I mean, it looked like he was asleep—he falls asleep all the time, there’s no way they can spin their way out of that—but either way, note how Trump’s propagandists are really keenly aware that any hint of Trump as sunsetting or weak or enfeebled just instantly cracks his mystique, and they just have to lash out furiously at anyone who dares to point out what everyone can see at the end of their own nose, which is that this guy is on his way out.

Heffernan: Sometimes I think—I’m just incurably hopeful about the future. I do trust the American people. I just trust them to find their way out. Not because we’re intrinsically decent, but because we are just bad at being governed by a despot or an emperor that doesn’t have popular support. We don’t even want to handle a single casualty in Iran. Bless us for that. The American people hate that war. They hate rising oil prices, and that contempt is now splashed all over Trump.

Sargent: You’re putting your finger on an important point, which is that the American people are reacting badly to the trappings of despotism and tyranny and all the visuals of it. The ballroom is a really good example of this. The Washington Post poll on this—taken before and after the recent shooting incident—found the ballroom to be deeply unpopular.

It’s opposed by 56 percent of Americans, supported by only 28 percent. Independents opposed it by 61 to 18. Working-class Americans by 54 to 28. And moderates by 64 to 16. To use your understanding of this—they’re trying to make us submit to the ballroom as almost a symbolic capitulation to his imperial and dictatorial presidency.

And people are just reacting badly to it. The imagery of Trump tearing down the people’s house, the White House, and replacing it with a monument to himself is triggering for a lot of people on a deep level.

Heffernan: Yeah, it’s funny. A friend of mine from high school who—he triple-Trumped, as they say—he was MAGA, he’s been MAGA for a long time. I started to see him, as many of us do our friends, in a red cap on Facebook, and I thought, He’s gone.

Sometime recently, he emailed me and said when he saw the destruction of the East Wing, he knew that something was gravely wrong. And he is now trying to repent, and he started something called Christians Against Trump in Florida.

You probably know the story of Ozymandias. It’s told in a Percy Shelley poem called “Ozymandias,” and it conjures this really powerful image of a statue where it’s just two legs standing, and the pedestal says, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair”—but the statue is broken. The head is off. I think of that with Trump all the time.

This is a guy saying, I’m going to annex another state, I’m going to build a ballroom, I’m going to build an “Arc de Trump.” I am the greatest, biggest, all-powerful Oz—or all-powerful Ozymandias. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. And his head has rolled off.

This isn’t just the emperor with no clothes. This is an emperor, absolutely rotten, his brain. It’s just terrible to imagine what’s going on in his brain. It seems tragic. If this were a family member, he would really have to be sort of sidelined from public events. I know he doesn’t drink, but it just looks like a brain on fire and in trouble.

Sargent: So you brought up Trump’s new proposal, or whatever you call it, to do with Venezuela. I want to talk about another weird moment on Fox News involving that. Anchor John Roberts reports on a conversation he had with Trump about Venezuela. Then he asks spokesperson Anna Kelly about that. Listen.

John Roberts (voiceover): I was talking to the president this morning. It was just before the Oval Office event. He kind of surprised me a little bit, because he said, “John, I just want to tell you, I’m very serious about this. So you could talk about this. I’m serious about beginning a process to make Venezuela the fifty-first state.”

Now there’s a rich history in this nation of taking territories and absorbing them into the United States. Puerto Rico is one that people talk about. But this would be the first time in my knowledge that a sovereign country was ever invited to join the United States of America. How would that work?

Anna Kelly (voiceover): Well, John, I won’t get ahead of what the president was comfortable sharing with you as far as those plans go. But look, this is a president who is famous for never accepting the status quo.

Sargent: This seems like a really perfect example of what you’re talking about. Basically, Fox News—who’s obviously very, very loyal to Trump, a major Trump booster—is dancing around what’s obviously the elephant in the room, which is that this guy has completely lost it in just about every way and is completely unfit for this job.

So it’s brought up very delicately. And then of course Anna Kelly has to respond in a way that invites everyone to just pretend not to notice how crazy this guy is. Can you talk about that? I found that to be a really extraordinary exchange.

Heffernan: It is, and you almost—I wouldn’t say feel sorry for—but I remember when NXIVM was breaking up and you just saw that there were these hangers-on who still gazed at Keith Raniere, the cult leader of the sex cult NXIVM, gazed at him the way Nancy Reagan used to gaze at Reagan. I will say, a lot of them are women. They gaze at him and block and tackle for him.

It really just brings together the last gaspers in a cult who are still staying to the very end. But there are these people who have left MAGA—including Tucker Carlson, including Ashley St. Clair, this younger person who was involved with Turning Point, had a baby with Elon Musk—who are explaining what it looks like when you snap and when the lights come on and you say, I can’t do this anymore. That is very, very useful for people just to provide an example of what it might look like if you could—this is from the MAGA base—change your mind.

Sargent: Well, I want to bring up some of the mockery that met that exchange between John Roberts and Anna Kelly. One person tweeted out an image of a North Korean propagandist talking about dear leader and just drew the likeness directly to what Anna Kelly had said there. Norm Ornstein, the congressional scholar, said, “The mental decline is accelerating.”

