But viewed through another lens, this is an optimistic moment. The federal government isn’t the only game in town. Union approval sits near a half-century high—roughly seven in ten Americans—worker organizing is climbing, and state and local governments are moving on workers’ rights with real dynamism.

Labor Day is the perfect time to take stock of that forward motion—and to raise our expectations of government closer to home. We need more than honeyed words once a year about the dignity of work. States and localities possess immense power to improve workers’ lives, and we should demand that they use it.

The most encouraging story of 2026 isn’t only that states passed good laws (though they did plenty of that, as we outline in a new issue brief). It’s that a growing number are building the muscle to enforce them—putting money, prosecutors, and real teeth behind labor standards just as federal enforcement collapses.

Workplace laws aren’t self-executing. Recognizing this, some states are funding the work. Virginia put $10 million into its labor department and stood up a new worker protection unit in the state attorney general’s office; Illinois expanded its attorney general’s workplace rights bureau to inspect payrolls and interview workers on-site; and New York’s budget seeded grants for district attorneys to pursue wage theft and workers’ compensation fraud, modeled on similar programs in California.

The sharpest edge is criminal prosecution. If an employee steals from an employer, no one questions whether criminal prosecution is appropriate. But historically, when an employer has stolen workers’ wages, even repeatedly, intentionally, and egregiously, that has been treated as a civil matter. This is changing, as a growing number of district attorneys have added labor to the docket. One day before his office convicted Donald Trump, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced guilty pleas in a wage theft case against the owners of famed pizzeria Grimaldi’s. And prosecutors are bringing workplace fatality cases that once went largely unpunished: In Travis County, Texas, District Attorney José Garza secured a guilty plea from a construction company over the trench-collapse death of 24-year-old Juan José Galvan Batalla, with the plea agreement requiring worker trainings and an independent safety monitor.

Cities and counties are in the mix too. San Diego County created an Office of Labor Standards five years ago and has been a bulldog against wage theft; this summer it sued several national sushi companies for allegedly underpaying sushi chefs in supermarkets. And if restaurants fail to pay final state orders of unpaid wages? After trying to extract payment, the county will suspend the restaurant’s permit to operate.

Well over two dozen localities now run offices dedicated to workers—the newest in Cleveland, and the original in San Francisco, marking its twenty-fifth anniversary this year. Enforcement by Denver Labor and the San Francisco City Attorney has reclassified thousands of gig workers at staffing businesses as employees with wage and other rights. Boston passed a construction and demolition ordinance requiring extensive safety measures as a precondition for getting a large-scale building permit in the first place.

Far-reaching city involvement seems standard now, but in fact we should appreciate that it’s remarkable: A mere decade ago, this was not a thing that cities did.

States and localities also shape the economy as purchasers and regulators. When a business wants a license, permit, tax incentive, or government contract, that’s leverage to demand legal compliance and, ideally, good working conditions. Some cities and counties block repeat wage thieves from bidding on government contracts, and many jurisdictions set prevailing- or living-wage standards for government contractors, so bad apple bidders can’t win by offering bargain-basement working conditions.

Others write new standards outright: This year, Connecticut and Rhode Island joined nearly a half-dozen other states in reining in the punishing warehouse quotas that churn through workers’ bodies. Virginia joined states like Oregon and Maryland in passing a law to set simple but specific heat rules for employers as temperatures rise, rules that have been proven to keep people healthier and save lives. Washington enacted one of the nation’s strongest noncompete bans. And as more states look to understand the impact of artificial intelligence on the workforce, Connecticut became the first state to make employers disclose whether layoffs are AI-driven.

On the most fundamental right—to organize and join unions—states have less leeway, because federal law constrains their powers. But there’s still tremendous untapped opportunity for action, including granting organizing rights to state and local public employees, but also going far beyond that. Illinois this year gave rideshare drivers a path to unionize, joining California (by statute in 2025) and Massachusetts (by ballot initiative in 2024). Washington and Oregon last year followed New York and New Jersey in allowing striking workers to receive unemployment benefits. Minnesota’s Nursing Home Workforce Standards Board lets workers, employers, and the labor commissioner negotiate binding standards for an entire industry—the “sectoral bargaining” that labor experts have long lauded, and that should be replicated many times over.

For all this motion, a new ingredient should also be stirred in: cross-state coordination. Conservatives have long understood that states acting together, through the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, and its allies, can move markets and set national agendas. Progressives should be just as ambitious: sharing rosters of labor violators so a scofflaw barred in one state can’t win contracts in the next, coordinating multi-state cases, and even synchronizing the “drop dates” on which state labor bills are introduced.

The dynamism on worker issues isn’t evenly spread. You’ll have noticed perhaps that every state mentioned above is a blue one. In red America, some leaders remain indifferent or even hostile to their own constituents. One illustrative recent example: Nebraska’s attorney general just filed a lawsuit to keep wages lower, hot on the heels of state lawmakers moving to weaken voter-approved ballot initiatives raising the minimum wage.

Even so, state legislators have made some minor inroads even in more challenging terrain: Utah and New Hampshire both curbed non-competes for certain health care workers this year. And there are still more glimmers of hope: Many city and state leaders in worker-hostile states keep fighting mightily for working people. Consider recent action in deep-red Texas: Just last month, Houston’s mayor signed an executive order raising the minimum wage at the city’s airports to $20 per hour, from its prior rate of $15. And Harris County, Texas, where Houston is located, last year passed a worksite safety policy for its construction contractors, with inspections and real consequences for violations.

The constellation of pro-worker state and local action isn’t just a scatter of separate dots. There’s a trendline, and a lesson.

Right-wing culture and economic warriors laid considerable groundwork at the state level for their current national takeover. Downballot elections and governance have never been the cool kids for national advocates, but people with humane, economic justice values ignore state and local government at our peril. This is where the rebuilding happens—and where government can prove, tangibly, that it can make people’s lives better.

Strategists are drafting national blueprints for 2028; but for workers, the real blueprint is already an iterative work in progress closer to home.

So this Labor Day, the charge runs both ways: To leaders at every level, examine the full powers of your office and use them for working people—even if your office isn’t nominally about labor; even if your predecessor did nothing for workers. And to the rest of us: Expect and demand more from state and local leaders than annual Labor Day platitudes. The best way to gain and exert power—for workers, and for cities and states—has always been to use it.

As with so many other laws and norms, President Donald Trump has shattered that tradition. The war he launched against Iran in February 2026 involved no effort to explain to voters why we were fighting. Even after the fact, Trump showed little belief that there was any need to persuade the public that he was justified or correct. It was a war of pure presidential whim.

Trump’s illegal and unconstrained warmongering stems, in part, from his contempt for democratic decision-making—and a toxic stew of racism and Islamophobia. But his belligerence is also fueled by crony capitalism. After invading Venezuela in January 2026, Trump made his motives stunningly clear, crowing that “Venezuela will be turning over between 30 and 50 MILLION Barrels” of oil, and the “money” from it “will be controlled by me.” He repeated that move with Iran, declaring that “if it were up to me, I’d take the oil.” Indeed, Trump’s basic approach to foreign policy is to enrich himself, his family, and his advisers through investment deals and free planes. Trumpian foreign policy is bribery, white supremacy, and authoritarianism all the way down.

There is, of course, a long history of capitalist greed driving U.S. foreign policy. The Marine Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, for example, who led military interventions throughout the Western Hemisphere in the early 1900s, later lamented that he “helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in” and “helped make Mexico … safe for American oil interests.” Taking the oil has always been the goal. Trump is, in some ways, a supercharged version of the kleptocracy that came before.

Two new books helpfully illuminate the sordid business of U.S. foreign policy and show how the system became vulnerable to the unchecked militarism and flagrant corruption of Trump’s presidency. A.J. Murphy’s Pentagon Capitalism tracks how the military “modeled itself on private business” and ultimately privatized national security. Chad Levinson’s The President’s Echo System reveals how the White House secretly manipulates seemingly private outside experts and think tanks to “sell” foreign policy to the public. Both of those trends have increasingly privatized foreign policymaking and placed foreign affairs beyond democratic control. The question is whether we can democratize foreign policy in the future.

Without a large and well-armed military, presidents wouldn’t have the ability (or the temptation) to deploy force at will. And to control that enormous military apparatus, the United States has gravitated toward the model of private enterprise, organizing the national security state on the template of a multidivision, for-profit corporation. These days, military officers who want to get promoted earn MBAs to round out their résumés. It’s the accountants scattered throughout the sprawling defense bureaucracy who often set policy for the most powerful military in history.

As Murphy brilliantly narrates in Pentagon Capitalism, the national security state increasingly embraced corporate-style management in the wake of World War II. To compete with the Soviet Union, the United States established a huge standing Army for the first time in its history and maintained hundreds of bases around the world. But the cost of that new defense establishment created tension. During World War II, the United States was willing to spend whatever it took to win. In the quasi-peacetime of the Cold War, the military no longer got a blank check. In the late 1940s, Murphy explains, conservative politicians who were opposed to the “expanded government capacity” of the New Deal state attacked defense spending as “creeping socialism” and “a betrayal of the free enterprise foundations of the American system.” In response, “the architects of the Cold War defense apparatus increasingly invoked business as both a practical resource and a legitimizing model for organizing American military power.” Defense planners rearranged the military like a private enterprise to make it more efficient and to fend off charges that centrally planned defense spending was state socialism.

The heart of that project was a revolution in how the Pentagon managed money. In 1949, a commission appointed by President Harry Truman reported that “the most disturbing aspect” of the national security state was its “enormous cost.” Fixing how the military managed its budget, the commission said, could “make the difference between democracy and totalitarianism.” The technical details of financial accounting methods carried existential, world-historical stakes.

Congress agreed. The National Security Act Amendments of 1949 reorganized how the Pentagon handled funds. In particular, the military shifted to “consumer funding.” Under this new model, instead of unit commanders requisitioning as much materiel as they could get, each unit—say, an Army base—received a set amount of funds. That unit could then use its funds as a “consumer” to buy gear from other military units—say, a supply depot with food or winter coats. Supply units wouldn’t receive any funding directly from the federal budget: Their funds would only come from “selling” supplies to other military units. This system simulated a free market, shaped by supply and demand, and it theoretically increased efficiency by incentivizing bases to “buy” only what they needed and supply depots to stockpile only what they could “sell.”

These new types of budgeting also required financial experts to implement them, in the form of military comptrollers. In the early 1950s, the Senate Armed Services Committee recommended “immediate and aggressive action” to train accountants for “the vital work of comptrollership.” Military comptrollers quickly ballooned. Bases ran weekend and night schools to teach financial management, and management schools took off. Syracuse University created an Army Comptrollership Program and an MBA for the Army. George Washington University ran a comptroller training program for the Navy. And the Army Management School, founded in 1954, borrowed methods from Harvard Business School to teach high-ranking officers “the ins and outs of the military’s new financial system.” By 1957, 100,000 defense employees worked in financial management. Murphy calls the comptrollers spread throughout the defense bureaucracy “the foot soldiers of modernized military finance.” Higher up the org chart, at the Army Management School, colonels and generals “relaxed in executive-type lounge chairs” discussing business school case studies with their professors, fostering “a culture of executive identity” among top brass.

The sudden centrality of accounting turned military officers into corporate managers. Generals who had led combat troops in World War II now found themselves balancing budgets at bases, choosing how to spend limited funds on equipment, housing, or medical care. As a result, officers began trying to maximize the productivity of their workers, using popular new techniques for managing personnel. Starting in the 1940s, business school professors and management consultants developed theories for how to control the increasingly large and decentralized corporate conglomerates that dominated the U.S. economy—multidivision companies like GE. These business intellectuals achieved surprising cultural salience in the 1950s—as Murphy says, “management celebrities disseminated their ideas far and wide.” The military listened.

Military officers studied new management techniques in business schools, then applied them to their personnel. They embraced the methods of Frederick Winslow Taylor, the pioneering theorist of industrial manufacturing, for tracking and controlling workers. In Taylorist fashion, they timed each movement workers made on the job, then added up how long each task should take. For example, the Pentagon’s Defense Work Measurement Standard Time Data Program found that “mopping in a lightly soiled room full of furniture, using a damp mop, and making four strokes forward and back on each spot” took “twelve seconds for every ten square feet.” Officers believed such control boosted efficiency. “Local supervisors” at one base, Murphy reports, “were particularly pleased with the results in the laundry facility, where a change in the method of folding socks and sorting incoming clothing was leading to appreciable speed increases.”

Workers didn’t like this intrusive control. In fact, laborers at the Watertown Arsenal had gone on strike in 1911 when the Army tried to introduce Taylorist production controls, leading Congress to temporarily ban such management techniques in federal workplaces. But as the post–World War II military expanded, it hired more female workers, and as the United States built hundreds of bases abroad, it hired local workers for jobs like cooking and cleaning. The white male officers overseeing this increasingly female and nonwhite workforce sought to extract maximum productivity from the people under their control. Murphy concludes that both “racialized views” and gender politics “structured the military’s Cold War transformations” into a businesslike bureaucracy. Racialized and gendered systems of workplace power built the infrastructure for U.S. military hegemony.

All this focus on businesslike efficiency changed how the United States went to war. In 1961, Robert McNamara, an executive at Ford who had both studied and taught at Harvard Business School, became secretary of defense and accelerated the adoption of management thinking. Under his leadership, for example, economists from the Pentagon-linked think tank Rand moved into official comptroller positions at the Defense Department and, as Murphy puts it, “set out to measure, quantify, and price more military functions than ever before.” Statistics would shape defense policy.

That process reached its infamous apotheosis during the Vietnam War, when the Pentagon used a “body count” metric of enemy deaths to track progress. Critics have argued that the body count metric both encouraged “indiscriminate violence” and “blinkered American military leadership to the realities of the war” by treating statistics on total deaths as a proxy for strategic gains. Similarly, Gen. William Westmoreland, who studied at Harvard Business School and commanded U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, launched a program in 1967 to bring down the “high cost per individual casualty” (at the time, it took six tons of munitions to kill one enemy combatant). Westmoreland called this economizing project “a matter of highest priority.” It produced such tangible results as “changes to the process of sweater procurement.” President Johnson praised the program for employing “innovative management improvements” amid the “most trying conditions conceivable in a combat zone.” At least LBJ had his priorities straight.

After Vietnam, the officer corps turned against some forms of technocratic managerialism. In one survey, Army generals called the body count metric a “great crime.” But in the 1970s and 1980s, economistic logic became even more embedded in national security. The libertarian economist Martin Anderson, who later shaped Ronald Reagan’s economic policies, pushed Richard Nixon to end the draft, and some reformers saw the end of the draft as a chance for the Pentagon to privatize more military functions by hiring outside contractors. When Nixon did end the draft in 1973, he said the military would now “compete in the job market” for employees. As the military became an all-volunteer force, human relations became more important. Officers were urged to “enrich” each service member’s job to help productivity. One military theorist, Col. John Boyd, blended management with a countercultural spirit when he advocated “The Art of Success,” a mindset meant to “shape or influence events so that we not only magnify our spirit and strength but also influence potential adversaries as well as the uncommitted so that they are drawn toward our philosophy and are empathetic toward our success.” The Marine Corps’s “Warfighting” doctrine still draws on Boyd’s ideas, and both military leaders like Jim Mattis and corporate titans like Jamie Dimon cite Boyd.

Indeed, contemporary business practices have been influenced by the history of managerialism in the military. Management consulting firms used defense work during World War II to build their cachet, while Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program, which still trains executives today, grew out of a program for defense management in World War II. In the 1960s, budgeting techniques that were developed in the military to control costs spread to other parts of the federal government, bringing what Murphy calls “military-incubated economic analysis” to bear on public “health, education, welfare, and housing.” At a more pervasive, ideological level, key elements of neoliberal economics, including an infatuation with rational choice theory and cost-benefit analysis, trace their lineage partly to Rand and the experiences academic economists had with the military. The Defense Department, Murphy writes, “served as a breeding ground” for the ideas that shaped neoliberal capitalism and its radical free-market beliefs.

At the same time, Murphy argues, the neoliberal free-market economy in the United States, far from eliminating any role for the government, “has in fact relied on an active and massive state, including a massive military.” Military power secures “overseas markets and resources,” while the Pentagon pumps capital into large corporations, which contract with the military to provide services, including weapons production, that the military itself often used to carry out. Military spending, Murphy concludes, is “part of the essence of American neoliberalism.” We live in a market-fundamentalist system that strips benefits from the public at large while channeling immense sums into the state-run Department of Defense and its cozy corporate contractors.

The use of military contractors to fight the war on terrorism is another product of the trend toward privatization that Pentagon Capitalism narrates. The drive to cut costs that inspired new methods of “sweater procurement” in Vietnam also led to the deployment of mercenaries in Afghanistan and Iraq. As Murphy emphasizes, this “outsourcing changed the nature of war,” because private contractors are less accountable for causing civilian harm, and they enable the public to ignore the wars being fought in our name. Privatizing the infrastructure of war incentivizes more war.

Even as the expanding national security state made it easier for presidents to wage war, they still needed to sell their hawkish foreign policy to the public. That’s where Levinson’s book The President’s Echo System comes in. Levinson traces how the White House surreptitiously orchestrates nonprofit groups outside the government to run public relations campaigns. Those ostensibly private mouthpieces make it look as if independent experts support the president’s foreign policy plans, when they are really just echoing the president’s line.

This “echo system” arose because federal law bans domestic propaganda. The U.S. government ran propaganda campaigns in both world wars—the poet Archibald MacLeish famously worked in the Office of War Information in World War II. But Americans have been wary of state propaganda. Since 1919, an anti-lobbying statute has barred the executive branch from using federal funds to pay for any “advertisement, telegram, telephone, letter, printed or written matter, or other device, intended or designed to influence in any manner a Member of Congress … to favor, adopt, or oppose” any “law” or “policy.” As a result, the White House can’t run publicity campaigns to pressure Congress. To get around that, Levinson shows, presidents have built an entire ecosystem of private groups that “launder” the president’s foreign policy proposals as their own.

The modern version of that “laundering” started in the late 1930s, as President Roosevelt tried to mobilize the public for war. After World War I, many Americans came to believe that big banks and arms manufacturers had duped the United States into war to line their pockets. That led to a wave of isolationism, epitomized by books like Merchants of Death and the Senate Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry. Congress therefore passed a series of Neutrality Acts. Roosevelt himself signed the Neutrality Act of 1935. But by 1937, he favored intervention—his “Quarantine Speech” urged the United States to act more vigorously abroad.

Facing an isolationist Congress, Roosevelt used outside groups to promote his plans like “cash-and-carry” and “lend-lease.” In particular, the Committee to Defend America, or CDA, placed articles and ads in newspapers across the country. The White House helped manage that campaign. At one point, one of FDR’s aides asked the CDA to delay a petition, and the CDA said it was “very glad to comply” and would take “no action on it until such time as mutually agreed.” FDR himself thanked the CDA’s chair for a “grand job” on cash-and-carry. After Pearl Harbor, the CDA shut down. But the CDA’s director, Clark Eichelberger, in close consultation with the White House, ran the American Association for the United Nations, or AAUN, to generate public pressure on Congress to ratify the U.N. Charter. One of the last things Roosevelt did before he died was to release a statement, written by Eichelberger, backing the AAUN’s work.

Later presidents made similar moves. When the Truman administration proposed the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, Eichelberger recommended creating an outside lobbying group, the Committee for the Marshall Plan, or CMP. Dean Acheson, the undersecretary of state who helped design the Marshall Plan, resigned from the government and founded the CMP to lobby for his own proposal. The CMP printed 1.25 million texts, including petitions and postcards for citizens to fill in and send to Congress. Then, when Truman sought to boost defense spending after 1950 to implement a more confrontational Cold War strategy, the CMP reformed as the Committee on the Present Danger, or CPD. The State Department and the Defense Department both coordinated with the CPD, even sharing confidential military information. The CPD called for more military aid to Europe, and it ran a weekly, nationwide radio show to circulate its views.

The foreign policy echo system intensified during Vietnam. In 1967, as the antiwar movement took off, White House aides organized the Committee for Peace with Freedom in Vietnam, or CPF. The CPF was co-chaired by former presidents Truman and Eisenhower and endorsed Johnson’s conduct of the war. The White House aide who steered the project told LBJ that ­Eisenhower’s involvement helped because it “automatically takes suspicion off the White House.” That same aide wrote that “for obvious reasons,” it would be “wise” to keep the CPF files “locked up.”

Nixon doubled down on the secrecy and manipulation. Charles Colson, Nixon’s special assistant for public liaison, organized Americans for Winning the Peace, which ran a marketing campaign to defeat a congressional attempt to end the war. Colson also helped raise $25 million for the American Enterprise Institute, or AEI, then a relatively minor think tank, which backed Nixon on the war. Those funds helped make AEI a major player, but the White House masked its ties to AEI—one White House aide warned of risks “should evidence of any of our activities surface.” Colson himself went to jail for Watergate. But President Gerald Ford created the Office of Public Liaison to formalize the job Colson had done. Jimmy Carter used the Office of Public Liaison to coordinate with outside groups on the Panama Canal and arms control. Ronald Reagan’s Office of Public Liaison worked with think tanks like AEI and the Heritage Foundation to try to get Congress to fund the Contras in Nicaragua. When Congress refused, Iran-Contra was the result.

The war on terrorism followed a similar script. In 1992, the CIA provided startup funds for the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmed Chalabi. Then, in 2003, Chalabi helped justify invading Iraq. George W. Bush promoted the invasion in a speech at AEI a month before U.S. bombs started to fall. Dick Cheney praised the Iraq War two months later at the Heritage Foundation. Private organizations that owed their power, prestige, and sometimes their very existence to government backing proceeded to support the White House’s plans for war.

Levinson convincingly argues that this echo system naturally tends toward hawkish policies. The White House turns to outside groups when it needs to manufacture support for ambitious plans, which means that presidents tend to ally with groups that favor robust interventionism. Those groups then get privileged access to policymakers and information, which gives them insider advantages in subsequent foreign policy debates. The intellectual ecosystem for foreign policy ideas therefore becomes systematically biased toward interventionism. Levinson’s book can be a bit dry—it often reads more like a political science lecture on scope conditions and independent variables than like the sharp story of political intrigue it should be. But Levinson reveals a critical history of presidents constructing clandestine, privatized propaganda networks that keep dragging the United States into war. Maybe, after his book, we’ll learn our lesson.

Since at least Eisenhower’s farewell address, critics have worried about the military-industrial complex capturing government policymaking and funneling ever-increasing funds to private defense contractors. Between them, Murphy’s and Levinson’s books highlight new and different facets of the public-private partnership that fuels America’s addiction to war: The national security state modeled itself on private enterprise, ultimately outsourcing war, while the presidency came to rely on private organizations to launder interventionist plans to the public.

The Trump administration has radically embraced that privatization. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is using private companies to build and run mass immigrant detention centers. Trump proposed removing Palestinians from Gaza so that the United States could “own” it and construct a “Riviera” on “a beautiful piece of land.” Trump-aligned companies like Palantir have won huge contracts with the Defense Department and ICE. Trump donor—and defense contractor—Elon Musk headed the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, potentially contributing to hundreds of thousands of deaths abroad. After the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” demanded a “review” of “all general and flag officer promotions” to weed out “critical race theory” and concern for “climate change” in the military, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has begun purging women and nonwhite officers from the upper ranks.

What to do? Levinson’s somewhat thin solution to the foreign policy echo chamber is better elites. Because “citizens take cues from elites,” he argues, we need to clean up our “marketplace of ideas” to make sure foreign policy experts aren’t just White House puppets. It’s crucial, of course, to halt government manipulation or censorship of the media. But beyond focusing on elite discourse, perhaps grassroots antiwar movement–building and a more active role for Congress—the people’s representatives—might improve foreign policy legitimacy and results.

More broadly, it will be necessary to combat the ideology of privatization that has swallowed foreign affairs. Democracy is not a private enterprise. If we want to rein in the excesses of the national security state, we will need to reawaken the sense that foreign policy is a public good.

America, in 2020, was in one of its ephemeral periods of racial lucidity. The images from Minneapolis had accomplished what decades of statistics, testimony, earlier images, and earlier funerals had not: They had made ignorance difficult to maintain. Corporate America, which is exceptionally good at detecting changes in the weather, responded accordingly. Nonprofit arts organizations, which are exceptionally good at detecting what corporate America has already detected, responded shortly thereafter. Statements were issued, commitments were made, reading lists circulated, listening sessions convened. White colleagues, newly acquainted with the concept of white fragility, turned with considerable enthusiasm to a white academic to explain it to them. Job-search mandates broadened, and, with remarkable speed, qualified Black people were found.

I was among the found; I took the calls. I mention this because hindsight has a way of turning everybody into the person who saw through everything at the time, and I have no interest in improving my biography that way. I was skeptical, but I was also hopeful, and neither feeling prevented me from accepting an invitation to a conversation that should perhaps have occurred years earlier. Professional opportunity is not made counterfeit merely because the person extending it has recently altered their rationale for doing so. Besides, I work in marketing, a profession built in no small part on the proposition that what people want is inseparable from when they want it.

In November 2020, while much of the country was still speaking of a racial reckoning as though the reckoning had already produced a result, I wrote in American Theatre about my own difficulty believing that the country’s newfound racial consciousness would endure. George Floyd’s murder had entered my home, my work, and my seven-year-old daughter’s understanding of what might happen to her Black father. By the end of that essay, she had decided to join me on my morning walks to make sure I was safe. I wrote then of America’s “fleeting capacity to love.” I had seen enough cycles of national horror, recognition, resolve, and amnesia to distrust the permanence of our attention. Rodney King, Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo, and too many others had already taught the lesson. What I did not know was whether George Floyd would become another name in that sequence or the name that finally broke it. I hoped for the latter while understanding how mercurial the odds could be.

What happened next is usually discussed as a story about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and I think that understates it. DEI was merely the institutional vocabulary of the moment. The more consequential event was a temporary renegotiation of relevance. For a period of time, Black experience was not treated as a specialized form of knowledge useful primarily when the subject was Black people. It became germane to conversations about business, audiences, culture, leadership, risk, talent, and the country itself. People who had long possessed that knowledge experienced the peculiar sensation of watching its market value rise while its substance remained unchanged.

That distinction matters because the conventional explanation for exclusion has so often been scarcity. There were not enough qualified candidates. The network did not yield them. The search had been exhaustive. Or, more delicately, the organization had decided it was looking for someone with more fundraising experience, more institutional experience, more experience at scale, more experience with precisely the thing that had somehow escaped mention in the prospectus but acquired decisive importance once certain candidates came into view. The pipeline, that blameless piece of corporate infrastructure, could always be counted on to justify the final decision.

Scarcity, however, was already taking a sabbatical. The résumés appeared. The executives appeared. The strategists, creatives, advisers, and board candidates appeared. Search firms that had spent years describing a difficult supply problem demonstrated, under different demand conditions, formidable powers of discovery. This was one of the period’s more useful revelations because it converted a long-running argument into something closer to an experiment. The supply of Black talent had not materially changed. The consequence of failing to find it had.

That is not quite the same thing as hypocrisy, which is the accusation most readily available and therefore the least interesting. Hypocrisy requires us to know that people did not believe what they said. I suspect many of them did believe it. The chief executives signing letters, recruiters widening slates, and colleagues posting black squares may have been entirely sincere. Human beings are capable of sincere conviction whose durability depends heavily on the surrounding conditions. Institutions are even better at it.

This is where my profession becomes useful. Marketers spend a great deal of time listening to what people say they value and considerably more money discovering what they actually choose. The distance between the two is not necessarily evidence that consumers are lying. It is evidence that preference has a context. Change the price, the convenience, the social reward, the perceived risk or what everyone else appears to be doing, and a deeply expressed preference can become surprisingly negotiable.

For a time after George Floyd, overlooking Black people became expensive. There was reputational cost, employee cost, consumer cost, and, perhaps most powerfully, the cost of appearing not to understand what everyone else suddenly understood. Institutions adjusted with an efficiency that suggested the obstacle had never been quite as immovable as advertised.

Then the price plummeted. The demonstrations became smaller and eventually disappeared from nightly television. The black squares traveled down social feeds into digital archaeology. Corporate declarations remained online but ceased to require much tending. Meanwhile, “woke,” a word with roots in Black vigilance, was relieved of most of its original meaning and repurposed as a remarkably capacious term of indictment. Conservative activists had already demonstrated the utility of taking specialized language such as “critical race theory,” stretching it to contain nearly every objectionable feature of progressive race politics and then making the container itself toxic. “Woke” proved even more efficient. It required no seminar, no footnotes, and eventually no definition. DEI could now be made to signify not an imperfect collection of workplace practices but an entire theory of undeserved advantage, institutional decline, and cultural excess.

Organizations that had once competed to describe the depth of their commitment became newly interested in precision of language, then in different language, and sometimes in no language at all. Some programs disappeared, some were renamed, some survived, and some of the people who had been very interested in hearing from people like me became interested in other things. My phone, which has always possessed a sophisticated understanding of macroeconomic and cultural conditions, adjusted too.

I do not resent this nearly as much as you might imagine. Resentment would require me to treat the calls as something I was owed, and I never did. What I had been given instead was an unusually clean view of how value gets conferred. Nothing material about me changed between the period when my perspective was newly sought and the period when it was less so. The underlying asset, if I may commit the indignity of describing myself that way, remained stubbornly constant. What fluctuated was the market’s willingness to price certain parts of it.

That is a different proposition from saying race was suddenly all anyone valued about me. It would also be unfair to the people who called, many of whom were interested in the full range of what I knew and could do. The subtler point is that race altered the aperture through which everything else became visible. Experience that had existed all along acquired a different legibility once the culture had decided that the person carrying it might know something newly worth knowing. And there, I think, is the part of the story that survives the exhausted arguments about DEI.

We like to imagine merit as a stable property—something a person accumulates, and which the world eventually recognizes. But recognition has fashions too. Institutions do not merely evaluate talent; they decide, often without acknowledging that they are deciding, which forms of talent are salient at a given moment. The person can remain exactly the same while the institutional imagination around that person expands or contracts. And for a few years, the imagination expanded.

This is why I resist both the triumphant account of 2020 and the betrayed one. The first asks us to believe that a durable transformation occurred because institutions said one had. The second asks us to believe that every retreat proves the original commitment was fraudulent. Neither gives people, or organizations, enough credit for contradiction. A conviction can be genuine and conditional at the same time. Indeed, most convictions probably are. What 2020 revealed was not that corporate America had suddenly developed a conscience and then misplaced it. It revealed the conditions under which conscience could become operational.

That is a less satisfying conclusion, but a more useful one. It also explains why I feel no particular need to confront the recruiters who found me then and seem to have misplaced me since. I do not require a reckoning for what changed, much less a reprisal. The conditions changed, most certainly. Their clients changed. The perceived risks changed. The social rewards changed. The conversation changed. Perhaps their own convictions changed as well. I cannot know, and I am old enough to distrust stories that depend upon knowing the contents of strangers’ hearts, much less the timing and provenance of their change. I am less a victim of changing conditions than someone made unusually aware of their collateral damage.

There is a phrase economists use, revealed preference, for the idea that what people choose may tell us more than what they say they prefer. I have come to think of the years since 2020 as an extended exercise in revealed preference. We learned that institutions could find Black talent when failing to do so carried sufficient consequence. We learned that the faces in meeting rooms could change quickly when sameness became uncomfortable. We learned that expertise once considered peripheral could become central without the experts themselves changing at all. And we are learning now that none of those discoveries was durable.

Again, this doesn’t make me a victim. If anything, it has spared me a certain kind of confusion. I know more now about the difference between being valued and being valuable, and about the danger of assuming that the former is reliable evidence of the latter. Value can exist for years before a market recognizes it, and it can survive quite comfortably after the market’s attention has wandered elsewhere. America did not finally discover Black value in 2020; it discovered a reason to value publicly what had been available to it all along.

So, to the recruiters who called, the organizations that listened, the executives who discovered urgency, and the many people who genuinely believed we had crossed some permanent threshold, I offer neither accusation nor absolution. I am simply acknowledging what the market has told me. For a season, Black was not merely a race or an identity or one of those demographic boxes whose insufficiency we periodically rediscover. Black was insight, credibility, perspective, access, urgency, and, in certain rooms, capital. Then it wasn’t.

My daughter is older now, a teenager, and no longer joins me on morning walks to make sure I am safe. I have never forgotten that she once felt she had to. Nor have I forgotten the hope of that period, when it seemed possible that the country’s attention might finally have acquired the endurance its conscience had so often lacked. But I’m wiser now. I do not look at my phone in expectation.

Piker, by his own admission, earns a living at the intersection of high risk and high reward. He’s a compelling enough thinker and speaker to have built a massive audience—more than three million followers on Twitch and about a million more on YouTube. But there is a downside to speaking extemporaneously for hours and hours every day. “If you were talking for 10 hours a day,” he told Regunberg, “you’re going to say stuff that could very easily be misconstrued.” Case in point: Piker has been getting barracked for lamenting recently that equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, at a time when Israel’s popularity is at an all-time low, does little more than put Jewish Americans in danger. That sentiment is not materially different from what Ezra Klein had to say in his own recent essay about Piker—but when you’re a sainted member of the white intelligentsia, you are apparently allowed to say this. If you’re not, it’s head on a pike time (no pun intended).

But it’s not Piker who’s being forced to weather this storm, it’s Democrats—newly minted Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed in particular. Having previously invited Piker on the campaign trail, El-Sayed now has to deal with the fact that the political media has made Piker its idée fixe. These preoccupations mostly run hand in hand with the most recent hype cycle over the alleged, and overblown, DSA takeover of the Democratic Party. The assumption that any leftist candidate must be palling around with Piker is so deeply entrenched that CBS News’s Gayle King (now working under Bari Weiss’s much dumber and race-baiting management) had a whole segment ready to spring on Florida Senate candidate Angie Nixon for campaigning with Piker, only for Nixon to tell King that not only had she never campaigned with Piker, she—like most Democrats—wasn’t particularly familiar with him, either.

In a recent MS NOW encounter with anchor Katy Tur, El-Sayed reminded us that he is something of a novice at navigating the ins and outs of the cable news business. Pressed by Tur to account for his association with Piker, El-Sayed attempted a canned pivot: “This campaign is not about a streamer in California. This campaign is about affordability in Michigan. This campaign is about the ability to have health care,” he said. “This campaign is about the challenges Michiganders face. And I get that, in the media, it’s a lot easier to pick up one person and be like, ‘This is what this is about.’ But this is why a lot of people get so frustrated about politics and political media, because it doesn’t actually speak to the challenges they face.”

I think El-Sayed is largely correct on the merits here, but forget it, Jake, this is cable news, a forum in which merits don’t really matter and the attempt to reengage a news anchor with a more substantive conversation is always a waste of time. Tur actually did better than most during the longer segment: She led a discussion about money in politics and gave El-Sayed a chance to lay out his ideas on how to end the billionaire capture of our politics and implement Medicare for All.

But El-Sayed walked onto that set hoping that the headline was going to be his economic policy plans, and ended up with the brief conversation about Piker being the most widely talked about aspect of the interview. It’s worth learning about how that happened and what someone like El-Sayed could do differently.

Right about now, some of you are probably grousing about the differing standards the news industry applies to the two parties. Yes, Republicans learned long ago that if their response to some associate’s controversial statement is simply, “I didn’t see the tweet/post/video,” their interlocutor will move on, even when the person you’re claiming ignorance of is the actual president of the United States, whose every utterance is push-alerted right to our phones. The fact that the GOP has become so licentious in its corruption and so casual about lying works to its advantage. If the Democrats are the only ones who believe there should be high standards for public servants, they’ll be the only ones held to any.

But valid complaints about the cable news industry have been around for ages. What hasn’t arrived in their wake is any serious effort among the industry’s leaders to reform things. I cannot recall a time in my life when I thought cable news was getting better. (I no longer tune in, so in the extremely unlikely event that it does, it will go without my notice.) Democratic candidates hoping that a better media might be wrought from the current state of affairs will draw their last breath waiting for it to happen. There is no saving cable news from itself, there is only using what it offers to your advantage.

The Hasan Piker flap has been excellently instructive about one of my major points about the television news industry: Substance is not what they’re after; they want conflict, controversy, and cheap shots. Saddle a politician with an invented demon, and everyone eats that night. The way to win, in this situation, is not to make an appeal to Katy Tur’s sense of civic virtue but, rather, play her game with equal abandon by giving the hungry cable news maw another street fight to broadcast.

Oddly enough, El-Sayed had one pretty well locked and loaded, if his campaign’s press page is any guide. Instead of trying to force Tur to pivot back to the needs of Michiganders, he should have offered up his opponent Mike Rogers’s faith adviser, Pastor Lorenzo Sewell, who attended a hate rally put together by fascist gadfly and January 6 rioter Jake Lang, whose whole schtick is to show up places and try to provoke violence. Lang is a nasty piece of work and, unlike Piker, a vocally committed antisemite. El-Sayed’s campaign has done its homework, and has made an effort to tie Rogers to Lang, but he would have done well during his MS NOW interview to offer up Lang as a punching bag rather than try to steer the conversation back to the economy. On cable news, never opt for the high road when the low road is beckoning.

Democrats in general need to get themselves into the character-assassination business (though I suppose a few have imperiled their own party’s chances to take back the Senate by making Piker one of the few bogeymen they’re willing to publicly decry). As I noted a few weeks ago, one of the biggest bankrollers of Republican politics this cycle is Elon Musk, a guy whose cuts to USAID and other programs have led to hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world and who is currently in court fighting the state of Minnesota for the right to create nonconsensual deepfake nudes of children. If Democrats raise the salience of this connection, and demonize Musk in aggressively grandiose terms, they will at least be giving the cable news industry what it wants: crass, cynical conflict.

Democrats need to better understand the cable news environment and its propensity for bad-faith attacks and controversy mongering. Does that mean that they should assume that every time they step on set, they’re going to get ratfucked? Honestly, that might be the best possible footing for future television news encounters. No one goes broke underestimating the civic virtues of the cable news commentariat. Rather than complaining about these practices, it’s better to understand the stupid games this industry likes to play, and master them yourself.

The report further details just how sloppy and reckless Chavez-DeRemer’s tenure as Labor secretary was until she stepped down in April.

“During Chavez-DeRemer’s April 15–20, 2025 personal travel to Oregon, she requested an off-the-record stop at an establishment that was determined upon entry to feature partially nude dancers,” the IG report reads, noting that Chavez-DeRemer made a point to bring her limousine driver inside with her.

“Chavez-DeRemer subsequently took money from her purse, gave the money to the driver, and directed him to give it to the performer. When the agent resisted and sought guidance from [Assistant Special Agent in Charge]1, ASAIC 1 instructed him to comply with Chavez-DeRemer’s requests,” the report continues. “Chavez-DeRemer then took additional money from her purse and asked the agent to drop the bills one by one onto the partially nude woman. The agent again hesitated and sought intervention from ASAIC 1, who told him to follow Chavez-DeRemer’s instructions. The agent complied against his wishes.”

This is the woman President Donald Trump handpicked—at the behest of Teamsters president Sean O’Brien—to lead the country’s Labor Department as part of a so-called “pro-labor” administration. And that strip club moment is just one of many ways in which she created what the IG report describes as a “toxic, intimidating, and humiliating” work environment.

The report also notes that while in Michigan, Chavez-DeRemer massaged ASAIC 1’s shoulders “while seated behind him in a vehicle after he completed a driving shift,” and asked if he was tired. ASAIC 1 told her he was “solid as a rock,” which witnesses interpreted as a sexual innuendo in reference to a massage-induced erection.

Chavez-DeRemer also reportedly discussed employees’ performance in front of them, including whether they had cried, and would drink during the workday. She and her aides would pressure other employees to join them and would mock them if they declined, witnesses said.

The dysfunction wasn’t just from Chavez-DeRemer. Her chief of staff Rebecca Wright screened Office of the Secretary applicants by race, weight, and sexual orientation—even moving someone’s desk because she didn’t want a “fat person” in her line of sight. She also told women in the office not to cut their hair too short to stop them from “turning into a lesbian.”

This is an update from the April allegations that led to Chavez-DeRemer’s resignation—that she had an affair with a member of her security detail, asked staffers to buy alcohol for her at various hours of the day, and used taxpayer funds to throw a birthday party for herself.

My copy of the book is a signed one, inscribed by Steinem “To Robin—with gratitude for this International Women’s Day—and the future.” I can’t be certain, but I like to think that the Robin addressed here is the poet and activist Robin Morgan, Steinem’s friend and collaborator, and one of the books many dedicatees (there are more than a dozen of them). Outrageous Acts may have a single author, but Steinem knew that feminism is a collective project.

Steinem, who died this past Wednesday at 92, was many things: an editor, an organizer, a public speaker, a fundraiser, a co-founder, a mentor, and, in her own words, an “entrepreneur of social change.” But before she was all these things, she was a writer, and she remained one until her death. (Her final book, the memoir An Unexpected Life, will be published on September 22.) It’s easy to forget this, despite her impressive publication record—she published 11 books over the course of her lifetime—and her evident way with words. A kind of poster girl for women’s liberation, with her aviator sunglasses and her long sun-kissed hair, Steinem spent so much time in the public eye that one could be forgiven for thinking she was more like the jet-setting elites she occasionally profiled (and dated) than the working writer toiling away in relative obscurity.

But writing was Steinem’s first and perhaps most enduring love, the activity that gave her a sense of purpose even though, or perhaps because, it could be so daunting. “For me, writing is the only thing that passes the three tests of a metier: (1) when I’m doing it, I don’t feel that I should be doing something else instead; (2) it produces a sense of accomplishment and, once in a while, pride; and (3) it’s frightening,” she wrote in Harper’s in 1965.

That she felt so committed to writing is all the more impressive given the media environment surrounding her. Media was a man’s world: Magazines and newspapers were run by men, edited by men, and distributed by men—although much of the work needed to put out an issue was done by women. Male journalists got assigned better stories and earned higher fees. Even though many magazines were marketed to women, male editors scarcely believed women knew how to read. (A top editor at Ladies’ Home Journal described its audience as “mental defectives with curlers in their hair.”) Steinem struggled to earn respect, let alone interesting assignments. When she first tried to break into Life magazine, the editor she spoke to told her, “We don’t want a pretty girl. We want a writer.” 

Steinem was a writer, as the pieces in this book attest. At her best, as in the 1978 piece “If Men Could Menstruate,” she is pointed and funny, displaying the same gift for aphorism that she showcased in her public speeches. But she could also be earnest and introspective, expressing complicated truths in a plainspoken style. “I still don’t understand why so many, many years passed before I saw my mother as a person and before I understood that many of the forces in her life are patterns women share,” she writes in “Ruth’s Song,” a moving autobiographical essay about her troubled mother, written specifically for Outrageous Acts. “I suppose I couldn’t afford to admit that what had happened to my mother was not all personal or accidental, and therefore could happen to me.”

But she was not always the writer she wanted to be. During the 1960s, when she wrote the most, she rarely expressed her political commitments or personal values in print. During the 1970s, when she honed her politics, she rarely had time to write. “It’s one of the ironies of trying to be a writer and an activist at the same time that just when you feel you have the most to say, you have the least time to say it,” she later recalled. Traveling on the lecture circuit, often with Black feminists like Florynce Kennedy or Margaret Sloan-Hunter, she couldn’t even find time to keep a diary. 

It’s a problem familiar to many activist writers: how to live according to your political principles without sacrificing your art—or vice versa. (We’ll leave aside, for now, the whole question of earning money.) How do you reach a wide readership without diluting your message? When does the world need your words, and when does it need your action? Should you go to that organizing meeting or meet your deadline? Steinem lived these tensions, wrestling with them and, sometimes, writing about them. If she never quite resolved them, she did something perhaps equally admirable: She faced head-on the challenge of being a writer while living a politically committed life.

The fact that Steinem became a writer at all is remarkable. Born in 1934 in Toledo, Ohio, to Leo Steinem, an antiques dealer and the owner of a summer resort, and Ruth Steinem, a journalist turned homemaker, Steinem, the second of two girls, had a difficult, itinerant childhood. Her father was a schemer and a dreamer, taking the family on the road in a trailer during the winter and evading the debt collectors who tried to track them down. Ruth, meanwhile, struggled with mental illness and underwent multiple hospitalizations.

When Steinem was ten, her parents separated; with her sister away at college, Steinem became her mother’s caretaker. The two lived in “a deteriorating farm house” on a small fixed income. Steinem tended to her mother, who used tranquilizers to calm her nerves and who often slipped into a stupor. When she could, she escaped into books—and plotted her ultimate escape. “My ultimate protection was this: I was just passing through, a guest in the house,” she later reflected. She would get out of East Toledo and avoid her mother’s fate.

She succeeded, matriculating at Smith College, where she majored in government. Smith in the 1950s presented a different set of challenges than East Toledo did. Populated by well-off, intelligent, entirely conventional women, Smith sent, in Steinem’s words, a “double message” to its undergraduates. As she later wrote, students were “encouraged toward personal accomplishment and excellence, and then expected to subordinate themselves to children and a husband’s career.” Ambivalent about marriage, and eager to chart her own course, Steinem left Smith for a fellowship in India—but not before stopping in Britain to have an illegal abortion, performed by a doctor who made her promise never to mention his name.

It wasn’t until she was sent, as a journalist, to cover a 1970 Greenwich Village speak-out on abortion that she would understand her abortion in political terms. “Suddenly, I was no longer learning intellectually what was wrong,” she later wrote. “I knew.” She called it her “big click,” as in the “click of recognition,” a term used in feminist consciousness-raising circles to describe the moment when the scales fall from your eyes.

Radicalized and galvanized, she did what journalists do: She pitched stories about her new interest. There were a few takers: New York, where she was a regular contributor, ran several of her columns about sexual politics. But for the most part, editors were dismissive—as Steinem later wrote, the very same “editors who had assumed I had some valuable biological insight into food, male movie stars, and textured stockings now questioned whether I or other women writers were biologically capable of writing objectively about feminism.” Such stonewalling and sexism drove Steinem to “try speaking instead of writing,” despite her longstanding fears of speaking publicly. Inspired by her companions on the lecture circuit, by Kennedy in particular, she got more comfortable in the limelight—so much so that other leading feminists, such as Betty Friedan, came to resent her.

It also drove Steinem to create her own magazine. In 1971, she hosted a group of female journalists at her Manhattan apartment to talk about the sexism in their industry. One of them, Brenda Feigen, suggested that the group produce a “slick magazine,” something that would stand out from the pamphlets and newsletters that various feminist groups distributed. With the help of Clay Felker, Steinem’s editor, Ms. magazine launched as a special insert in New York. Few thought the project would be successful, but when Ms. published its first standalone issue, the magazine sold out in eight days.

As a founding editor of Ms., and one who remained with the magazine until 2001, Steinem did more than almost anyone to change the media environment for women. Ms. was entirely run by women, and it solicited only female contributors. It broke taboos about what could be published in a glossy, running articles on lesbianism, welfare (a “woman’s issue”), abortion, and the household division of labor. Editors solicited contributions from women of color and put a Black woman on the cover of the June 1982 issue—to the dismay of Southern newsstand owners, who refused to distribute it. And Steinem and her fellow editors proved that there was, in fact, a national audience of intelligent, curious, politically engaged women who were willing to pay for a magazine that spoke to them about the real problems they faced. Ms. eventually reached a circulation of 550,000, spawned all sorts of feminist media successors, and recently published an anthology celebrating its 50th anniversary.  

Steinem contributed to Ms. as she could. Her first piece for the magazine, “Sisterhood,” is a well-meaning if perhaps overly optimistic argument for building solidarity across racial and class lines. But she spent much of her time courting advertisers, whose money was needed to fund the production and distribution of the magazine. In a 1990 essay for Ms., she wrote about the sense of “desperation” she felt, trying and failing to convince advertisers to buy space. Ms. eventually started running more ads, including ads for traditionally feminine products, which meant cutting fiction and poetry. In that same essay, Steinem admitted that the magazine’s “edges got smoothed down—in spite of all our resistance.” It’s a tidy formulation, as so many of Steinem’s were, providing a perfect image of political compromise. One imagines a counterfactual Ms.—less successful but perhaps spikier—and wonders what writers it might have nurtured, and to which readers it might have appealed.

But Steinem was smooth, not spiky; there is a reason she became the figurehead of women’s liberation and not, say, Kate Millett. She wanted feminism to reach as many women as possible: not just the New Yorkers and the professed radicals, but, as she put it, the “wives with white gloves welded to their wrists” and the “students with boots who used words like ‘imperialism’ and ‘oppression.’” She wrote—and edited, and fundraised—for the white woman, the woman of color, the agricultural worker, the factory worker, the housewife. She knew what it was like to need print the way one needs water. She wanted her magazine to reach the women who needed it desperately, so they could learn that were others who felt just the same.

By the 1980s, the beginning of the “backlash” against feminism described by Susan Faludi in her book of the same name, Steinem didn’t see herself primarily as a writer. She had given herself over to other projects; she’d let political action triumph over art. “There have been days in the last ten or twelve years when I thought my collected works would consist entirely of fund-raising letters, scribbled outlines of speeches, statements hammered out at the birth of some new coalition, and introductions to other people’s books,” she writes in the introduction to Outrageous Acts. She imagined her legacy wouldn’t be a book or an essay but rather “the invention of something as brief and pithy as the phrase reproductive freedom.” It wasn’t until her friend and Ms. co-founder Letty Cottin Pogrebin went through boxes of old articles and put together a potential collection that Steinem took seriously the idea of writing a book. 

There was a part of Steinem that always wondered what she could have done as a writer, had she had world enough and time. “I didn’t take myself very seriously,” she reflects in the introduction to Outrageous Acts, recalling the frivolous stories she wrote as a young journalist. She didn’t fight hard enough for the stories she wanted; she let herself be distracted and make excuses. “I’m not regretful of the time I’ve devoted to those projects”—those many projects that took her away from writing—and one can’t help but think that she’s protesting too much.

In truth, neither Outrageous Acts nor any of her subsequent books amount to Steinem’s legacy—though they are certainly part of it. In this way, Steinem differs from her contemporaries—Shulamith Firestone, Germaine Greer, and Millett among them—who are best known for their books theorizing sexism and feminist utopia. Steinem will be remembered for her actions: co-founding Ms., advocating for the Equal Rights Amendment, mentoring younger feminists, and forming coalitions with feminists whose politics and interests might have differed from her own.

By her own account, she loved the work of organizing—as much as she loved writing, or perhaps more. “On a good night, a roomful of people can set off a chain of thought that leads us all to a new place—a sudden explosion of understanding, a spontaneous invention,” she writes in the introduction. “We hear ourselves saying things we had felt but never named.” It’s an ephemeral moment, a collective feeling. It’s an experience that can’t be captured in words.

Inside Washington

President Donald Trump’s efforts to restrict mail-in voting have grabbed news headlines in recent days, as the Postal Service builds an involved screening system that would require states to submit voter information before sending out absentee ballots. But one potential consequence has not received the same level of attention: the implications for Indigenous voters across the country. In addition to throwing up more roadblocks for a population that has historically faced significant obstacles to voting, these moves by the USPS could have an impact in key elections in states such as Alaska and Arizona. 

Tribal voters living at remote addresses on reservations may need to travel for hours to reach their nearest polling place, meaning that absentee voting is the best method for having their voices heard. “Often, vote by mail is the only option that is made available to Native communities. And so, when you disrupt that process or start creating lists that are imperfect and keep people off [of voting rolls], then Native voters are going to be inevitably cut out and disenfranchised,” said Jacqueline De León, a senior staff attorney at the Native American Rights Fund. 

A federal whistleblower has alleged that the development and deployment of the USPS system has been rushed and haphazard, and could result in voter disenfranchisement ahead of the general election. Despite a court order barring the Postal Service from continuing to develop the portal, the agency said this week that it is moving forward with its plans.

Native voters already face difficulties in having their vote counted. Some states with photo ID requirements for voting do not accept tribal identification. Because many Native Americans living on tribal lands do not have traditional addresses, they may need to pay for a P.O. box if they want to receive any kind of mail—including absentee ballots. The new policy would present yet another barrier.

“I know tons of Native people who all have their mail delivered to one family member’s house because it’s the only house that USPS reliably can find. These are things that could easily trigger false red flags in a system that’s not carefully designed around the realities of Native voters,” Elizabeth Reese, an associate professor at Stanford Law School who specializes in tribal law, told The New Republic in an email.

The lack of traditional addresses also presents challenges to registering to vote and staying on voter rolls. A new report by the Native American Rights Fund, or NARF, and Blackwell Consulting found that rejections of voter registration applications via mail and the Department of Motor Vehicles spiked dramatically in counties where Native Americans account for at least 25 percent of the population between 2020 and 2024. The report analyzed data from the 2020, 2022, and 2024 elections.

“Native voters do not receive equitable services, and often receive inadequate services, which result in Native voters having to navigate really unreasonable barriers in order to cast a ballot,” said De León. “I think that it would shock the conscience of the everyday American if they knew how difficult it can be to vote in Indian country.”

Native voters may be particularly susceptible to being purged from the rolls because notices sent by election officials to confirm voter information go unanswered, and that in turn could be because the mail is undeliverable.

When voters are removed from the rolls—sometimes without their knowledge—they can submit provisional ballots, but these can also end up being rejected. Provisional ballot voting more than doubled between 2020 and 2024 in counties with a significant Native population, according to the NARF report, but the provisional ballot rejection rate in counties with significant Native populations is higher than the national rate. The rate of rejection for mail-in ballots also increased in these counties between 2020 and 2024, even as the actual number of mail-in ballots cast declined.

These challenges may have significant repercussions for critical swing elections this year, which could determine control of Congress and of governors’ mansions across the country. Alaska has a large Native population, a significant portion of whom live in rural areas that may not reliably receive mail—a factor that could affect the outcome of the competitive Senate race between Democrat Mary Peltola and Republican incumbent Senator Dan Sullivan. Reese said she was “particularly worried” about how the screening system being built by USPS could potentially affect that race.

“This is the state with the highest percentage of Native voters, the most significant challenges for in-person voter access, and that happens to be one of the races that could determine control of the Senate,” said Reese.

Native voters could also have an impact in the close gubernatorial race in Arizona, where Democrat Governor Katie Hobbs is fighting to stay in office. 

Native Americans have faced deliberate hurdles to make voting more difficult for them since they were granted the right to vote in 1924. This election is making both the stakes and the complexities of voting access especially clear. “Native voters hold a tremendous amount of political power,” De León said. But they also “have to expend more time and resources to exercise their fundamental right to vote.” In close contests, that vote may be a determining factor in which candidate wins the race.

—Grace Segers

Outside Washington

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel finds that ICE arrests spiked dramatically in Wisconsin over the summer. “ICE detained and arrested more than 250 people in Wisconsin in June alone, an 82 percent increase compared to the previous month. Immigration arrests slowed but remained elevated in July,” reports Eva Wen. (For more on how ICE seems to have adapted post-Minneapolis, hitting new records without making as many headlines, read Melissa Gira Grant’s analysis from July.)

Colorado Public Radio profiles Democrat Eileen Laubacher, a retired Navy rear admiral who’s challenging Lauren Boebert in Colorado’s 4th congressional district. “There are more than twice as many registered Republicans as there are Democrats in the district, although almost half of the registered voters are unaffiliated,” reports Caitlyn Kim. “The last time the district elected a Democrat was in 2008, when Democrat Barack Obama was at the top of the ticket.” But despite that, some people are letting themselves feel just a wee bit optimistic about Dem chances of flipping the seat: Laubacher has far out-raised Boebert, and Trump is very unpopular.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

Data for Progress finds that voters “strongly disapprove of Trump’s handling of Israel-Palestine conflicts” and that this disapproval has grown over the course of the year: “In January, voters were roughly split in their assessment of Trump’s handling of the conflict, with 42 percent approving and 44 percent disapproving—a −2-point margin. Today, only 33 percent of voters approve of Trump’s handling of this issue, while 56 percent disapprove—a −23-point margin.”

At the Brennan Center, Derek Tisler, Edgardo Cortés, and Elizabeth Howard have put together a guide to how official election results are tallied. “Each of these steps has safeguards in place to protect the rights of voters and the integrity of our elections,” they emphasize. “They are conducted in public; representatives from both parties, citizens, and the media can observe that they are done properly. At each step, voters, candidates, and other interested parties can go to court to enforce these safeguards if needed.” They take readers through the steps of receiving and processing ballots, tabulating, election-night reporting of unofficial results, provisional ballots, curing, and more. A useful resource as the November elections (and concerns about the process) draw closer.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Good week: Mary Peltola

The Democratic candidate for Senate in Alaska keeps getting encouraging signs in a very tough red-leaning state. The latest vote tally of the state’s nonpartisan primary now shows her and the other Democratic finisher totaling over 50 percent, a key metric. The news came as the other Democrat, David Leslie, withdrew this week, enabling Peltola to consolidate the Democratic vote. Indeed, one forecaster now rates Peltola “narrowly favored.” Though a lot can still go wrong, there’s now a pretty clear path.

Bad week: Scott Bessent

The treasury secretary has had a string of unsightly public pratfalls. This week, reporters grilled the Trump administration on Bessent’s July prediction that gas prices would drop to $3 per gallon by Labor Day, which hasn’t exactly panned out. Bessent also engaged in heavy-handed ridicule of Canada’s supposed weakness, which looks particularly tone-deaf amid mounting GOP angst about his and Trump’s dim-witted trade war with our northern ally. And Bessent endured harsh mockery over his sneering claim that Ukraine’s defense of itself against Russian aggression is to blame for high energy prices. In sum, Bessent is now the front man in defending some of Trump’s most buffoonish and destructive failures, and as he’s finding out the hard way, they’re, well, indefensible.

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

Name the union each of these labor leaders helped found or famously led for many years: Bill Haywood; John L. Lewis; A. Philip Randolph; Dolores Huerta; Walter Reuther; William Winpisinger. (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in Tuesday’s newsletter.)

Puck News’s Dylan Byers reported that executive producer Patrick Ignozzi was fired from Bartiromo’s show on Thursday, following her out the door after she was sent packing for “betraying” Fox News by offering the Trump administration information on how the network was covering the president. 

On top of that, Fox News kept the Mornings with Maria host isolated from her colleagues for weeks, a move stemming from issues over the $787.5 million settlement Fox News was ordered to pay to Dominion Voting Systems in 2023 due to false claims of election fraud in 2020.  

“In order to talk to her, you had to go to management,” an anonymous source told Mediate. “[That’s how we] knew something was up.… Even her own staff had to go through management.… People were freaking out.” The source also noted that Bartiromo wasn’t even reachable over the phone, being completely iced out from the Fox News work environment. 

It’s unclear where Bartiromo will find herself next. 

Bartiromo’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman, contacted The New Republic claiming that reports of her departure from Fox News were “absolutely and unequivocally false”—even though the network itself had put out a statement announcing it on Thursday. 

“Make no mistake, we have the receipts and witnesses and they will come out whether through the courthouse or otherwise,” Freedman said in a statement. “Those reporting her firing or the incredulous facts supporting that fiction have exhibited a complete and utter reckless disregard for the truth.”

This story has been updated.

The White House launched a new arcade website Thursday that hosts a series of retro-style video games touting the administration’s policy priorities—including one where players can detain undocumented immigrants crossing the border.

In “Rio Run,” players are directed to “pick up every crosser in the lot.” An avatar of a balding white man dressed in a suit and tie collects stationary bodies, and adds them to a growing line of orange-jumpsuited figures floating behind him. The snake-style game evokes the horrific images of chained immigrants boarding planes to foreign countries.

If you thought that was callous and dehumanizing, just wait: In a Tetris-style game called “Build the Wall,” players are directed to stack bricks in order to stave off a “border zombie siege.” It has never felt more clear that the Trump administration is made up entirely of terminally online right-wing trolls desperate to appease deportation fanboys.

Other White House arcade games invite users to “sort the school lunch to Make America Healthy Again,” or use a net to catch cash and gold to “fill your kids’ Trump accounts.”

A White House official told CNN the arcade was “an effort to further contrast between a culture of fun and winning and the dark socialist vision Democrats have for America.”

It’s hard to get much darker than turning a mass detention policy into some kind of game—a legal front on which the Trump administration is definitely not winning. A total of eight federal appeals courts have ruled that the policy is unlawful.

I’ve been wrong before, of course. On the other hand, I’ve also been right before. In 1998, for example, everybody—I mean everybody—was saying that Bill Clinton’s Democrats were going to lose umpteen seats in that year’s midterms, because the elections took place in the wake of the revelations that Clinton had had a sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, and all the smart people knew that the voters were going to rise in fury to smite him and the louche Democrats who were defending him. The Republicans, in the majority already, were surely going to pick up another 20, 30 seats.

Not so fast, said I. Because the polls were showing clearly, to anyone who bothered to study them, that the public was more disgusted with House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his morality police—Gingrich’s mistress at the time, by the way, is now my and your official American representative to the Holy See in the Vatican—than with Clinton and his very human, if gross, weaknesses.

I just sniffed the zeitgeist and sensed the conventional wisdom was dead wrong (in the end, the Democrats gained five House seats that year). This year, that same olfactory sense is telling me, dare I write it, that November 3 may be even worse for the Republicans than the conventional wisdom now predicts. There are three groups of voters who matter in this election, and each of them is going to punish Trump severely.

The first is people like you and me—the people who have always thought he was a fascist goon and an imbecile, and who would go out to cast a vote against him and his minions even if it meant voting for Homer Simpson. We are turbo-charged to get to the polls, and there are millions of us.

The second is the swing voters who were, to be frank—oh, okay, let’s put it slightly more politely—naïve enough to believe that Trump could lower prices and fix the economy. They know now that Trump cannot do that; he possesses no such magic wand. Would that they had known in November 2024. But they know now, and those who bother to vote will vote 80, 90 percent against Trump and his party.

Third is the BMPs: the Betrayed MAGA Pigeons. They’re not the same as swing voters. Unlike swing voters, they were never going to think for five minutes about voting for a Black woman in 2024. But to feel okay about themselves, they had to build a case for Trump in their brains that justified their Trump vote, even made it a righteous protest against the status quo. Core to the BMP justification were a few central ideas: that Trump would improve the economy; that he was right on immigration and heads needed to be cracked; that Kamala Harris was the real warmonger, and Trump would calmly keep the peace.

Well, that defense against reality has been crushed like a grape under a tire. Trump has failed on the economy. He’s gone way too far for these people on immigration (Joe Rogan this year compared ICE to the Gestapo). And finally, the Iran war destroyed it. Trump and the Republicans are losing the “manosphere,” a process Sidney Blumenthal described with coruscating precision on this site a couple weeks ago. But they’re losing many other segments of MAGA-land as well that simply can’t believe he started a war; let alone an obviously stupid war that we’re losing; let alone at the behest of Benjamin Netanyahu, as the Israeli prime minister just bragged on Israeli TV.

The first two groups will turn out in droves against Republican candidates. The third group won’t do that. But it, dispirited and confused, simply won’t turn out. And their absence, I think, is what will be decisive. There will be no defense against the onslaught.

Well, you say. That may all be true. But a clever politician can reframe things. We’re on the cusp of Labor Day—the traditional start of general-election campaigns in the regular-people-start-to-pay-attention sense. On the assumption that most people haven’t been paying attention so far, doesn’t Trump have time to redirect the narrative?

The answer is that he does, maybe, have the time. He certainly has the money, though he may be hoarding it for his own selfish purposes well beyond this year. But he doesn’t have the brains. And he doesn’t have the brains because his brain marinates in a fantasy world in which Trump can do no wrong. His reality-denying cocoon has sometimes been beneficial to him. Last year, for example, when he was riding (comparatively) high, when law firms and elite universities quaked before him, he was able to create a willed reality. But today?

The cultural power that he possessed in the spring and summer of 2025 has completely vaporized. He sits up there and says we’ve won the war, we control the Strait of Hormuz. Inflation’s no big deal. Affordability isn’t a thing. Data centers are great, and if you’re against them, you want to stay “backwards and poor.” The United States is the “hottest” country on earth. As the American people cry out for help, he’s obsessed with building monuments to himself.

With the multibillion-dollar propaganda machine he’s got behind him, there are, of course, still millions of Americans who believe him. But to return to my three groups: The first group of course doesn’t believe a word; the median representative of the second group has lost all faith in him; and the BMPs have turned on him.

And ask yourself: What’s going to get better in this country between now and Election Day? Answer: Not much that I can see. We got a good jobs report this morning, but the bond market is still jittery and central banks are contemplating rate hikes. On Iran, he may cut a deal, but it will be a bad, desperate deal, and most people will recognize it as such. He’d better pray that a new ICE shooting controversy doesn’t explode in October. Am I missing anything? Ah, yes. Water-body renaming. He may score a couple more key wins there.

So: By November 3, there’s every chance that Trump will be more unpopular than he is today. His mental deterioration in just these last few weeks is noticeable, and in two more months, he may literally be drooling. Even dear old Rasmussen may have him down in the 30s by then.

The result? Again—I don’t want to jinx anything. I’ll just say it like this: I heard someone the other day on TV say that we may need to start paying more attention to Senate races in states like Kansas, where Democratic preacher Adam Hamilton is in a near dead heat with GOP incumbent Roger Marshall. In Nebraska, a recent poll has independent Dan Osborn running even with GOP incumbent Pete Ricketts. One recent Arkansas poll was close. In Florida, everybody laughs off the democratic socialist who won the Democratic nomination. But she pulled off a stunning upset in the Democratic primary, and she did it without running a single television ad. And the appointed Republican incumbent is knee-deep in that Medicaid scandal involving the governor’s wife.

I’m not predicting Democratic wins in the last two states. I am saying that a wave is building. And the man toward whom the wave is heading looks out on the ocean and sees calm, pacific seas. He’s delusional, spent, incapable of responding to reality. In the next two months, all that is only going to get worse—and more apparent to the American people.

New reporting from The Wall Street Journal showed that Fetterman couldn’t care less about the bare minimum presence and effort his Senate job requires, or the Pennsylvanians he’s supposed to be fighting for.

Text messages obtained by the Journal show Fetterman asking an aide why he had to meet with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) of all places in September.

“Why do I have to keep having to meet with chop,” he asked.

“Because they are worried about vaccines and Medicaid cuts,” the aide said. President Donald Trump’s cuts to Medicaid have negatively impacted children’s hospitals across the country.

“Well I’m not,” Fetterman responded. “I’m convinced they just want free trips to DC.”

Another exchange shows Fetterman calling a funeral for three slain police officers that same month a “nonstarter” because it was three hours long—a sensible length of time given it was three officers at once. And even if it wasn’t, any U.S. senator should be able to spend a few hours at a cop’s funeral.

The report also notes that Fetterman canceled a scheduled meeting with three paralyzed military veterans in June, telling them he had eaten something that upset his stomach. He arrived at his office an hour later, perfectly healthy, and got on Fox News to talk about how great Trump’s war on Iran was going.

And aside from these more recent developments, he is still skipping votes, still ghosting constituents, still sitting out of committee meetings, and still choosing to side with Republicans and the larger conservative landscape—all things that have become common for him, particularly after his 2023 stay in Walter Reed for clinical depression.

Fetterman has free health care, good pay and pension, and a job that is really not that hard in the grand scheme of things. And yet he can’t be bothered to cast votes, attend funerals, or look paralyzed veterans in the eyes.

In a sprawling dispatch Friday, New York Magazine’s Ben Terris asked Trump what he made of a viral barb from Jon Ossoff, a Democratic senator from Georgia who suggested in June that the president had become obsessed with building monuments to himself because “no one will honor him when he’s gone.”

“That’s true,” Trump said. “Nobody will do it once I’m gone. When I leave here, nobody will.”

Monuments are typically something that great leaders earn by being, well, great. Trump’s comment suggests that the president is well aware that he’s going to walk away from his two terms with few great deeds worth remembering. It also indicates that Trump has no idea there are things you have to earn, not just buy.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced Thursday that construction would begin on the “Great Triumphal Arch” in a traffic roundabout between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Cemetery. Trump has been raving about the project, nicknamed the “Arc de Trump” online, for almost a year. Earlier this week, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ensured it was virtually impossible to challenge the illegal construction of a $600 million White House ballroom.

Trump has skipped work to oversee at least a dozen renovation projects around Washington, D.C.

The president gilded the Oval Office in the gaudy golden style of Mar-a-Lago, demolished the East Wing, paved over the Rose Garden, renovated columns and porticos, repaved the driveway with white granite, directed statues to receive a gold leaf makeover, built and rebuilt a helipad, re-lined the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, and then had to scrape that off to re-line it again. And who can forget that he launched a monthslong legal campaign to tack his name onto another man’s memorial.

Previously, a prominent clinical psychologist signaled that the president’s tireless obsession with renovations could be a warning sign of cognitive decline.

Bartiromo’s sudden termination stemmed from President Donald Trump’s incendiary prime-time speech in July baselessly accusing foreign agents of tampering with our last three elections. Fox News reportedly issued guidance to senior staff to avoid validating Trump’s wildly inaccurate claims on-air, resulting in a noticeable lack of coverage of the speech.

It’s not clear whether someone at the White House asked Bartiromo directly about the coverage, or if she offered the information freely. But Bartiromo told the White House all about Fox News’s guidance, disclosing confidential company information and violating the terms of her employment in the process.

Bartiromo’s departure was announced in an unusually short statement from Fox News Thursday. The next day, she wasn’t even mentioned on Mornings with Fox News, previously Mornings with Maria.

This incident indicates a stunning level of cooperation between the Trump administration and the sycophants working at Fox News. There was early speculation that Bartiromo left her position at Fox News for a role in the Trump administration, which prompts the question: Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?

“The Missouri Supreme Court just ridiculously ruled in favor of changing the maps back to what they were a long time ago. It’s called, Ancient History! The problem is, according to Legal Scholars, that not only was the ruling horrible, ridiculous, and unConstitutional, but there won’t be enough time to change the map back with the Election coming up in a very short period of time,” the president wrote on Truth Social. “The Election Process, as usual, is being disturbed in America! Missouri must be able to use the map that was in effect just a couple of months ago, in the Primary. This is a Dark Day for ‘Justice’ in Missouri!” 

The court’s unanimous ruling put a massive damper on the Republican race to redistrict, particularly in the bluer Kansas City region. 

“This unprecedented decision clearly violates federal law and has thrust our state into a full‑fledged constitutional crisis,” Republican state Attorney General Catherine Hanaway said. Others rejoiced, praising Missouri for not capitulating to the gerrymandering arms race that Trump started last year in a brazen attempt to win as many House seats as possible. 

“Today’s ruling affirms what we’ve been saying all along: voters should pick their representatives, not the other way around,” Missouri Representative Wesley Bell wrote on X. “Now, Missourians will finally get to have their say at the ballot in November on rejecting these partisan and unconstitutional maps. I’m proud of all of the folks who organized, called and lobbied their elected officials, and made their voices heard.  In a democracy, we’re supposed to trust the people to self-govern. Jeff City Republicans might want to take their cue from the people they allege to represent.”

Richard von Glahn, the executive director of the organization People Not Politicians Missouri, also lauded the ruling. “In a year when map-drawing has become a national weapon, courts across the country are watching what happens here,” he said in a statement. “A Missouri win for the referendum is a signal that the people still hold the power.”

Hanaway promised to appeal the ruling. 

Let’s start with the labor market. It’s shrinking, and it’s weak.

The weakness doesn’t show up in the unemployment numbers. Unemployment is 4.1 percent, almost exactly the same as in January 2025 (4 percent), when Trump was sworn in. Lower unemployment would be better, but most economists think you needn’t start worrying until unemployment rises above 5 percent.

The problem is job creation. It’s way down. In January 2025, the economy created 143,000 jobs, approximating the robust monthly average over the previous 12 months under President Joe Biden. During the 12-month period ending in July 2026, however, job creation averaged only 31,000. Anything below 100,000 is bad. In August, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data released September 4, the economy created 162,000 jobs, but that’s a fluke. The month before it created only 21,000 jobs, which was worse than the recent trend under Trump, and the recent trend has also been weak.*

How can unemployment be low when the economy is only barely able to create jobs? Because the number of people looking for work is shrinking. The main reasons for that are Baby Boomer retirements, which are at what demographers call “peak 65,” and a steep decline in immigration. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, immigration fell from 2.7 million in the 12 months following July 1, 2023, to 1.3 million in the 12 months following July 1, 2024, then down again to an estimated 321,000 in the 12 months following July 1, 2025.

The U.S. no longer wants to admit immigrants except maybe if they’re highly educated and therefore able to put Kamala Harris voters out of work. That may qualify you for an H-1B temporary visa or an EB-1 “Einstein visa,” both of which are reserved for individuals of exceptional talent (or, in the case of fashion models, exceptional hotness; in her youth, the Slovenia-born First Lady scored one of each). Otherwise, you’re probably out of luck.

Measured according to numbers (though not according to human suffering) Trump’s crackdown on immigration has been a much more significant nativist policy than Trump’s mass deportations. Trump has kept out about twice as many foreign-born people as he’s kicked out, and maybe more. The theory is that reducing the number of foreign-born workers will increase employment for native-born workers. Trump’s immigration czar, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, is conducting a brutal human experiment to prove this hypothesis correct. But the findings (assuming Herr Doktor Miller ever looks at them) must be a terrible disappointment, because employment for native-born Americans has been going down.

Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, observed last month that since Trump took office, employment among native-born workers has fallen while employment among foreign-born workers has risen. When Trump reentered the White House, employment for Team Furr’ner was actually lower than for Team ’Murrcan. But Trump and Miller reversed that. During the past year, employment among foreign-born workers has been higher than for native-born workers. That’s probably because the White House’s xenophobic policies increase demand for those foreign-born workers who remain in the United States (and are therefore available to perform jobs that native-born workers, it turns out, really don’t want).

If you are a Trump partisan and hope to find ideological solace in a more robust manufacturing sector, you’re out of luck. The United States has lost 62,000 manufacturing jobs under Trump. Manufacturing employment is rising right now, but it fell so steeply in 2025 that Trump still logs a net loss. The best you can say about Trump’s second-term record is that it’s better than his first-term record, when Trump managed to lose 200,000 manufacturing jobs, mostly through the spectacular mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic that lost him the 2020 election (but which journalists agreed to forget about in 2024; see my October 2024 piece, “How the Press Memory-Holed Trump’s Pandemic Train Wreck”). During the presidency of “Sleepy Joe,” as Trump likes to call him, the United States gained more than 775,000 manufacturing jobs.

But wages are up, right? Yes, but they’re rising at a slower pace than when Trump entered office. Nominal wage growth (excluding inflation) was about 4 percent in January 2025, and real wage growth (i.e., including inflation) was about 1 percent. Today, nominal wage growth is about 3 percent and there’s no real wage growth at all; inflation is outrunning wage gains by 0.2 percent. Remember how Trump won the election by saying Biden presided over “the highest inflation perhaps in the history of our country”? Inflation averaged 2.9 percent in 2024. Today it’s 3.4 percent, thanks to Trump’s inability to end the war he started with Iran. Three months ago, the most recent government report pegged inflation at an even higher 4.2 percent and Trump declared: “I love the inflation.” He is not a well man.

Trump’s economy is setting records for labor, but these are nothing to brag about. According to Myles McCormick of the Financial Times, pre-tax corporate earnings in the second quarter of 2026 represented the largest share of national income (18 percent) since the aftermath of World War II, while employee wages and benefits fell to their lowest level (60 percent) since the 1950s.