I just find this moment to be so indicative of where we are, because everybody can see that this is absolute madness and that this guy has no business being president and talking that way to the country or the world. Yet that contrast between that obvious unfitness and the total maintenance of cult-like support for everything he says we saw from Anna Kelly is just really disorienting on some level.

Heffernan: I think that’s absolutely right. There were still some people when Keith Raniere went to prison—right near me, Brooklyn House of Detention, which is now closed—that stood outside beaming up with flashlights and singing support to him. There will be people who are still with him to the end. But it is, as you say, absolutely unnerving to imagine they’re still here for him.

But when we think about the 30-plus percent who still say some version of they approve of him, we can’t mix them up with the real Smithers types—you know Smithers in The Simpsons, “Somebody down here loves you!” who absolutely loves Montgomery Burns? I don’t think the 30-plus percent who approve of him are that glued to him. Maybe they are rattled by people who are glued to him because it’s so self-abasing. It’s humiliating.

Why would someone stand by him? You think of the Mike Pences of the world that stand by him until they’re cast aside and vilified. And the humiliation—it must be this crazy double consciousness where it used to seem manly to support him and now it seems pathetic.

Sargent: You wrote about this figure who was deep in the MAGA cult who left, who escaped the MAGA cult. What does it say about MAGA that there are all these escapees who are getting away from it and getting out from under it on the one hand. And just to close out, what’s going to become of MAGA when Trump is gone and there’s this gaping hole at the center of it all?

Heffernan: There’s just not a lot of people to pick up the pieces. Ashley St. Clair left MAGA. She was right in the center of it with Turning Point. She had a baby with Elon Musk. And after she was creamed with revenge porn with Grok. She just blew the lid off it and really showed how the sausage was made with MAGA, and that it wasn’t cool and that it wasn’t interesting to be anti-trans.

It just looks hopeless. It looks tired. It’s been around 10 years now. It’s not witty. It’s not complicated and cool to be anti-woke. There are no heirs to this. There are no heirs to this. And even the older people, the Tucker Carlsons are breaking with it ideologically. I just don’t think there’s much left, will be much left.

Sargent: And so we have an end-stage cult.

Heffernan: We have an end-state cult with the leader and some glazed-eyed people around him trying to desperately tell a story of why the emperor deserves to be treated with abasement and deference by everyone else—but we’re not buying it.

Sargent: I will say the glazed-eyes thing is real. Anna Kelly has it. Karoline Leavitt has it. Senators like Katie Britt have it when they talk about Trump. These are U.S. senators. People who were elected to statewide office.

Heffernan: It’s an increasingly narrow band of people who are capable of this—I’d say almost like a tradwife style of deference to the patriarch. I love that we’ve seen that Americans cannot tolerate this. We have a low tolerance for suffering for someone because we think he has divine powers. We’re really, really not very good at it.

Sargent: I want this to be a positive story and I hope it ends positively. Virginia Heffernan, awesome to talk to you. Thank you so much for coming on.

Heffernan: Greg, great to talk to you too.

That could be a problem, because new research by the People’s Parity Project, or PPP, finds that half the business court judges in the United States are former corporate lawyers. In seven states, more than 90 percent of business court judges are former corporate lawyers. Only a small fraction of these judges have any experience representing workers or consumers in need.

That’s one reason why critics say these courts are perceived as biased in favor of corporations. Though several states are rushing to adopt business court systems, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ended its state’s pilot program last year, after a new progressive majority took office. One justice warned that the program resembled a “two-tiered” court system.

Business courts are often characterized as the ideal venue to settle disputes between businesses or between owners of a business. They’re intended to be quicker and more efficient; the same judges handle the cases from start to finish. Some proponents argue that the faster process makes litigation easier for small businesses, which may lack the resources of larger corporate litigants.

In many states, however, the jurisdiction of business courts extends much further than disputes within or between businesses. Maine has a “business and consumer” court that is staffed by two judges with experience representing corporations and employers, who rule on lawsuits filed by consumers who claimed they were wronged by a corporation’s product or service.

North Carolina’s business courts have very broad jurisdiction. The chief justice only has to designate a case as “complex” to assign it to the court. Recently, these complex cases have included a defamation case, a class action lawsuit by hospital patients over the privacy of their medical records, and the state’s lawsuit against TikTok over whether the app is addictive. The chief justice also assigns North Carolina’s Superior Court judges to the business court; our research found that all nine judges were former corporate attorneys.

Many business courts were explicitly intended to be staffed with lawyers with experience in corporate law. A lawyer who helped design Arizona’s business courts said their intention was to get judges with “strong backgrounds in business litigation”—though they didn’t want the court to be perceived as “pro-business.” Elsewhere, the lawyers who proposed Michigan’s business courts listed one goal as “attracting and retaining businesses.”

PPP’s new report found that 100 percent of business court judges in Arizona, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Tennessee are former corporate lawyers. In Delaware, where the prototype for business courts was created centuries ago, the appellate courts are also dominated by judges who spent their legal careers representing employers and corporations. The state’s “Court of Chancery” and the body of law that it developed is the reason why so many big companies are headquartered in Delaware.

But after Delaware courts ruled to undo billionaire Elon Musk’s lavish compensation package from Tesla, some of those companies began leaving the state. Texas established its own business court, filled it almost entirely with corporate lawyers, and courted companies to reincorporate there. Delaware’s state legislature, which is controlled by Democrats, responded to this so-called “Dexit” by making their laws even friendlier to corporate executives.

Texas explicitly requires business court judges to have experience either representing businesses or serving as a judge in civil court. These judges are also appointed by the governor, even though the state constitution requires that judges be chosen by the voters.

In neighboring Oklahoma, lawmakers also established a business court with appointed judges. But the state Supreme Court struck down that law in 2025, because the Oklahoma Constitution says that judges must stand for election.

Oklahoma’s judges are appointed and then run in “retention elections,” in which voters decide whether to keep them in office. Republican Governor Kevin Stitt signed a bill creating a business court with unelected judgeships. Stitt claimed, “I saw court systems in other states playing politics with people’s businesses.” He also called for judges with “business experience” to fill the courts.

Republican lawmakers don’t want business court judges to be accountable to voters like other judges. In North Carolina, the chief justice has assigned an unelected “special” Superior Court judge, chosen by the legislature, to the state’s business court.

Why do corporations need a separate judiciary, staffed by former corporate lawyers, that is unaccountable to voters? This raises obvious concerns about preferential treatment for corporations. And these concerns have kept some states from adopting business courts.

In July 2025, just a few months after Musk spent tens of millions of dollars in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, the court’s new progressive majority ended its state’s pilot business court program. The program had encountered opposition from judges and attorneys, including a former corporate lawyer who asked, “How does the public not look at this without believing that the court is putting its thumb on the scales of justice in favor of business? ... Why don’t injured parties and those that have been denied their civil rights get the same treatment?”

When the previous conservative majority maintained the pilot program in 2022, Justice Ann Walsh Bradley warned that it was sending a message: “Businesses with large claims deserve special treatment, entitling them access to the most efficient, fair, and cost-effective treatment available in the court system.” She argued that everyone is entitled to the best justice the courts can provide and said that Wisconsin’s judges had no problem handling complex business cases.

Voters in Nevada, which is making a big push for companies to reincorporate there, could soon vote on a constitutional amendment to establish business courts. Lawmakers have passed an amendment creating a court with judges who would stand in retention elections, rather than the nonpartisan, contested elections that other judges endure. They must pass the amendment again before it goes on the ballot for voters to decide.

These states could ultimately regret rushing to adopt business courts. These unelected business court judges may, like the U.S. Supreme Court, start putting corporations over workers, consumers, or concerned shareholders. This is particularly a concern when states, such as North Carolina, confer broader jurisdiction on business courts.

These courts are hearing lawsuits filed by workers or consumers, as well as challenges to crucial state taxes. Voters should demand judges on these courts with diverse experiences. If these courts are hearing cases involving workers, they must include judges who spent their careers doing something besides defending employers.

Research has shown that judges’ backgrounds matter when it comes to how they rule. Our recent report found that judges in Connecticut who previously worked as corporate lawyers or prosecutors were more likely to evict people. Another study found that the same judges are less likely to rule for workers. And a 2022 study found that former public defenders were “less willing to render extremely long sentences tantamount to life in prison.” Professional diversity is important, especially when it comes to judges.

Business court judges shouldn’t be drawn exclusively from the ranks of large, powerful corporate law firms. If that’s what lawmakers really want, they should say that explicitly. And they must ensure that the jurisdiction of these courts is sharply limited and doesn’t sweep in lawsuits involving workers or consumers.

Voters in Nevada and other states where lawmakers are exploring the creation of business courts should take a close look. The public should understand what these judges do and how they’ll be chosen. These courts are sweeping the nation, and we should at least talk about how to do it right—and what the consequences are for getting it wrong.

It’s tempting to write off such utterances as just another deranged aspect of Trump’s second term, but religious zealotry has proved a useful tool of control for military leadership going back centuries, says Jasper Craven. His book, God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood, examines the ways in which brutality and blind loyalty within the armed forces have informed our traditional notions of masculinity.

In fact, Craven writes, early nineteenth-century West Point superintendent Samuel Thayer believed that “Christianity could serve as a powerful binding agent for his military project, an easily imported belief system that would at once form resilience and motivation in his boys and help them elide the major moral questions at the heart of the burgeoning imperial project to which they belonged.”

During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Craven and I discussed the tensions between morals and manhood within a military context.

Lorraine Cademartori: Did the Hegseth speech surprise you?

Jasper Craven: None of this surprises me. Pete Hegseth is the perfect embodiment of many of the different threads and histories that I have been tracing for the last three years as a part of book research. Religiosity has been core to military training since the founding of this country. We see from the earliest days of American military education—mandatory chapel, fire and brimstone sermons—and then most concretely with the founding of the U.S. Air Force Academy just after the Second World War: a strong evangelical subculture that has permeated the upper ranks of the military and is largely oriented around America’s supreme firepower. Obviously, the last two and a half decades have been marked by what President George W. Bush, in the days after 9/11, called a “crusade.” There is rhetoric that has long pervaded our military involvement in the Arab world. This is just the latest example in a long history.