Meanwhile, according to Stuart Anderson and Mark Regets of the nonprofit National Foundation for American Policy, writing in The Washington Post, “Trump is on track to become the first president in a century to oversee a U.S. labor force that will be smaller when he leaves office than when he entered.” Already the number of people either employed or looking for a job is down by 1.6 million. The only previous president Anderson and Regets can identify whose labor force shrank on his watch was Abraham Lincoln, who had to contend with workers leaving their jobs to fight in the Civil War. Since 1948, write Anderson and Regets, 40 percent of economic expansion has been attributable to expansion in the labor supply.

So much for the labor market. Let’s move on to Trump’s labor policies, which perhaps I should call Trump’s Deliberate Labor Policies, or DLPs, to distinguish them from Trump’s Inadvertent Labor Policies, or ILPs, as discussed thus far. Trump’s DLPs are even worse than his ILPs.

I’ve reported in earlier dispatches about Trump’s attempt to dismantle the National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB. The NLRB is the agency that regulates management-labor relations, a topic that ought to interest the public at a time when democratic socialism is on the march. But the press finds the NLRB so very tedious that, excepting for Bloomberg Law, no news organization of any size pays it any heed. (Neither, for the most part, do the Democratic Socialists of America, in whose platform the word “union” appears only four times, compared to six for “police.”)

Public indifference gives the NLRB carte blanche to rubber-stamp violations of labor law. A July study by the Center for American Progress tracking the first 15 months of the Trump administration found that the NLRB was 14.2 percentage points more likely to dismiss union complaints of unfair labor practices than during the last year of the Biden administration. The NLRB was also 10.7 percentage points more likely to dismiss worker complaints of unfair labor practices. These decisions were all made at the regional level, since Trump denied the five-member Washington-based board a quorum until this past December.

With board vacancies now reduced to one and three Republican appointees to one Democrat, we can expect much worse going forward. In an August 26 memorandum, NLRB’s general counsel Crystal Carey, who acts as a sort of prosecutor for the agency, identified seven pro-worker precedents she’s already seeking to overturn, including one Biden-era ruling that prohibits management from inserting sweeping confidentiality and non-disparagement clauses into severance agreements, and another Biden-era ruling barring management from calling “captive audience” mandatory anti-union meetings during organizing drives.

In the memo, Carey informed the board that she will also target six additional pro-worker precedents, including one Biden-era ruling requiring an employer who commits an election-related unfair labor practice to immediately recognize and bargain with a union if it’s previously demonstrated majority support by collecting union authorization cards (“card check”), and another Biden-era ruling expanding monetary remedies available to workers. (The latter led to contradictory rulings in appellate courts awaiting resolution by the Supreme Court.) In addition, Carey, who before she came to the board represented Amazon as a law client, has delivered two pro-management settlements that screw Amazon drivers, about which I wrote earlier this week.

At the Labor Department, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, has expanded the number of companies eligible for penalty reductions of as much as 70 percent by loosening its definition of “small business” to include, according to September 2 testimony before the House Subcommittee on Workforce Protections by AFL-CIO safety and health director Rebecca Reindel, billion-dollar corporations. As the former TNR editor Michael Kinsley has observed, it’s an anthropomorphic fallacy that small businesses are owned by small people.

According to Reindel, Trump’s Labor Department has issued more than 60 proposals that weaken protections for workers, including a proposed reinterpretation of the Occupational Safety and Health Act’s “General Duty Clause” barring OSHA from prohibiting, restricting, or penalizing “inherently risky activities that are intrinsic to professional, athletic, and entertainment occupations.” This proposal drew an immediate legal challenge from 16 state attorneys general and labor departments. Another OSHA strategy is to try harder not to find out about safety violations in the first place. Under Trump, OSHA worksite inspections have dropped more than 20 percent.

The NLRB and Labor Department aren’t the only federal agencies screwing workers under Trump. The Agriculture Department, for example, has moved to accelerate maximum line speeds at poultry and pork plants—in the case of chickens, from the current maximum of 140 birds per minute to 175 birds per minute—and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has proposed increasing permissible radiation exposure for workers at nuclear plants, because sure, why not? The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is doing its bit by rescinding a Biden-era guidance document on sexual harassment.

One could go on. Most of this mess you can blame on Trump, but the weakness of organized labor makes it harder than it should be to fight back. The percentage of American workers who belong to unions (10 percent) is half what it was in 1983 (20 percent), when labor was already in decline. For private-sector (as opposed to government) workers, the percentage is an even more dismal 5.9 percent. On the bright side, the numeric increase in union members last year was a somewhat encouraging 411,000, according to a new report by the nonprofit Illinois Economic Policy Institute, or IEPI. This was the biggest one-year increase since 2008. Sadly, though, as a percentage of the working population, it was statistically insignificant.

The argument for joining a union remains strong. According to the IEPI report, unions increase average wages by 8 percent nationally. Union membership is also associated with a higher home ownership rate, lower Medicaid enrollment, lower food-stamp enrollment, and a higher marriage rate. Why social conservatives don’t love unions is a mystery. In “right-to-work” states (i.e., the 26 states where union strength is weakened because workers in union shops needn’t pay dues or their equivalent to the union that negotiates their salary and benefits) workers earn 8 percent less, corrected for cost-of-living differences, than in non-right-to-work states. Sparing yourself the annoyance of paying union dues therefore turns out to be penny wise and pound foolish. Even so, Trump has said he supports right-to-work.

The stage is set for a union revival. According to a Gallup poll released September 1, the percentage of Americans who would like to see unions acquire greater influence has risen from a low of 25 percent in 2009 to an all-time high of 47 percent. Public approval for unions is even higher, rising from an all-time low of 48 percent in 2009 to 71 percent, its highest level since 1959. Union approval is just one percentage point lower than it was in 1936, at the height of the New Deal.

Even Republicans like unions; a 52 percent majority told Gallup it approves of them. House Speaker Mike Johnson has had to contend in at least two instances with House Republicans breaking ranks to side with Democrats in pushing through pro-labor bills that subsequently died in the Senate. But in that Gallup poll, Republicans said they didn’t want unions to acquire greater influence; only 19 percent were on board with that. And House Republicans remain sufficiently squeamish about even the word “labor” that whenever they regain a majority they change the name of the Education and Labor committee to the Education and the Workforce committee. Republican ambivalence about unions, combined with the Trump administration’s miserable record on unions, workers’ rights, worker safety, and the broad labor market, provide Democrats with an excellent midterm opportunity to recapture working-class votes. Let’s hope they take it.

*This article has been updated.

The 20-point agenda, called “A New Economic Bargain,” is a master class in nibbling around the edges. It dusts off liberal ideas from the before-Trump times, and thus reads like a watered-down version of the platforms released by progressive groups earlier in the campaign season—that is, when it’s not indulging Republican delusions of rampant government fraud. Which is to say, while Democratic voters this year have shown time and again that they want bold ideas and a party that will fight for them, Third Way has decided what they really want is middle-of-the-road incrementalism.

The logic of releasing an agenda that addresses Americans’ most pressing economic concerns is unassailable. Voters gave President Trump a second term at least in part because they remained upset about post-pandemic inflation and an economy that is increasingly unfair to workers. Of course, he appealed to them by pointing the blame at immigrants rather than his billionaire friends. But that anger is still valid, and it’s what Jim Kessler, Third Way’s executive vice president for public policy, said his group wanted to address. “This is a country where the majority of Americans are just not satisfied about what’s going on in their economic lives, and it’s been going on for a long time,” he told me.

The plan contains plenty of inoffensive, even sensible, ideas. It nods to the abundance agenda with multiple references to cutting red tape, in particular for building new housing and energy production (though it characteristically does not mention a preference for a particular kind of energy production, whether renewables or fossil fuels—so one can assume it’s the outdated Obama approach of “all of the above”). It also proposes cutting tariffs on “family essentials,” capping energy bills, and expanding apprenticeships and alternatives to college. And it has one genuinely new idea: to provide a Federal Housing Administration-like car loan program for used cars, which would help tackle one of the biggest transportation costs many Americans face.

The agenda also tries to tap into Americans’ fury at Big Tech for colluding with local governments to build data centers in their neighborhoods, hogging electricity and raising energy bills—but it comes up short. Third Way’s plan would force tech companies to work with communities when building data centers, including “significant investment in the local electricity system, no increase in household utility bills, enough new tax revenue to cut local property taxes, good jobs for local workers, transparent negotiations including a ban on NDAs, and straightforward community engagement.” But it doesn’t call for a halt on new data centers, which even some Republican governors have done.

On health care, the agenda proposes a “health care bill of rights” made up of “sweeping but simple guarantees” to limit out-of-pocket costs, provide access to basic care, get rid of surprise medical bills, and give patients the right to see any doctor they want. But it doesn’t explain how it would do this. The massive Affordable Care Act attempted to tackle many of these problems, with decidedly mixed success; the agenda is short on specifics on how a simple “bill of rights” would accomplish what that massive, ambitious legislation could not. (After this article was published, Third Way noted that it has previously laid out its plans to enact these ideas.) What’s clear is that Third Way thinks that just a few tweaks, rather than an overhaul of the system, will do the trick. “We don’t need to tear down the health care system and start over,” the agenda states. “With the most comprehensive health care protections in history, we can make health care affordable, easy to use, and reliable for everyone.”

An item titled “Universal Child Care Coverage” simply promotes the idea that families could have affordable options within their work by building out the existing private system, without spelling out how it would do so. “Let’s guarantee every family at least three affordable childcare options within 15 minutes of their home or work,” the agenda states. Who would object to that? But then it adds: “We’ll get there by significantly expanding private sector options.”

Even worse, the agenda reinforces the idea that there’s massive fraud in the federal government. The group argues that the government could save billions by cracking down on waste, fraud, and abuse, and says that the savings could be returned to taxpayers as a dividend. But fraud is not widespread in most government programs, including nutrition assistance such as SNAP. It is also an odd note to strike given Trump’s historic level of corruption, which costs taxpayers much more.

But the item that perhaps best encapsulates the agenda, and Third Way’s politics broadly, is the one calling for raising the national minimum wage to $15 an hour and then indexing it to inflation. The so-called “Fight for $15” launched in 2012, at the beginning of President Obama’s second term. Progressives have long since moved on from that goal. Instead, some of the former Fight for $15 organizers have launched campaigns for true living wages across the country, which in some cities are as high as $30 an hour. It’s hard to imagine voters being excited to go backward on those numbers, especially considering the cost of living has increased dramatically since then.

A New Economic Bargain comes after a series of progressive plans released earlier this year, such as The Working Families Party’s first national platform, the Congressional Progressive Caucus’s New Affordability Agenda, and the Democratic Socialists of America’s “Workers Deserve More.” Almost all focused on major affordability issues that resonate with voters: health care and childcare costs, worker pay, and affordable housing. But these organizations want to expand government health care programs like Medicaid or Medicare to cover everyone, not a patient’s bill of rights; they want states to step up and actually provide childcare instead of trying to subsidize families’ use of the private market; and they want to rein in landlords who charge high rents and bring back public (or social, in the new framing) housing, rather than just allowing developers to build more. The DSA goes further to promise a utopian future without any bills to pay at all. Almost all of them, though, would get there by taxing the wealthy more and using that money to strength the government itself, not shore up the private market.

The progressive agendas urge big, fundamental changes to how the U.S. provides these services and strengthens worker power—namely with more robust government involvement in these marketplaces, which is a radical departure from the Clinton-era neoliberalism that continued to define Democratic politics until 2016. Third Way’s plan is a throwback to that era, both in terms of policy and policymaking. It wants to bolster the private market and find a middle ground between conservative and liberal economic ideas, and it wants to work with whatever already exists—to tinker around the edges rather than forging a new path.

In our interview, Kessler presented the agenda as one of several sets of ideas that will be argued over during the ideas primary leading up to the 2028 presidential nomination. Democratic primary voters will decide, he said. “I’m not going to criticize anybody else’s ideas out there,” he said. “We’re going to have a wide-open race for president in a Democratic primary, and let the ideas flourish, let the gardens grow, let people, you know, pick the harvest that they choose,” he said. “What we’re looking at here is what are the biggest things that you can do that are also ruthlessly pragmatic that could conceivably get done.”

It’s hard to imagine, given the wreckage of the Trump era and the increasingly broken economy, that Democrats will be craving ruthless pragmatism. They certainly haven’t been voting that way of late. They’re increasingly backing candidates with the biggest, boldest ideas, who are promising—as Trump did—to blow up the establishment and upend a system that they feel is rigged against them. This 20-point plan doesn’t rise to the anger of the moment.

More such disasters are sure to follow. Even with unprecedented emissions reductions, global temperatures will rise to at least 1.8 degrees Celsius (3.24 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, the U.N. Environment Programme announced yesterday. As rising temperatures melt more glacial ice, “we can expect more and more of these events, a greater frequency, a greater magnitude,” Alton C. Byers of the University of Colorado, Boulder, said at a Covering Climate Now live conversation on the Nepal floods.

Meanwhile, The Guardian, Agence France-Presse, The New York Times, the Associated Press, Bloomberg, Deutsche Welle, and other outlets whose reporting has long reflected established climate science suddenly are no longer outliers. The shift is particularly striking among U.S. television networks, whose climate coverage had declined by 35 percent during the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term.

NBC News did not mince words in an August 28 report, with graphics that spelled out the climate connection: “Past 60 Years Glacial Loss increased 4X, Glaciers Less Stable Worldwide From Melting.” Even CBS News has noted, more than once, the climate connection to the Nepal disaster. This despite a president, Bari Weiss, who has fired the entire CBS News climate unit, derided climate change in newsroom meetings as “woke,” and intervened to push the network’s reporting to the right on a range of topics, above all Israel. Referring to the “glacial burst” that triggered the gargantuan flood that swept away buildings, roads, and bridges, the CBS Evening News stated on August 26, “Experts believe this is linked to climate change.” On August 31, CBS’s morning news show interviewed scientist Daniel Swain while graphics told viewers, “Climate Change Impacting Extreme Weather Events, Shifting Global Sea Levels, Ecosystems, and Human Health.”

The Nepal coverage has demonstrated the importance of public officials speaking plainly, thus giving journalists a peg to make the climate connection to extreme events. Each of the Big Three U.S. networks, as well as CNN, the BBC, and other international news organizations, headlined the statement by Nepal’s Foreign Minister Shisir Kahnal blaming the flooding on global warming. Days later, Kahnal said that Nepal is demanding compensation from the world’s biggest emitters.

Such high-profile coverage predictably irritated the tiny but noisy band of bots and cherry-picking blowhards who still deny climate change. The opinion section of The Wall Street Journal, which has disparaged climate science since the 1990s, published an article on August 28 that studiously avoided engaging with the actual scientific expertise other outlets had cited. Instead, it accused “the Western media” of rushing to judgment by embracing its “all-purpose explanation for everything: climate change.”

The Journal’s accusation was hardly more persuasive than that of an online conspiracy theorist who tried to blame the Nepal floods on a research project in Alaska. The fact-checking unit of Agence France-Presse, which delivers news to thousands of news outlets and government offices worldwide, quickly slapped down that absurdity: “AFP has repeatedly debunked claims that the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) is to blame for extreme weather events, and scientists say manipulation cannot cause floods of this magnitude—instead pointing to human-caused global warming.”

Why the Nepal disaster has called forth more plainspoken climate coverage than usual is, at this point, unclear. The availability of stunning video showing the awesome size, speed, and force of the flood was doubtless a factor. But that can’t be the sole explanation: The images of Helene’s ferocious winds and of L.A. hillsides engulfed in flames were no less eye-catching. Yes, the link between higher global temperatures and melting glaciers makes intuitive sense, but is it any more intuitive than the connection between higher temperatures and the extreme heat that has killed 35,000 people and counting in Europe this summer?

In any case, the question now is where climate coverage goes from here. Nepal’s floods are a textbook illustration of the stark injustice at the heart of the climate story: The people who did the least to cause the problem tend to be the ones who suffer the first and worst. As Bill McKibben noted on his Substack, The Crucial Years, “On average, Nepalis produce about four-tenths of a ton of carbon emissions annually, compared with about 14 tons for an American.”

At the COP28 U.N. climate summit in 2023, the world’s governments operationalized a Loss and Damage Fund to compensate victims of climate disasters. Contributions have been paltry, but The Nation reported this week that the fund’s board of governors was discussing whether to make an inaugural donation to Nepal as a symbol of why the fund needs to be fully capitalized. As journalists and newsrooms prepare to cover the COP31 summit in Turkey this November, the long-standing debate around climate loss and damage deserves our focused attention.

Nepal’s floods also highlight another aspect of the climate story: Who is responsible for all those losses, and who should pay for the damages? To date, most reporting has trodden lightly on these questions, even though a handful of investigative exposés have made clear who the chief culprits are. “A 1981 internal memo written by the director of one of Exxon’s science labs said it was ‘distinctly possible’ that cumulative carbon emissions could eventually ‘produce effects which will indeed be catastrophic (at least for a substantial portion of the earth’s population),’” author Jeff Goodell pointed out the day after the Nepal floods.

Exxon and other companies hid that science for decades, instead pressing for ever-increasing fossil fuel production and consumption. If holding power to account is a core duty of journalism, then connecting the dots between Big Oil and the Nepal floods, and other coming disasters that Big Oil’s delaying tactics have made inevitable, is a good place to start.

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

The statistics might be familiar, but they are jarring nonetheless. Over the past 50 years, the global fertility rate has fallen from four children per woman to just over two. Whatever is causing this is happening all around the world. In 1960, the average woman in the United States had 3.5 children; in India, Latin America, and the Caribbean, almost six. Today, the number is below two in all of these places.

This decline is having an incalculable effect on global politics. Many of our political debates are, just under the surface, about the fear of population decline. This is transparently the case for, say, Social Security and immigration. The crisis of Social Security comes from the decline of the working-age population; immigration, some argue, is the only realistic mechanism to prop it up. Our debates about education are shaped by the fact that there will be fewer and fewer kids to educate. Over the next 15 years, the number of high school graduates in the United States will fall by 12 percent, creating an enrollment cliff that is just as threatening to higher education as is artificial intelligence.

The issue is often veiled because it’s so hard to discuss directly. Any discussion of birth rates and population decline feels a hair’s breadth from fascism—and for good reason. The twentieth century is littered with examples of attempts to use statecraft to engineer populations. Hitler was obsessed with increasing the German population, while Communist China, with its one-child policy, tried to shrink its own. These efforts came at an enormous cost. This was not just an effort from the political extremes either. The eugenics movement, which included many American liberals in its ranks, was just as concerned with shaping the quality and size of populations.

The question of fertility cannot be ignored, but we do need new ways to think about it. The discussion has been dominated by conservatives, who either explicitly or implicitly want women to have more babies (you might recall JD Vance’s remarks about “childless cat ladies” as a scourge on the republic). The mandate is a perfect storm for today’s unhinged conservatism: It allows you to complain about professional women and contraception, while also signaling a desire to stock the homeland with racially pure children, undercutting the need for immigration.

Progressives tend to respond that the birth rate is downstream from other issues. If people had good jobs and health care, the argument goes, they would be more likely to have children. This is probably not true, and in any case it sidesteps the specific issue of fertility, which has its own shape and importance. The journalist Anna Louie Sussman, in her important new book, is trying to help. Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty looks at the issue from the perspective of reproductive justice. That tradition, rooted in Black feminism, emphasizes three interconnected rights: the right not to have children, the right to have children, and the right to parent those children in safety and dignity. In a world of true reproductive justice, we would be able to have children, if we want them, and to have the number of children that we want. In the wake of the repeal of Roe v. Wade, it is clear how the right not to have children is at risk. But what, Sussman asks, about the right to have them?

That choice, she shows, is under assault, too. Through prodigious research and dozens of personal stories from around the globe, Inconceivable shows vividly the difficulties of starting a family in a world that is growing hotter and more unequal. The book makes a compelling and humane case to lower the barriers to having kids for those who want them—although it may overestimate just how many people that would include.

“This is a global story about how our reproductive lives have been disfigured by an economic system gone awry,” explains Sussman, a reporter and New York Times Opinion contributing writer. As she travels in the United States as well as South Korea, Poland, and elsewhere, she meets people whose desire to have children has hit some kind of barrier, and she recounts her personal experience, too: The book opens with her trip to Italy to freeze her eggs. These stories, like anything that is bound up with love and money, are complicated. Her book, therefore, covers a lot of ground, from IVF to patriarchy to student debt, but always circles back to the economy, whose punishing rhythms shape every aspect of human fertility.

She begins with the challenges of dating. Why, Sussman asks, do many women freeze their eggs, as she did? The myth, and it’s a misogynist one, is that they are so devoted to their jobs that they can’t imagine hitting the pause button to have kids. According to one study, however, a full 82 percent of them did so because they could not find a partner. Some of the challenges in contemporary dating are cultural, and Sussman pays due attention to social media, pornography, dating apps, and all the other technologies that are conspiring against stable, long-term relationships.

Sussman insists, though, that the technology is not determinative, and that the throb of economic anxiety is underneath those missed connections. She introduces us to a man named Marwan, whose dating life dried up. He muses that he has not become ugly or less polite. The only thing that changed was that, for good reason, he left a prestigious and high-paying job. Finding a partner has never been just about love, after all. We are not so far from Jane Austen’s world as we think. Men and women alike are looking for partners with secure economic futures—and those, in 2026, are not easy to come by.

The specter of downward mobility looms over many of the people Sussman interviews, particularly in the United States. She profiles people whose parents experienced something resembling the American dream: hard work, the purchase of a home, a clutch of kids. All of that feels impossibly distant to Sussman’s subjects. Most of them are relatively privileged and are facing precarity more than they are genuine poverty. Even so, that precarity can be psychologically debilitating. Talia, a grant writer at a nonprofit in California, had to move in with roommates after a breakup. In her mid-thirties, she could not afford to live alone—how is she supposed to afford children? We meet, too, a nurse named Trent in the Dallas area. “If I’m able to get this student loan forgiveness,” he told Sussman, the year after Joe Biden announced his debt forgiveness plan, he and his partner could have a child “probably in the next year.” But if not, it would be several years more.

These interviews show the way childbearing is actually discussed in American families: a dialogue that is as much about debt and fear as it is about love and hope. Yet Sussman doesn’t think that immediate economic realities are enough to explain the decrease in fertility. If they were, you would find more children being born in countries with more stable economies; you would also find, in the United States, more children being born in times of relatively good economic data. But you don’t. The American fertility rate continued to decline even as we came out of the 2008 recession.

The deeper reasons, Sussman thinks, are psychological. To have a child is to make a bet on the future. How can prospective parents place a bet on the future while still saddled with the debts of their own past? Young people like Talia and Trent don’t simply want to have children—they want to offer their children a life of dignity, with proper housing and nutrition and education. And that, like so much else in 2026, feels far from assured. And the long term is even harder to predict than the next few years. A child born in 2027 would enter the workforce in the mid-2040s, and would be breathing the air of the 2040s, and scrambling to find whatever habitable land remains then. Would any of us, really, wish that on our worst enemy? What about our flesh and blood?

Those questions are not really statistical ones, but for those who care to look, the numbers are sobering. An American born in 1940 had about a 90 percent chance of outearning their parents. In the 1980s, it fell to 50 percent. It is, of course, too soon to tell about children born later. But as someone with elementary school children, I can confirm the sense that Sussman heard from her subjects. The true nature of the future economy is unknowable, but the gut instinct of contemporary young people is not. We have reached what Kyla Scanlon, a Gen Z financial writer, calls “the end of predictable progress.”

Inconceivable spends a large amount of time exploring fertility treatments. This is necessary for a book focused on the second prong of reproductive justice: Those are the means we have to help people who are having trouble reproducing. Maybe fertility medicine was once a niche area, but no longer. About one in 36 children in the United States is conceived with IVF; in Denmark, one in seven is now born through fertility treatment. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently sparked a conversation about egg freezing, when she posted about embarking on the process of egg retrieval herself. Reproductive justice should mean equal access to such treatments. In fact, of course, access is far from equal. Treatments are astoundingly expensive, and families often pursue them until their accounts run dry. The public purse, in this country, is little help. Medicaid covers contraception but almost never covers infertility treatment—a situation that Sussman thinks is nearly eugenic, sending a message to the underprivileged that the state is more than happy to keep them from reproducing, but not to help them to do so.

Access to IVF has in fact been a flash point in recent years. In Alabama, for instance, the state’s Supreme Court ruled in 2024 that frozen embryos are rights-bearing children. This caused a flurry of confusion and led the state’s largest hospital to temporarily suspend IVF services. In that case, the state legislature passed a law granting immunity to health care providers. The situation remains legally murky and shows how quickly a well-established option like IVF can become unavailable. In Poland, where Sussman carried out reporting, a law went into effect in 2015 that restricted IVF treatment to married or cohabiting heterosexual couples. This meant that neither queer couples nor single women, two groups that regularly use the procedure, were eligible. It also meant that women in those categories who had already frozen their eggs and created embryos had them held hostage by the state.

Sussman interviews a Polish woman who became caught in the legal and moral morass created by the legislation. She wanted to have children as a single woman, so she froze embryos with her own eggs and a Danish donor’s sperm. Once the law was passed, she was unable to access those embryos. And because of a tissue of laws elsewhere, she was unable to get them out of the country: Spain refused to accept embryos because the sperm donor was not anonymous, as is required there; in Ireland, an agency refused to accept the embryos because a previous baby born from that donor had a birth defect. Eventually, she was able to transport the embryos to Ukraine. The amount of work was staggering and beyond the means of most women. But in this case it was worth it, as it resulted in a happy and healthy child. Such is getting pregnant and giving birth in 2026: the navigation of medical, legal, romantic, and financial minefields.

Sussman, too, manages to pick her way through this tangled system herself, and at the book’s end, reveals that she did, in fact, retrieve her frozen eggs and conceive a child through IVF. The baby girl was born, happy and healthy, back in the United States. It’s an ending that reminded me of Children of Men, the great 2006 film, adapted from P.D. James’s novel, about a world in which pregnancy has become, mysteriously, impossible. Inconceivable is something of a journalistic counterpart to the sci-fi spectacle. Both works end with a birth, against the odds, and with all the joy that entails. Life, as another sci-fi franchise puts it, finds a way.

The structure of the book inclines us to celebrate each new birth. The fact that someone wanted to have a child and was able to is indeed cause for celebration. Yet it’s easy to confuse an individual wanting to have children with society wanting a higher birth rate. These are very different things, though Sussman sometimes elides them. In the book’s introduction, she declares that she is “not arguing for people to have more or fewer children.” But at the same time she implies throughout that low birth rates are a problem we should fix. The implicit argument of the whole book is that a world of more certainty would be a world of more babies. She refers to “rock-bottom birth rates and the palpable anxiety of a generation of would-be parents,” linking the two and concluding that we should address those anxieties “if we want people to feel stable enough to consider future life.” In a New York Times op-ed last year, she made explicit what is only implicit in Inconceivable: If policymakers could make child-rearing more appealing, it might just “raise the birthrate.”

This is an appealing rhetorical move for progressives: accept the call for higher birth rates, while claiming that a more secure and just society is the way to get there. It’s a move that should be rejected. The struggle for reproductive justice and the push to increase birth rates are not the same and are more than likely at cross-purposes. The clear trend in global fertility is that when women have the ability to choose fewer pregnancies, they do; in large part, the decline in birth rates is a result of women around the world having far greater access to contraception and abortion than they did 50 years ago. This is an unqualified victory, and an incomplete one. According to a 2025 U.N. survey, it is still more common, globally, to experience an unintended pregnancy than it is to desire children and be unable to have them. American surveys show that here, too, we do not have a younger generation that is clamoring to raise children. According to a 2024 Pew Research Center survey, Americans under 50 are hesitating to have children for many of the reasons that Sussman describes. But the biggest reason is one that she, for the most part, ignores. They simply do not want them.

Right-wing politicians and intellectuals who want to juice the birth rate despite this reluctance know that the path lies through turning back the clock on women’s rights and progress. If women don’t want children, so much the worse for them. Sussman is absolutely not joining that chorus. She is aware of the dangers of natalism. And yet, by accepting the framing that the low birth rate is a problem that might be solved through better policy, she misses the opportunity to reject the premise that the birth rate needs to rise.

In any case, there is also little evidence that creating a more equitable world, as she envisions, would encourage more births. After all, the insecurity faced by Americans now is nothing compared to that of, say, settler communities in the nineteenth century West, who had babies by the bushel as crops failed and locusts descended. People in Denmark have, by every measure, more security than Americans do—and yet they have even fewer children.

Young people are not stupid. They see what it’s like to raise children. Maybe the issue is not primarily that they lack certainty about what’s coming. Maybe the issue is that they have it.

The truth is that we are, whether we like it or not, transitioning into a world that will be demographically different from anything in recorded history. Whatever women say in surveys, they are voting with their bodies for a world with fewer children. We have passed, as the demographers put it, the era of “peak child.” At some point in the next few decades, the population is going to start to shrink. Schools and universities are going to close; pension systems are going to enter a crisis.

The task for progressives is to recognize that this is happening, and that it is an inevitable consequence of a necessary and overdue increase in female autonomy. Sussman is right that, in this new world, we should devote enormous resources to ensuring that everyone who wants children is able to have them. Her book shows what this will cost, and shows that it is worth it. But we should also recognize that a commitment to reproductive justice is most likely, at the same time, a commitment to a shrinking and aging global population. This raises a whole host of challenges and opportunities—a smaller world really could be a better one, if we plan for it properly. For the sake of Sussman’s daughter, and my own, I hope we do.

“A lot of the individual members’ online donations are down because more of the small-dollar donors have gravitated towards MAGA Inc.,” Comer said, referring to the super PAC overseen by Trump.

Comer’s revelation came during a discussion on Fox about the news that MAGA Inc. has spent little on midterm races out of the pot of $400 million it had raised as of July 31. Comer—a senior Republican who chairs the House Oversight Committee—said he hopes Trump’s PAC will spend more on GOP contests going forward.

“We’re going to need every penny of it,” Comer said. He carefully suggested he’s in no way criticizing Trump. Instead, he praised the president, insisting he’s “managed” his super PAC money “well” by not yet spending it on House races, supposedly to hold it for the home stretch.

But—by specifically clarifying that small donors are giving to Trump’s super PAC rather than to GOP incumbents and candidates—Comer shed light on a deeper way that Trump is screwing his party. Here’s why: If small donors are giving to MAGA Inc. to the exclusion of Republicans, it’s in no small part because Trump is helping make that happen.

Recall that Trump has repeatedly broadcast a message to his voters—in many different ways—that the GOP Congress has failed him. Trump recently elevated a long screed from a MAGA influencer who sharply criticized congressional Republicans for letting Trump down by continuing to “slow walk” everything Trump voters expect from the president’s agenda.

That sparked widespread media discussion, but it’s hardly a one-off. Trump himself recently declared that his voters are “not angry at me, but they are angry at Republicans.” He emphasized this several times to drive it home, even suggesting his supporters might not turn out: “The question is, will they vote?”

Those barbs are aimed at discouraging exactly the Trump voters that Republicans need big turnout among this fall. It’s just the sort of talk that could induce small-dollar Trump supporters to … give to MAGA Inc. rather than to GOP candidates. So Comer’s admission that this is now happening underscores how badly Trump is screwing the GOP. That he’s also hoarding the money—and not spending it on GOP races—is just the cherry on the melting sundae.

There’s another layer of irony here. Trump’s theory of the case appears to be that getting rank-and-file GOP voters energized about him—and not about the GOP Congress—is the way to get them to show up in November. As The Atlantic reports, Trump has ordered up ads trumpeting his stupendous accomplishments to fire up disillusioned midterm voters.

Yet by all indications, Trump is not succeeding in energizing his own supporters about him, either. Democrats increasingly believe a key midterm dynamic is that far more voters strongly disapprove of Trump than strongly approve of him, and that this is expanding the battlefield into House districts that backed Trump by significant margins.

That reading is supported by internal polling by the Democratic-aligned House Majority PAC that was shared at my request for its data on the president. It finds that across six battleground districts HMP is targeting in Ohio, Trump’s favorable versus unfavorable ratings average 42 percent to 56 percent, and his very favorable versus very unfavorable numbers average 30–50.

Meanwhile, across HMP’s three key battleground districts in Florida, Trump’s favorable versus unfavorable ratings are an average of 43–54, while his very favorable versus very unfavorable ratings are 28–50. And across three in Iowa, those findings are 41–55 and 28–49.

For context, note that in 2024, Trump won all these battleground districts on average by a significant margin. Yet across all of them, Trump is viewed very unfavorably by an average of around 50 percent, while he’s seen very favorably by around 30 percent. That’s very, very bad.

Public surveys bear this out. Fox News’s recent polling of the most competitive Senate races found Trump’s very favorable versus very unfavorable numbers at 27–47 in Iowa, 27–43 in Texas, and 24–46 in North Carolina.

The pattern is clear: Even in areas where Trump won, there’s far, far more intensified grassroots energy against him than for him. Nationally, the latest Strength in Numbers poll finds that those who strongly disapprove of Trump outnumber strong approvers by nearly three to one. And Democrats now hold a clear registration edge of 10 points, 49–39, when independent leaners are included. As James Downie writes at MS NOW, that signals waning energy behind Trump inside his own party.

So, to recap: Trump essentially keeps telling his supporters that the GOP Congress has failed him. They are, by Comer’s admission, now giving to Trump’s super PAC to the detriment of GOP candidates. Meanwhile, Trump plans to spend the loot he’s raked in on ads promoting himself, and as of now, he’s refraining from spending it in the GOP’s most contested races. Yet he isn’t even energizing his own voters all that much, and regardless, that group is massively dwarfed by those energized by their hatred of Trump to vote against Republicans. Really, it all couldn’t be happening to a bunch of nicer lickspittles.

Ranking member Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut claimed in a Thursday press release that the Defense Department signed an interagency agreement that could give it access to billions of dollars in funding intended to go toward studies on influenza, malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, and Ebola. 

“This secretive attempt to siphon research funds away from NIH is outrageous. The interagency agreement needs to be terminated immediately,” DeLauro said. “These funds were provided for lifesaving medical research, not as extra money for the Department of Defense.”

The Pentagon is running so low on money that it apparently needs to take from the NIH’s cup to buy more ammunition—to shoot down Iranian artillery that costs millions of dollars less than ours. That alone shows how devoted we are to the war machine, and how obtuse this administration’s priorities are.  

“It is no secret that the Department of Defense is facing enormous financial pressure because of President Trump’s war of choice with Iran,” DeLauro continued. “But the Trump administration cannot make American patients, families, and scientists pay the price. Circumventing Congress to divert money intended to help Americans who are exposed to … deadly diseases—and directing those funds to the Department of Defense—is beyond the pale. DOD already has programs, funded by Congress, to research and develop medical countermeasures to chemical, biological, and nuclear threats, and does not need NIH funding to do so. The administration must provide Congress with a full accounting of how this interagency agreement was developed and exactly how much taxpayer money it is trying to transfer to DOD.”

In November, Caity Peak, Flock’s director of market management, led a webinar that explained how law enforcement officials could use FlockOS Real-Time Crime Centers to monitor “everything from small parades, to unexpected protests, to unprecedented disasters.” One example she used was tracking demonstrators at an anti-Trump protest.

“Now imagine that you’re an incident commander, and you’re working this No Kings protest. For the sake of the call, we put this in Denver as an example,” Peak said, explaining that an officer could review a response plan while watching live video footage of an event.

“I’ve got the video footage to monitor when things go sideways, I know when the environment is starting to shift. But I also know a lot of other things as well,” she said.

No Kings protests, which have been recurring since the beginning of the second Trump administration, are historically extremely tame, and generally attract older liberals who love America but hate Trump’s policies. The temperate collective action would likely not be far-left enough for any radical anti-fascist. Historically, it’s far more likely that counterprotesters or federal law enforcement would escalate violence at these events.

Still, the milquetoast demonstrations have managed to inspire outrage from Republicans and the Trump administration—marking their attendees as targets for the president’s police state.

Law enforcement officials, including police officers and border patrol, have used Flock’s automated license plate readers to track protesters at No Kings protests in June and October, as well as other demonstrations protected by the First Amendment, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The group found more than 50 instances of law enforcement agencies using the company’s data servers to search for activity related to protests, and specific activist groups.

Thousands of readers who learned of the trailblazing feminist’s death via The Washington Post’s social media notifications Thursday were met with an image of former New York Representative Shirley Chisholm—the first Black woman elected to Congress—rather than Steinem.

Steinem was in the photograph, seated beside Chisholm, who was pictured center. However, due to Steinem’s far-left placement in the image, she was cropped out of most of the paper’s social media posts.

The paper corrected the error by using an entirely different image of Steinem, though the original image still exclusively showed Chisholm on Google’s search engine for a few hours.

Steinem died Thursday morning, age 92, according to a statement published to her Instagram account.

She was one of the most famous feminists of the twentieth century, emerging as a leader of the second-wave feminist movement through the 1960s and ’70s. She often served as the face of a movement that—in no small part due to her influence—witnessed the development of Title IX, laws and regulations guarding women’s legal and financial rights, the passage of Roe v. Wade, the first United Nations World Conference on Women, and the national expansion of rape crisis centers, turning what had previously been a private issue into a political debate on equality.

Steinem’s journalism career was similarly profound. She broke into the national writing scene in 1962 with a feature for Esquire on contraceptive use that became a vehicle for Steinem to argue against the contemporary demands placed on women, forcing them to choose between having a career or having children. She went on to use her editorial prowess to advocate for and champion women’s rights.

The Post, meanwhile, has been on a downward spiral since Jeff Bezos decided to play a larger role in its operations in 2023, an enormous change after having mostly left the venerable newspaper to its own devices since purchasing it in 2013.

In 2024, Bezos refused to let the paper endorse a presidential candidate, ushering enormous public backlash and a wave of subscriber cancellations, chipping away at the paper’s business position as well as its reputation. Since then, the Post has bled some of America’s top journalistic talents, who were either forced out by relentless layoffs or the job insecurity they caused, sparking concerns that the paper is “dying.”