L.C.: Is the framing of this war as “end times” a new development?

J.C.: [It] is definitely a ratcheting up of this rhetoric. I see it as a result of the fact that the American public and the American military at this point is very wary of conflict.… At this point the stakes must be ratcheted up to motivate the mission. When it becomes this existential, I think Hegseth and his deputies hope that it will animate the men fighting below them.

L.C.: Right—you say in the book that “since America’s founding, military brass have painstakingly developed and refined a military curriculum that breeds loyalty, teaches obedience, and constructs violence, all the while convincing the public that conflict is a hardwired male instinct.” But the Founding Fathers had a fair amount of reticence toward the idea of even forming a military academy, or establishing a quasi-professional fighting force, correct?

J.C.: These are people who endured a frustrating, and at times abusive, occupation by the British monarchy. The rebellion itself was a rejection of such tactics and such power. At the same time, this paradox forms in which the only way out of occupation is amassing of military power by the colonists. This tension has really marked America profoundly in the centuries since.… The Founding Fathers were generally really focused on ensuring that the soldier was never elevated above the citizen.

L.C.: Eventually the Continental Congress votes to fund West Point in 1802. It sounded like there was a fair amount of back-and-forth about a vision of education of this “fighting elite.”

J.C.: There are a series of scuffles culminating in the appointment of Thayer as superintendent to West Point [in 1817] that demonstrate the push-pull over what a military officer should look like. Thayer’s major nemesis, and also his former frat brother at Dartmouth, is Alden Partridge. [Partridge] offers, in his time as West Point superintendent, a more gentle approach, at least by military standards. He spares [cadets] the worst punishments and has a more relaxed approach toward military education.

Thayer is someone who, through his experience in the War of 1812, watches in disgust as the men below him demonstrate incompetence, don’t always listen to his orders, sometimes defect. He wants obedience, and he believes very strongly that only a quasi-authoritarian environment can breed the right kind of soldier. Thayer imposes dozens and dozens of new rules that strictly limit cadet behavior. He brooks no dissent. He’s in charge for a fair amount of time, and I think his ethos disseminates [within the military] through the years.

L.C.: One of the core arguments in your book is that the military has been profoundly effective in reaching out to children—young men, younger than 18, particularly through Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps programs, and through the growth of military academies. Tell me about this ecosystem.

J.C.: Yeah, there’s a really interesting fight that plays out in the early twentieth century, in which military leaders and superintendents of military academies come to feel existentially threatened by the public school system, and by public school teachers, many of them women, pacifists, Quakers. This line of messaging emerges that viciously derides the female influence on the young American schoolchild. The military takes a number of actions to inject mandatory military trainings into public middle schools, especially in New York—which was where their power is concentrated, thanks to the allyship of corporate figures, like J.P. Morgan, who believe that creating obedience in young schoolchildren has an added benefit of [preparing] them to serve in corporate environments.

[But] back in those days, people like John Dewey were making the argument that the best way to create peace is to establish, among children, the possibility, and to show them how it can be done, and they will be the great agents in changing this violent mindset of humanity. I think the military understood that, too, and that’s exactly why they fight to control boys at such an early age.

L.C.: You even came to this book through reporting on youth in the military, at Valley Forge Military Academy and College in Pennsylvania—where cadets suffered widespread abuse and trauma.

J.C.: I’d been been covering the military and veterans’ issues for a while when I started investigating the Forge for Mother Jones, but that work helped me illuminate for the first time the pedagogy that pervades the Pentagon, pervades military training—and really this network—that maintains real power. I mean, there are 5,200 JROTC and ROTC programs in America. Seeing the raw, mutant, violent strains of masculinity that were leading to terrible abuse at Valley Forge made me want to write a book that could forcefully push back against this enduring idea that the military is this perfect catchall system for lost boys. Really, it just creates more dysfunction.

L.C.: There have been periodic attempts at reform, going back to well into the nineteenth century. I was struck by the tale you relate in the book of Oscar Booz, a West Point cadet who died from chronic hazing in 1900, but who never told on his abusers, and many others. [Among other abuses, Booz was forced to chug Tabasco sauce, resulting in tuberculosis in his larynx, and to participate in the academy’s underground fight club.] The top brass often say the right things when these tragedies occur, but nothing changes. Is that because the model is simply irreconcilable with reform?

J.C.: To inculcate loyalty, to motivate violence, you need to use pretty harsh tools, and I’ve lost count of the times military school leaders have, in the face of severe hazing scandals, or cheating scandals, or administrative corruption allegations, pledged to end hazing, to reform these programs, to impose accountability—to fully embody the very pure ideals that these places claim to live up to—but it’s never happened, and I don’t think that’s an accident. Creating these perilous conditions is vital to establishing a man’s desire to get out of them: to secure power, to secure validation. I think that is what’s most effective at forcing men to engage in really risky, violent, traumatic behavior.

L.C.: How did you reach the conclusion that “American masculinity is predicated on the wobbly assumption that man is violent by nature”?

J.C.: There are a number of underlying principles that Americans are in broad agreement with as they relate to American manhood. The subtext of many of these principles is very dark and fatalistic and violent. Sacrifice, for instance, is this big idea that you see many self-help gurus or manosphere figures preaching about: Man is expected to protect his family and to protect this country should threats arise. That is the pinnacle of American manhood.

But it’s incredibly devaluing for man’s lot to essentially be there to take the arrows that may rain down upon him in some imperial battle. And so to justify that, what needs to be argued is that man is violent, that it is man’s inherent duty to fight and to kill. We continue down a violent path toward male validation that is playing out in so many of the domestic crises that this country is seeing today, whether in school shootings or domestic abuse or the opioid epidemic or anything else. I mean, military service is now the number one predictor of violent extremism in America. And it just doesn’t have to be that way.

L.C.: Circling back to the beginning of our conversation—do you take anything away from the number of anonymous complaints? Does it tell you anything about the state of the military internally?

J.C.: Things are very fraught at the Pentagon now. I do think there are a lot of enlisted and officers who deeply value the political neutrality of the military, who have no interest in waging more war in the Middle East, who recoil at the idea or the actions of militarizing the southern border and deploying the National Guard into American cities. The problem is this abiding mentality of loyalty. I just look to the history of the American military, and I see situations in which gross war crimes were being committed, in which constitutional violations were occurring, and most people in the military sit idly by or participate in those activities. That’s due to a number of factors, including that there is also a long pattern of whistleblowers standing up and not seeing their issues heard or remediated. But I really wish that there were figures out there who were forcefully pushing back against what’s occurring. It makes you question all of this rhetoric that those who serve in the military are the most courageous among us. I’m not seeing much courage from people with skin in the game right now.

L.C.: Had you heard that Valley Forge Academy is graduating its last high school class this month?

J.C.: I do think that the story of Valley Forge is instructive, because what you can see is that when cadets break from the expectations foisted on them to be stoic, to endure unrelenting abuse, that space can really open up for reform. I mean, the reason that Valley Forge is in dire straits is because cadets and their families have relentlessly been voicing concerns for many years.… You can see tangible impact from them coming forward. They have had to subvert the ideology that has been drilled into them. And there is something that is very touching and beautiful about that.

At the same time, the ideology is very well funded, and it will take a lot to undermine it forever.

The problem was that the U.S.–Mexico border wasn’t where anyone thought it was.

Years earlier, an American irrigation company had cut an unauthorized cutoff in the Rio Grande, leaving a loop of U.S. land south of its new course. Under treaties governing the boundary, artificial shifts in the river could not move the border. The legal boundary between the countries remained the same, and now cut through a dried-up riverbed—over which Rio Rico then expanded. So while the town was founded on Mexican land, its growth inadvertently moved it across the invisible border.

No one noticed for years. When the error was finally uncovered by an American geography professor in the 1960s, American officials were forced to confront a peculiar reality: A town that had long functioned as part of Mexico was, in fact, straddling the border.

The two governments eventually negotiated a fix. A 1970 treaty restored the river as the boundary, and in 1977, the United States formally transferred the land under Rio Rico to Mexico. The map once again matched the lived reality—but the law does not move as easily as the river does.

In the decades before the correction, children had been born in Rio Rico on American soil. One of them, Homero Cantú Treviño, later entered the United States and faced deportation for overstaying his visa. His defense was straightforward: He was not an undocumented immigrant at all, but a U.S. citizen by birth.

The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees citizenship to everyone born on American soil and subject to American jurisdiction: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Cantú’s claim forced the government to confront a question that now sits at the center of Donald Trump’s attempt to restrict birthright citizenship: What does it mean to be “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States?

For advocates of a narrower interpretation—right-wing immigration restrictionists, in the main—birth on U.S. soil is not sufficient. That’s the case that the president and his legal team made recently before the Supreme Court in Trump v. Barbara: Children born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrant parents shouldn’t get automatic citizenship because they aren’t really integrated into the nation and subject to its jurisdiction. The Fourteenth Amendment applies only to those fully subject to American authority, they argued.

Rio Rico would seem to have provided a near-perfect test case for that position. The town was governed in practice by Mexico. Its residents lived under a different sovereign, and the U.S. exercised no real authority over them. If “jurisdiction” is understood as something more than a formal abstraction, it is hard to see how it applied here. And yet, the U.S. declined to take that path.

Cantú’s case made its way through the immigration system. The Board of Immigration Appeals supported him only on narrow grounds. But in reviewing the case, President Jimmy Carter’s attorney general, Griffin Bell, went further. He acknowledged the unusual circumstances but declined to draw a limiting principle from them. Birth on U.S. soil remained the decisive fact. Cantú was granted citizenship, as was everyone else from Rio Rico who could prove birth on U.S. soil.

The episode presented an unusually clean opportunity to redefine the scope of birthright citizenship. If there were ever a case in which the U.S. might have insisted that geography alone was insufficient, this was it. The gap between sovereignty and governance was clear and undeniable, but the government chose not to draw that line.

The reason is not hard to see. Once introduced, such distinctions are difficult to contain. If jurisdiction depends on the degree of control exercised by the state, then every marginal case invites a challenge. How much control is enough? What kinds of authority count? And how are those judgments to be made in situations where the facts are less clear than they were in Rio Rico? These, no doubt, are some of the questions the Supreme Court is wrestling with as it decides how to rule on Trump v. Barbara in the next month or two.