Speaking to the press at the White House Thursday, Vance said that the U.S. was the only country capable of ensuring that world energy markets “continue to stay supplied.” He claimed that if the U.S. left the Persian Gulf, there would be “no guaranteed access to oil and gas” and that the U.S.’s Gulf Arab allies say “that would be the worst thing in the world.”

The alternative, Vance said, was accepting that “the Iranians were going to shoot at ships like crazy people.”

“We’re going to do what we have to do in order to ensure that their efforts don’t lead to a worldwide energy crisis. We’ve been quite successful up to this point. Gas, frankly, could’ve been much, much higher were it not for our efforts,” Vance continued.

JD Vance on Iran: "We've been quite successful up to this point. Gas, frankly, could've been much much higher were it not for our efforts." pic.twitter.com/sergoDRcvl

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 3, 2026

In the U.S., gas prices were less than $3 per gallon before the start of the Iran war in February, and since then, the national average is now $4.14. That increase has cost Americans more than $50 billion, according to a Brown University analysis. As of this writing, the most expensive gas in America is in California, where car owners are spending as much as $5.78 per gallon. That has hurt the economy, with Americans spending a lot less money on vacations over the summer. Flights and road trips have also declined, as jet fuel costs have also been affected by the Iran war.

Vance’s comments belie the fact that the Iran war was arbitrarily and unnecessarily started by the Trump administration. There was no threat to the flow of oil and gas or other maritime traffic traversing through the Strait of Hormuz prior to the war. If not for the efforts of President Trump, gas would in fact be much, much, lower.

Before Thursday, the Pentagon’s website showed a link for “Clinical Guidance for Health and Human Performance Optimization” that explained Hegseth’s testosterone deficiency screening requirements for male and female service members 30 and older. On Thursday, that link read “PAGE NOT FOUND.”

“The draft (document) published on September ​2, 2026, has been temporarily rescinded to allow for updates,” an anonymous official told Reuters. The reversal leaves the status of the controversial program unknown, as the department offered neither a timeline nor specifics on what was going to be updated.

Hegseth announced the controversial program last month.

“Today, I’m authorizing a new screening program for testosterone deficiency for our service members—ensuring you have the right testosterone levels to operate at your absolute best. Because it’s well-established science that as we age, testosterone levels often, naturally, drop,” he said in July. “Warfighters aged 30 and older are gonna be tested annually as part of their periodic health assessments.... Those under 30 can voluntarily choose to get the test as well.... If treatment is recommended, it’s entirely your choice to receive testosterone replacement therapy.”

Trump officials will present plans Thursday to install permanent fencing around Lafayette Square Park in Washington D.C., a historic gathering place for protesters, four people told The Washington Post.

The move comes more than eight months after Lafayette Square was originally closed on January 19 for a “major rehabilitation,” set to reopen on May 31. That deadline came and went, but the fences stayed up. Now the Trump White House is hoping to make the fences surrounding the park permanent.

The project has been a longtime priority for the Secret Service that will finally be made a reality at the expense of the public. Trump officials will also present plans for a $180 million visitor-screening facility.

Permanent changes to transform the White House complex into an impenetrable fortress would radically reshape the institution’s already rocky relationship with the surrounding city Trump’s been using as a personal playground all summer. The move serves as a startling distillation of the ever-widening gap between the Trump administration and the people it purports to represent.

The National Parks Service announced Tuesday that in addition to Lafayette Square Park, Sherman Park, the First Division Monument, and the Ellipse would also remain restricted areas through September 22.

“Lesser restrictive measures will not suffice due to the Secret Service’s security-based assessment based on its assessment of sensitive intelligence that these park areas need to be kept clear,” the agency said in a statement.

The pedestrianized stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House, which has served as a viewing spot for tourists and a gathering place for protesters for two decades, would also remain closed. Earlier this summer, the area was transformed into a parking lot for Trump’s various celebratory events. Later, the Secret Service decided to install permanent fencing, allowing it to close pedestrian access if it deems there are security risks.

The recent efforts to fortify the White House come amid heightened security threats resulting from Trump’s optional war against Iran.

Maybe we could actually believe that this was purely a precautionary measure if Trump wasn’t obsessed with making sweeping, unilateral changes to the White House grounds. Not to mention his rampant authoritarianism that has led to the useless militarization of Washington, D.C. It seems clear that the president, who regularly lashes out against critics, isn’t interested in getting any more angry feedback from the American people.

The outfit was made by Orion Costumes and marketed as a “German Army Soldier Adult Costume” that included a jacket, trousers, attached boots, a belt, and a hat. The outfit was also sold by other major retailers, including Amazon and Target.

Walmart initially sold the fit as a “vintage-themed” costume inspired by 1940s military gear, but its source material was obvious: One advert of the high-collared grey garb photoshopped the model in front of a German flag.

By Thursday morning, the costume had been stripped from all three companies’ respective websites without explanation.

The New Republic reached out to Walmart, Target, and Amazon asking why the item had been removed, as well as why the item was listed in the first place. The companies did not respond to the request by the time of publication.

It’s not the only egregious inventory decision made in the run-up to the Halloween season. Last month, Target faced another round of backlash for selling what customers described as a racist caricature inspired by Jim Crow–era minstrels. The marketing images for the outfit featured a Black child model, further incensing critics who argued the company was perpetrating wildly harmful symbols that were historically used to justify racial discrimination and violence.

Target issued an apology after pulling the costume from its shelves, claiming that they were “deeply sorry” that they “got this wrong.”

“We know this is especially hurtful for our Black guests, team members and partners,” the statement read. “Removing the costume is an important first step, and the company is looking closely at how this happened and what needs to change to ensure this won’t happen again.”

Libby Klinner, the widow of U.S. Air Force Major John “Alex” Klinner, who died in a crash in Iraq in March, said on Instagram Sunday that she had not received certain military benefits as a surviving spouse.

“The Air Force recently told me that because we haven’t officially declared war, my kids and I aren’t eligible for some benefits,” Klinner wrote. “So, not only was my husband killed in a war he never wanted to participate in, but now the benefits we’re left with are being dictated by semantics and public perception.”

In a follow-up post Tuesday, Klinner said that the Air Force’s director of mortuary affairs had contacted her after the initial post to audit her benefits. She has not posted any updates about her benefits since.

The Air Force has reached out to Klinner, a spokesperson told the Daily Express, in order “to ensure she is receiving all eligible benefits she and her family are entitled to, as well as ensure all her questions are fully addressed.”

“We understand this matter has been difficult for Mrs. Klinner and her family, and we are committed to addressing her concerns with care and respect,” the spokesperson said. “We remain committed to providing clear information and continued support to Mrs. Klinner, as well as all the families of the Airmen who died in the KC-135 crash.”

Klinner’s husband is one of 18 U.S. service members who have been killed during the war with Iran. Another 757 people have been wounded, according to the Department of Defense. President Trump has mishandled the war, seemingly operating without a plan, and has stopped and restarted hostilities in order to make the dubious legal claim that the conflict hasn’t been one unceasing war but several small ones, in an effort to avoid accountability. If Klinner’s claim is true, it seems that this legal sleight of hand may also be to deny military benefits.

The Associated Press, citing an unnamed source, reports that officer Christian Castro, who allegedly shot Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg during January’s Minneapolis crackdown, has been charged with making false statements to federal investigators.

The federal charges come after Castro was released from a Texas jail last week thanks to Republican Governor Greg Abbot’s refusal to sign an extradition order to Minnesota, where Castro faced separate charges of assault and false reporting related to the shooting.

The government tried to claim Sosa-Celis beat an officer with a broom handle and snow shovel but was forced to drop its charges against him after video evidence debunked its case. ProPublica reported earlier this week that the Department of Justice blocked federal prosecutors from bringing more serious civil rights charges, like those brought against the officers who killed George Floyd, against Castro.

The Associated Press reports that no final decision has been made regarding whether further charges will be brought against Castro. It’s a surprising move from the DOJ, considering how much the Trump administration has sought to protect ICE agents from prosecution. The DOJ still has not charged anyone over the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, two Minnesotans who were shot and killed by ICE agents as part of “Operation Metro Surge.”

In those cases, it may all be up to Minnesota authorities, who have received evidence from both killings from the federal government. But Minnesota may run into resistance, much like it did in its attempt to prosecute Castro. For now, though, Castro may soon have to go to federal court.

The Protect Economic and Academic Freedom Act, headed by Republican Representative Virginia Foxx and Democratic Representative Josh Gottheimer, strips federal funding from any school that carries out a “nonexpressive commercial boycott” of Israel—like “refusals to deal” with it on a business level. Notably, the bill also applies to boycotts of institutions based in Israeli settlements.

“Thank you @RepJoshG and @virginiafoxx for leading this important bipartisan effort to counter the dangerous BDS [or Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions] campaign and safeguard academic engagement with Israel,” the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, celebrated on X after the vote. “This legislation helps protect pro-Israel students from discriminatory boycotts and efforts to deny them the ability to study in Israel or learn from Israeli professors, while fully protecting First Amendment rights.”

This is a boldfaced attempt to make not just political capitulation but financial capitulation to Israel a requirement for federal funding. Eighty percent of Democratic voters and Democratic-leaning independents have a negative view of Israel, as it continues to bomb Gaza and Lebanon and Israeli settlers terrorize Palestinians in the West Bank.

The bill has many detractors, even in the Democratic Party.

“The bill’s federal requirements raise serious questions about how they would operate in practice, the potential negative effects on institutions, and the extent to which the federal government may condition funding on policies that implicate First Amendment-protected speech,” the House Education and Workforce Committee Democrats wrote in a statement before the vote.

“No matter how strongly I oppose the BDS movement, I also believe that those who engage in BDS have a First Amendment right to do so. The First Amendment right to free speech does not apply only to agreeable speech,” Democratic Representative Jerry Nadler, Congress’s most senior Jewish member, wrote. “No matter how much I may disagree with BDS, and find it strategically stupid and morally repugnant, I will always fight to protect Americans’ right to speech with which I disagree. It is the only way to ensure speech I do agree with is equally protected.”

The bill now heads to the Senate to be voted on when it returns from Labor Day break on September 14.

Here is every Democrat who voted to take funding away from universities that boycott Israel:

Jake Auchincloss (Massachusetts)
Kathy Castor (Florida)
Gilbert Ray Cisneros Jr. (California)
Jim Costa (California)
Joe Courtney (Connecticut)
Henry Cuellar (Texas)
Donald G. Davis (North Carolina)
Lois Frankel (Florida)
Laura Gillen (New York)
Jared F. Golden (Maine)
Vicente Gonzalez (Texas)
Greg Landsman (Ohio)
George Latimer (New York)
Susie Lee (Nevada)
John W. Mannion (New York)
Jared Moskowitz (Florida)
Donald Norcross (New Jersey)
Jimmy Panetta (California)
Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Washington)
Josh Riley (New York)
Bradley Scott Schneider (Illinois)
Hillary J. Scholten (Michigan)
Kim Schrier (Washington)
Brad Sherman (California)
Darren Soto (Florida)
Haley M. Stevens (Michigan)
Thomas R. Suozzi (New York)
Shri Thanedar (Michigan)
Dina Titus (Nevada)
Ritchie Torres (New York)
Juan Vargas (California)
Eugene Simon Vindman (Virginia)
Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Florida)

Perry Bacon: This is Right Now on The New Republic. I’m Perry Bacon, I’m the host. I’m joined by Natasha Warikoo. She’s a professor of sociology at Tufts University. She wrote a great book a few years ago called The Diversity Bargain, and now that we’re so focused these days on issues of diversity and inclusion and so on, I wanted to talk to her about kind of where we are.

She’s done a lot of work on higher education and diversity, and I feel like that’s a great place to kind of start from. But I want to talk about diversity, inclusion, and all the kinds of ways those issues are being affected by Donald Trump. So Natasha, thanks for joining me.

Natasha Warikoo: Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.

Bacon: So let me start with the book itself. So the book that you wrote, called The Diversity Bargain, which was written a few years back. And I’m going to tell people, I’ll confess some interest in here, because I went to a college called Yale that very few people went to, but is an elite school. And the book is about, I think it’s Harvard, Oxford, and Brown, and you interviewed both white students and students of color, and you talked about diversity in elite college campuses. But I think the issues of diversity there are relevant to the rest of the society. But talk about what the phrase diversity bargain means.

Warikoo: Sure. Yeah. So I did these interviews with students on the Harvard and Brown campuses, and then also in the UK at Oxford, thinking—I wanted to understand people who are at the most elite places, and how they think about issues of fairness, inclusion, knowing that these places are very exclusive and elite, and certain groups are underrepresented. And the diversity bargain is this, that I found that white students in the United States really did support provisions for equity, particularly affirmative action, which was legal at the time. And they did it, but there was a bargain involved, right?

So they said they supported the inclusion and attention to race in admissions, so that there could be more Black students, Latinx students, Native American students on campus, because they saw it as a benefit to them. They understood that diversity had shaped their worldviews, that they were exposed to different perspectives, that their world was opened up through interacting with people who had very different lived experiences to their own.

But this meant a few things, that they expected underrepresented minority students to integrate at all times. So if they saw a table of Black students sitting together, then they thought that they were not upholding the diversity bargain. Of course, they didn’t notice all the tables of white students on the other side of the cafeteria, but that was OK. They didn’t want it to, quote-unquote, “go too far,” right? That there was this idea of reverse discrimination kind of lurking in the back of their heads.

And so even if they’d gotten—there was one student who said, memorable quote, where they said, “If I hadn’t gotten into Harvard, I would’ve felt that I had experienced racial discrimination if a Black student at my school had gotten in and I didn’t.” And so that script is already in the back of their minds, even though they had won. And so you imagine that student going on to apply to graduate school, apply for a job—the second that they don’t win, affirmative action is an easy thing to blame.

So there were these kinds of expectations that were rolled into the support for affirmative action, in part, and I argue, because there was less attention to kind of racial justice, and that the origins of affirmative action were related to racial equity for underrepresented minorities, frankly, African Americans, in the very beginning. And so that was underplayed in this discourse.

Bacon: So the book resonated with me. I read it, I think—when was the book published, Diversity Bargain?

Warikoo: It was 2016.

Bacon: 2016. So it resonated with me, in part—I think I read it in 2018—in part because, while it was about universities, I felt like, having worked in elite media, having attended an elite college, having worked in think tanks and other things, like, this was not just about universities. This idea that the African Americans particularly in these places needed to deliver some kind of benefit, and to be grateful to be there, and that kind of thing, was not just a college campus thing, but was also reflected in other things I had experienced.

And the reason I thought about the book more recently was, in 2020, I felt, oh, now we’re seeing a movement not just for diversity, but for real racial justice, and I wonder what this looks like. Natasha was hinting that when the demand is not just for Black people or minorities get in the room, but minorities get to shape things, and there’s a call for justice, then the white college students get mad.

I wonder if the rest of our society will feel similar to that, and I wonder if 2020 and the aftergrowth of that—you’ve seen some of the sort of, diversity is OK, but really challenging the structure of America is not OK.

Warikoo: Yeah, it’s been fascinating to watch this unfold. And so, 2020, for many people who care about racial justice and equity, was really an inspiring moment where we thought, “OK, this is what I was calling for,” right? I was calling for greater attention to racial justice, to equity. Systemic racism became, like, a household, an everyday phrase, that left the academy and went into corporate America.

And so it was this moment, and I think it was a hopeful moment, but yeah, unfortunately it didn’t last. I think we’re seeing the kind of backlash towards that movement. It happened pretty swiftly. By September, President Trump is issuing this executive order banning DEI, and so the backlash has been very forceful, and effective, I would add as well.

Bacon: And let’s—I want to talk about the backlash in a couple different ways. The first was, you saw all these, like, red states, I’ll say, right after 2021, passing all these sort of bans on books and ideas about race. You can’t study sociology in this way, or Black studies in this way. So you saw that pretty much 2020, 2021, 2022, that was in red states, that was happening.

So that was maybe not surprising, but that was a sign early on that there was going to be resistance to really studying systemic racism and thinking about it this way, right? That was early on, even when Biden’s president, this very, very strong resistance to academic work around this from the very beginning.

Warikoo: Yeah, absolutely. There’s a kind of back and forth, I think, between the local and the federal, right? So President Trump issues this executive order in September 2020. Biden takes office, rescinds that order, but states and local areas take it up, right? So you have Governor DeSantis in Florida using very similar language. They take on this phrase critical race theory, right?

Very few schools in this country have ever used that phrase, critical race theory, which is a very specific academic term, but they latched onto this, I think, related to this phrase systemic racism, without totally understanding what it was. But having these bans, right? Bans on the teaching of critical race theory, through the state legislatures. Local school boards really got on board with wanting to ban books and, quote-unquote, “parent rights.” Moms for Liberty, that came out of Florida, really helped local school districts elect people who are going to be on board with this project.

Again, you see this legislation and these movements in local areas with very similar language, because it’s a kind of systematic movement supported by organizations like Heritage Foundation. And so this is a very organized effort to attack any kind of policy related to diversity, justice, race, and to build a kind of narrative about this kind of reverse racism, right? To build this false narrative that somehow people of color, trans people, LGBTQ people are getting ahead, right?

And I found it really interesting that the Trump administration started using the language of meritocracy, right? So this idea that we’re going to restore merit by ending attention to inequality when we make selection decisions. And so there is this concerted effort that kind of then, when they’re out of office and Biden’s in office, it flows to the states. The states are enacting these bans, local school boards, and then it goes back to the federal when Trump gets back in office, right? And his administration takes on this again. And again, with alignment around language. It moves between K-12 education and higher education as well. So you see, it’s a very kind of systematic, and very effective in many ways, movement.

Bacon: And in corporate America, something happens too, where, like, 2014 to 2023, I’ll call this period, where a lot of companies feel like they have to—they put out diversity guidelines. We’re going to hire more women, we’re going to hire more people of color. We’re going to have more trainings. We’re going to have more implicit bias training. Some of these things are evidence-based. Some of them, candidly, are not particularly useful.

And then you see Facebook and other companies start rolling that back in early 2025. Sometimes it feels like in response to the federal government and Trump, sometimes it feels because they wanted to. I can’t quite tell. So what’s the corporate America story, in your view?

Warikoo: Yeah. I don’t know what’s going in their heads, but I can tell you what I see. There’s this great book that came out around the time that my book came out, called The Enigma of Diversity by Ellen Berrey, who’s another sociologist, where she compares the language around diversity in higher education, but also in the corporate world and in real estate as well, and this idea that diversity is being sold as a commodity in these different spheres, right?

So the corporate world, it’s, yeah, you need diversity because you’re going to make more money, because you can sell those—I forgot what they’re called—those, the Newports, in Black communities, or whatever. And corporate America, I think in 2020, a lot of these organizations put out statements, and I think genuine statements. I do think that there was a real reckoning. In some places it was strategic, but it was also, I think, heartfelt by a lot of people, where they understood, I think particularly white corporate America understood, things about the experiences, again, particularly of African Americans, and racial exclusion, in ways that they didn’t before. Ways that I think African Americans and other people of color always understood, because that was their lived experience. But I think this was a shift.

And I do think that there has been this, again, this shift back, in part because of fear, right? Fear of the Trump administration. Maybe lack of being totally on board, or worry about the bottom line, or that having been maybe more performative. I think all of those things can happen at once, right? But, when push comes to shove, we’re not going to put ourselves on the line, and I think that’s what we have seen.

And some are willing to take more risks than others. But for the most part, there’s a sort of pulling back, the way that we’re seeing in higher education as well. And I think that’s related to the federal government. But I think what you’re hinting at is also true, that maybe we don’t totally want to be full on. What are we willing to give up, right? And I think that’s where, when you’re asked to give up something, like, you’re asked to give up your security, you’re asked to put yourself at risk, that’s when we see the choices that are being made, and different organizations are going to make different choices.

Bacon: The higher education story feels to me like a couple different things. Which is, one, you had the red states opposed to all kinds of things because they’re very conservative. You have this Supreme Court decision about affirmative action, which says you can’t consider race in a variety of ways in admissions, particularly in higher education. So you have the Supreme Court acting.

I think you mentioned, we were emailing, you mentioned the Gaza protests and the reaction to them, and the sense that the campuses themselves were too left, which was felt by some people on campus who are Democrats. And so that created some culture, some shift. And then Trump coming in with this sort of really—colleges are too woke, I want to move colleges to the right. So the higher education context has been probably the place where this sort of move to the right on DEI has been felt the most, right? And it’s been the most aggressive place for it.

Warikoo: Yeah. I think there’s this sort of convergence, right? And to me, that was a moment, right? When—again, people have different perspectives in different universities, even within universities. But there was a—after those Gaza protests is where you see a lack of alignment, right? When Black Lives Matter happened, not all Americans were on board with down with systemic racism.

But in universities, for the most part, there was a lot of alignment, right? Universities were putting out statements. There was a kind of reckoning. There were meetings. There were statements. There were commitments to diversifying the faculty, to more resources for financial aid. All of this was happening. But I think in 2023, there was a lot more disagreement. More disagreement, around, on these liberal campuses than usual.

And so this created this kind of moment where I think the right saw an opening and swooped in. So you see this shift where, up to that point, a lot of the focus of the anti-DEI work on the right was in K-12 education, right? Book bans, right? Anti-DEI teaching, all those critical race theory, all that legislation was K-12 schools. 90 percent of those bans were at the K-12 level. But then there’s this shift, like, Oh, wait. OK, here’s an opening for us in higher education. And then they shift to higher ed, right? And then we see the systematic attacks in the second Trump administration in higher education. And of course, bolstered by the 2023 US Supreme Court decision, right?

So the 2023 US Supreme Court decision ends affirmative action in college admissions, where you can no longer consider race in admissions. And then you see the Trump administration uses that decision, which is really a narrow decision about college admissions, to say, Oh, now you can’t have any kind of DEI programming. You can’t have a student center. You can’t have scholarships.

And of course, that is not settled law, but they use that in that Dear Colleague letter that came out in February 2025, to say, Stop everything. And if you don’t, we’re going to withhold federal funding. Now, again, there’s a lot of throwing things at the wall and seeing what will stick in the Trump administration, but it creates, like, fear. And universities are like, “Wait, we don’t want to get sued. We don’t want to be the ones in a lawsuit.” So that starts, and then the Gaza war really creates a wide opening to say, OK, the withholding of federal grants, and it just continues on and on over the last year and a half.

Bacon: So I’m not on a college campus at all most days, but you are. You’re in Boston, you’re in, in some ways, the center of university life in America. So you’re at Tufts, and you’re also around other colleges. So what’s it like now? Do people feel nervous to say diversity or inclusion on campus? Do people feel nervous about those words? Do minority students feel under threat? What’s it like to be on a college campus in this sort of administration, in this time of diversity backlash? And you’re a person of color yourself, obviously.

Warikoo: Yeah. I’m in a very liberal state. I’m on a liberal campus, so I’ll start with that caveat. I think the biggest things that we worry about are our international—

Bacon: Private college, it’s worth noting. We’re a private college too, it’s worth noting. So anyway, yeah, Tufts is private.

Warikoo: Yes. Oh, sorry. Yes, that’s what I mean. That’s really important. It’s a private college. But we have a lot of federal grants, and so we are beholden to the federal government. I think we worry a lot about our international students, increasingly draconian policies related to, like, first getting a visa, and then the four-year new policy for graduation. Are they going to be targeted? We had our student, was kidnapped by ICE, right? She thought she was being kidnapped off the street. She didn’t even know what was happening. And so I think we worry a lot about that.

I think for the students, there is this sense—there is this sense of the ground is shifting under their feet, right? So there’s a curiosity, I think increasingly there’s a tension too, I think they realize that they have a hard time talking across difference. But I’ll say, with a big but, I don’t think this is related to specifically things that are happening on campus. I think this is a society-wide thing. I think our society is increasingly polarized. Social media has a lot to do with that. We are increasingly segregated, not only by race, like we always were, and class, but also by political identity. And I think there’s this sense of, like, anything you say can be posted and go viral.

And so I think a lot of those things are happening. I think that’s now getting, again, taken up and attributed to, it’s the supposedly ideological bent of the faculty. I think that’s totally wrong. So I think there is that, but I think it’s not a result of these political things. I think it’s a result of broader social trends. And so, I think, on a day-to-day level, students are just, like, doing their thing.

I think what’s on our minds as faculty is, what I see as concerning, right? I think faculty across the country, even in blue states, are wondering, like, are we going to be increasingly scrutinized? Are we going to be able to teach the way we think we should be teaching? Where is my syllabus going? And who is using, who is looking at these materials? Is a student going to record my class?

People are now putting on statements like, You can’t record in your class, in my classroom. I understand that, and, a few years ago, it never would’ve occurred to me to have a statement like that on my syllabus. So I think these are the kinds of things that are happening right now. And I think our students are also just worried about, am I going to get a job after I graduate, with all of this debt, or with this degree? And I think those are the big concerns, I think.

Bacon: What does this period mean for you, as a person who works in sociology, a field that the right seems to be very focused on demeaning, who works in higher education, who works in race, and who wants to make our society more equitable, on racial grounds, and particularly in higher education? What does it mean for you? It feels like a lot of the things you’re working on are under threat right now. Or a lot that you spend your career on are under threat right now. How does that affect the way you think about your work?

Warikoo: Yeah. In some ways it makes it feel more important than ever, right? So Florida, two years ago, and now it’s been formalized, first started saying, You know what, you can’t take sociology for your distribution requirements, and sociology can no longer be part of gen ed requirements. And part of me was like, Oh, they understand the value of sociology, right? What do we do as sociologists? We look at society. We look at data on society. We reveal the things that are hard to see, right?

That there are racial disparities or class disparities, that we don’t live in a true meritocracy, and we have data to—we look at data and say, “Look, this is what our society’s actually”—and people who don’t want to understand those things are trying to ban sociology. So I feel, on the one hand, that the work that I feel like I’m doing is more important than ever. Unfortunately, right? I wish my research were out of date and no longer relevant, but I think it’s really important.

I’m actually going back to those young—they’re not young anymore—the people I interviewed for The Diversity Bargain. They’re now in their 30s, and I’ve been re-interviewing them to say, “Hey, how’s it turned out? And do you still believe in meritocracy? Do you think that this is a fair system?” And you know what? A lot of them are saying, like, no, it’s not a meritocracy. Like, hiring, it’s not a meritocracy. I got my job because I knew somebody. And the way I hire, or the way my firm hires, I try to give, like, a sample activity, or I’ve suggested we take the names of universities.

But at the end of the day, often it’s like someone recommends someone who I knew from this thing, and so they see that. And if the elites are seeing this—so I feel like, my job is to reveal what is happening in society that we don’t get—that I have the luxury of being able to take time, chat to people, analyze it, look for trends, and so I think that’s really important.

The other thing that I feel really passionate about right now is just defending higher education, right? This attack on higher education, to me—any authoritarian regime attacks the institutions of knowledge, which is what we’re seeing, and it’s so disturbing. But how do we have a just as organized a response, to showing the value of what happens in higher education? Higher education is—I’m not saying it’s perfect. We’re not perfect. We got a lot of work to do. But a lot of good things happen in higher education.

You think about our community colleges, which are, like, these engines of social mobility for so many Americans. Our big state schools that are educating so many people with decreasing funding. And so I think a lot of good happens in higher education, and what I hope we can do is change the narrative around, why is diversity good? What does it do for us? What is it doing as a—who we are as a—how is it helping us be who we want to be as an American society? And that’s what I’m trying to do right now, is, like, how do we change this narrative and have just as organized a response to the way that this organized attack has been happening over the last few years.

Bacon: Let me give one suggestion that no one in academia has listened to so far, but I will try it again. I’m in a Black family. We have Thanksgiving dinner. I go to a Black church sometimes. Everyone does not agree on everything. We have disagreements about lots of things.

Warikoo: Yes.

Bacon: None of us voted for Donald Trump, though, so you might want to stop conceding that you all don’t have any thought diversity because people voted for Democrats. This concession, when there are Republican voters in the room, that people all think the same, is not actually true. And if you expand out to the rest of society, I don’t think everyone in the Black church all is of, like—we have fierce debates about private schools and charter schools and public schools, but no, we do not debate if Donald Trump is a good president or not.

So I think this idea—I’m disappointed the president of Yale and people who I would like to—we need to, forget about the authoritarians for a second, the people on our side need to defend the idea. I don’t think professors are indoctrinating students, and I don’t see that, and I don’t know a lot of professors that do so.

It’d be nice if the David Brookses and the president of Yale and people who are not Trumpists would actually defend higher ed first. That’d be helpful. Like the Yale report—there are a lot of reports that, I don’t agree with a lot of what they said in there, and you might want to start there before we worry about JD Vance.

Warikoo: 100 percent. I am in total agreement with you. It is really upsetting to me, and worrisome, that we’re conceding this language. And yes, 100, we have a lot of—that’s what scholars do. We debate ideas. We look at data—

Bacon: Like, diversity is not—political diversity, viewpoint diversity, is not Republican versus Democrat. You and I differ on issues, I’m sure, but we might vote for the same person, is my guess. I’m not going to ask you that, being—

Warikoo: Yes, 100 percent. And this whole viewpoint diversity stuff, to me, is so ironic, because when I look at what they’re saying and talking about, it’s like borrowing the language of racial diversity, right? And, in the 1980s, we spent so much time researching the benefits of racial diversity, how to talk across difference. There are all these models. There are all these things that we know, right? How to build, like, intergroup dialogue in the classroom. We know how to do this, and so to suddenly say, “No,” like, that’s what we were doing.

But I think the viewpoint diversity thing is also disingenuous, because it starts with an end point, right? You are diverse because you think this thing. You support President Trump, or you support whoever it is—it doesn’t have to be President Trump—you are anti-abortion, or whatever. But the diversity stuff said, “No, you might think something,” but diversity challenges you to consider a different way, and then whatever you conclude, right? But this viewpoint diversity thing is, “Here’s my stake in the ground. You need to listen to this.” And I think that’s so deeply problematic.

So I couldn’t agree with you more. And this idea that we are—those reports, I just think that they concede this idea that we are somehow indoctrinating our students. When you look at the data, there’s been studies of, sure, there are probably more registered Democrats in an anthropology department or a sociology department. But that has nothing to do with—first of all, that has more to do with who ends up in these fields, who ends up in higher education—there’s cultural things.

But then also, I think particularly in a field like sociology, when you’re looking at the data, and you’re drawing conclusions based on that, that might lead you to a broad range of politics that are over here. Like you said, there’s a lot of differences over here, but less over here. And so I think—and even if you have that conclusion, our job is not to bring that into the classroom.

Of course, bias comes in, and if you ask my students to guess my politics, they might, broadly speaking, be able to guess who I voted for president in 2024. But beyond that, my job is not to teach them what I think. It’s to teach them to think for themselves, and look at evidence, and look at different perspectives on an issue. And that’s what most of us do. And so I couldn’t agree with you more, and I find that whole discussion really troubling myself.

Bacon: So the reason I thought about you was with this whole Woke 1.0 discussion, because we’re going to finish there. Which is that I’m concerned that—I know there’s been defenses of what she said, but I was concerned that the thing that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a leading sort of progressive figure in America, said was Woke 1.0 was crazy. I don’t quite know what Woke 1.0 is.

I don’t love that phrasing in the first place. But when I think about 2020, I think a lot about a lot of ideas that needed to be stated, that were, like, they were truths that were presented more directly than before, that the police are often not a source of safety but often a source of inequality and violence, that we have systemic racism, that we have long-standing biases of all kinds that affect our culture. So, for me, that was the period of truth, and the rest of America often is crazy. And so I’m concerned to hear that.

So I’m wondering what to do about that, in a certain way. So, I get the fact that there was a political backlash to that. So if you’re running for office, I can see—like, you, Natasha, are not wrong. If you’re planning to run for office in Wisconsin, do not say the things you said. I agree. But what do the rest of us do who are not running? That’s what I want to talk to you about, is, like, how do we defend—if you’re not running for office, how do we defend the ideas of 2020? Because I think that’s important. I think those ideas were not wrong, and I think we need to stop conceding them.

And if Senator Sanders and Zohran and AOC and people whose names are on the ballot have to concede ideas that they know are true, I’ll talk to them about that in private, and why they should find different ways to disown things they know are true. But let’s focus on the rest, for the rest of us, let’s talk about how we defend things that are known. And so how do you talk about DEI to people who are skeptical of it? I don’t love that phrase in the first place, and I never did. But how do we talk about the values of diversity and equity, and fighting systemic problems in the country? It’s an easy question.

Warikoo: Yeah. Look, I think this idea that we want American society to be broadly inclusive, that people of all racial identities, of all backgrounds, should feel that they can be part of the American dream, and that we want to take steps in schools, in higher education, to make that happen—I have a hard time believing that most Americans will not be on board with that. And that’s fundamentally what the Diversity Project has tried to do, right?

Make our universities more accessible to groups that have been historically excluded, and then once they arrive on campus, make it so that they can be successful. What supports do we need to put in place so that students who traditionally haven’t gone to these universities, whose parents didn’t go to this kind of university, make sure that they can be successful? Just making that very clear, I think, is easy, and making it so that everyone feels like it’s possible for them, right?

And again, I think we have to counter this narrative, right? I think what the right has been really successful at doing is creating this narrative that, a lot of people are hurting in American society right now, of all races, right? And so, to say, You know why you’re hurting? It’s because of those people. It’s because of the trans people. It’s because of African Americans. It’s because of immigrants. And they’ve been, like, remarkably successful at that. And I think we have to shift that narrative, and to say that, No, you know what it is? It’s housing policy. We need to figure out housing. It’s economic policy. It’s—

The policies on race are not—it’s not zero sum, right? It’s not about this group versus this. I think about when I was talking a lot about affirmative action, and people would say it should be class-based, not—and it’s, yeah, maybe. We should have a lot more financial aid. That’s true. And we also need race-based affirmative action, because we have, for all of these other reasons—these are two—so these should not be mutually exclusive.

And so I think just laying that out to ordinary Americans in a way that’s clear and consistent and not defensive, I think, is going to go a long way. I think people who are critical of the way that we’re going need to build—when I look at that Project 2025, the foundations and how systematic and organized that movement has been, like, can we build that? And that’s what I want to be a part of.

Bacon: And on the higher ed—

Warikoo: I want to build that in the other direction, I should say. Sorry, just to be fair.

Bacon: On the higher ed side, I think that sounds like affordable college for as many people as possible, right? That—whether it’s free or debt-free or whatever, you should not leave college with $100,000 in debt, and you should be able to get a job without going into debt. I think that’s the sort of most fundamental part. If you want to go to college, everyone should go to college if they want to. And then on the diversity side, it’s, like, we want to have a society where your race or gender or sexual orientation does not bar you from, does not determine your livelihood, right? That’s what we’re going to get to.

Warikoo: Yeah, 100 percent. Who would disagree with that, right?

Bacon: But yes, because as you were talking, I was thinking of that book, The Sum of Us. Did you read that book by Heather McGhee that was published in 2021? It talked about this idea of, the right uses these issues to wedge different groups, so the key is to create a collective all.

Warikoo: Yeah, people have been talking about that in different ways for many years. And there’s this balance between—we’re not saying that we have to be colorblind. I don’t think being colorblind would get us there. But we do have to show how these different groups have similar interests, and that we have to be aligned and build these coalitions across lines of difference, in ways, and think about issues that we are all facing. I think there is a balance there. I think we still have to recognize there are issues specific to race, to sexuality or whatever, and that there is a common interest, economic interest, economic issues as well.

Bacon: Natasha, tell people where they can find some of your work and your thoughts. Are you doing a Substack? Are you doing anything like that there?

Warikoo: You can go to my website. Oh—I signed up for Substack. I need to—

Bacon: Everyone gets an evening newsletter, I promise.

Warikoo: But don’t go to my Substack. Go to my website, natashawarikoo.com. That has a lot of my work, and you can look at my recent books, Race at the Top and Is Affirmative Action Fair?

Bacon: Good. This was a great conversation, and thanks for joining me. Great to see you. Take care.

Warikoo: Thanks so much for having me.

Bacon: Bye-bye.

Following Army Secretary Dan Driscoll’s resignation on Wednesday, Senator Thom Tillis called for President Trump to fire Hegseth, saying that he has “never witnessed more inept management” at the Pentagon.

“If we had a @SecWar who maintained the same priorities and forward-thinking, he would be fighting to retain talented leaders like Dan and the many flag officers he has forced into retirement. Instead, he is creating a leadership void at the top of our military ranks,” Tillis wrote on X. “I urge the President to find a new leader at the Pentagon who will retain and empower our military talent rather than diminish it.”

Later on Wednesday, Republican Representative Don Bacon backed up Tillis.

“I agree with the sentiments of Senator Tillis. I hate to tell the president who he should hire and fire. I don’t know if it’s really my role, but I would say this: I would not—he would not be on my team. I think he is—he has not been a very good leader in many ways,” Bacon said on CNN regarding Hegseth.

Other Republicans have not yet called for Hegseth to go but have expressed concern over Driscoll’s departure.

“I was disappointed. I think he’s been a pretty solid guy. So disappointed,” Senator Mike Rounds told The Hill.

“I’m tired of all the churn,” Republican Representative Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said Tuesday. “I want to see some stability over there.”

Driscoll informed Trump personally about his fears of a weakened military with all of the high-level military purges pushed by Hegseth. Initial reports suggested that Trump was shocked at the news but has not signaled that any changes are forthcoming.

Inside Washington

Is this district the key to the 2026 midterms?

The closely watched rematch in Virginia’s 2nd congressional district between former Democratic Representative Elaine Luria and the Republican who defeated her in 2022 is shaping up to be a doozy. The famously swingy district in southeastern Virginia has close ties with the military. President Donald Trump’s war in Iran and commensurate hikes in energy costs—and the extent to which sitting Republican Representative Jen Kiggans gets tagged with them—will define the election.