The appeal of restricting birthright citizenship lies in its promise to align legal status with ideas about allegiance and authority. But as Rio Rico demonstrates, reality is messier. Sovereignty can be formal or practical, jurisdiction can be partial, and the relationship between the two can shift over time.

So a simple rule has its advantages. For most of American history, that rule has been that birth on U.S. soil confers citizenship. That sometimes produces results that can seem counterintuitive in edge cases. But it has the virtue of clarity. And it avoids the need to adjudicate degrees of belonging.

Only after I moved in and tried to fall asleep on the first night did I realize why I was able to rent the place so easily: It was a few blocks down the street from a fire station, and the trucks passed under my window whenever they responded to a call. It took me about a month—a painful, exhausting, bleary-eyed month—to get used to it. Now I can sleep through almost anything.

I think about that fire station whenever I stumble across one of President Donald Trump’s social media posts during his second term. Gone are the days when his 140-character remarks on Twitter would shape the news cycle, in the late 2010s. Now it is easier to tune out the long jeremiads that he cranks out on Truth Social, which also might be the least readable social media website in internet history.

Trump’s social media rants these days are so frequent and so voluminous that it is rarely worth paying them any specific attention. But his Mother’s Day post about the Supreme Court is a notable exception. The president gave a surprisingly frank assessment of his view of the Supreme Court—and how he expects personal loyalty from the justices that he appoints to it.

In the lengthy post, Trump criticized two members of the high court for voting in Trump v. Learning Resources, the case that nixed his purported ability to impose hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs under a Cold War–era emergency powers law. The Supreme Court held 6–3 that Trump had exceeded the powers laid out in the statute.

“I ‘Love’ Justice Neil Gorsuch! He’s a really smart and good man, but he voted against me, and our Country, on Tariffs, a devastating move,” Trump wrote. “How do I reconcile this? So bad, and hurtful to our Country. I have, likewise, always liked and respected Amy Coney Barrett, but the same thing with her. They were appointed by me, and yet have hurt our Country so badly!”

It would be hard to find a better example than this of Trump’s thinking that the justices that he nominated to the high court should be personally loyal to him. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, his third appointee to date, was among the dissenters. There were six justices in the Learning Resources majority; four of them did not warrant a mention here. Trump did not even bother to criticize Chief Justice John Roberts, who actually wrote the opinion.

Naturally, that partial silence was not out of respect for the court. Trump obviously does not hold the three liberal justices in high regard. Last month, for example, in another social media post, he described Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson as “low IQ,” an insult that he typically reserves for Black lawmakers and officials. Chief Justice John Roberts has also been frequently criticized by Trump in the past, but received a less harsh treatment after his rulings for Trump in the disqualification case and the immunity case.

Instead, Trump focused on the two justices he appointed who ruled against him. “I’m working so hard to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, and then people that I appointed have shown so little respect to our Country, and its people,” he continued. “What is the reason for this? They have to do the right thing, but it’s really OK for them to be loyal to the person that appointed them to ‘almost’ the highest position in the land, that is, a Justice of the United States Supreme Court.”

Two things stand out here. One is that Trump implicitly admits that, by siding with him, Gorsuch and Barrett would not be doing “the right thing.” So deeply ingrained in American culture is judicial independence that even Trump himself, the arch-heretic of American civil republicanism, must acknowledge it. The other is that Trump drops the pretense and explicitly demands loyalty from them.

Trump’s demands for personal loyalty are no surprise 10 years after his first rise to power. The Russia investigation, which consumed the first half of Trump’s first term, exploded into public view after Trump demanded personal loyalty from then–FBI Director James Comey and then fired him after he didn’t receive it. So highly does Trump prize loyalty that he has packed his second-term Cabinet and key federal agencies with loyalists who often place his personal whims above ethics, the public interest, and the law itself.

But it is still striking to see him demand it from Supreme Court justices—and, by extension, from a coequal branch of government—simply because he appointed them. If this is his public thinking about the justices, it casts doubt on whether any second-term Trump appointee can be trusted to place the national interest or the law ahead of Trump’s personal and political goals.

Kevin Warsh, who is currently awaiting a Senate confirmation vote to be the next Federal Reserve chair, told lawmakers last month that he would “take [his] responsibility to be an independent leader of the Federal Reserve very seriously” and assured them that Trump had never “asked [him] to predetermine, commit, fix, [or] decide on any interest rate decision in any of our discussions, nor would I ever agree to do so.”

That under-oath answer would be more reassuring if Trump hadn’t spent the last year waging a war against Fed independence and specifically demanding that interest rates be set to his liking, at his whim. His administration has launched pretextual investigations into both Jerome Powell, the outgoing Fed chair, and governor Lisa Cook. Trump tried to fire Cook from the Fed last summer despite statutory for-cause removal protections; the Supreme Court blocked her removal pending its decision on the merits later this term.

Trump desperately wants the Fed to lower interest rates to help boost his chances in this year’s midterm elections. He wants it so badly that he has tried to destroy the Fed’s independence—a load-bearing pillar of American monetary hegemony—just to achieve it. Now his nominee is asking Americans to believe that Trump does not want personal loyalty from him—even as Trump demands it of Supreme Court nominees who are unambiguously independent from him.