“Usually, foreign conflicts engender a rally round the flag sentiment in military communities. But in this case, the handling of the Iran war has caused well-publicized hardships for the military, especially sailors. This creates a challenge for Republicans in the 2nd district,” said Mark Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.*

In 2022, Kiggans successfully tied Luria to unpopular President Joe Biden. Now the situation is reversed. Trump’s national approval rating is consistently hovering below 40 percent, and he is presiding over an economy that Americans view unfavorably.

“Although Republican voters are notable for their loyalty, the combination of the war going badly and high gas prices will weaken the reflexive support of some GOP voters. The effect will be amplified among independent voters,” Rozell continued.

Luria has focused on Trump before, including as a member of the select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol—and has acknowledged that her service on that panel may have cost her reelection. But she’s concentrating her campaign on Kiggans’s support for the current Trump administration, not the previous one.

“She’s not a moderate. She can’t separate herself from Trump,” Luria said of Kiggans on MS NOW’s Morning Joe this week, pointing to Kiggans’s vote in favor of legislation that cut Medicaid and other government benefits, and her vote against renewing expired Affordable Care Act subsidies. Luria has also hammered Kiggans over her positions on the Iran war: Kiggans voted seven times against resolutions that would have directed Trump to end the war or seek congressional approval.

Kiggans said in August that she would “like to see that conflict wrap up so we can bring our military men and women home.” But Luria has criticized Kiggans for previously dismissing reports of bleak conditions on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, which is now headed home after a nine-month deployment. “It really shows a lack of care and concern for our military, our military families,” Luria said on Morning Joe. Both Kiggans and Luria are Navy veterans.

The district is uncommonly purple, with voters hopping between narrow support for candidates of both parties in federal and state elections. Although Kiggans flipped the seat in 2022, Trump’s margin of victory in the district was only 0.2 percent in 2024, and Democrat Abigail Spanberger earned just over 53 percent of the vote in the 2025 gubernatorial race. There’s consensus among political analysts on the unpredictability of the contest between Luria and Kiggans: The Cook Political Report, Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, and Inside Elections have all rated the seat as a “toss-up.”

Carolyn Fiddler, a left-leaning state elections expert based in Virginia, told The New Republic that the district has a strong politically independent streak. When she first ran, Kiggans was able to cast herself as more moderate, but now she has a record of supporting Trump’s policies.

“She’s doing nothing to really distance herself from Trump, and I think that’s going to cut against her,” Fiddler continued. Virginia Beach, one of the district’s hubs, is also a key site for wind farm construction—which Trump has opposed. Hampton Roads, the district’s other main city, is also prone to flooding, meaning that climate change could be a concern in the election. “These environmental concerns provide another whole avenue of opportunities for Luria to set herself apart,” said Fiddler.

The race is being closely monitored by House leadership, with Speaker Mike Johnson saying during a visit to the district in August that it “will determine the fate of the country because this will be a close election.” He isn’t being hyperbolic. J. Miles Coleman, the associate editor at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, told The New Republic by email that the fate of the 2nd district would be an indicator of Democrats’ overall chances of taking the House.

“Since the 2008 elections, the party that has won VA-2 has also won the House overall; so Democrats could capture the House without it, but it would be a bit of a curiosity if they didn’t,” Coleman wrote. “If Democrats fail to win VA-2, the majority could still be within reach for Republicans. If Democrats flip VA-2, they probably have at least a majority in the 220s.”

—Grace Segers

Outside Washington

It probably won’t get the attention it deserves—climate fatigue is real—but amid devastating news of flash floods on multiple continents, unprecedented heat waves and revised estimates of heat-related deaths, widespread wildfires, and plummeting harvests, the United Nations has released another climate report, and it’s a doozy. The longtime goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial temperatures is toast, dozens of climate scientists say: Earth will pass that point in a few years. The urgent task now is to reduce emissions with extreme speed, and “aggressively pursue measures that pull heat-trapping gases out of the atmosphere, so global temperatures will start to decline,” The Washington Post reports. “In a best-case scenario, this pathway will limit the planet’s time above 1.5 degrees to a few decades.” The bad news is that carbon removal at scale so far remains highly hypothetical, and even if that changes, “it will not restore the world we once knew.” The Post’s Sarah Kaplan reviews some of the details, and attempts to end on a hopeful—or at least agency-promoting—note: “The report’s authors urged people to stay focused on what scientists do know: That every fraction of a degree matters. That the sooner humanity acts, the safer our future will be.”

Earlier this summer, Inside Climate News analyzed congressional press releases, finding that Democrats’ mentions of climate change had fallen precipitously in recent years, even though there’s little evidence to support this strategy of retreat. A few Democrats, including Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Representative Ro Khanna, have sharply criticized this trend within the party and urged politicians to talk more about the climate crisis.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

Thursday at 9:30 a.m. the Center for Strategic and International Studies will release a live webcast in which the organization’s Energy Security and Climate Change Program director Joseph Majkut and senior adviser Kevin Brook discuss “the new U.S.-Venezuela oil agreement and what it signals about the growing role of energy in geopolitical competition.”

Public Citizen released a new report alleging that “many” of the companies involved in President Trump’s $3 billion critical minerals initiative “are examples of potential cronyism or are still in the early stages of development.” The watchdog lists examples of firms that “are only nine months old, connected to the administration’s family members or donors, associated with past fraud or fraud allegations, or whose financial backers remain largely hidden from public view.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Here’s Why That’s B.S.

Why is JD Vance talking about the end of the world with a 22-year-old podcaster? Watch TNR’s Edie Olmsted get into this mess of a story.

Political Trivia Question of the Day

With so many eyes on the Texas Senate race, two questions: Who was the last elected Democratic senator from Texas, and who was the last actually liberal Democratic senator from Texas? The former beat the latter in the 1970 Democratic primary, pounding him from the right over his opposition to the Vietnam War. (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

* This quote was previously attributed to the wrong person.

The Department of Treasury proposed a new rule Thursday that would require the IRS to deny tax-exempt status to any private school offering targeted support for Black and minority students. If implemented, the rule will go into effect on May 31, 2027, and affect an estimated 18,000 schools across the country.

The Trump administration has long asserted that the very programs meant to address the nation’s history of racial discrimination and segregation are themselves a form of racial discrimination in violation of federal standards. The new rule comes amid sweeping efforts by the government to gut funding from supposedly diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and to reallocate any money that’s not earmarked for the white—sorry, right—purposes.

The proposed rule could have stark implications for historically Black colleges and universities, which are currently tax-exempt. Even as the Trump administration made efforts to gut funding for programs pushing DEI at other schools, these institutions previously received a financial boost from the Trump administration, a surprising move that gave some the impression that the president has no problem with Black people in Black spaces. He just couldn’t stomach them attending the universities his friends’ kids might go to.

The proposed rule also stands to gut charitable giving from donors. If schools fail to comply with the Trump administration’s rule and lose their tax-exempt status, donors’ gifts would no longer be considered tax-deductible. If schools hope to retain their tax-exempt status, the proposed regulation would force institutions to work with donors to determine alternative sets of eligibility criteria for scholarship recipients.

The proposed rule is likely to face legal challenges, but it comes as the Supreme Court has gutted protections against racial discrimination toward Black and minority communities by pretending we all live in a postracial society.

Black had appeared before the committee for a voluntary, closed-door interview on June 26, where lawmakers used the brief meeting to subpoena Black regarding two nondisclosure agreements he had with different women and to demand he return for a videotaped deposition under oath on September 3.

But Black did not show up. Instead, Black’s legal team filed a lawsuit, suing the committee in an attempt to block the subpoenas.

Earlier this week, Black was identified by outgoing representative Thomas Massie as one of 14 co-conspirators and “perpetrators” of Epstein’s crimes that the lawmaker said the Justice Department should immediately investigate.

In a 28-page complaint, Black’s legal team claimed there was “no justification for such a sweeping and intrusive subpoena served upon a private citizen.”

“Mr. Black supports the congressional efforts to stamp out trafficking and to ensure that this country never has another Jeffrey Epstein. But Mr. Black has already testified to Congress that Epstein had nothing to do with drafting or creating any confidentiality agreements he may possess,” the complaint reads. “He has also informed the Congress that [Ghislaine] Maxwell had nothing to do whatsoever with any such agreements.”

Black co-founded and led Apollo Global Management until 2021, when he was ousted after an internal review found he had significant ties to Epstein, including more than $150 million in payments for financial advice between 2012 and 2017.

Two years later, an unidentified Jane Doe sued Black for allegedly raping her when she was just 16 years old in Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse. The graphic lawsuit detailed that the victim had autism and a rare form of Down syndrome that has left her “developmentally … at about 12 years old.” It was the third such lawsuit accusing Black of rape.

MS NOW’s Priya Sridhar appeared on The Last Word Wednesday night after speaking with some of the 5,000 sailors deployed for nearly 300 days onboard the aircraft carrier during their long-awaited port call in Pattaya, Thailand.

“Many of them told me that this was in fact the worst deployment that they have ever experienced,” Sridhar said. “It was incredibly hard. And many of them expressed to me that they actually wished they hadn’t even done a port call, at this point, they wanted to just go directly home.”

The sailors also expressed concerns that amid President Trump’s ongoing war with Iran, lengthier deployments would become normalized and hurt Navy retention, especially among junior service members, Sridhar said.

MSnow: Now, I also got a chance to speak to some of the crew, the regular rank and file sailors who are part of this 5000 member crew that have been on this record setting deployment. And many of them told me that this was, in fact, the worst deployment that they have ever… pic.twitter.com/ioRSuPoH1a

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 3, 2026

Families of sailors aboard the Lincoln have come forward with reports about their relatives’ experiences with poor conditions, food shortages, and sanitation issues. During the Lincoln’s record-breaking deployment, there have been multiple instances in which sailors tried to jump overboard. One sailor who attempted to jump overboard is reportedly facing disciplinary action and could lose half his pay.

But the Navy’s problems are more widespread than just the Lincoln. Trump’s extended military campaign in the Middle East and total disregard for the conditions U.S. service members are facing is seriously killing morale, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s lackluster leadership certainly isn’t helping.

It looks like the issue will only continue to escalate, as Trump is reportedly plotting to ramp up military action against Iran after the midterm elections.

The House will no longer vote in the final two weeks of September as previously scheduled, according to a notice from Majority Whip Tom Emmer’s office. After a Labor Day break, the House will only be in session for four days before representatives head home again  for all of October. 

Rather than pass laws regarding the war on Iran, data centers, the Epstein Files, the affordability crisis, or any of the litany of other issues burdening Americans right now, members of Congress will return home to focus on campaigning for their own reelections—or just take the two-month paid vacation they’ve just granted themselves.  

This comes just days after Speaker Mike Johnson called Representative Thomas Massie “stupid” and “nonsensical” for suggesting that he was going to send the House home to avoid voting on the Epstein Transparency Act II. 

“Tuesday I tweeted Mike Johnson would recess Congress until after the election in an attempt to stymie our latest Epstein bill,” Massie wrote Thursday on X. “Johnson went on TV adamantly saying that was STUPID and we’d work every day. Today he announced we’ll recess on Sept 17… until after the election!”

House members will clear out of the nation’s capital by September 17. 

This story has been updated.  

Donald Trump defended one such slipup Thursday, shielding Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick after his longtime adviser claimed that no Americans had been harmed in Iran.

“Sec. Lutnick had Venezuela on his mind when he said nobody was killed. 18 people were killed in Iran!” Trump posted on Truth Social.

But Lutnick did not mince his words when he flubbed the statistic during an interview with CNBC on Wednesday, making it abundantly clear that the secretary understood he was speaking about Iran.

“The way the president is playing Iran, right, there’s not—there haven’t been American deaths, it’s really just an economic choke-out, which the administration is now executing more broadly and I think it’ll be very effective,” Lutnick told the network.

Whether or not Lutnick was thinking about Venezuela when he opened his mouth hardly matters. His inability to get the facts right revealed just how clueless the Cabinet member is about the administration’s warmongering, whether that relates to an unpopular Middle East war that has cost the American public hundreds of billions of dollars and more than a dozen American lives, or the decision to indiscriminately bomb boats in the Caribbean, infiltrate a South American government, and abduct its leader.

Nonetheless, Lutnick embraced Trump’s cover, writing in a statement Thursday that he “misspoke.”

“Eighteen members of our military have died, and to those families my heart breaks and I am so very sorry for their loss,” Lutnick wrote on X. “I was thinking about the Venezuelan military operation where no service members died.”

Lutnick then invoked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attack, claiming that he was “deeply thankful for our military and the sacrifices the men and women who serve our great country make.” He noted that he lost his brother Gary and hundreds of his “close friends and colleagues” in the World Trade Center collapse.

Last Friday, the CDC held off on its annual Friday measles update, waiting instead until Sunday, when it removed the Pennsylvania fatalities, adding a note that read, “At this time, available information does not establish whether measles caused or contributed to the (Pennsylvania) deaths or whether the individuals died from other causes while infected with measles.”

The change was made at Kennedy’s personal request, three sources familiar with the conversation told Reuters.

This decision came days after Kennedy and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro traded barbs online, with Shapiro accusing Kennedy of stoking fear and spreading misinformation by claiming that the measles vaccine contained “fetal tissue,” and that the disease could be cured with “chicken soup and vitamin A.”

“Before [RFK Jr.] held his current position, measles was virtually eliminated in the United States,” Shapiro wrote on X last week. “As recently as 2024, there were only 285 cases of measles across the entire country over 12 months. This year, in just 8 months, there are nearly 400 cases of measles across 29 counties in Pennsylvania alone—and nearly 3,000 cases across the country.... The correlation is clear: Secretary Kennedy has stoked confusion amongst parents and others—and the result has been less protection from measles and more cases.”

Even still, newly appointed CDC head Erica Schwartz removed the deaths from the measles tally in Pennsylvania at RFK Jr.’s behest, completely delegitimizing the findings of the state health care apparatus. Former American Public Health Association chief executive Georges Benjamin called that move “unheard of.”

“The secretary had no business ​interfering in the normal process,” he said. “He has an anti-vaccine agenda and he’s using this to play out his anti-vaccine agenda.”

As Shapiro noted, measles is virtually entirely preventable due to the development of the MMR vaccine, an acronym for “measles, mumps, and rubella.” RFK Jr. of course loathes this vaccine, and his rhetoric against it has surely contributed to the resurgence of the disease—and the deaths which he ordered erased from the database.

The CDC denied Reuters’s reporting and the legitimacy of Pennsylvania’s measles count, writing to The New Republic: “CDC has a responsibility to ensure its reporting accurately distinguishes between what is known and what remains unconfirmed. The information currently posted reflects the best available information and our commitment to transparency and telling the American people the truth—a foundational principle of the Trump Administration.”

This story has been updated.

Reuters reports that White House officials want any new offenses in the war to come after the November vote to prevent heavy losses in the election. For now, the focus is on economic pressure against Iran in order to get a better peace deal, anonymous sources told Reuters.

“We are keeping the pressure on Iran,” an official said. “But November is a priority.”

The latest polls show that the war is highly unpopular, with 63 percent of Americans disapproving of the conflict versus only 31 percent in approval. Iran has every incentive to make things worse in the next two months and step up its attacks on U.S. military bases in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has extended troop deployments into 2027, signaling that the war won’t end anytime soon. Warship crews, air defense units, and paratroopers are among those whose deployments have been prolonged. Anonymous sources told The Wall Street Journal that the move is meant to give Trump more options in the war, but it’s also pushing troops to their limits and causing a maintenance backlog.

It’s not clear what Trump will actually do, although the Journal reports that he is discussing how to declare the war over. On Wednesday, he claimed that he was happy with the economic pressure campaign against Iran, but complained about the Iranian people failing to “rise up and fight.” Whatever happens next is not likely to please the American people or ease pressure on the struggling economy.

Speaking at a dinner at the White House Rose Garden Wednesday, Trump promised to campaign for the Texas attorney general—but couldn’t resist telling everyone what he actually thinks about the Republican Senate hopeful.

“So, Ken Paxton, you might not like the way he dresses. And I say this—it’s so insulting to him, but I might as well say it—you might not like the way he looks,” Trump said. “You might not love his look. You might not love his television interviews, but he was the best attorney general in the country, perhaps, he was one of the best in the entire country. And that speaks a lot louder than the suit he’s wearing that doesn’t look so great. Or than anything, frankly.”

Trump: Ken Paxton, you might not like the way he dresses, and I say this, it's so insulting to him, but I might as well say it. You might not like the way he looks. You might not love his television interviews. But he was the best attorney general and that speaks a lot louder… pic.twitter.com/TOu5IP31WE

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 2, 2026

It’s not exactly surprising that Trump’s thinking is so transparently shallow—after all, he’s scouted half his Cabinet members from television shows—but his humiliating outburst highlights how little control the 80-year-old president has over what he says in public.

Trump has repeatedly pledged his desire to see Paxton elected but has yet to commit any part of his $400 million MAGA Inc. war chest to help him win. Meanwhile, Paxton has struggled to match Democratic candidate James Talarico’s funding. According to the latest quarterly filing with the Federal Election Commission, Talarico’s campaign had raked in $31.6 million, while Paxton had only raised $9.3 million.

Instead, Trump has directed his super PAC to spend on ads that focus not on the Republican candidates who are running for the House and Senate, but on the president himself.

If this is how Trump talks about his friends, well … I guess we’ve actually seen him talk about his enemies a lot, and that was really bad, too.

She passed away peacefully in her New York City residence, according to a statement posted Thursday on her Instagram account. She was 92.

“Gloria’s near-century on earth were years well-lived, and she continued working for equality until the very end,” the statement read. “Gloria’s greatest gift was her ability to listen to others, to make others feel seen and heard. Her words, actions, and example gave people permission to be their truest selves. Gloria lived true to her independent spirit, always with curiosity and a great sense of humor.”

Steinem emerged as a leader of the second-wave feminist movement through the 1960s and ’70s. She often served as the face of a movement that—in no small part due to her influence—witnessed the development of Title IX, laws and regulations guarding women’s legal and financial rights, the passage of Roe v. Wade, the first United Nations World Conference on Women, and the national expansion of rape crisis centers, turning what had previously been a private issue into a political debate on equality.

Steinem’s journalism career was similarly profound. She broke into the national writing scene in 1962 with a feature for Esquire on contraceptive use that became a vehicle for Steinem to argue against the contemporary demands placed on women, forcing them to choose between having a career or having children.

Her star shone even brighter the following year when she published “A Bunny’s Tale” in Show magazine, exposing the exploitative labor conditions, unsafe working environment, and abysmal pay rates offered to New York City’s famed Playboy Bunnies. To write it, Steinem went undercover for a year, applying to a classified ad under a pseudonym, Marie Ochs, to work at the city’s Playboy Club.

In interviews throughout her career, Steinem explained that it was a 1969 abortion rally that changed the trajectory of her life, morphing her from a nascent journalism star into a public activist. Steinem had gotten an abortion herself years earlier—in 1957—when the procedure was illegal.

Steinem had no biological children but is survived by the four stepchildren she gained from her husband, David Bale, one of whom is actor Christian Bale.

This story has been updated.

Her debut novel, Lives of the Saints (1985), is her best-known work, now reissued by New York Review Books. Her book-length courtroom reportage, The Ritz of the Bayou (1987), has been reissued by Hub City Press. Lemann’s unofficial title for The Ritz of the Bayou, a perfect companion to Lives of the Saints, is “Lives of the Sinners.” And a new novel, The Oyster Diaries, caps off the renaissance. Also published by NYRB, it has a charmingly discursive, drawer-emptying quality, a novel stitched together from journal entries, stray vignettes, and perhaps the once-discarded heels of other projects.

Lemann’s career revival arrives during a boom of rediscovery, a golden age for reclaiming a lost author. Reissued work is sometimes overpraised, out of an urge to embrace a great artist who went out on the tide of obscurity. And so it’s exciting and alarming to discover how worthy Lemann’s work is of reclamation: her crackling humor, her sharp and soulful observations of character. Her fiction, thin on plot and thick on atmosphere, defies many tired rules of novel writing, just as Ritz defies the rules of journalism. Tina Brown, who originally commissioned it to run in Vanity Fair, found it unpublishable due to Lemann’s total disregard for the details of the case. Lemann was in pursuit of something greater than telling a story or holding attention.

Her career has been refreshingly unproductive. She writes the only way she knows how: comic, intuitive, frustrating, discursive, self-doubting. Her novels are light on plot because she views life as unplotted. She writes toward her idiosyncrasies—with repetitions, streaks of reverie, and narrative self-effacement—and her novels model and reward a form of attention akin to worship. These tendencies have crystallized into the style of a great artist, one of the most charming American prose writers alive today.

Lemann was born in New Orleans in 1956. She grew up across the street from the writer Walker Percy, who became her literary mentor and hero. Much like Louise Brown, the narrator of Lives of the Saints, Lemann attended Brown University before returning to New Orleans, where she got a job at a law firm, lived a vibrant social life, and forced herself to write a novel. Freshly returned to the city of her birth, and seeing it with a new love and longing, Lemann wrote Saints in three months, filling it to the brim with a nostalgia for youth even as her youth was still unfolding.

Invoked more as a term of endearment than of caution, the “wastrel-youth contingent” of the novel is best represented by Claude Collier, an improbably dashing alcoholic. Claude is a clever inventor—his shrimp-peeling machine is a hit—a blue-eyed Catholic, and, sitting squarely in the crosshairs of Louise’s longing gaze, the novel’s leading man. There’s the will-they-won’t-they question of romance, as well as another will-they-won’t-they: Will Louise succeed or fail in saving Claude from himself? “I’m falling apart,” says Claude. “She’s falling apart,” he says, pointing at Louise. “Everyone is falling apart,” he concludes. Saints is a haunted book, its young people settling prematurely into the neuroses and shortcomings that will stunt their chances at happiness.

Claude’s family is an eccentric collection of members of the New Orleans patrician class: the father an oyster-obsessed lawyer who’s studying ancient Greek, the mother a Northern transplant studiously adapting to the customs of high society Southern living. Louise, drawn to Claude and the Colliers, hangs around like a chronicler of their antics, serving as the solo audience for their performances of self. Louise’s own family is more roughly sketched. Raised by her aunts—who never appear—Louise is the heiress to a Mississippi lumber fortune, of which Mr. Collier is a trustee.

The novel opens with a long party scene, the wedding reception to celebrate the union of Henry Laines and Mary Grace—peers of Claude and Louise—who offer a grim picture of marriage in the upper crust. Henry Laines is also “falling apart” because “he was made that way. He was made to scream wild declarations of love to women in dressing rooms and gardens, and then throw pots and pans on them.” And Mary Grace? “Life ran high in Mary Grace,” observes Louise. “It takes generosity to love … and she had loved many. But she was in a state of Total Chaos, among the madcap palms and honorable oaks, as society shed its bloodshot eyes upon the scene.” In Saints, the palms—like the people—are madcap, the rain slashes into the azaleas, love is a little doomed, and Louise cuts through the brush to see into the clearing of a person’s troubled soul.

For the first half of the novel, it seems Lemann is content to move from one languid set piece to the next: first the wedding, then a sprawling Sunday afternoon and evening at the Colliers’. Then tragedy strikes, interrupting the rhythms of the book. In the middle of the night, Saint—Claude’s younger brother—falls from the balcony; in the morning he’s found dead in the garden. Without him, the Colliers lose their engine of purpose and suffer the stuckness of grief, the “unlawfulness” of loss.

Writing for The New York Times in 1985, Michiko Kakutani described Saints as a “musically patterned novel,” its repetitions powerfully accumulating over its span. It’s a near perfect work, and even my quarrels—the on-the-nose play on words of the title (Claude’s younger brother is named Saint), the noisy gimmick of Lemann’s intermittent capitalization—are subsumed by its merits. Lemann’s repetitions of description and pronouncement are her most conspicuous flourish of style, and they imbue her prose with a hypnotic and cyclical rhythm. Her characters do things over and over too, as when Louise says at breakfast: “Scrambled eggs, scrambled eggs, scrambled eggs, scrambled eggs,” and Claude replies, “Could you, uh, reiterate that?” These repetitions arise from an artful and persistent narrator approaching her subjects again and again from slightly altered angles; they speak to a keenness to remember things just so—to preserve the memory of a place and its people.

Louise is honing her observational skills, preparing for the life of a writer. But she is also placing her loved ones behind glass, protecting the artifacts of a cherished world: her home. “I don’t want it to be just in my memory,” says Claude, speaking for both of them, all. “I don’t want to forget.”

Although Lives of the Saints takes place over only three months, this single season of Louise’s young adulthood lends the orbiting people and events an outsize gravitational weight. Lemann’s book inverts one of the novel’s most useful tropes: Rather than have an older Louise look back on her younger self, Saints features the young Louise enshrining this period of her life, predetermining its importance and predicting—shaping—her own future: She will become someone for whom the Summer of Claude was monumentally consequential. Rather than a book of recollections, Saints is about the willful manufacture and prioritization of memory, the curation of a nostalgia to be felt in the future.

Oyster Diaries is a less heady dose of Lemann’s prose. It can feel less substantial than Saints, but its digressiveness lets in a refreshing breeze. Delery, a volunteer court monitor, lives in Washington, D.C., but she returns to New Orleans to visit her dying father. Delery sees herself in him, the man who never forgave her mother for being unfaithful; now Delery grapples with her own partner’s infidelity. Oyster Diaries is a sort of sequel to Saints, and Lemann returns to old themes, like the fallen angel Claude Collier, whom she can’t keep out of the book. In one of Delery’s remembrances of their wastrel youth, he materializes on a motorcycle wearing a black suit. Years later, they meet again, and Claude looms as the forbidden love of her life—an “old flame,” she calls him. “It is surprising how much you can love someone,” Delery reflects, although there is a “tortured quality” to her love for Claude. Claude married her dear friend Louise, a Pyrrhic victory that earns her the epithet “the long-suffering” Louise.

Do people change? “No man can escape himself,” Louise observes, referring to Claude, whose excess of alcoholic kindness reads as an evasion of his own despair—a faith in others to paper over the void of faith in himself. Or as Delery sees him: “His angelic self-effacement was causing him to ruin his life. Or at least it dampened his will to fight patent infringements.”

Delery and Claude share a common reverence. “He was in awe of his father,” Delery says of Claude, and she is too—of his and of her own. She is the adoring daughter of the titular oyster diarist, a lawyer who lunched: For 20 years he kept a careful record of the oysters he consumed at a restaurant across the street from the courthouse. The log includes such entries as “Sept . 19—passable” and “Sept . 29—not so hot.” Delery assesses the diary and its keeper: “It is the work of a madman.”

The Oyster Diaries the novel is about the death of the fathers—Delery’s, her husband Jack’s, Claude’s, all. Squinting, one can even read the novel as an ode to a vanishing place. “You won’t find a new country,” reads the book’s opening epigraph from C.P. Cavafy. The dads are dying, taking the world with them. Claude’s father drops dead in his seersucker suit, which only further enrobes Claude in melancholy. “The hero is one already well acquainted with grief,” Delery notes. Her own father lives on and on for years, long enough to marry her best friend—once a peer, now her stepmother.

Delery’s own children only pity her. Rather than deify her, her daughters see their mother as a child. Annoyed with her for suffering Jack’s transgressions, they find out about their father’s affair before she does—and force him to confess. Delery is like Louise in Saints, if Louise grew into the elder guardian of her own naïveté. “Idiotic innocence” is how Delery describes her state. For isn’t the gauzy glow of nostalgia a form of enforced naïveté—the deliberate selection of the good, the convenient omission of the bad?

Ritz of the Bayou is a different kind of portrait of home. Lemann’s work of gonzo journalism is ostensibly about the corruption trial of Edwin Edwards, governor of Louisiana, but she can barely bring herself to discuss the specifics of the charges, so busy is she describing the elegance of the defense attorneys and the cracked and attractive nobility of the governor himself. A shaggy, sweaty riff on the proverb that the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know, Ritz asks who would trust, or lust after, a governor who wasn’t corrupt? Our leaders should be brutally human, she suggests, lousy with imperfection and contradiction.

“A flawed thing may be more full of life than a perfect thing,” Lemann writes in Ritz; the line could serve as a summary of her broader artistic project and her attraction to the beautiful and broken. Lemann shows a weakness for white-haired men, and her writing is full of a tenderness toward the patrician Southerner, the august but fragile figure of faded glory. In Oyster Diaries, there’s the father, who marries Delery’s best friend; in Saints, there’s Mr. Collier, Claude’s father, who listens to opera while he gardens in seersucker shorts. In Ritz, there’s the defense attorney Camille Gravel, “a drawling white-haired gent of seventy” who was “perhaps the hero of the courtroom”—not to mention Governor Edwards himself, the white-haired and scandal-clad leader of Louisiana who once said the only thing that could take him down was being “caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.” Lemann, starry-eyed with esteem for the crooked man, seems to agree.

Lemann doesn’t shy from grand pronouncements about the South and its people. From Saints: “The way your slip was showing,” Claude says to Louise, “it reminded me of the South.” “He had the levity of the Southerner, a brave thing, being actually desperation masked by levity.” “Southerners need carbonation.” “I was experiencing life in the slow lane—the South.” “Southerners do not like philosophical conversations.” Lemann even posits his and hers Southern traits: “his Southern-boy crackpot streak,” “his Southern inscrutability, his Southern good-old-boy aspects”; her “Southern butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth demeanor.”

It was Walker Percy, Lemann’s beloved mentor, who wrote in his novel The Moviegoer about “the genie-soul of the place which every place has or else is not a place.” He observed: “One step out into the brilliant March day and there it is as big as life, the genie-soul of the place which, wherever you go, you must meet and master first thing or be met and mastered.” Nancy Lemann is a writer of uncommon commitment to capturing the genie-soul of New Orleans. Her repetitions are the persistent attempts to meet and master its memory and essence, and these three books reveal just how faithfully and lovingly Lemann has strived to capture its spirit.

Titled “Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology?,” the “study” was something that the department had “commissioned,” according to an August 26 press release. HHS Assistant Secretary for Health Brian Christine said the publication “raises important questions” and that “the association between sex-rejecting clinical beliefs, authoritarian attitudes, and the justification of political violence warrant serious scientific scrutiny.” Here, the department has unwittingly raised another “important” question: Why has HHS decided to commit public resources to investigate an alleged “association” between support for transgender people and political violence? That question demands actually serious scrutiny.

Don’t mistake this publication for science. Functionally, it has more in common with the president’s anti-trans and anti-left executive orders than it does with any scientific paper subject to peer review. Its authors position the report as an intervention, countering existing literature that regards “opposition towards ‘gender affirming’ norms” as “a symptom of prejudice,” as well as challenging work that “assumed” that “authoritarianism was primarily a right-wing phenomenon.” This is not much more than a lightly sourced remix of common right-wing talking points, amounting to the same old thing: Have you considered that the right are unfairly painted as bigots, when it’s the left that are the real aggressors?

It makes sense that in commissioning this report, then, HHS turned to think-tank fellows whose other work aligns with the administration’s goals, specifically its broad campaign to characterize the left—and queer and trans people, in particular—as a security threat or as domestic terrorists. One of the authors, Colin Wright, hails from both the right-wing Manhattan Institute and the anti-trans group Genspect’s own think tank, the Killarney Group. Genspect is a leading player in an international network of anti-trans groups known for using pseudoscience to undermine efforts to protect the health and rights of trans people. Another report author, Joel Finkelstein, is the co-founder of the Network Contagion Research Institute, or NCRI, which has repeatedly sought to link the left with ”extremism,” including by espousing false equivalencies between political violence from the left and the right. Finkelstein is the only author disclosed as an NCRI affiliate, but the three other authors have co-authored previous NCRI reports (such as “The Corruption of the American Mind” and “Instructing Animosity: How DEI Pedagogy Produces the Hostile Attribution Bias”). However, they are identified in the HHS report only as being affiliated with Rutgers University—with which NCRI is itself affiliated.

It is not surprising, given these authors, that the report recalls earlier Network Contagion Research Institute work; as respectably as it may be packaged, it delivers content ready to drive right-wing news cycles. One 2024 NCRI report warned that diversity, equity, and inclusion programs “may implicitly or explicitly characterize members of so-called ‘dominant’ groups—or those who disagree with ‘anti-oppressive,’ ‘anti-racist,’ or contemporary ‘anti-fascist’ frameworks—as oppressive, racist, or fascist.” (Four of the five authors of the HHS report worked on that one.) Another NCRI report on “militant anarcho-socialist networks” from 2020, which shares two co-authors with the HHS report, included subheads like, “ACAB-LINKED MEMES APPEAR WITH CLEAR CALLS FOR VIOLENCE VIRTUALLY AND ARE USED TO SYMBOLICALLY OUST STATE AUTHORITY AND MARK TERRITORY IN THE REAL WORLD.” (ACAB, of course, is international shorthand for “All Cops Are Bastards.”) Lately, NCRI has accused the Democratic Socialists of America of being a “foreign agent”—dovetailing nicely with Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s own attempts to drag DSA into his vintage midcentury anti-Communist crusade.

To be clear: The publication of this anti-trans report is not a case of decent, evidence-minded experts at HHS being deceived. The agency’s Assistant Secretary for Health Brian Christine, who promoted the report, and whose X profile includes a banner reading “Make America Healthy Again,” regularly promotes medical misinformation about transition popularized by anti-trans groups. On August 13, promoting another recent HHS “commissioned” report, called “Wolves in White Coats,” Christine accused providers of gender-affirming care of having “mutilated, and then cast aside,” children “for profit and politics.” In fact, Christine was a speaker at a 2026 Genspect lobby day in Washington. That HHS turned to someone who works for some of those same anti-trans groups to produce this latest “study” also, unfortunately, tracks.

The new HHS report does do something quite unique, however, even as it recalls both historic Red and Lavender scares: It provides the appearance of a scientific basis for the administration’s obsession with connecting what it calls “gender ideology” with political violence. Here, I’m using its terminology only because it speaks to an umbrella category that doesn’t quite have an affirmative term. In essence, the administration is referring to people who are trans and those who defend trans people. This is the cohort the authors attempted to capture in their whopping sample of 1,208 participants, who were recruited through a platform on which people are paid to take surveys. (I reached out to the report’s co-principal investigators through Rutgers University, with which they as well as NCRI are affiliated, but received no response.) Through that platform, respondents were asked to do essentially two surveys: one to evaluate what the authors called “endorsement of ‘gender-affirming’ norms” and one about their support for “left-wing authoritarianism.” Taken together, the authors claimed, the results “suggest that gender ideology is associated with [left-wing authoritarianism] and willingness to justify political violence.” To say that one thing suggests an association with another thing is certainly a sentence that suggests such an association—but it’s not a finding.

The report HHS published does not prove that “gender ideology” radicalizes people; it demonstrates only that the administration is trying to make that case, and that’s why this is so chilling. Unfortunately, this report is not the only evidence of the administration’s aims. In Trump’s blitz of executive orders after he returned to office last January, one of the first was titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” At the same time, Trump issued his pardons of January 6 rioters. Altogether, the administration would now position trans people, not Trump supporters, as the “real” extremists.

Since then, the administration has only accelerated its efforts to link trans people and violent extremism. In the Justice Department’s attempts to prosecute people for resisting Immigration and Customs Enforcement, among those charged in some of the highest-profile cases, trans people are vastly overrepresented. Take, for instance, the Prairieland cases, which resulted in multiple trans and nonbinary activists sentenced to decades in prison, as well as the Spokane 3 cases, in which one ICE agent’s transphobic posts on X were revealed. Then there is NSPM-7, a national security memo issued by Trump nearly one year ago, which attempts to define as “domestic terrorists” people who espouse “extremism on migration, race, and gender,” as well as “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” The new White House counterterrorism strategy, released in May, pledges to “prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.” It also claims that Charlie Kirk was killed by “a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.”

There is more, and worse—much of which is not worth dignifying, like the right’s immediate attempts to claim each new mass shooter as trans, or the Heritage Foundation pressuring the FBI to designate what it calls “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violence and Extremism” as domestic terrorism.

The propaganda that pulls it all together, however, comes from White House and Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller, who spoke this July on “the resurgence of political terrorism.” Miller did not name trans people directly, but given all of the above, how the administration has worked to collapse “the left” and “trans people” and “extremists,” it is hard not to read gender in this screed. I apologize for quoting from it at length, but keep in mind: These are the words of the White House and of Homeland Security at what was supposed to be a counterterrorism event.

“The leftist looks at a perfect family with a perfect life and a perfect job and perfect kids that goes to church every Sunday and is filled with a feeling of inadequacy and jealousy, and they covet,” Miller began. “It’s not a coincidence that when you look at these violent antifa demonstrations, you see any photograph of those who were assembled—to be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. Not one looks normal. They’re all deformed in some way—in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism.” He went on: “Every one of them, through the course of their life and their decisions, has scarred their body and their appearance, in many different ways, to the point in which their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred.”

Then Miller invoked the opposite of the “deformed”: “Trust your instincts—to all people and across all civilizations. You know what normal is. You know what beautiful is. You know what good is,” he said, sounding like a children’s book. “You know that children are precious and beautiful and must be protected.” Protected from what? When the “violent leftist” sees all that normal, beautiful goodness, Miller said, “that burns an ember in them, and that’s how you end up with the horrors we’ve seen throughout history, where good families are dragged out into the street and executed.” He was asking without asking: What wouldn’t you want us to do, if it could save your children?

That sentiment is the true backdrop to the publication of this HHS report: not only the acceleration of anti-trans misinformation and bad science but the pattern of scapegoating trans people and anyone who defends them. As with other Trump administration attacks on trans people, the report didn’t have to be well executed or even believable to work as designed. As much as anything voiced by Trump or Miller, the report functions as propaganda, built on a question that can’t produce an answer, only dehumanization and fear.

Rather, the court held that the stay on construction should be lifted because the plaintiffs lacked standing and the order was irreparably harming the administration. Both aspects of the decision were flawed.