If Trump is willing to demand personal loyalty from Supreme Court justices, what about his lower court nominees? Senate Democrats have asked Trump nominees for federal judgeships whether they believe Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. On multiple occasions, they have merely responded that Biden was “certified” as the winner—an evasive response that flatters Trump’s conspiracy theories about the election, defies the will of the American people, and suggests a lack of independent judgment.

“Democrat Justices always remain true to the people that honored them for that very special Nomination,” Trump continued in his Truth Social post. They don’t waver, no matter how good or bad a case may be, but Republican Justices often go out of their way to oppose me, because they want to show how ‘independent’ or, ‘above it all,’ they are.”

This would surely be news to Democratic presidents. Both of Obama’s confirmed Supreme Court nominees voted against him in a 2014 case on his recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. Justice Elena Kagan sided with the court’s conservatives on blocking Medicaid expansion requirements in the landmark 2012 case on the Affordable Care Act’s constitutionality. I have personally never looked at the three current liberal justices in quite the same way since they voted to overturn Trump’s disqualification from the Colorado presidential ballot two years ago in Trump v. Anderson.

I’m sure that the Supreme Court’s liberals would vote against Democratic presidents more frequently if the Supreme Court had a liberal majority. More daylight would inevitably emerge if those justices were frequently asked to constrain adventurous efforts to stretch law and precedent by liberal legal activists and Democratic presidents. But this is a conservative Supreme Court with a conservative supermajority, so those opportunities are few and far between.

If anything, Trump should be thrilled with his treatment by the Supreme Court these days. During his first term, the court was much more willing to constrain Trump in key cases—keeping Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals on the books, blocking a citizenship question for the 2020 census, allowing a New York grand jury to subpoena his financial records from his accountant, and so on. Back then, I noted, he seemed to assume that the court was closely aligned with him even when it very clearly wasn’t.

Now the reverse is true: The Supreme Court has given him nearly everything that he has wanted over the last two years—and he still isn’t satisfied. This is the same Supreme Court that just boosted his party’s midterm chances earlier this month by demolishing what’s left of the Voting Rights Act. He should be thanking Gorsuch, Barrett, and the other conservative justices for saving his political career in 2024. Had they and their colleagues simply upheld the Constitution that year, Trump would have been barred from running for a second term and instead stood trial for his crimes. Every public and private act he has taken since then stems from those fateful decisions.

From there, Trump once again recounted the scope of his 2024 electoral victory—which was middling at best—and expressed dismay that the court would likely soon strike down his birthright citizenship executive order. It is unclear whether he has any personal insight into the court’s decision-making. Leaks from the high court are increasingly common these days, and past presidents have occasionally received a clandestine heads-up about key rulings from friendly justices.

Either way, Trump said his prediction was “based on what I witnessed recently by being the first President in History to attend a Supreme Court session,” which is a fair assessment of how the Trump v. Barbara oral arguments went. Trump’s attendance, he complained, “was not even recognized or acknowledged, out of respect for the position of President, by the Court—Something which did not go unnoticed by the Fake News Media!”

“Well, maybe Neil, and Amy, just had a really bad day, but our Country can only handle so many decisions of that magnitude before it breaks down, and cracks!!!” he continued, in what can be interpreted as either a prediction, a threat, or an act of desperation. “Sometimes decisions have to be allowed to use Good, Strong, Common Sense as a guide. A negative ruling on Birthright Citizenship, on top of the recent Supreme Court Tariff catastrophe, is not Economically sustainable for the United States of America!”

One does not need a high opinion of the conservative justices to think this reasoning won’t work, at least not on some of them. Beyond the extralegal plea for “common sense” as the basis for immorally denaturalizing millions of Americans, the United States has also had birthright citizenship for the last 150 years. It could hardly be “economically [un]sustainable” if this country also became a global superpower in that timespan.

What Trump’s rant does underscore is how he thinks about the court and its place in American society—not as a neutral arbiter of constitutional law but as a Pez dispenser to give him easy wins. In fairness to Trump, the court failed to disabuse him of his notion when it defied the Constitution on his behalf in 2024. But even these justices appear to have some limits—at least for now—as shown by the tariffs ruling that he despises.

This rhetoric must also be held against any nominee he puts forward in a role that requires any sort of institutional neutrality, whether at the Federal Reserve or a federal district court somewhere in Florida or Texas. The president has made clear once again that he expects reciprocal favor from anyone he installs in a high government position. This is not a new siren blaring across our political landscape, but Americans cannot afford to sleep through it.

Early last week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law a gerrymander so that Republicans could win as many as four additional seats. Three days later, Tennessee Republicans seized on the U.S. Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais ruling to eliminate the lone majority-Black congressional district in the state. On Friday, four Virginia state Supreme Court justices, three appointed by the state’s legislature when both houses were controlled by Republicans, invalidated a ballot measure that could have resulted in four additional seats for Democrats through redistricting. Later that day, Louisiana Republicans, also taking advantage of Callais, presented new maps that will almost certainly result in the defeat of one Democratic member of Congress there. Five days; 10 seats; zero votes from members of the public.

Adding immediate context only makes it worse. Florida voters approved a ballot measure in 2010 that explicitly bans partisan gerrymandering. The all-Republican Florida Supreme Court is almost certainly going to let the redistricting stand anyway. In contrast, a clear majority of voters in Virginia, more than 1.6 million people in total, backed the redistricting that four judges wiped away. Voting had already started in Louisiana but has now been suspended. The South, a region with a long history of discriminating against Black Americans, is now rushing to eject from Congress Black members elected by Black citizens.

Then broaden the picture further. We have an authoritarian president who ignores laws and core democratic values. He knows that the party in the White House often loses a ton of House seats. He knows that trend is particularly likely to continue if the president is unpopular, as Trump is now. And he knows that a Democratic House might force him to actually follow the law. So instead of taking steps to become more popular or accepting defeat, he ordered Republican officials to start gerrymandering districts to ensure a party totally under his thumb keeps control of the House. And the plan is working. Republicans have won themselves on net from six to eight additional seats in these gerrymandering fights.

A lot of nonpartisan analysts and even a few Democrats are trying to downplay these redistricting gains by Republicans. Some argue that Trump is so unpopular that Democrats will still win the House. Others even claim that the redistricting will result in Democrats winning more seats than they would have otherwise because Republicans have spread out their voters too much.

Perhaps. But some estimates suggest that the Democrats will need to win the national popular vote by at least four percentage points to carry the House. That’s a lot. Remember that Trump’s 2024 victory, which was covered by many pundits as some dramatic shift in American politics, was by 1.5 percent over Kamala Harris. It would be terrible if Republicans lost the popular vote 48 percent to 52 percent but remained in control of the House. Or if Republicans won 226 seats or below—meaning their majority was retained only because of the Trump-ordered redistricting.

I don’t mean terrible in a Democratic sense, but in a democratic sense. Trump would have escaped accountability (electoral defeat) and a check on his power (a Democratic-controlled House) by rigging the election rules. And that rigging would have been an entirely partisan project, with GOP state legislatures and governors driving the process while judges appointed by Republicans somehow always determined that the law aligned with the GOP’s preferred outcome. Democrats would be essentially punished for having created independent redistricting commissions in Virginia and other states over the last decade.

But let’s say that Democrats win the House in November. Trump would get the punishment and constraints that he deserves. But that wouldn’t make what’s happened over the last year, particularly over the last week, less of a democratic crisis. We have a Supreme Court whose rulings, such as Callais, almost always align with the Republican Party’s priorities. We have a Republican Party that is constantly trying to shield itself from voter accountability. And where that party is popular, such as the states in the South, it wants to completely silence the political voices of anyone who opposes it. We have a political system that allows and really encourages parties to constantly change district lines and other procedural rules to gain electoral advantage. That system also gives judges virtually unchecked power to overrule the decisions of officials and the public.

And because Republicans have gutted majority-Black districts, the new Democratic majority would almost certainly have fewer Black members and fewer members elected largely by Black voters. This gerrymandering fight is essentially forcing the Democrats to spend more time campaigning for the votes of upper-income white suburbanites and less courting African Americans, who on average have lower incomes.

What do we do with this reality? There are increasingly far-fetched proposals, such as moving up the mandatory retirement age for Virginia’s Supreme Court judges, that could address the GOP gerrymandering advantage in 2026. A Virginia Democrat told my colleague Greg Sargent that the party isn’t going down that path. I wasn’t wild about that idea, but I concede that in the short term Democratic Party officials have to violate democratic norms because Republicans are.

But the permanent solutions are much harder. Creating a Supreme Court that isn’t totally biased toward the Republicans will require a Democratic trifecta that either adds justices or severely curtails the court’s powers. A Democratic trifecta that enacts proportional representation is necessary to permanently weaken today’s Republican Party. The authoritarian tendencies of GOP states in the South can’t be addressed by elections alone—since Republicans will win most of those. There may need to be general strikes and other labor action, and ultimately, LGBTQ people, African Americans, professors, and others whose rights are endangered by Southern legislatures may need to move north. To have news organizations, business groups, and other parts of our civil society who will directly state that the Republicans are the ones eroding democracy will almost certainly require the creation of a completely new civil society, because our current nonpartisan organizations seem to prefer continued democratic decline over being accused of “taking a side.”

First, though, we need to recognize the severity of our problems. Reassuring ourselves that the last week or year wasn’t that bad if the Democrats win the House is the same mistake that U.S. democrats (yes, small-d) made in largely moving on from Trump’s 2020 contesting of the election because Joe Biden won and was inaugurated. Or after Democrats did pretty well in the 2022 elections and everyone wrongly assumed Trump wouldn’t run and win in 2024. We have a democratic crisis. That can’t be solved by Democrats winning every election. They can’t—and it wouldn’t really be a democracy if they did.

We need a total change of our electoral and political structures so that a political party led by an authoritarian won’t have the chance to win 10 seats in a week without any member of the public voting and the chance to win an election while finishing four percentage points behind in the popular vote. That won’t be easy, but the last week is the latest illustration that such massive changes are the only way to make America democratic again.