To sue in federal court you need standing, and the bedrock of standing is injury—something “concrete and particularized” that is “actual or imminent.” The typical injury is financial or physical, but the court has long recognized the possibility of aesthetic injury, particularly in environmental cases. So, for example, in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, the court held that the “desire to observe an animal species, even for purely esthetic purposes,” is “undeniably a cognizable interest for purpose of standing.”

There’s an ethereal quality to aesthetic injury, but that doesn’t make it vaporous. We can appreciate a landscape, or work of art, or historical battlefield, or public building with sustained passion and intensity, and its loss takes something valuable from us, whether it costs us money or not. That was the basis for standing in the ballroom lawsuit, and it’s difficult to see how it could be more concrete.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation brought the lawsuit. To sue as an organization, it had to put forward one member with standing in her own right. And in this case that was Alison Hoagland. Hoagland is not, as Trump sneered, some lady who happens to walk by. She is a professor of history and historic preservation, an authority on American architecture, and a Washington resident who goes to look at the White House because looking at it is, for her, the whole point.

The five-justice per curiam, or unsigned, opinion, did not purport to overrule the cases that say so. Rather, it pooh-poohed Hoagland’s felt harm, recasting her documented, decades-deep professional interest as “mere offense,” no different, in the majority’s telling, from “virtually every citizen” who wants “to challenge virtually every government action that they do not like.”

The court carved off the environmental precedents on the ground that those plaintiffs did “more than” look: They fished, they swam, they hiked. In his dissent for four justices, Chief Justice John Roberts fairly demolished that argument, pointing out that the principal way anyone enjoys a historic building is precisely by looking at it and that the court had misconceived Hoagland’s injury.

What the majority actually did by way of determining that the administration was likely to prevail on the merits was narrow aesthetic standing to the vanishing point. As of now, “I want to look at a crocodile” passes muster while “I want to look at the White House” does not. And since it’s hard to think of any prospective challenger to the ballroom who would not be relying on aesthetic injury, there is no clear path around the court’s tacit reframing of the doctrine.

To grant the stay, the Supreme Court also needed to find that the administration would be irreparably injured if the stay weren’t granted.

The court’s first recognition of irreparable harm was the mere fact that the executive will was frustrated. That is blatant bootstrapping that just restates the court’s legal judgment, but it’s a move that has become routine for the conservative supermajority.

The court also credited an argument from the administration that the ballroom’s “height and mass” are “crucial” to shield the underground installation from “kinetic impacts,” lest engineers “dig impractically deep.”

But this second theory was a mid-litigation invention. Roberts’s dissent guts it in a single devastating footnote. It points out that the government had earlier told the district court the opposite—that its below-ground security work was driven by concerns having nothing to do with the ballroom above it. And the injunction never touched that work: It barred only the ballroom, leaving the government free to build the underground facility and whatever was needed to protect it.

In fact, the actual irreparable harm is plainly on the plaintiffs’ side of the ledger. With the court’s decision, the crews will return to 20-hour days, with the goal of building the project up to a point where it may be impossible to undo.

With the majority ducking the merits, Roberts’s dissent went to the heart of the case. Not surprisingly, Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson joined without a word of their own, because the chief’s voice packed the most powerful punch.

Roberts’s opinion begins with the straight declaration that the ballroom is likely unlawful, in effect a raw power grab. Congress has expressly forbidden any building on federal park grounds in the District of Columbia without its express authorization, and it has given none. The two statutes the government waves around come nowhere near authorizing the president to raze the East Wing and put up a private ballroom with hundreds of millions in outside money.

He concludes with the true stakes of the disputes, and the enormous social injury of the court’s casual dismissal on standing grounds. “The White House,” he writes, “is not just any building, and … Hoagland is not just any person.” And he saves the perfect quote from Winston Churchill for his final paragraph: “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.”

That’s the real tragedy of the case, the point that eclipses standing doctrine and irreparable harm. Every court to consider the ballroom’s legality has found it likely unlawful. Four justices now say the same, and not one justice has written a word defending it. The five in the majority say only that they “do not pass upon” it, but that’s cold comfort when their ruling means that the unlawful project now resumes at deliberate breakneck speed.

It’s not simply the illegality. It’s vastly unpopular with the American people, the actual owners of the “people’s house.” It would destroy the neoclassical serenity of the most important public building in America. And it’s hideous.

The White House’s serene neoclassical design is the shape of democracy; Trump would convert it to a bloated monument to his own megalomania. Only a consummate and abject failure of all of government—a corrupt president, a pliable and quiescent Congress, and a cynical Supreme Court refusing to confront the real stakes of the case—could even make it possible. But that’s precisely what is now staring us in the face.

What a difference a few years, and a change in administration, can make. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services and a proudly ravenous meat eater, has turned the principles of the growing Make America Healthy Again movement into government policy: The Trump administration’s new Dietary Guidelines for Americans, promoted to the public as “Eat Real Food,” enshrine a national obsession with consuming more protein and fewer processed foods. Meat (ideally red, usually beef) and milk (ideally whole fat, potentially raw) are now being lauded as saviors of the American diet.

It’s an expensive diet. Beef prices are skyrocketing as cattle herds have shrunk to their lowest level in 75 years, owing to drought, increased costs to ranchers, industry consolidation, and international competition. President Trump responded last week with a proclamation pausing tariffs on 300,000 metric tons of beef that will be sold to the U.S. at a 25 percent discount. Agricultural economists don’t expect the move to make a meaningful difference in the cost of a hamburger. Not that it matters. Americans are spending record amounts on meat and are projected to eat more meat than ever this year. Meanwhile, sales of plant-based meats and even plant-based milks are declining.

This is an unfortunate vibe shift. The case against meat has not weakened. It is still unhealthy to eat in excess, environmentally damaging to produce, and extremely profitable for the industrial farms and multinational conglomerates that make up Big Agriculture. Therein lies the contradiction at the heart of MAHA’s meat fixation: Eating more of it will only exacerbate the very problems that the movement purportedly wants to solve.

Meat is by far the most environmentally damaging part of the American diet. Most animals are raised on industrial farms, not on open pasture—and even still, livestock grazing accounts for about 35 percent of all American land. Livestock make up about half of all agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, or 5 percent of all national emissions, most of that coming from methane belched by cows and manure expelled by factory farms.

Now consider the damage caused by growing feed for livestock. Cropland for feed—mostly hay, corn, and soy—accounts for another 8 percent of all land, and more water is used to grow feed than for any other agricultural purpose. For instance, about a quarter of all water withdrawn from the Colorado River, which is facing historic lows, goes to alfalfa for cattle feed. Furthermore, growing vast amounts of feed crops requires the widespread use of artificial pesticides and fertilizers that often contaminate soil and drinking water.

Every year, close to 10 billion animals are slaughtered in the United States, most of them chickens. Ninety-nine percent of those chickens come from factory farms, as do close to 99 percent of pigs, and north of 75 percent of beef cattle are fattened for slaughter on industrial feedlots. This massive volume of production enables Americans to eat more meat per capita annually—about 225 pounds each, not counting seafood—than almost any other country on earth.

Given all of this, it’s odd to see meat arise as the dominant food choice of those ostensibly committed to improving our food system. The arguments in favor of meat tend to break down along three often overlapping appeals: purity, processing, and protein.

Proponents of meat, given pride of place in Health and Human Service’s new dietary guidelines and discussions of improving American agriculture, tend to trot out the idea that meat is as real as “real food” gets, associating it with small-scale ranching and “regenerative” grazing on bucolic farmscapes unsullied by agricultural industrialization. This is an old idea that has taken firm hold in food circles, from Michael Pollan through the Food Babe. Even food journalists get drawn into this frame, with The New York Times’ Kim Severson, writing about meat’s resurgence, casting it as a happy meeting between liberal farm-to-fork enthusiasts and the right-wing “‘don’t tread on me’ crowd, who prize family tradition and less-processed food—much of which they might grow or hunt themselves.”

But preindustrial meat is not what most Americans eat. It represents maybe 1 percent of the meat consumed in the country. And even if we were to somehow reorganize our food system to increase this sort of farming, there are hard limits to how much we could produce. A study that modeled land use requirements to meet our current demand for beef with entirely free-range cattle found that we would have the capacity to produce only 45 percent of our current supply. Meeting current demand for chicken with pasture-pecking birds would require 60 percent more land. In short, without factory farms there would be far less meat and it would be far more expensive.

If the MAHA movement were remotely coherent, it would push for this less-but-better meat vision. But simply calling for more meat inherently means calling for more factory farms. And that, in turn, runs directly counter to MAHA-aligned policies like taking on Big Ag and reducing agro-industrial pollution. Eating more meat means producing more meat, which in turn means more mass-produced cheap feed, factory farming, and industrialized slaughterhouses.

This is also the big blind spot for those who see meat as an alternative to so-called “ultra-processed food,” or UPF. Kennedy Jr. and many in MAHA-adjacent meatfluencer circles tout meat as an unprocessed alternative to the industrial slop they see as polluting American diets. The government’s new guidelines explicitly urge Americans away from processed food and toward meat. Lest this be dismissed as bro-science, this is also how Nova, the Brazilian food schema from which we get the idea of UPFs, classifies meat. Nova, which is shaping food policy from Brazil to Belgium to California, clusters foods into groups based on their level of processing, and deems any food that is produced using industrial processes or industrially produced additives as “ultra-processed.” The term creates an easy bogeyman and facile shorthands, such as RFK Jr.’s claim that products with ingredients “that I can’t pronounce” are dangerous (a lukewarm reheating of Pollan’s equally anti-intellectual suggestion, “If you can’t say it, don’t eat it”).

Putting aside the debate over the actual validity of the term and its applicability to adjudicating the healthfulness of food, Nova and other definitions of “ultra-processing” start at the farm gate, when harvested food begins its journey from field to fork. Thus, soy beans processed and mixed with other ingredients like methylcellulose to make an Impossible Burger, or even some types of tofu, are branded as ultra-processed, as if they were nutritionally equivalent to Doritos. Meat, meanwhile, escapes scrutiny because schemas like Nova have nothing to say about the process of commodity production itself. A pig or chicken genetically modified to grow extremely fast and fed a steady diet of soybean meal and industrially produced feed additives like phytase will, when slaughtered, become meat that is considered “unprocessed.” So the production process at factory farms, where most U.S. meat comes from, is made to disappear with a definitional sleight of hand—and meat, arguably the most industrial of America’s major foods, emerges as somehow anti-industrial. This, in turn, conceals not just meat’s provenance but the fact that it is both far more environmentally harmful and likely less healthy than an “ultra-processed” plant-based alternative.

It’s all the more troubling, then, to see meat being touted as a health food. HHS’s guidelines have almost doubled the recommended daily intake of protein over its predecessors, and nutritional advice online is increasingly pivoting to describing meat as a nutritionally dense superfood. And yet, protein deficiency is not a generalized health risk in the U.S. The USDA’s Healthy Eating Index shows that Americans are not eating enough fruit, vegetables, and whole grains. Meanwhile, the average American male already eats as much protein as the new guidelines suggest (or about twice as much as the old guidelines did).

Not only is there no health rationale for urging Americans to eat more meat, but there is extensive evidence suggesting that they should eat less of it. This was the conclusion of the original committee of nutrition and public health experts gathered by the Biden administration to advise the government on revising the dietary guidelines. But the Trump administration ignored this advice and sidelined the committee, replacing it with an ad hoc one created by Kennedy that included experts with direct ties to the meat industry (and one who co-authored a paper downplaying the climate impact of meat). No wonder the new guidelines ignore the vast evidence of meat’s health risks. Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, called them “simply wrong and dangerous to the health of Americans,” and they’re now being challenged by a lawsuit filed by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.

But if MAHA adherents’ arguments in favor of meat crumble under cross-examination, why have they proven so popular? The answer is politics—and more specifically, popularism. If there is one truly bipartisan activity in the United States, it’s eating meat. Doubling down on an existing practice but recasting it as healthy and socially responsible is a way to promise change without changing anything. It is also a way of subsuming the real hunger among the public for healthier eating by treating the status quo as desirable. When Michelle Obama urged Americans to eat more salad, conservatives raged against her and whined about government overreach because—if the Healthy Eating Index is to be believed—they probably weren’t eating much salad. When RFK Jr. tells them to eat meat, they cheer because they already are. This is the obvious political advantage of cheerleading for orthodoxy. It is extremely difficult and fraught to try to change Americans’ diets, and especially to reduce their meat consumption. It requires the building of permission structures, to use a term Barack Obama popularized: psychological scaffolds that allow people to change deeply ingrained beliefs and behaviors. MAHA’s push for meat doesn’t need permission structures; it just gives people permission to carry on.

And so we get fast food, one of the root causes of our dietary woes, being transformed by the right into a paragon of health—with a side of owning the libs. “MAHA meal,” conservative influencer Benny Johnson posted on X last week, along with a video of his family eating at Steak ’n Shake. “Seed oil free. Grass fed, grass finished beef. Beef tallow fries. Real milk milkshake.” As The Wall Street Journal noted this week, the restaurant chain has gone “full MAGA” by switching to grass-fed beef, cooking fries in beef tallow, and launching a “Protein Steakburger”—all spearheaded by its “chief MAHA officer,” who of course is a former HHS staffer under Trump.

But the bill will come due for all of us, in one way or another. If Kennedy and the MAHA movement are successful in convincing Americans to eat even more meat, it will not only cause more heart disease and diabetes, but necessarily lead to more factory farms, more cancer-causing pesticides, and more rivers polluted by runoff. That is the reality. The MAHA fantasy is just a road to the very future that MAHA claims to oppose, in which we’re all in poorer health and Big Ag is bigger than ever.

What can be done to stop him? Nothing, says the Supreme Court. Five of the six conservative justices ruled on Monday evening that a historic-preservationist group did not have standing to challenge the project in court, which means it is likely to proceed unhindered for the rest of Trump’s second term.

“Today, we do not pass upon the legality of the government’s East Wing project,” the majority wrote in an unsigned per curiam order. “We conclude only that, based on the submissions before us, the government is likely to prevail in showing that the Trust lacks Article III standing to challenge the project in federal court and that the remaining stay factors favor relief.”

The court’s flawed decision sheds new light on a pernicious issue: the conservative justices’ narrowing of Article 3 standing to weaken Congress and supercharge both the executive branch, at least when Republicans control it, and the Supreme Court itself.

Standing is, in general terms, the right to bring a lawsuit at all. Article 3 of the Constitution lays out the powers and limits of judicial power. One of those limits is that the federal judiciary can only hear “cases and controversies.” Among other things, this means that federal courts cannot render advisory opinions on acts of Congress or executive branch decisions. There must be some kind of legitimate and articulable interests at stake.

In the ballroom case, the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States sued the president, via the National Park Service, to stop construction of the ballroom. A federal judge temporarily granted that request earlier this year, enjoining further work on the aboveground ballroom while allowing construction for the below-ground security complex to go forward. The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to lift the lower court’s injunction, which it duly did.

The majority’s mistakes in this case start with their first sentence: “In October 2025, the federal government started a project to replace the East Wing of the White House.” In reality, the president is only one part of the federal government, albeit an important one. The majority’s phrasing gives a benign, normalized gloss to the president’s illegal decision to tear down the East Wing of the White House. Congress authorized no such thing by law and, through other statutes, expressly forbade it.

Another prong in the court’s analysis at this stage is whether a party will suffer “irreparable harm” and how the “balance of the equities” should fall when reviewing a lower court’s injunction. The executive branch exists to “take care” that federal law is executed. Logically speaking, the president cannot suffer “irreparable harm” when a court stops him from doing something illegal. But five of the six conservative justices disagreed, instead crediting a vague national security justification for the project without questioning the validity of that claim.

The government has also presented declarations from the Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Director of the United States Secret Service, and the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and the Secretary of the Army, among others, attesting to national security and other harms that would likely arise from enjoining a “single, coherent” project that cannot be readily cleaved into distinct below- and above-ground pieces.

In an earlier age, these declarations may have deserved at least some deference. But this is the era of the unitary executive. The same justices who nodded along to this passage also insist to Americans that the president can and must wield absolute, untrammeled control over the executive branch, even among the Senate-confirmed officials who help lead it. In that sense, citing them is akin to using my cats and my two-and-a-half-year-old son as sources for one of my columns.

But the real problem is with the majority’s standing analysis, which essentially makes it impossible to challenge the project in court. The National Trust argued that it could bring the lawsuit because at least one of its D.C.-residing board members, Alison Hoagland, would suffer an “aesthetic injury” if the project went forward. Courts, including the Supreme Court itself, have often recognized similar injuries for standing purposes—for example, in cases involving the loss of endangered wildlife. (More on that later.) The illegal destruction of a world-renowned symbol of American republicanism would certainly seem to qualify under that threshold.

The conservative majority—except for Chief Justice John Roberts—disagreed. It reduced the trust’s alleged “aesthetic injury” to a personal grievance against the Trump administration. “To the contrary, we have repeatedly held that mere offense, disagreement, or distaste does not qualify as a concrete and particularized injury under Article III,” the majority wrote in an unsigned opinion, quoting from recent precedent. “As we have put it, ‘this Court has long made clear that distress at or disagreement with the activities of others is not a basis under Article III for a plaintiff to bring a federal lawsuit.’”

I am almost surprised that whoever wrote this opinion did not call Hoagland and the trust a woke liberal snowflake. It fell to Roberts to explain, without apparent success, how the law actually works to his colleagues in the majority. “A historic preservationist such as Hoagland can be aesthetically injured in a concrete, particularized way by the transformation of a historic building that she frequently enjoys,” he wrote, in a dissenting opinion joined by the court’s three liberals, “just as an environmentalist can sustain a concrete, particularized aesthetic injury from the extinction of a particular animal or the transformation of a particular forest or river that he regularly enjoys.”

Environmental law keeps coming up in this discussion because of a major precedent that significantly narrowed Article 3 standing. The pivotal case was 1992’s Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife. Under the Endangered Species Act, federal agencies must consult with the secretary of the interior when the agency does or funds something that threatens an endangered species or its habitat.

The Interior Department initially held in the 1970s that this consultation process applied to actions undertaken by a federal agency anywhere in the world. In the early 1990s, the Bush and Clinton administrations changed the rules so that the consultation requirement would only kick in if a federal agency did something within the United States or in international waters. Defenders of Wildlife, an environmental group, sued the department in federal court to challenge the rule change.

Defenders identified two members who would have the right to challenge the department’s new rule. One of them told the courts that she had traveled to Egypt in 1986 to view the “traditional habitat of the endangered Nile crocodile,” which she said was threatened by U.S. support for that country’s Aswan High Dam project. The other litigant said something similar about Asian elephants that she had previously encountered in Sri Lanka in 1981, which would be imperiled by USAID funding for a project there.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for a 7-2 court, ruled that the plaintiffs had not shown that they had Article 3 standing to challenge the department’s then-new rule. A plaintiff, he wrote, must demonstrate three things. One is that they have what Scalia called an “injury in fact,” meaning that they face the “invasion of a legally protected interest.” Second, the plaintiff must show that the injury is “concrete and particularized,” meaning that it is not merely abstract or imaginary. Finally, a litigant must show that the injury they face is “actual or imminent,” by which they mean it is not merely hypothetical or possible.

“Of course, the desire to use or observe an animal species, even for purely esthetic purposes, is undeniably a cognizable interest for purpose of standing,” Scalia acknowledged. But he concluded that the plaintiffs’ injury was too remote to justify their lawsuit here. Their past visits to these countries were insufficient, he explained, and their future plans to return were too hazy and uncertain to justify a court’s intervention. An intent to return someday to see endangered animals, Scalia concluded, was not concrete enough to stop the executive branch’s rule change.

Scalia went further to suggest that citizen-suit provisions, like the one found in the Endangered Species Act, might be unconstitutional if applied too broadly. He argued that it was not the courts’ role to “vindicat[e] the public interest,” as he put it, without a strict approach to Article 3 standing. If Congress could authorize private citizens to sue “regardless of whether they suffered any concrete injury,” he reasoned, it would “transfer from the president to the courts the chief executive’s most important constitutional duty, to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’”

Much of this is highly technical, but the impact of the decision was straightforward. Lujan represented a sea change in how Article 3 standing worked when challenging the executive branch’s actions in court—and, more importantly, how Congress could define it. One legal scholar noted that it was the first time in modern legal history that the court had limited Congress’s power to “bestow standing on a potential plaintiff” and had seriously injured the legislative branch’s ability to make “judicially enforceable policy decisions.” Another observed that Scalia’s triumphal invocation of history and precedent was surprisingly thin: The oldest Supreme Court case that the justice had cited for his holding, he pointedly noted, was from 1972.

Scalia himself had championed such a reversal long before taking the bench. In a 1983 law review article, he argued that policing the bounds of standing was important for separation-of-powers reasons. A narrow version, he argued, “roughly restricts courts to their traditional undemocratic role of protecting individuals and minorities against impositions of the majority” and “excludes them from the even more undemocratic role of prescribing how the other two branches should function in order to serve the interest of the majority itself.”

By claiming judicial humility, Scalia effectively argued for expanding the executive branch’s powers and curbing those of Congress. But he also made clear that policy outcomes, not only constitutional theory, were at the forefront of his mind. “Strict enforcement of the environmental laws” by public-interest litigants, Scalia sneered, “met with approval in the classrooms of Cambridge and New Haven, but not in the factories of Detroit and the mines of West Virginia.” He also opined, somewhat nonsensically, that allowing this form of standing was bad for democratic governance.

“It may well be, of course, that the judges know what is good for the people better than the people themselves; or that democracy simply does not permit the genuine desires of the people to be given effect; but those are not the premises under which our system operates,” he wrote with apparent sarcasm. Here he seems to forget that Congress is the primary vehicle through which our democratic system of government is meant to operate, and that upholding its policy decisions through laws is the most elementary way to carry out the people’s will.

Scalia’s faux populism even led him to champion the notion that some laws might go unenforced or disregarded if no one had standing to challenge their nonenforcement by the executive branch. “The ability to lose or misdirect laws can be said to be one of the prime engines of social change, and the prohibition against such carelessness is (believe it or not) profoundly conservative,” he wrote. “Sunday blue laws, for example, were widely unenforced long before they were widely repealed—and had the first not been possible the second might never have occurred.”

That might be understandable for forgotten municipal ordinances, but it does not really make sense for acts of Congress. The lives and fortunes of hundreds of millions of Americans are shaped by the laws that Congress enacts. It is not a stretch to say that the global economy is more or less built on them. Our entire system of government is built on the notion that Congress can pass laws, and that those laws matter. The notion that a president charged with enforcing the laws can defy them so freely turns our constitutional order upside down.

After Scalia transmuted this position into constitutional law in Lujan, he received widespread criticism from various legal scholars. One of his defenders was a future colleague: John Roberts, then in private practice, who wrote a 1993 law review article defending Lujan in the Duke Law Review. The blandly titled article, “Article III Limits on Statutory Standing,” is a revealing pre-judicial window into Roberts’s basic views on the separation of powers.

The future chief justice echoed Scalia’s theories about judicial restraint, albeit without Scalia’s caustic insinuations. “The legitimacy of an unelected, life-tenured judiciary in our democratic republic is bolstered by the constitutional limitation of that judiciary’s power in Article III to actual ‘cases’ and ‘controversies,’” he wrote. This limitation, he argued, gave the courts the legitimacy they needed to countermand the elected branches of government.

Like Scalia and other conservatives, he embraced a sharp divide between the branches. Twentieth-century governance was defined by Congress delegating certain regulatory powers to independent agencies kept at arm’s length from the president. This productive mixture of two branches’ powers has no place in Roberts’s constitutional worldview. “Separation of powers is a zero-sum game,” he wrote. “If one branch unconstitutionally aggrandizes itself, it is at the expense of one of the other branches.”

That much is true in this case. By allowing the ballroom’s construction to go forward, the Supreme Court has allowed the president to break a constitutionally valid law without consequence. (What else is new?) The court has also further weakened congressional primacy by subordinating Congress’s power of the purse and explicit authority over federal property to the whims of a self-aggrandizing president who has given up actual governance in favor of treating the nation’s capital as a personal sandbox.

As a stop-gap measure, Congress should consider giving a statutory grant of authority to challenge future illegal presidential building projects to the mayor of the District of Columbia. The imposition upon city streets and public utilities, combined with Congress’s plenary authority over the District and federal property in general, should overcome even this court’s strict interpretation of Article 3 standing. Lawmakers may also want to consider empowering committees, ranking members, or even a specially designated legislative branch official to challenge patently illegal acts by presidents in the future.

Ironically, as Roberts suggested in his dissent, he also had the better read of Lujan. Scalia’s opinion did not foreclose all forms of aesthetic injury. As quoted earlier, Scalia acknowledged that the mere “desire to use or observe an animal species, even for purely esthetic purposes, is undeniably a cognizable interest for purpose of standing.” He simply ruled that the plaintiffs in that case hadn’t met it because their ability to actually view the animals in question was too abstract and unsupported.

The five conservative justices in the majority appear to have gone much further than that, adding a new hurdle for standing in environmental cases where aesthetic injury is the basis for standing. Contrary to the expressed wishes of Scalia and Roberts, narrowing Article 3 standing also doesn’t appear to have reduced the court’s role in public policymaking. Take, for example, the Supreme Court’s decision last month to allow the U.S. Postal Service and other federal agencies to implement Trump’s executive order to undermine state mail-voting systems.

Congress did not grant the Department of Homeland Security any power to create “state citizenship lists,” nor to coerce states to use those lists by threatening prosecution from the Department of Justice, nor to refuse to deliver states’ mail ballots if they do not meet the Postal Service’s standards for whether a ballot is valid or not, which they have no legal authority to do. And yet those agencies can do precisely that, over the loud objections of multiple states with the congressional authority to run elections, precisely because the conservative justices (all six that time) were so narrow and exacting on Article 3 standing.

The court’s ruling did not mean that implementation of the order “will necessarily be lawful,” the majority reassured Americans in yet another unsigned opinion. “On that score, time will tell.” But the conservative justices felt obligated to let the Trump administration go forward because the states had failed the Article 3 standing test. As I noted, the court’s framing of the issues at hand gave little comfort that it will ultimately stop Trump’s midterm gambit, though some of the recently reported details of what USPS has planned might go too far for some of them.

The court’s strict approach to Article 3 standing when challenging Republican presidents also does not apply to Democratic presidents with equal force. In Biden v. Nebraska, the conservative majority allowed a coalition of GOP-led states to challenge—and ultimately defeat—Joe Biden’s student-loan debt relief plan, which was authorized by a 2003 act of Congress. Though the states were not injured in any rational way by the debt-forgiveness order, they claimed an independent student-loan debt servicer created by Missouri would be affected, and therefore Article 3’s standing threshold had been met.

Except the servicer in question was fully legally and financially independent from Nebraska, and it had chosen not to challenge the relief plan. “MOHELA is fully capable of representing its own interests, and always has done so before,” Justice Elena Kagan noted in her dissenting opinion. “The injury to MOHELA thus does not entitle Missouri—under our normal standing rules—to go to court.” The court’s conservative justices, who could not disguise their antipathy for the Biden policy at oral argument, ignored those constraints and let the lawsuit continue so it could rule against the administration. So much for judicial restraint.

In that time, the U.S. military has killed at least 227 civilians in some 65 strikes, according to an analysis published Wednesday by The Intercept.

“It’s been a year of murders,” a defense official told the outlet. “The Trump administration has normalized murder.… It’s absolutely criminal.”

The White House has insisted the violence is justified, broadly accusing the boats of trafficking narcotics to the U.S. from Venezuela and Colombia. A classified opinion penned last summer by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel attempted to shield the forthcoming attacks by claiming that suspected drug boats amounted to legitimate military targets.

But U.S. lawmakers have been more than skeptical on the matter. That’s partly due to the fact that several of the targeted boats were thousands of miles away in international waters at the time that they were struck by U.S. forces. Another reason is because the vast majority of the attacks were conducted without prior investigations or interdiction, leaving little ability to gather evidence that could support or refute the government’s allegations.

The administration’s lawless behavior has even restructured foreign governments. After blaming Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro for the attacks and the alleged drug pipeline, U.S. forces stormed Caracas and abducted Maduro in the early morning hours of January 3.

The strikes themselves have been criticized as extrajudicial killings.

“There is no plausible legal justification for the strikes. They’re obviously not occurring in the context of an armed conflict and outside of armed conflict, the term for premeditated killing is murder,” Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer and specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war, told The Intercept.

The unprecedented gathering will take place on September 9 and 10 in Dallas. But the private group organizing the conference, a nonprofit known as the Dallas 2026 Host Committee, has not yet disclosed any of its donors (federally mandated filings that would offer such transparency still aren’t due for several months). The only insight available as to who’s behind the multimillion-dollar operation stems from the nonprofit’s address.

An OpenSecrets investigation published Tuesday found that the Dallas 2026 Host Committee shares an address with Make America Great Again Inc., a super PAC formed in 2022 to back Donald Trump and his endorsed candidates.

Further still, the treasurer of MAGA Inc.—Charles Gantt—is also the listed custodian of the convention’s nonprofit, according to a Federal Election Commission filing and an IRS letter that tied Gantt to the self-advertised “nonpartisan” nonprofit.

Last month, the Dallas 2026 Host Committee told The Dallas Morning News that it raised $45 million in just 27 days from various independent and corporate contributions. That sum didn’t include the revenue expected from sales for the ticketed event, which requires even invited House members to pay a minimum of $25,000 to walk in the door with a guest.

The committee did not elaborate on who’s been filling its coffers.

The group’s nonprofit status legally prohibits it from sponsoring political candidates or aiding elections. Instead, organization leadership told the newspaper that the money it obtained would go toward aiding Dallas’s local economy and covering government costs.

“This Dallas Host Committee, if it stuck to just promoting Dallas, making Dallas look good, that would be permissible—as long as it’s not crossing that line to making contributions to the RNC or the state party,” Shanna Ports, senior legal counsel for campaign finance at Campaign Legal Center, told OpenSecrets. “Then, it would be operating within the realm of campaign finance laws and tax status.”

But that doesn’t seem to be the primary motivator for the GOP conference. Trump and Vice President JD Vance are both expected to deliver speeches to the conservative assembly, which has been strung together at the eleventh hour to give Republicans a boost ahead of a contentious midterm cycle.

“On 11 separate days, more than three million travelers flowed through the American flies, they, they, uh … American skies were loaded up with planes,” Trump, 80, said while seated at the Resolute Desk.

Trump: "On 11 separate days more than 3 million travelers flowed through the American flies they. They, uh, American skies were loaded up with planes." pic.twitter.com/Cag833amM0

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 2, 2026

It’s clear that Trump meant to say “American skies,” but that his brain got in the way. The meeting was ostensibly supposed to be a chance for the president to brag about high levels of tourism in the U.S. over the summer, but not only did Trump fumble his lines, Americans have actually spent a lot less money on vacations these past few months. Flights and road trips have also declined compared to last year. Foreign tourism into the U.S. has also dropped sharply since Trump resumed office.

Trump’s ongoing cognitive decline seems to be getting worse each day. He’s fallen asleep dozens of times throughout his second term as president, frequently slurred his speech, and last month seemed to forget how to spell the word “dumb” at a speech in Las Vegas with cameras rolling. Just last week, the president fell asleep during a health care announcement at the White House.

Meanwhile, Trump’s decisions are increasingly erratic, from abruptly signing an executive order to rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America” to his continued poor handling of the ill-advised war with Iran. Hours before his meeting Wednesday, Trump proposed renaming the Strait of Hormuz after himself. All of this clearly points to a man who is not well, yet has just over two more years of being president left.

“Now that we have it under U.S.A. control, should we change the name Hormuz Strait to TRUMP STRAIT??? Like America itself, it would be ‘hotter’ than ever before! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP,” the president posted on Truth Social Wednesday morning.

The move wouldn’t have any support beyond his fans, and it is a terrible idea due to Iran currently being able to throttle maritime traffic through the crucial narrow waterway. Trump’s executive order to change the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” last week was unpopular with Canadians and many Americans, although Google and Apple decided to bow to Trump’s demand by renaming the lake on their map services.

Trump has sought to rename everything from buildings to aircraft carriers after himself in his second term as president, and even has his sights on renaming New York’s Penn Station. Florida just renamed Palm Beach’s airport after him: it’s now officially the President Donald J. Trump International Airport, complete with the code DJT.

At a time when Trump claims to want a deal with Iran, changing the strait’s name would undoubtedly hurt the prospects for peace. It’s not likely to go over well with the other countries in the region, such as Oman and the United Arab Emirates. If Trump is serious, the move is sure to invite more comparisons between him and historical dictators who also sought to rename everything.

The Small Business Administration announced Tuesday that the agency’s Million Dollar Pitch Competition would be concluded with a “live finale event” in Washington D.C. on September 18.

Five small manufacturing companies from across the country are set to go head-to-head for cuts of a $1 million prize pool furnished by Clover Network Inc., a point-of-sale and payment-processing platform. Think Shark Tank but way more boring.

The program will be presided over by a panel of Trump sycophants and scam artists, including Nicki Minaj, the rapper-singer who took a hard-right turn when her vaccine skepticism hit the MAGA mainstream; Grant Cardone, a get-rich-quick influencer accused of misleading investors; and Joe Gebbia, the co-founder of Airbnb, who currently leads a group of DOGE goons running federal websites. The event will be hosted by actor Dean Cain, once Superman, now fanboy for the president.

This is the Trump administration’s second foray into reality television, after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy debuted his flop travel show last month. It’s not yet clear where the SBA’s show will “air,” but if Duffy’s project was any indication, it will be quietly dumped on YouTube and immediately forgotten.

Beginning at noon Wednesday, the U.S. Mint is selling $1 commemorative gold coins emblazoned with Trump’s face on its website for the country’s 250th anniversary—for the low, low prices of $61 for 25 coins or 100 coins for $154.50. Interest from Trump supporters appears to be so high that an online waiting room was set up.

Among the minted coins are 250,000 coins pressed on July 4 that carry a “July 4” privy mark, according to a U.S. Mint press release. The coins feature Trump’s official White House portrait, a move that should be illegal under the Presidential $1 Coin Act, which states that no coin shall “bear the image of a living former or current President” until at least two years after their death.

The Circulating Collectible Coin Redesign Act of 2020 also states that living people can’t appear on the back of a coin, but the Trump administration claims that the act allows the president to create memorial coins celebrating America’s 250th anniversary.

The coins aren’t even made of gold but have a “gold-like finish,” according to the Treasury Department. That won’t matter to Trump supporters, who shell out their cash for anything that the president sells, from gaudy golden sneakers to Trump-branded Bibles made in China. He’s also sold unsightly watches and overpriced fragrances bearing his name.

Trump has made more than $2.2 billion since being sworn in as president last year. While most of that is from cryptocurrency, he’s still making a pretty penny on merchandise, and now he’s got the U.S. Mint hawking his likeness on actual currency. It seems that there’s nothing Trump won’t do to make a buck, ethics be damned.

Inside Washington

The Ukraine bill that House Dems have no intention of passing

For years, Democrats in both chambers of Congress could reliably agree on support for Ukraine. But now, House Democrats are pushing back against a Russia sanctions bill that sailed through the Senate in July, frustrating their colleagues in the upper chamber. The issue? House Democrats say it gives too much power to President Trump.

Representative Gregory Meeks of New York, ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, thinks, in lieu of this particular sanctions bill, the Senate should pass a bipartisan bill that the House approved in June. That legislation provides more aid to Ukraine and expands sanctions on Russia but does not include sweeping tariff authorities for President Donald Trump.

“The Senate is not superior to the House. We both pass bills, so we should be discussing both bills and making a determination what would be the best bill to support Ukraine,” Meeks told reporters on Tuesday.

The Senate legislation—named for the late GOP Senator Lindsey Graham—passed in the upper chamber with a final tally of 86–11, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in the chamber for the vote. The measure allows Trump to impose new tariffs on countries that import Russian oil, and imposes punishing sanctions on Russian President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials and institutions.

The legislation was introduced after roughly a year of negotiations with Trump to get to a point both he and a bipartisan majority in Congress could accept. Senator Richard Blumenthal, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and co-sponsor of the bill, has urged his colleagues in the House to support the measure.

“It is a moment of extreme urgency, for the reason that Putin may try to escalate, but also because Putin is on his heels economically,” Blumenthal told CBS News on Sunday.

But key House Democrats say giving Trump further tariff authority could be unwise, given the president’s retributive trade wars with U.S. allies. They argue that Trump only agreed to the bill because it included a provision that allows him to waive any sanctions, as long as he justifies it as in the “national interest.” Given that Trump has expressed an affinity for Putin, some Democrats worry that Trump might remove sanctions on Russia instead of adding to them.

Representative Don Beyer of Virginia told The New Republic on Tuesday that Russia has enough “kompromat” on Trump that even if the measure did pass, the president wouldn’t actually take action against Putin. “He’ll just break the law and wait for someone to sue him,” Beyer said.

Blumenthal has said that, while the bill allows for sanctions on Russia’s trading partners, it would not affect European allies, because it carves out certain exceptions. Senator Raphael Warnock, who had initially held up the bill in the upper chamber, was assuaged by Trump trade representative Jamieson Greer’s promise to lift tariffs once countries are no longer purchasing Russian oil and gas.

“If you give [Trump] an inch, he will take a mile. We don’t have to imagine. We are seeing it in real time,” said Warnock in a speech on the Senate floor in August. “But this commitment that we were able to get from Ambassador Greer is meaningful, because if the president ignores the law, if he oversteps his power, we will see him in court.”

House Democrats aren’t convinced. Meeks noted that the provision to allow Trump to impose up to 100 percent tariffs on the largest importers of Russian oil could include the European Union.

“I’ve heard Mr. Blumenthal and others say, ‘Oh, it won’t affect our allies.’ He says, ‘It won’t affect our European allies,’ but it’ll affect the EU. Who’s the EU? Our European allies,” argued Meeks. He believes the Senate measure looks good on paper but would allow Trump to waive sanctions on Russia rather than impose them.

“You look at the mess we have with Canada, and how many allies we’ve pissed off because of stupid tariffs, and the impact on consumers—he just can’t be trusted,” said Representative Linda Sánchez of California. Representative Richard Neal of Massachusetts has also expressed opposition to the Senate bill.

Zelenskiy’s top aide on sanctions, Vladyslav Vlasiuk, is meeting with House Democrats this week in an effort to sway their opinion on the measure. Meeks said Tuesday he was looking forward to speaking with him but that he believed his own legislation would be better for supporting Ukraine.

This entire disagreement may be moot: The House’s major priority this week is passing a continuing resolution to keep the government funded through mid-December. The House will be out next week for the Labor Day and Rosh Hashanah recess. It’s possible that they’ll decide not to return to Capitol Hill at all until after the November elections; Congress is already skipping town for the month of October to campaign.

Beyer said that even if the House did return the week after next, he wasn’t sure there would be time for any action, although he’d heard talk of a potential amendment to limit Trump’s tariff authority. A similar amendment failed in the Senate.

“The person who was telling me about writing the amendment also thought that Trump would still hate it, because he and [White House trade adviser Peter] Navarro want carte blanche tariff authority,” he said.

Despite the disagreement between Senate and House Democrats, Beyer said he hasn’t gotten too much guff from his Senate colleagues about opposing the bill.

“No one’s beating me up on it,” he said. “People are asking about it, they’re asking why, but nobody’s pressuring me to change my mind.”

—Grace Segers

Outside Washington

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that “more than two dozen immigrants, mostly green-card holders with past arrests, have been held at San Francisco International Airport this year without access to dedicated medical care, attorneys, or even beds for more than three days,” turning the airport into a “de facto immigration detention center.” Among other examples detailed in the Chronicle’s lengthy investigative report, staff writers Sara DiNatale and Christian Leonard recount the case of a “67-year-old diabetic” who has “been legally in the country for 50 years” but was pulled off a flight by immigration agents and “detained for eight days earlier this year without a way to check his blood sugar.” Democratic Representative Kevin Mullin, whose district includes SFO, reportedly demanded access to the Customs and Border Patrol facility at the airport after learning of the Chronicle’s investigation and was first (illegally) turned away before being admitted, six days later, to find five people in the “holding room.” He told the Chronicle that agents on-site “were not hiding from the fact this is a definitive policy shift from the Trump administration.”

The most quietly, boringly goofy story of impropriety this year has come to a close: Rhode Island State Representative Julie Casimiro has resigned her seat, following outcry at her continuing to draw a salary despite having moved to South Carolina in July. “Although state lawmakers only meet for the first six months of the year,” the Rhode Island Current’s Nancy Lavin explains, “their taxpayer-funded salary is spread across the entire calendar year.” That $20,922 salary amounts to “$800 every two weeks, plus health insurance.” Would that every political scandal these days could end so anticlimactically. Rhode Island’s primaries, which will include three candidates competing for Casimiro’s seat, take place September 9.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

Thursday at noon, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication hosts a live webinar on “how public opinion is affecting data center development.” YPCCC director Anthony Leiserowitz will moderate a discussion with George Mason University Ph.D. candidate Neha Gour and Rewiring America’s Kristin Eberhard. RSVP here.

In case you missed it: Graham Steele has a blog post at the Roosevelt Institute explaining in layman’s terms why Treasury yields and interest rates are up, what it means for the broader economy, and why the Trump administration’s responses so far haven’t worked. The bottom line: “At this point, there are no easy answers for how the U.S. government can pull itself out of the recurring cycle of market stress followed by chaotic policy responses,” writes Steele. But “a good place to start would be restoring the U.S. government’s reputation as a reliable and respected domestic and international actor committed to the rule of law and financial stability.” Continuing on the current course, he concludes, risks broad economic collapse.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Book of the Week

The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time—and How to Fix It

By Annie Lowrey

THE GIST: Want a government benefit you are entitled to—at least theoretically? To get it, you will probably have to go through expensive and confusing paperwork, bureaucratic delays, meetings, and more. In The Time Tax, Lowrey explains how we got here and what we can do about it.PRAISE: Tim Wu writes in The New York Times that “Lowrey’s book joins what is a growing push to tackle the hassles and frictions that make people hate government. We’ve seen what’s possible. We just need the collective will to use the tools we already have.”

CRUISING THE INDEX: Lowrey traces the “time tax” back to the Civil War, when bureaucratic hurdles were put in place out of anxiety that the wrong sorts of people—often racial minorities—would gain access to benefits they didn’t “deserve.” Bureaucracy may be utopian in theory, promising “order, fairness, impartiality, and predictability,” Lowrey writes. But the experience of it is more like Dante’s hell: “a rigid, insuperable hierarchy: spendthrifts pitted against heavyweights, alchemists afflicted with sores, flatterers immersed in shit, and traitors encased in ice.”

TNR’S QUICK CRITICAL ASSESSMENT: Combining incisive history with empathetic, wide-ranging reporting, one of the best policy writers in the country pinpoints a problem all of us face too often—and outlines how we can finally fix it.

—Alex Shephard

Political Trivia Question of the Day

Aside from the Roosevelts, what other presidents were related to each other? Three pairs shared a last name. The fourth connection is considerably more obscure (hint: One was a Founding Father, and the other was one of our few Whig presidents). (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

Jeffries, joined by Democratic Whip Katherine Clark and Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar, announced a probe into Representatives Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington and Jared Golden of Maine who rescued a procedural rule vote Republicans were set to lose.

“The decision by two of our colleagues to blindside the entire House Democratic Caucus and join with the Republican majority to pass a procedural rule on the brink of failing represents a significant breach of trust,” the statement said. “It is an action that necessitates a serious response, and we have asked the Committee on Caucus Rules to take this up in short order.”

The procedural rule would allow a vote on a number of measures, including a resolution to denounce socialism and praise the Save Act, Donald Trump’s disastrous voter repression measure, as well as a measure to bar federally funded universities from boycotting Israel.

Golden advanced the rule in order to pass a bill protecting Maine lobstermen from new regulations involving the North Atlantic right whale.

Gluesenkamp Perez’s reasoning was much more opaque. “Working America is hanging on by a thread, trying to feed our families without being beholden to big government or big business. Standing around pointing fingers, debating -isms and making people photocopy their birth certificate every time they cast a ballot is not the job,” she wrote on X following the vote.

Of course, this vote had absolutely nothing to do with passing a continuing resolution.

The apparent defections are a humiliating blow for Jeffries, and his public response indicates a heightened level of effort in the struggle to maintain party discipline.

In an interview with NBC News published Wednesday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries outlined four policy goals that he believed would attract “uniform Democratic support.”

“We have to reverse the Medicaid cuts. We should extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits,” Jeffries said. “We should restore congressional authority as it relates to tariffs, because the Trump tariffs are making life more expensive for the American people. And we should end, decisively, if it’s still going on, Donald Trump’s reckless and costly war of choice in the Middle East.”

But there’s still a long road ahead. Virginia Representative Don Beyer told the network that while there’s consensus that the party’s first post-election bill should focus on affordability, there’s little agreement on exactly what that should look like.

“In the affordability debate, nothing’s more central to it than health care,” Beyer told NBC News. “My expectation is that it’ll very much be about affordability one way or the other.”

Yet a growing contingent of Democrats—including the party’s emerging cohort of democratic socialists—want the party to aim higher on health care than the low-hanging fruit of reversing Trump’s unpopular cuts.

New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—a rumored 2028 presidential candidate—said it would “absolutely not” be enough to restore Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.

“Of course, we need to take immediate action on those ACA subsidies and making sure that we lower those prices immediately,” Ocasio-Cortez told NBC News. “But it doesn’t fix the deeper systemic issue that has led health care to be one of the primary drivers of inflationary costs over the last decade, frankly.”

“We need to be doing a lot more to take on corporate power, to break up a lot of these monopolies that are rolling up—Big Pharma, insurance, private equity entering the space of health care unchecked,” she continued. “I think there’s a lot here for us to really dig in on, to work on.”

Successfully enacting the agenda (and unravelling Trump’s Project 2025 victories) will be dependent on the size of the party’s Election Day wins. If Democrats fail to win a significant number of seats in either chamber or are forced to contend with a thin majority, they’ll face seismic challenges in passing any sort of anti-Trump legislation.

“I’m not trying to force Iran to the bargaining table, as ABC Fake News reported. I couldn’t care less if they sign a worthless, to them, agreement. I like our position now much better, with almost total control of the Hormuz Strait, and their economy totally collapsing,” the president posted on Truth Social Tuesday night. “They are just playing out the inevitable. When are the Iranian people going to rise up and fight? President DJT.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. bombed the Iranian city of Kuhestak in Sirik County near the Strait of Hormuz overnight Tuesday, hitting a wedding ceremony in one of the strikes and killing at least five civilians, most of them women and children, according to the Iranian government. A nearby communications tower is believed to have been the target. In response, Iran fired missiles at U.S. bases around the Middle East.

“The United States’ catalogue of atrocities against the nation of Iran is now complete: a residential home in Kuhestak, #Sirik, was brutally attacked tonight while families were celebrating a wedding. More than 50 innocent men, women and children were martyred or wounded,” Esmaeil Baghaei, a spokesperson for the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, wrote on X. “This cruelty cannot be separated from the chain of atrocities that preceded it in #Minab, #Lamerd, Qeshm and elsewhere nor from the strikes on military targets that were dressed in deceptive justifications.”

To the Iranian public (and elsewhere), pictures and videos of such attacks are likely to help the Iranian government’s cause much more than Trump’s. For all Trump’s talk of wishing to help the Iranian public against their government, the death of innocent civilians sends an entirely different message.

Iranians haven’t forgotten the bombing of Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab at the start of the war in February that killed 200 people, mostly schoolchildren. They aren’t going to forget that a wedding was bombed, something that seems to be a recurring theme of American military misadventures. Trump is delusional if he thinks that this will win over the Iranian people.

In his resignation, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll laid out his concerns that Hegseth was blocking efforts to modernize the military by removing the generals spearheading those efforts, a source told CNN Wednesday. One person familiar with the matter told Politico that Hegseth thwarted Driscoll’s efforts “at every turn.”

Multiple sources told CNN that they agreed that Hegseth was firing the leaders behind modernization efforts, and instead focusing on culture war issues.

“It’s conflicting because yeah he put out a memo saying this is important, but … he’s talking about muscles, dudes in dresses, testosterone,” a defense official in Europe told CNN. “We don’t see a change at that level.”

Unlike Driscoll and his deputy Army undersecretary Dave Fitzgerald, who also resigned, Hegseth was more focused on the way things look, not with long-term strategic priorities, one source familiar with their relationship told CNN. “Driscoll and Fitzgerald were focused on the modernization issues and less the social,” the source said.

Sources also pointed to the removal of three other army officials focused on the future: Army chief of staff Randy George; General Chris Donahue, the former head of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, who was working to learn drone warfare from the Ukrainians; and General David Hodne, former commander of the U.S. Army Transformation and Training Command.

“It’s critical that you have key leaders that understand technology and have the temperament to deal with industry and turn that into the formation,” a former senior Army official said. “When you fire these guys for arbitrary reasons, it creates confusion and a void … the Army is enduring turbulence right now.”

Meanwhile, Hegseth positioned his senior military assistant General Christopher LaNeve into position to serve as acting chief of staff after George’s removal. One defense official told CNN that LaNeve’s “whole schtick is that he’s a ‘back to basics’ guy.”

Since his appointment, Hegseth has been consumed with the project of remaking the U.S. military in his own image. The secretary was quick to install new rules for how soldiers should look—no beards or bellies—and recently introduced mandatory testosterone screenings. He’s repeatedly thwarted the advancements of Black and female DOD personnel, and overseen a ban on new transgender and nonbinary soldiers.

A cadre of conservative mayors in the Peach State have opted to publicly back Democratic incumbent Jon Ossoff rather than get behind Trump-endorsed Representative Mike Collins.

Those mayors include Gail Fry of Toccoa, James Matheson of Valdosta, and Julie Smith of Tifton. The key to their successful bipartisan relationship with Ossoff rests in the senator’s attentiveness to Georgia’s myriad communities.

In an interview with The Daily Beast published Wednesday, Fry explained that—despite voting against Ossoff six years ago—she’s come to appreciate his responsiveness.

“We have gotten more support from Senator Ossoff than any other office that we’ve contacted,” Fry said, citing a multimillion-dollar federal grant that Ossoff secured for natural gas infrastructure in her city. “He calls us and says, ‘What do you need?’”

The others listed similar experiences with the liberal lawmaker.

“I don’t have to track him down. He tracks me down,” Smith told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last month. “He’s been very good to South Georgia, and in my nonpartisan role as mayor, I have to look to someone who takes care of their constituents. I’m a Republican, but there are times when a person exceeds the party. They go above and beyond.”

Matheson—who described himself as a “hard-core conservative”—told the Journal-Constitution that he expects to “take heat” for endorsing Ossoff, but “it doesn’t matter.”

“There’s no way I can turn my back on this relationship,” Matheson explained. “The voters put me in here to do a job, and that man has been absolutely incredible.”

Trump, meanwhile, has spent inordinate amounts of time online, dividing the American public with his polarizing opinions rather than trying to build similar relationships across the country. The president has practically thrown his entire election cycle playbook at Ossoff, using his enormous platform to lob personal attacks against the 39-year-old. On Truth Social, the president has taken to mocking Ossoff’s looks and name, referring to him as “Os(jerk!)off” and comparing Ossoff to comedian Pee-Wee Herman and Alfred E. Neuman, the fictitious mascot of Mad Magazine.

A Politico survey of more than 70 Republican candidates and party members found that most were not planning to attend the two-day function that begins September 9. Others were still debating whether they should be there. Dozens more refused to disclose their plans.

The Dallas-based event will be the first GOP midterm convention in American history. Trump and Vice President JD Vance are both expected to deliver speeches to the conservative assembly. The unprecedented conference seems to have been created out of an eleventh-hour necessity rather than a nationalistic groundswell, aiming to give Republicans a boost ahead of a contentious midterm cycle. But many candidates feel that showing face at the event could only damage their odds.

Some 45 Republicans told Politico that they weren’t going to be at the convention due to obligations—such as fundraisers or weddings or college tours—that were planned before the convention was announced in June.

But yet another group of conservatives were planning to dodge the event, which has been dubbed “Trump-a-palooza,” in order to avoid being held accountable for the president’s inflammatory rhetoric.

“I just felt I’d be more useful in my district,” Representative Tom Barrett told Politico. “I travel a lot for this job and if I can be back home and see my family and do the job back home as well, then that’s sort of what I lean toward doing.”

Barrett is in a tough battle against progressive William Lawrence for Michigan’s pivotal 7th district. When asked if Trump’s comments could make that race harder, Barrett told the outlet: “I can’t control what the president’s going to say at the convention, but I can control where I’m at, what I’m doing.”

Another House Republican (who spoke on the condition of anonymity) told Politico the convention is a “waste of time” and that the event planning was a “mess.”

“You shouldn’t be having to rally your base at this point,” the member said. “You should be trying to convince independents. Independents are not attending nor watching the midterm convention.”

Most major party conventions are centered on a specific item of business, such as formally nominating a presidential candidate. But this function will offer no such line items. Instead, the event has been billed as a big Republican party—and the ticket prices reflect it. The two-day convention has asked House members to pay a minimum of $25,000 to get in the door with a guest. But that’s really the bottom of the barrel: Better packages have been priced closer to $100,000.

The conference has also been backed by corporate sponsors, and proceeds are being dumped into a nonprofit that does not have to disclose its donors.

Comey’s attorneys argued in a court filing Tuesday night that he was charged under the wrong law, making the government’s criminal indictment moot.

“On the actual question before the court, the government has little to offer,” the filing states. “A call for others to commit violence can only be incitement—which the indictment does not charge.”

Comey was charged with making threats against President Donald Trump by posting a picture to social media of seashells spelling out “86 47” in May last year. But his lawyers argued that the government made a mistake. Prosecuting Comey under the wrong law would unconstitutionally “broaden the possible bases for conviction beyond those included in the indictment.”

“The government’s attempt to prosecute an incitement case through a threats indictment violates settled law,” Comey’s lawyers wrote. “The indictment must be dismissed.”

Comey’s lawyers also mocked the federal government’s rationale that “86 47” constitutes a death threat, accusing federal prosecutors of relying on “a 2005 edition of Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang” and a 1991 New York Times article explaining to its readers that “86” was “military jargon for killed in action.”

The fact that prosecutors had to explain the term means that “the ordinary meaning of ‘86’ is not ‘to kill,’” the filing states, making it clear that “86 47” is “a statement of nonviolent political opposition.”

Trump is obviously using ginned-up charges to take revenge on Comey for supposedly wronging him during his first term as president. The case has been riddled with missteps since last year. It doesn’t help that the embattled current FBI Director Kash Patel cobbled the case together based on conspiracy theories, or that prosecutors consulted a former mobster in an attempt to prove that “86” was threatening language, only to be told their claims were bogus.

The Department of Justice even made the stunning claim that, while Trump or his supporters didn’t pressure the DOJ to prosecute Comey, it’s OK if the department has no independence from the president. This case has all kinds of issues, and Comey’s attorneys seem to have no trouble making it look like a farce.

Perry Bacon: This is Right Now on The New Republic. I’m the host, Perry Bacon. Great guest today. I’m joined by Alex Vitale. He is a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College. He’s also very well known for a book he wrote called The End of Policing, which is a book about police reform and has been one of the intellectual books that undergird a lot of what we talked about, police defunding and abolition and real changes to policing.

This book has been read by everybody, including people on the right. I think Ted Cruz asked some—I think it was Ketanji Brown Jackson, I’m forgetting now. Ted Cruz asked somebody who was a Democrat, who was being confirmed, if they’d read the book, and basically was asking the person to disavow the book. So congratulations on that as well, Alex. Good to see you.

Alex Vitale: Thank you. And unlike Ted Cruz, I was actually born and raised in Texas.

Bacon: OK. Let me start with talking about—the reason I wanted to talk to you was, like, this whole Woke 1.0 discourse that started with Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez going on ABC News a couple weeks ago, distancing herself from Woke 1.0 without saying exactly what that meant. So we’ve had some discourse about what she could have, or maybe did, mean.

But I think what I want to ask you is, it feels to me, six years out from the height of the protest after George Floyd died, that we’re in a moment where police changes, desires to change policing, that whole momentum has backtracked pretty fully, to the point where people like Zohran Mamdani, who we’ll get to in a minute, but people who are on the sort of real left, people who are progressives, are also trying to backtrack from it. That’s my perception, we were in a weak moment for that.

2014 to 2020 was a real momentum around criminal justice reform, and now we’re in a moment where even the progressives have said, “Let’s leave that alone. Let’s talk about affordability only and economics only.” How do you—is that how you see it too? Or maybe you see it differently. What do you say?

Vitale: No, there’s clearly some truth to that. There was a concerted and broad-based attack from the right and the center to any of these ideas. And I think there was this moment in 2020 where people didn’t quite know what defund the police meant, and myself and others had access to the mainstream media and got a chance to begin to tell the story about what this could mean.

And once they figured out what it meant, they were like, Oh, we got to put a stop to that. We are against that. And so that was it—those mainstream media conversations then became a dialogue between the far right and the center right on this issue. And that just really closed out a lot of space for this conversation.

Now, a couple things to think about here. One is that no one at the beginning of 2020 thought we were getting ready to have a national transformation of policing. This was a small movement that was making inroads, that was engaged in grassroots campaigns, and was feeling happy that there was, like, a national network of people who were really talking seriously about what we could invest in instead of policing to create real public safety.

But then, with the outburst of the protests in 2020, the expectations for what the movement should be achieving became astronomical and unrealistic, and there was no organizing infrastructure to take advantage of, to build on those heavy demands that were being put out.

Now, the other thing I want to say is that, even though we’ve not made much progress in dialing back policing, I would say we have made some progress, especially in school policing. But what we have made progress on are exactly the kinds of alternatives to policing that I talk about in The End of Policing, that others have been advocating for. We have seen a massive expansion in civilian mental health crisis teams. We’ve seen big expansions of community-based anti-violence work. So we have seen some of the positive parts of the equation. We just haven’t seen the parts as much as we’d like in terms of dialing back police power and violence.

Bacon: OK. So let me come back—there’s a couple things you said there I want to come back to. So come back to the—because I’ve been reading a little bit about Baltimore, and I think that’s a good example of what you’re talking about, with just that Baltimore has had this decrease in the murder rate, and to be blunt here, they have not decreased the number of police. I think they’ve actually increased the number of police.

But they’ve also done a lot of the—they’ve also done the full scope of things to try to reduce violence, have the community more involved. So what you’re saying is, we’re seeing this sort of divest from police, invest in other things—we’ve seen the invest in other things happen, but the divesting from police hasn’t happened. Is that what you’re saying, in other words?

Vitale: Exactly.

Bacon: Some of the defund thing, the message of defund hasn’t worked in terms of defund police, but it has worked in terms of increased funding in other things that might reduce violence.

Vitale: Yeah. And really, in a lot of ways, we have won some of the key kind of intellectual arguments. I think everyone in America now understands that we should not be sending police when someone’s having a mental health crisis. There’s national polling that shows even a majority of Republicans agree with this sentiment. And so in a way, we’ve won these arguments in some ways, and we’re just now trying to get to the implementation of it.

Bacon: OK, so you won the argument about that part. But the part about—I read End of Policing a while ago, but give people a summary of—let me, maybe I’m going to do it that way. But anyway, there’s an argument that we want to have the police have a smaller role in our lives, and have a smaller number of police, and that argument has been lost, I would argue, right? Or has not been won, or has not moved much since 2020. How do you assess that part?

Vitale: I think that we have seen places where police spending has been flattened. We’ve seen even a few places where it’s been reduced, like Newark, New Jersey, that has been enjoying tremendous reductions in violence because of the investments in community alternatives. And of course, here in New York, Mamdani campaigned quite clearly, and he was the only candidate in both the primary and the general election who said, I don’t want to hire more police. That’s not the solution to our problems. Instead, we need these other investments.

So not cutting the police budget, but holding it steady, or at least the headcount. And that’s important, and I think that signals a politically viable possibility for a way to move forward on this.

Bacon: Are you closer to abolish the police, defund the police? What’s your ultimate goal here? What’s the conclusion of The End of Policing? I think there’s a clue in the title. But anyway, what’s the goal in The End of Policing, the book you wrote?

Vitale: It’s to try to get the police out of our lives in every way we possibly can, but to do it in a responsible fashion, that’s based on building up new infrastructures of public safety that are evidence-based, that show results. And as we build those infrastructures, we reduce our reliance on an institution that has been a huge source of inequality, injustice, and brutality in American society.

And an abolitionist framework is really based on the idea that the institution of policing is fundamentally unjust, even when we do it in a kinder, gentler way. Like, a less racially biased war on drugs is still a completely unjust way of dealing with America’s drug problems.

Bacon: So are you an abolitionist, just to be clear?

Vitale: Yes.

Yes, I’m an abolitionist, but I don’t feel like my job is to go around getting people to say they’re abolitionists, or to talk about abolition. My public-facing work does not typically even use the word abolition. I’m trying to talk to people about public safety. I’m a criminologist who is worried about public safety. We don’t have enough public safety, and our over-reliance on policing is not the best way to achieve that.

Bacon: So the reason I wanted to ask that was, in part—are we hung up on looking back, from 2020? The terms defund and abolition, were those terms seized by the center-left, the center-right, and the right in a way that sort of hijacked—the way you’re just—like, when I talk to people about these issues, when I say, “We want to gradually reduce police funding and gradually increase funding of other things,” and, you live in a safe neighborhood—is your neighborhood full of cops? In general, no. Your neighborhood is full of upper income people who can afford what they want to afford. That’s what we want for everyone.

Crime is not going to be ultimately solved by having cops everywhere. It’s going to be solved—and yes, I want, murderers should not walk the streets. What I do want to have is more violence prevention that’s not about cops, and have people living fuller lives where they’re not looking to commit crimes in the first place. When I say it that way, they can hear me. But I have to say, “Yes, you should not just say defund in a swing district first.” I feel like I have to lead with that now.

So do you wish the words defund and abolish were never heard from, or—Matt Yglesias couldn’t have read them, or Abigail Spanberger, whoever, you know, who just exploit those words?

Vitale: Yeah, Matt is not a good faith actor here. No matter what we called it, he was going to come up with some pithy reason why it was unviable. So look, defund the police was a three-word phrase that fit on a cardboard protest sign, that fit on a Twitter hashtag.

And it was important in the way in which it explicitly rejected the idea of mainstream police reform. After Ferguson and the Ferguson uprising, the killing of Mike Brown, there was all this discourse from Obama on down about, we’re going to reform the police with implicit bias training and body cameras. And that stuff doesn’t work.

Bacon: And we’ve seen it with ICE now. I think people have moved to that view, us giving ICE body cameras where they don’t have to show the film, and they’ve announced in public, “We’re not going to release the film unless it’s good for us.”

Vitale: There is no mechanism of accountability to use the film.

It’s just pointless, right? So it’s just window dressing to make us think it—they tell you what it is. It’s to restore public trust in the police. It’s not to make the police better. It’s not to reduce the violence. It’s to get you and me to trust them. And that is the wrong objective, and it has failed, both in the trust and in reducing what really matters.

So defund the police was important for that. It signaled this radical shift in the analysis. But it didn’t carry the other side of the equation, which is the invest side. And so a lot of people were left thinking, We’ve been told we can have one thing for public safety, and that’s a bunch of guys with guns running around shooting. And now you want to take away the one thing we’ve been told we can have. And we weren’t strong enough and clear enough to be able to make the case convincingly that what we’re really talking about is creating new infrastructures of public safety.

So do I regret the word? Not per se, but I think—and this is where the AOC thing comes back in—was there a lot of unhelpful discourse that was disconnected from actual organizing, from actual community struggle, that leaned into a lot of radical language without a real analysis, without a real political program to achieve victories? Yes. There was a lot of that throwing words around and trying to make people say the right word, without doing the real work on the ground in the neighborhoods talking about public safety.

So what I wish is that we’d had a lot less of that, and a lot more structured institutional support for community-based organizing around how to make our schools safer, how to better deal with mental health and substance abuse issues in our neighborhoods, and how to address violence from a community-led perspective.

Bacon: Why didn’t the phrase—I remember in 2020, some of my leftist friends who were more aware of it than I was did say, there’s another phrase, invest, divest, invest. Why did divest—because that’s also two words. So divest, invest did not take out the way defund did. Do we know why, or was there some messaging consulting?

Vitale: We should not discount the level of anger on the streets in the United States in 2020.

That had been building. It had been building from the Jena Six. It had been building through Ferguson. It had been building. There was a lot of anger at police and prosecutors. And so yeah, some of that anger gets channeled into demands and discourse that in the end maybe wasn’t the most strategic or helpful, but it was coming from a legitimate anger that was really felt out on the streets.

We saw millions of people pouring out into the streets, engaging in serious, disruptive political action. So we don’t want to say that’s somehow illegitimate, right? We just weren’t ready. We hadn’t built the political infrastructures to be able to take that anger and to make it more productive than it was.

So rather than, like, litigating something that I and others had no control over, let’s talk about what we should do going forward. So that’s my view. I don’t have any interest in, like, finding out who the people were that we should throw under the bus because they used the wrong language.

Bacon: The reason I’m asking is—you live in New York, I don’t, but to me, one of the most progressive leaders in the country—I do a lot of politics reporting, so, one of the most progressive leaders in the country, someone who might run for president as a progressive candidate, the words that came out were, “Woke 1.0 was crazy.”

And so that’s why I want—so that implication that we need—she, and a lot of the discourse since then, has been, people said stuff then they shouldn’t have said, and we need to find who said the bad stuff. And I want to be precise about what was said that was wrong, and on some level to unpack it a little bit. I want to look forward, but I think it’s—

Vitale: Well, I’ll give you an example, right? Folks on the ground in Minneapolis, before George Floyd, had an organized campaign to do invest/divest. They had a program with dollar amounts, specific programmatic interventions that they wanted. And then 2020 happens, and there is a panic among the political class, and you have city council members saying that they’re going to vote to abolish the police, or something.

That was not what was being proposed. And they were in no position to deliver on a demand like that. And if they had instead said, We’re prepared to vote for a set of programmatic interventions that are going to make our community safer, and we’re going to help pay for that in part by dialing back our over-reliance on policing, that would have mirrored what was actually happening, and I think it would have been a more responsible thing to say.

Bacon: Let me make sure I emphasize two points here. First of all, the difference between police reform in the way it’s been done by Obama, and in the way you’re for it—explain to people clearly. I guess the term I have heard used is non-reformist reform. Talk about the difference between the reforms or the changes in policing you’re for, and the changes in policing that more, I’ll call them centrist Democrats, are for. This is a very important distinction, I think.

Vitale: Yeah. So if you go back and you look at President Obama’s task force on 21st century policing, that was developed in the aftermath of the Ferguson uprising, you see very clearly from the get-go the language of what we call procedural reform, which is designed to tighten up police procedures to, as I mentioned before, restore public trust in the police. This is proceduralism. This is box checking. This is pointless training. It’s body cameras that produce footage that no one can ever see.

Bacon: Why is it bad to have more trust in the police?

Vitale: Because some of what the police do is unjust and should be stopped. I don’t want people to trust narcotics officers. I just did a podcast on The French Connection, the film that won best picture in ‘71, starring Gene Hackman, about this major drug bust that happens in the ‘60s, based on a real story, and they capture all these drugs, and everyone’s like, Oh, see, we got to get the bad guys. We got to get the drugs off the streets.

But then if you look at the film American Gangster, which is also based on a true story, those drugs that were confiscated in The French Connection were stolen out of evidence by police and sold back out onto the streets, and was used as a pretext for arresting thousands of Black and brown people. And destroying their lives, and I would argue their communities.

So why on earth would we want to restore public trust in the war on drugs? It was created with a racist goal in mind, right? Folks in the Nixon administration who created the Drug Enforcement Agency have come forward and said, We were in the meetings, and this was all about a racist attack on Black people. It had nothing to do with public health or public safety. So I don’t want to restore public trust in narcotics officers. I want to create a politics that says that police should have nothing to do with drugs. We should do what Portugal and some other places are doing. This is a public health issue.

And it turns out that this is true for a huge amount of what police do, that we don’t need them to be—between a quarter and a half of all people killed by police in the United States are having a mental health crisis. Police should not be responding to these things, and the cities that are pulling them out are showing fantastically positive results. They’re saving money. They’re saving lives. It’s more just.

So we don’t need to reform how police handle mental health calls. We need to quit sending the police. And so in my book, I take all these areas of policing, show why they’re unjust, and show why the solution is just to quit using them, and to use something else to address that problem.

Bacon: So in other words—put this—so one vision of police reform is, we are going to make changes to create the veneer—

Vitale: We’re going to give narcotics units anti-bias training.

Bacon: Yes. So to create the—one vision of reform is, we’re going to suggest that we can make the police nicer and more gentle, and the other version is, we’re going to get the police out of various tasks. We’re going to reduce the role of policing in society, basically. So these are two, and one of these visions obviously will probably require more police than the other—I mean, your vision—

Vitale: That’s right. No, in New York City, the NYPD goes on almost a quarter of a million calls of an emotionally disturbed person. That’s the terminology they use. We just don’t need them to do that. It is a huge driver of overtime, of police headcounts, and let’s just reduce the headcount by that 200,000 calls.

Bacon: OK, so that’s the difference between a defund position. So whatever term we’re going to use for police, people like you—so if we’re not going to use the term abolitionist right now, what term should I use for people like you?

Vitale: You can call it abolition. I’m not afraid of that as a label for myself. But what’s important is to describe what I’m actually talking about. Which is, it’s an analysis about a long-term strategy for change that’s about making us safer.

Bacon: OK. And so when you use the term public safety—I’m very focused on public safety. I think part of it is, like, how do you have an argument with someone who says—because I think a lot of people’s views about public safety means police. How do we get people to rethink—a safe city is not—when I think, when people think safety, they think men with guns. Not just also the police, but also, even with ICE, we’re having to explain that ICE is not making you safer.

So how do we get away from—say, a safe community is one where everyone has what they need is what we’re trying to get to. But how do we convince people that a safe community is not one where there’s lots of—at least the three—even safe communities in America, like gated communities, have the threat of armed men coming. So how do we get people to rethink what safety means? You used the term public safety a few different times, and I think people mean, think, public safety and the police are the same thing.

Vitale: Yeah. So first, I want to kind of cover two areas here. One is that we have limited our conception of public safety to the kinds of things that we send the police for, right? There’s a robbery, there’s a shooting, there’s a burglary, right? But somehow what’s not included in that is corporate pollution, unsafe food, wage theft by employers. When these things actually kill more people and steal more money than all that other kind of policeable crime combined.

So we focus too much on the wrong thing, and this is not an accident. This is by design, I would argue. The other thing is that we have told people that the only way they can produce safety in their community is policing. We’ve given them this—I would say it’s a kind of terrorism to tell people, Either accept all these people with guns in your community, or you get nothing.

And so, given that horrible choice—what’s amazing is how many people, given that choice, still say, No police. Which we know in a lot of poor communities, people are like, “I would just rather not have any police.” That people actually say this and believe this. But how do we overcome this? So my advice, typically, when I’m asked to come and meet with folks, is to say, “You got to start with a needs assessment. You got to go out and talk to people about what their public safety concerns are,” some of which are based in reality, and some are based on watching too many television news shows where, when it bleeds, it leads, and if there’s not enough local murder and mayhem—

They’ll go find some in Indiana or whatever, on the local news in New York. So you got to do a needs assessment, and then you need to put together a menu of options that are rooted in actual functional examples around the country, around the world. Oh, turns out a lot of people are concerned about opioid overdoses. Turns out policing has been a total disaster, complete failure. Actually has made the problem worse.

So what could we do? It turns out there are lots of things we could do, right? We could look at harm reduction strategies. We could look at legalization schemes. We could look at public education that’s not run by police, right? Drug testing. There’s lots of things we could do to save lives. But we don’t do those things. We just send the police to make more pointless narcotics arrests.

So when we do the needs assessment, when we get stuff on the table, then we can talk concretely to people about, “Oh, you’re concerned about young people getting in fights. Maybe there’s some shootings. OK, we noticed that there’s a community center down the street that is shuttered.” And they’re like, Oh yeah, they told us 20 years ago there was no money for the community center, but we could have a special narcotics unit and a gang task force instead. And if we say to people, “Would you rather have a fully functioning youth community center, or another gang suppression unit in your community?”—and when we give people that choice, it turns out the vast majority of them would rather have the community center open.

Bacon: Now let me put on my dumb pundit voice. I’ve already done it once, we’re doing it again. Did you know, Alex, that if you do a poll, that Black people—and did you know that you’re not Black, Alex? But Black people, if you ask them in a poll, will say that they prefer more police rather than fewer, and they live in Black areas, and sometimes those areas have high crime. So aren’t you just an out of touch white liberal who is talking about things that don’t really affect you? I’m just—

Vitale: Yeah.

Bacon: I’m going to give the full—this is the implication of what people are saying. So I’m just going to say it fully and get you to respond to it.

Vitale: Yeah. And of course my personal life situation is much more complicated than—

Bacon: Yeah, and I actually don’t know.

Vitale: —but that’s irrelevant. It shouldn’t matter. So the fact is that, yeah, that reflects decades of disinvestment and criminalization. And so that’s the choice people have been told they have to make. And of course, you laid out the choice in exactly that way: police or nothing. But it turns out, when we actually do polling that says, “Would you rather have the specific concrete thing other than policing?” the numbers are much better.

And so my job is to give people those other choices, to harness the national and international perspective, to look at the evidence. So when a community asks me to come in, as they do all the time, I can say, “Have you thought about this?” Or, “Did you know there is a program doing this, but they have no funding and no support, and the police are trying to undermine their work? Maybe we should lean into that, properly support it.” And then people are like, “Oh, yeah.” It’s giving them the alternatives, and also giving them permission to ask for what they really want.

Bacon: Two more questions. The first is, you’re in New York City, so Zohran did not quite give the AOC “Woke 1.0 was crazy,” but he did say, I’m opposed to defund. Defund is not something I agree with. I work with the NYPD every day. They’re a vital part of public safety in New York. Do you view him—I guess I view him as backtracking as well, and I view that as a worrisome thing, because he’s a DSA member in a fairly blue area, and if he can’t hold the line on this, then nobody can.

How do you view the mayor you’re experiencing right now? And I think you were on some kind of advisory committee after he won. So talk about what you’re seeing in your city, and if I should be worried about that, as someone who wants to see more real changes happen.

Vitale: So during the campaign, I, along with many other people, was asked to review the proposal for a Department of Community Safety. I have some fingerprints on that, and introduced him around to people. And then after he won, I was appointed to the mayor’s transition team, for the Committee on Community Safety, and I continue to act as an informal but regular advisor to the mayor’s office on public safety issues.

So I just declare all that. The mayor said during the campaign, I don’t want to increase the police, and I have some areas where I’m concerned about—gang policing, sex work policing, protest policing seems problematic and needs some change, and we maybe need to get rid of some units. And what I really want to focus on is creating a Department of Community Safety that’s going to do exactly these investments that the invest/divest movement has been calling for.

So that’s great, and he has appointed a deputy mayor of community safety to help get this department up and running, and they have staff now, and I talk to them all the time, and they are developing these things. They’re taking what already existed in city government, and they’re trying to fix it, expand it. They’ve got hundreds of millions of dollars of new money to try to make this work.

But on the other hand, the other side of the equation, nothing is being done about abusive policing. Broken windows policing is running wild. The complaints are running wild. There’s no accountability, and there’s no dialing back of these problematic areas of policing. I’m not happy about that. And I’ve been very public about not being happy about that. And when there was talk of hiring more police, because that’s what the police commissioner wanted, I was in The New York Times and other outlets, and working with people and organizations to put a stop to that, which we did, which is great. He did hold the line on hiring more police.

My best read of this is that he will feel politically in a stronger position to push back on policing when this Department of Community Safety is really up and running, and these on-the-ground infrastructures of safety are stronger and have more public support. This Department of Community Safety was very popular during the campaign, and there are a lot of people who want it to succeed. And I’m concerned that the city council speaker, Julie Menin, is trying to block it. But that’s what we need. So yes, I’m speaking out about the harmful policing stuff, but I’m also still heavily invested in the possibility of building out these new investments.

Bacon: So just to tell you where I see this—you were giving an answer about how you thought he would move forward on these things, and I thought you were going to say after he won a second term. But you said after the department, and I think I might be more right about this than you—we’ll see—but I think the actual constraint is, the police commissioner can be removed. My prediction would be, the day he wins a second term, or three days after that, the police commissioner will be asked to find some other job. But I think she’s—

Vitale: I think she’s going to become such a political liability for him, actually. By allowing out of control policing, she’s actually creating political problems for him in the neighborhoods. So I think there’s a point—and she’s opposed to his overall agenda, and she represents the interest of the billionaire class, and so—

Bacon: That’s why she’s going to be there the whole time, I would argue. But anyway, we might disagree.

Vitale: Maybe, maybe. Yeah, I’m not making a concrete prediction. This is just my read of the situation.

Bacon: And the final thing is, is there a place in the world—because I think you’ve done a good job making the point that policing—is there a place in the world that is doing public safety the way you would want to see it done?

Vitale: There are lots of places that are doing one or two parts of it here, and another two parts here. Belgium joined a couple of countries recently in decriminalizing sex work, and bringing them into employment schemes and benefit schemes and giving them workplace protections. Portugal has decriminalized all drugs. I was there recently. It just looks incredibly successful. Public health measures have improved dramatically as a result of that.

And we’ve seen cities get rid of school policing and bring back counselors and programs that target the highest needs, highest risk young people. I think what Newark, New Jersey is doing on violence reduction is amazing, and New Orleans and Baltimore similarly, and other places, including small places like Richmond, California. So there are lots of cities moving in the right direction, I think.

Bacon: As you’re speaking, I thought about San Francisco as the one I think is moving in the wrong direction, right? They’re the ones cracking—

Vitale: Yeah, they are, really.

Bacon: I saw my former employer, The Washington Post, wrote a story praising the new mayor, and I was like, “Oh, that’s a sign he’s doing something wrong.” And he’s cracking down on any kind of drug, any kind of mental health, drug use, you know?

Vitale: Yeah. And they messed up the civilian mental health response. They kept it too close to the police and fire department. It doesn’t have community trust. It’s not achieving the objectives. But if you go to Denver, where they created a robust civilian-only team, the results are fantastic, and crime is even going down in the neighborhoods they operate in.

Bacon: Alex, anything else you want to add about this policing discussion, which I think has gotten—I think you’ve even got us back to where we should be a little bit, so I’m just curious if you have—

Vitale: Yeah, no, I think it’s important to have a reality check that after 10 years of police reform, police are killing as many or more people than they ever have, that the racial disparities—

Bacon: Around 1,000 a year, right? In the US?

Vitale: More than 1,000. Significantly more than 1,000 a year, and that’s the numbers that we’re able to account for with no police assistance, right? They refuse to even tell us how many people they’re killing. So there are estimates that are much higher. And also, the racial disparities remain in place. And this is an unjust endeavor that we need to unwind.

And I think that communities have very mixed feelings about policing, and there’s no telling when another George Floyd-type incident might bring us back to where we were in 2020. These things are unpredictable and episodic, but they do occur, right?

Bacon: Alex, thanks for joining me. Tell people where they can find your work.

Vitale: So I’m on Substack, Alex Vitale, and I’m on most social media platforms.

Bacon: Good. Alex, thank you for joining me. Appreciate it. Good to see you. Bye-bye.

Vitale: You bet. My pleasure.

The Democratic Party nationally has largely stopped talking about making changes to policing. And more than 1,000 Americans are killed each year by police, numbers that have not dropped despite more than a decade of activism against police brutality. But Alex Vitale, one of the leading figures in the push to drastically overhaul policing in the United States, says that progress on policing is happening in three ways. First, many cities, while not cutting police funding or their number of officers, at least aren’t drastically increasing them, either. The message that local police departments are sufficiently and perhaps overly funded has landed, even if there isn’t yet support for pulling back some funds. Second, numerous cities, most notably Baltimore, are investing in non-police violence prevention programs and achieving positive results from them. (We are seeing some of the lowest crime and murder rates in recent history, even as the number of officers holds steady or declines in many cities.) Vitale and others have long argued that communities should invest in social programs and divest from policing to stop crime. The former is happening. Third, liberals and progressives are now pushing a much bolder police reform agenda. Instead of trying to make policing better through implicit bias training, body cameras, and other incremental changes, many on the left have accepted the argument from Vitale and others that the real goal should be to reduce the role of law enforcement in our lives. That’s what abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency would do, for example. Vitale discusses that progress and how activists could continue to build on it in the latest episode of Right Now. Vitale is a sociology professor at Brooklyn College, as well as coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project there.  He is the author of The End of Policing. 

Since regaining power last year, Donald Trump has been clear on his intent to establish military dominance in the Western Hemisphere. That has ranged from demanding favorable trade arrangements from regional partners to expressing the desire to either control or annex territories and whole nations. Along the way, he has revealed a steady fixation with combating drug traffickers, and has unleashed the full weight of U.S. military power to pursue those ends. But it’s only in recent days that this has turned into a clear policy framework. These actions in Ecuador are a preview of a wider campaign that looks poised to quickly grow in the coming weeks.

It wasn’t until late August that the full extent of military involvement in the region started coming into view. Juan Jaramillo, the governor of Ecuador’s Esmeraldas province, located near the Colombian border, revealed that Green Berets from the 7th Special Forces Group were conducting joint operations against cartels with Ecuadorian troops. Soon after, two ships—an American destroyer and an amphibious transport dock carrying Marines sent to the region explicitly to fight drug traffickers—arrived in Ecuador’s waters. These maneuvers coincided with fresh sanctions against various individuals alleged to be involved in drug trafficking. 

The U.S. military has largely remained quiet about the matter, not publicizing deployments; the news of its involvement broke via Ecuadorian officials. But U.S. Southern Command, or SOUTHCOM, has since issued triumphant statements about recent attacks. An airstrike on a small boat in the eastern Pacific, the first in two months without such an attack, was the first indication from SOUTHCOM of renewed actions. Soon after, the USS San Antonio and its embarked Marines stopped, boarded, and sank a ship alleged to be a “floating refueling station” used by drug traffickers. The Pentagon has suggested that other nations in the region governed by Trump-friendly leaders are amenable to joining these joint operations.

The Americas Counter Cartel Coalition, also known as the Shield of the Americas, was set up in March 2026, after the January 3 raid in Venezuela that captured Nicolás Maduro under the auspices of his involvement in the drug trade. For most of the year it was just a semiformal political organization, but last month—following earlier elections favorable to the Trump administration and shifting geopolitics abroad—the U.S. laid out the full intent of the coalition in practice. 

Speaking at a gathering in Panama in August, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth outlined the coalition’s goals: “To degrade, dismantle, and destroy narco-terrorist networks,” using the term the administration has for traffickers. Soon after, he outlined a new mission for U.S. forces in the area, operating under SOUTHCOM, saying that the U.S. is using “military capabilities against real threats who need to be deterred and defeated.”

Much of what the Trump administration is doing has been built on a long-standing foundation: The U.S. has sent forces to Latin America to fight drug traffickers in the past, and the 7th Special Forces Group has considerable experience operating in the region. What is new, however, is the call for expanded action: The administration has, for all intents and purposes, found a way to further weaponize the post-9/11 security state by labeling drug traffickers as “narco-terrorists” and designating the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. In so doing, the administration has the legal path for the full weight of military power to be brought to bear. And like in the global war on terror, that is manifesting in everything from targeted strikes on oceangoing vessels alleged to be manned by traffickers to less-trumpeted ground campaigns with regional partners. “That’s going after the enemies of our country—designated terrorist organizations—unabashedly,” Hegseth said last month.  

Backing the regional, U.S.-led coalition is a new military task force. In August, the U.S. set up Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere, replacing Joint Task Force Southern Spear, which oversaw the blockades of Venezuelan oil ships and, eventually, the raid on Caracas last January. The new command serves as the U.S. arm of the new security coalition, with deployed ships as well as a Marine Corps force sent to the region explicitly to fight traffickers. There are many questions about this new effort, including how many forces are actually being sent to the region and what objectives they have been assigned to pursue. There are also valid concerns over human rights abuses. But what is even more concerning is the way the administration has a free hand to rapidly scale up these operations under this new framework.

It’s a strategy for expanded military action that fits both the Trump administration’s stated agendas as well as the real-world situation in which the administration has become mired. Whether an unintended consequence of the war in Iran or not, that operation has pulled resources from the military’s strategy in the Pacific, with canceled drills and redirected warships. The Iran war has not yielded the easy victory Trump sought; he is now six months into the conflict with no end in sight. Troops sent to the Middle East are exhausted from long deployments. But in Latin America, the U.S. can operate with a relatively small footprint and work with partners to expand its forces, while waging a war against its stated enemies in a campaign that might offer better P.R. At a time when Trump’s Iran quagmire is draining munitions stockpiles, single strikes in Latin America can provide news of victories and shareable social media content—as the past year of boat attacks or the previous airstrikes this year inside Ecuador and Venezuela demonstrate.

Rather than a hostile intervention like Venezuela in January, or large-scale war like Iran, Washington has found a way to insert itself into these countries through partnerships with friendly governments, opening the door for military action. And now, this new anti-cartel coalition, with more than a dozen nations involved, seems poised to aid or at the very least allow the U.S. to expand its reach across the hemisphere. The campaign is just getting started, unchecked and largely unnoticed. If the current strategy in Ecuador is as robust as Washington says it is, it will only grow from here as the administration plots a bloody distraction from its other military misadventures.

And that’s not even the half of it. The U.K.—which endured its hottest summer since 1884—faced 2,700 heat-related deaths during heat waves in May and June. In Europe, at least 35,000 more people died than would normally be expected due to four record-breaking, back-to-back heat waves earlier this summer. More than 200 people are believed to have died in the unprecedented wildfires that have blanketed eastern Algeria in recent weeks, far outpacing the officially reported death toll.

Indeed, underestimating death has become something of a theme in our warming world. An investigation from NPR and researchers at Boston University revealed that heat deaths in the United States are dramatically and chronically underreported. While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that an average of around 700 people died of heat-related causes per year between 2018 and 2026, NPR’s analysis found—perhaps conservatively—an average of 9,000 heat-related deaths per year during the same period. In some years, heat-related fatalities soared above 10,000, with those in Florida believed to be 40 times greater than officially recorded death tolls.

Other accounts are more reliable. July 2026, for instance, tied with July 2024 for the hottest July since modern record-keeping began in 1850. Thanks to this year’s unusually powerful El Niño and climate change—which is widely believed to be strengthening that El Niño—2026 is very likely to be the hottest year on record, surpassing the previous record, set in 2024. If that turns out be the case, 2026 will have been the latest in a long string of record-setting hot years; as the World Meteorological Organization reported back in January, the last 11 years have been the hottest 11 years on record.

It would be too comforting to imagine that summers marked by steadily worsening heat waves, megafires, and landslides constitute a kind of new normal: a revised baseline that societies can adapt to in some straightforward, linear fashion. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. As climate scientist Kevin Anderson told Novara Media recently, “This is not a new normal. On average, this is the least extreme weather that I, you, and anyone else listening to this will ever live through.”

Rising global temperatures make some things—like melting glaciers, stronger hurricanes, and hotter summers—more likely. But climate change also makes the planet’s weather systems behave in more “unstable and unprecedented ways,” as climate economist Gernot Wagner has written. The impact of certain carbon “feedbacks,” moreover, like the excess emissions created by wildfires, still aren’t fully understood, and there is good reason to suspect that the earth could be more sensitive to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases than scientists initially thought. Economists have also routinely failed to account for the full and currently ballooning costs of the climate crisis, from dried-up shipping routes to wildfire.

What’s undeniably certain, however, is that the planet is getting warmer. Leading climate modelers now find “unavoidable” a world that is 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than preindustrial averages. A report out today from the United Nations Environment Program likewise concludes that a world that’s 1.5 C warmer is now inevitable. Continuing to burn fossil fuels will also keep making the planet warmer. What may well be the hottest summer of our lives, then, may also be the most normal one we’ll ever get.

Trump retaliated in 2019 by denying Amazon a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the Pentagon and giving it to Microsoft instead. Amazon sued, arguing this was an act of political retribution, and got the Microsoft award overturned; in 2022 the Biden administration divvied the contract among Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle. By then, Bezos had become more circumspect. After the January 6, 2021, insurrection, Bezos offered no public condemnation, and in 2024 he barred the Post from endorsing any presidential candidate. That turned out to be a prelude to dumbing down and lurching rightward the paper’s editorial pages, then shrinking the news staff so drastically—all but eliminating once-substantial coverage of foreign affairs, sports, culture, and the D.C. region—as to remove the Post from the first rank of American newspapers.

Bezos’s attention had turned elsewhere. Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s 2025 inaugural fund, created an online Trump merchandise store, paid $40 million to license a puffer documentary about first lady Melania Trump ($28 million of which reportedly went directly to Melania), spent an additional $35 million publicizing the film, and plans a follow-up Melania series this fall. By May 2026, Bezos was telling CNBC: “I think he is a more mature, more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term.” It’s doubtful even members of Trump’s own administration believe that (though of course they’d never admit so publicly).

In his forthcoming book, Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era, Jacob Weisberg argues that Bezos’s space company Blue Origin was the primary reason for Bezos’s pusillanimous surrender. “In the new privatized space race,” Weisberg writes, “fealty and favoritism would drive outcomes, as they did with everything else under Trump.” The Biden administration had awarded Blue Origin a $3.4 billion lunar lander contract that Bezos feared would be canceled as Trump brought into the White House his rival Elon Musk (who owns Space X). The Blue Origin contract was not canceled. Indeed, it and other Bezos-owned space companies this year received hundreds of millions in additional NASA contracts, even though the NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman, is an Elon Musk guy.

Amazon, too, has benefited from the Bezos surrender. On September 1, Virginia Representative Bobby Scott, ranking member of the House Government and the Workforce Committee, and John Mannion, a Democratic member of the committee, sent a letter to the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel, Crystal Carey, inquiring about two conspicuous retreats by Carey in a never-ending legal siege that Amazon has been fending off for years. At issue is whether Amazon may continue to pretend that workers who wear uniforms that say “Amazon,” drive vans that say “Amazon,” and deliver packages from Amazon do not work for Amazon and that Amazon therefore need not pay benefits, Social Security tax, unemployment compensation, minimum wage, etc., nor allow these workers to organize. Carey is allowing the masquerade of Amazon’s nonemployment of these delivery personnel to continue.

The fight to end Amazon’s fissured-workplace scam (which, among other things, gives Amazon an unfair competitive advantage over the United Parcel Service, which employs its drivers) is being carried out on multiple fronts, at both the state and federal levels, using various legal tools, including antitrust law and two labor statutes, the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act and the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, or NLRA. The two cases flagged by Scott concern the NLRA, and therefore the National Labor Relations Board.

One case concerns 84 former Amazon drivers who operated out of an Amazon facility in Palmdale, California. Their ostensible sole employer was an Amazon contractor called Battle-Tested Strategies. In April 2023, the drivers organized themselves into a unit of the Teamsters; negotiated a new contract with Battle-Tested Strategies; and informed Amazon that it would have to renegotiate its contract with Battle-Tested Strategies to conform to the union contract, which among other things included a wage hike.

Amazon responded by terminating its contract with Battle-Tested Strategies. Teamsters Local 396 filed a complaint with the NLRB, arguing that Amazon employed the drivers jointly with Battle-Tested Strategies and refused to bargain in good faith. President Joe Biden’s NLRB general counsel agreed with the complaint; the matter was referred to an administrative law judge, and a trial began. (The NLRB general counsel acts as a sort of prosecutor.)

In April 2026, however, with the NLRB under the control of the Trump administration, a new general counsel, Carey, interceded with a “unilateral settlement agreement”—an unusual maneuver in which the general counsel reaches a settlement with one party in the dispute (in this instance, Amazon) over the objections of the other (in this instance, the Teamsters). The unilateral settlement gave the affected workers two weeks’ back pay, with Amazon admitting no guilt in the matter.

The second of the two cases involved an Amazon contractor in Atlanta, called MJB LLC. In this instance, an NLRB complaint was filed by an Amazon driver named Hunter Richau. Richau said that after he complained that the boss welshed on a promise of bonus pay, he was subjected to various threats by MJB LLC, including one in which MJB LLC’s owner said the company had been instructed by Amazon to “silence the loudest voices” (which, if true, would confirm beyond any doubt that Amazon jointly employed Richau). This case, too, was initiated under Biden and continued for some time under Trump before Carey was appointed general counsel (though, unlike the Palmdale case, it had not yet gone to an administrative law judge). In June, Carey once again interceded with a “unilateral settlement agreement,” opposed in this instance by Richau. This time, all Amazon had to do was post a notice promising to honor workplace rights.

In their letter, Scott and Mannion pointed out that in permitting Amazon to avoid admitting guilt, Carey was contradicting a memorandum on settlement agreements to which she’d agreed in February. Scott and Mannion also requested that Carey inform the committee of any additional unilateral settlements reached under Trump.

We don’t know who these other violators of labor law handed a get-out-of-jail-free card may be. But we know that Jeff Bezos is getting a good return on his investment in Donald Trump. Granted, Trump likely has no idea what these cases were about. But he did nominate Carey to be general counsel knowing that previously she’d been an attorney with Morgan Lewis and Bockius, a prominent management-side law firm. Among Carey’s clients at Morgan Lewis was Amazon. Carey promised at her Senate confirmation that she would recuse herself from any enforcement decisions or actions concerning Amazon. But a year later, Carey claimed that her recusal expired before she was sworn in as general counsel! In effect, the Trump administration was telling Bezos: You play nice with us, we play nice with you.

Vance’s fake fury—he even called El-Sayed “very, very evil”—was ostensibly triggered by the Democrat’s recent claims about Vance’s marriage to Usha, who was born in the U.S. to Indian immigrant parents. It made big news, with headlines faithfully amplifying Vance’s outrage as if it were genuinely felt, implying that he’d righteously struck back at an out-of-bounds slight.

The vice president’s pose as an enforcer of chivalry and rectitude in our politics is ludicrous on its face, given his apologetics for Donald Trump’s nonstop vicious personal smears. But this episode is of interest for another reason: El-Sayed’s stance articulates a bigger point about Vance’s craven compromises with the MAGA coalition’s racist and white nationalist elements that is 100 percent correct.

El-Sayed’s latest barb about Usha illustrates the point. It came after Vance attacked El-Sayed at a different rally last week, arguing that El-Sayed had “once argued that criticisms of sharia law” are “rooted in white supremacy.” Vance then said this:

I’d love to go back in time and tell my Papaw that there is a man who claims to stand for working people—who says not only should we have sharia law, but if you criticize it, you’re a white supremacist.

In saying these things, Vance is lying: He’s referring to some much-dissected 2022 comments from El-Sayed about white supremacy’s historic role in shaping U.S. politics and history. Those did refer to the plight of Native Americans, African Americans, Muslim Americans and others, but didn’t say either of the things Vance claimed. Regardless, that Vance line is what prompted El-Sayed’s supposed transgression. In response to it, El-Sayed posted: “So do we think JD is taking Usha with him back in time to meet Papaw, or no.”

Note that Vance entered his family into the discussion here. He offered a revealing non sequitur: His grandfather from the Kentucky mountains, this salt-of-the-earth Appalachian, would have seen El-Sayed’s discussion of the historic plight of nonwhites in America as anti-working people. Who does Vance mean by “working people”?

The question answers itself. Vance, by falsely claiming that El-Sayed would impose sharia, is of course telling Michiganders that they should fear a Muslim Senate candidate by virtue of his religion. His Papaw would have been appalled; so too should today’s working-class voters, especially those who think of themselves, like Vance, as heritage Americans with roots in America’s white heartlands that reach back generations.

El-Sayed’s comment was a response to that. His claim is that if Vance’s Papaw would have seen a Muslim candidate in the bigoted terms that Vance articulated—as inherently posing a threat to “working people”—then he also might have seen Usha Vance in a similar way.

The key point is that El-Sayed is making an argument about JD Vance himself, not about his wife. He’s urging JD Vance to be a bit more reluctant to play such sordid racist games given his own marriage to a brown person—with whom he’s had four children—who herself has faced much bigotry.

That last bit is really critical here. Recall that some MAGA figures have attacked Vance’s marriage to Usha in heinously racist terms. And let’s not memory-hole this: Vance himself initially hesitated to condemn those attacks, almost certainly because it threatened the cohesion of the MAGA coalition. He ultimately did so after his passivity became untenable.

El-Sayed’s invocations of Usha, then, effectively ask Vance to reflect on his willingness to push anti-Muslim smears in the context of his own life experiences. This is an absolutely legitimate line of criticism. Because what El-Sayed is saying here is broadly correct: Vance’s successful rise in politics absolutely has required sordid compromises with factions in the MAGA coalition who are viciously bigoted, including toward his own wife, and this really should weigh more heavily on him.

One such vicious bigot, after all, is Donald J. Trump. The president of course hasn’t attacked Usha (there’s a separate story here about Trump-MAGA’s differing views of Hindus and Muslims, but that’s for another piece). Yet he has maliciously highlighted the hijab of El-Sayed’s wife and cast the El-Sayed family as alien others:

How dare El-Sayed “attack” JD Vance’s wife! What an outrage!! You’d think reporters would now ask Vance for his thoughts about Trump’s attacks on El-Sayed’s spouse, given his fury over El-Sayed’s highlighting of Usha. And Trump is hardly alone: El-Sayed and his family have faced a huge wave of anti-Muslim bigotry from MAGA.

Yet some in the media are playing dumb about many of these subtexts. Note, for instance, the New York Times write-up of all this: While it did report on the GOP’s hateful attacks on El-Sayed, it didn’t mention that his comment about Usha came in response to Vance’s bigoted monologue about his Papaw, El-Sayed, and sharia. This bizarre omission made it sound as if El-Sayed volunteered the Usha line unprompted, making it seem more personal and draining it of its real meaning.

I don’t know how the politics of all this will play for El-Sayed. His approach is undoubtedly provocative. My suspicion is that Vance’s real goal here is to tie El-Sayed down in disputes that remind people of his Muslim heritage, on the theory that this can only hurt him.

Indeed, there may be no easy way to invoke Usha Vance that works politically for El-Sayed. Perhaps he needs to reach for a somewhat higher tone, a loftier register, to get these points across most effectively. One possibility might be for El-Sayed, who has two daughters, to say something like this: JD, every time Trump and MAGA attack my family’s religion and smear my wife for wearing a hijab, they are attacking your wife and kids, too.

That has the virtue of highlighting the truth: Vance has made vile accommodations with gutter white nationalists of all stripes. Given Vance’s undisguised desire to be seen as a towering moral and intellectual figure, you’d expect him to ruminate just a tad on how he and his movement are treating El-Sayed and his family. But in the end, he almost certainly won’t judge his white nationalist allies harshly for a fairly simple reason: He largely agrees with them.

In other words, the Iran war is making the U.S. less safe, and the U.S. appears no closer to defeating Iran than it was in late February. But Trump continues, pathetically, to insist the U.S. has won the war—even as the countries resume tit-for-tat strikes. On Monday, he declared on Truth Social that Iran was “officially a Failed Nation. IT IS DEAD! They have no Navy, they have no Air Force, they have no currency, they are not paying their soldiers or police, Inflation is at 300%, and their leadership is in total disarray and incapable of properly representing the country.” He has been making similar claims for months, and yet Iran is still standing and the Strait of Hormuz, which was wide open before the war began, is still closed. The most powerful country in the world is somehow in a stalemate with a “DEAD” and “Failed Nation.”

These deluded rants, coupled with Hegseth’s slow Pentagon purge of anyone who isn’t a loyalist, point to something quite dark. Trump’s deep-seated fear of ground operations has (blessedly) kept the war from turning into something even worse, but no bona fide war has ever been won by a combination of air power and economic sanctions alone. There are few signs that anything can bring this conflict to a close. When combined with the warnings from top generals about just how overstretched the military is right now, the situation looks even more dire—not just for the U.S. but for global stability. And it will probably get worse before it gets better.

It almost certainly will not get better before next year, when the Democrats, assuming the November midterm elections go as expected, will be assuming control of at least one chamber of Congress. It may not improve before the 2028 presidential election, when Iran could be a pivotal issue, either directly (if the war is still ongoing) or indirectly (if the war’s fallout persists—especially the economic impacts, such as massive inflation, caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz). And yet, Democrats aren’t really talking much about Iran, beyond using it as a cudgel to damage Trump and Republicans ahead of the midterms.

To be clear, that is the right political strategy. There are few reasons why Democrats should advance their own plans for resolving a thorny geopolitical issue that is entirely Trump’s responsibility. In launching the war, he chose to ignore intelligence reports that suggested Iran would not fall easily—and that it could close the Strait of Hormuz—out of the hubristic belief that massive U.S. airstrikes would generate regime change without having to put boots on the ground. The economic and human consequences of this mistake should be placed solely at the feet of Trump and the Republican Party that enabled him. This is their war, and the Democrats have no reason to help him stop it. Even if they did, he wouldn’t listen anyway.

Moreover, a competing plan for resolution of that war—even if it was wise or plausible or both—would only distract from the facts of that war, all of which are very damaging to Trump and the GOP. Democrats should focus most of their political attention on rising costs and a depleted military—for now. But there is an argument that as the midterms approach, Democrats can press a successful policy to end the war that is also good politics.

There have been signs throughout the war that Iran would end it if the U.S. adopted an agreement that is more or less similar to the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which ensured that Iran’s nuclear program remained peaceful in exchange for the gradual unfreezing of economic assets. There are some caveats, the main one being that Iran would almost certainly want a more favorable version of the JCPOA that included as much as $20 billion in unfrozen assets (versus $2 billion in the original), partly as reparation costs for the damage wrought by U.S. bombs.

Still, the fact is that the JCPOA, though much maligned at the time as a “giveaway” to Iran that weakened the U.S., worked as intended. It certainly worked far better than Trump’s war has. Democrats’ pushing a return to the Iran deal—as a way to bring peace, constrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and give the military time to restock—would provide a useful contrast to the current administration. It would also hint at what the next Democrat administration must do: rebuild the numerous alliances and relationships that Trump has broken. Given the domestic wreckage being caused by this administration’s foreign policy, that message surely would hold some appeal for American voters this fall.

Transgender rights weren’t even close to the most prominent issue in the 2024 campaign. To the extent they were, it was a 2019 video of Harris supporting gender-affirming care for people in federal prison, a much harder position to defend than young people playing sports. It was strange that Moulton singled out transgender athletes for the Democrats’ defeat, as opposed to Biden, Harris, or their campaign strategists. Even worse, he whined when he was criticized for his remarks, suggesting those rebukes showed Democrats don’t tolerate alternative views. Moulton wanted to attack transgender participation in sports without those who support transgender athletes forcefully criticizing him in response. Sorry, Seth, that’s not how free speech or open discourse works.

Moulton exemplified the reactionary, left-bashing panic and capitulation to Trump we saw from many congressional Democrats in the wake of the 2024 election. Almost two years later, he got what he deserved: an electoral whupping. Incumbent Senator Ed Markey easily fended off Moulton’s primary challenge. The race was called quickly after polls closed on Tuesday night, and Markey is likely to win by more than 20 percentage points.

Moulton’s blowout loss, along with that of Angie Craig in Minnesota’s Senate race last month, should serve as a warning: Don’t expect to advance in Democratic politics, particularly in a blue state, if you spend the weeks after a Democratic presidential loss distancing yourself from the party base.

Defeating an incumbent senator is obviously hard, so Moulton’s loss isn’t shocking. But Moulton had a huge advantage in this race: age. Democratic voters, angered with Biden for initially running and then flopping on the debate state, are eager for generational change. So when Moulton, now 47, announced his challenge to Markey (80) back in October, I figured the congressman had the advantage.

In fact, it was an example of the scenario I feared. Early last year, some Democratic activists, furious about 2024, were arguing that any Democratic officeholder over age 70 should be replaced by someone younger. They’re wrong. What Democrats really need is not necessarily younger members but ones who fight hard, both for progressive policies and against Donald Trump and MAGA. I want Bernie Sanders (84) and Elizabeth Warren (77) on Capitol Hill, but not Josh Gottheimer (51) or Jared Golden (44). A fixation on age could elevate ambitious climbers who stand for nothing but their personal ambitions over the fighters we need to make America a better democracy.

But at least in Massachusetts, the younger candidate couldn’t hoodwink voters into thinking that he stands for change or fight or vigor. After all, this is Seth Moulton. He so perfectly embodies the hold-power, do-nothing ethos that plagues Democratic politics, which voters can easily discern. Despite serving in the House since 2015, he’s not been a prominent figure in fighting Trump. He didn’t propose anything particularly bold or creative during his brief 2020 presidential run. (You probably forgot that he ran.)

He likely only got on the radar of many Democrats in Massachusetts and nationally with his transgender comments. So when his campaign launched, progressive activists trashed him. “When people are talking about younger leadership stepping up, they’re talking about the Ayanna Pressleys, not the Seth Moultons,” Tanya Neslusan, executive director of MassEquality, a prominent LGBTQ+ rights group in Massachusetts, told NOTUS last fall.

And for an eightysomething, Markey was well positioned. Unlike Biden, he speaks clearly and walks confidently. He’s been a strong supporter of Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and other left-wing policies, so progressives love him—including younger ones. Markey, not Moulton, was backed by Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, and numerous other younger Democratic politicians.

Markey took full advantage of Moulton’s transgender remarks, painting himself as the defender of the LGBTQ+ community and other groups that often face discrimination.

Moulton isn’t the only youngish Democrat who positioned himself rightward in the aftermath of the 2024 election and was rightly punished for it. Representative Angie Craig of Minnesota was one of 46 Democrats in the House and 12 in the Senate who voted for the Trump-backed Laken Riley Act, which calls for federal law enforcement to detain and deport immigrants charged with nonviolent crimes even before they are convicted. The legislation itself was bad. The message that those 58 Democrats wanted to send to the rest of the party was even worse: Trump had won the election, so Democrats needed to move right on immigration.

At best, those Democrats didn’t realize just how fervently anti-immigrant this administration would be. At worst, they further emboldened this administration by signaling that some Democrats wouldn’t object to heinous immigration law abuses.

Craig also ran for the Senate. And she lost the primary by 20 points, in part because Minnesota’s Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flaganan hammered Craig over her Laken Riley vote.

Most of the 58 Democrats who voted for the Laken Riley Act and otherwise capitulated to Trump early last year or blamed progressives for Harris’s defeat remain in Congress. But at least two are gone. And in Moulton’s case, this was an embarrassing defeat. Democrats in Massachusetts were so desperate not to have Seth Moulton be their senator that they were willing to overwhelmingly reelect an 80-year-old to a six-year term. Seth Moulton kicked trangender Americans and other progressives when they were down. Now, Massachusetts voters have kicked him out of politics. Job well done.

Republicans now have a 218–213 advantage over Democrats, and they’ll be down one more vote once California Democrat Aisha Wahab—who replaced scandal-ridden ex-Representative Eric Swalwell—is sworn in later this week.

Blair—Georgia’s first openly gay congressman—was victorious in a special election last month to complete the term of deceased Representative David Scott, and will only serve until January. State Representative Jasmine Clark will represent the party in the November midterm elections in a district that usually trends blue.

.@SpeakerJohnson (R-LA) holds a ceremonial swearing-in for Representative-elect @evertonblairjr (D-GA) after he won Georgia’s 13th Congressional District in a special election runoff following the death of the late Rep. David Scott. pic.twitter.com/a1loDDp9JZ

— CSPAN (@cspan) September 1, 2026

Swearing in two Democrats in one week is unusual for Johnson, as he has traditionally gone well out of his way to delay Democrats taking their seats—it took Representative Adelita Grijalva a record 50 days to be sworn into office, delaying the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. In contrast, it took him less than 48 hours to swear in a Republican colleague last year.

Blair was sworn in hours before a tense vote on the Republican legislative agenda—including a resolution to condemn socialism, among other things. The vote resulted in the bill’s survival and averted a government shutdown, as Democratic Representatives Jared Golden and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez joined Republicans to advance it, even though five other Republicans refused to do so.

Representatives Jared Golden of Maine and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington bridged the gap left by five Republicans who voted against the rule. Without Golden and Gluesenkamp Perez, it would not have passed. Among the proposed legislation now advancing to debate is a resolution to condemn socialism ahead of the midterm elections, a bill designed to punish universities that speak out against the Israeli government, and alterations to environmental protections for the North Atlantic right whale.

After the vote, congressional Democrats were quick to voice their surprise and frustration. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jefferies told reporters that he “didn’t get a heads up,” and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that, when she sat at the helm of the chamber, “We didn’t even consider that anybody would do that…. We never had that problem, so I’m disappointed that they did that.”

“It’s one of the rules of being on a team, is that we vote against the rule,” Democratic Whip Katherine Clark told The Hill, referring to the precedent that members are generally expected to vote with their party when it comes to rules votes, regardless of how they plan to vote on the final legislation. “I’m sure we’ll have further discussions,” Clark said.

The five conservative Republican holdouts declined to vote to get their party’s rules over the finish line in protest of Republican leaders’ handling of an earlier vote Tuesday on government spending. Without Golden and Glusenkamp Perez’s surprise intervention, Republican Speaker Mike Johnson’s agenda for the week would have been dead on arrival.

Golden, who is not seeking reelection, is reportedly supportive of one of the Republican bills, which could protect a key Maine constituency—loberstermen—from the economic harm that may come from fishing regulations designed to protect the right whale.

According to the House clerk, 46 lawmakers failed to make it back to Washington in time for the first roll-call vote on Monday. The 6:56 p.m. event recorded the names of the missing members, which included 22 Republicans, 23 Democrats, and one independent. No lawmakers voted “present” on the bill, which aimed to establish national standards for the Justice Department to assess and respond to reports of sexual abuse by incarcerated people against prison staff.

Some of the missing lawmakers managed to make it to the lower chamber within the next 15 minutes, however, where a second roll-call vote took place at 7:10 p.m. At that point, 42 members (21 Republicans and 21 Democrats) were still missing in action, according to the clerk’s office.

The names of the representatives who still failed to arrive in time for the second vote Monday evening are listed below.

Democrats

• Nanette Barragán (California)
• Steve Cohen (Tennessee)
• Shomari Figures (Alabama)
• John Garamendi (California)
• Robert Garcia (California)
• Sylvia Garcia (Texas)
• Daniel Goldman (New York)
• Marcy Kaptur (Ohio)
• Stephen Lynch (Massachusetts)
• Kweisi Mfume (Maryland)
• Seth Moulton (Massachusetts)
• Richard Neal (Massachusetts)
• Nancy Pelosi (California)
• Ayanna Pressley (Massachusetts)
• Delia Ramirez (Illinois)
• Jan Schakowsky (Illinois)
• Adam Smith (Washington)
• Haley Stevens (Michigan)
• Nydia Velázquez (New York)
• Bonnie Watson Coleman (New Jersey)
• Frederica Wilson (Florida)

Republicans

• Andy Barr (Kentucky)
• Vern Buchanan (Florida)
• Scott DesJarlais (Tennessee)
• Byron Donalds (Florida)
• Neal Dunn (Florida)
• Sam Graves (Missouri)
• Wesley Hunt (Texas)
• John James (Michigan)
• Dusty Johnson (South Dakota)
• Nancy Mace (South Carolina)
• Michael McCaul (Texas)
• Lisa McClain (Michigan)
• Daniel Meuser (Pennsylvania)
• Mary Miller (Illinois)
• Cory Mills (Florida)
• Jay Obernolte (California)
• Burgess Owens (Utah)
• Jefferson Shreve (Indiana)
• Victoria Spartz (Indiana)
• Pete Stauber (Minnesota)
• Thomas Tiffany (Wisconsin)

“While abstinence-only education may well be appropriate for some age groups or communities, the agency has offered no explanation or evidence to support its across-the-board mandate that only abstinence strategies be pursued,” U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper wrote in his opinion. “On the topic of body literacy, the notices (remarkably) reference public health studies that appear either not to exist or not to support the propositions for which they are cited—a hallmark of AI-generated citations.”

Cooper issued a preliminary injunction, pausing an order that has already led to millions of dollars in grant cuts.

“The Court concludes that the Plaintiffs’ likelihood of success on their arbitrary and capricious claim, combined with the severity and irremediable harm to their programming and the balance of equities in their favor, justify the issuance of a preliminary injunction in this case,” he wrote.

This isn’t the first time the Trump administration—and HHS—have used AI to generate references or content. Last year, the department’s “Make America Healthy Again” report contained references to articles that didn’t exist and multiple citation errors.

The HHS is likely using fake AI slop to justify and defend bad MAHA policies that have real material impacts on the lives of everyday Americans, and could have alarming effects on public health.

“For far too long, tobacco-related disease has taken an enormous toll on American families, including Communities that have too often been overlooked and underserved. Pastor Scott understands these communities, and the challenges they face, and he knows how to bring people together to get RESULTS,” the president wrote on Truth Social. “Delivering on a Campaign promise, his work will help ensure that we take a serious look at how we can better protect Americans from dangerous tobacco products, while supporting solutions to reduce harm and SAVE LIVES.”

In Scott’s own telling, he met Trump in 2011 at Trump Tower, where he expected to find a sleazy real estate tycoon and instead found a devout Christian ready to do the work for Black Americans. He was involved in Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, introducing then-candidate Trump at rallies and Christian gatherings, and he co-founded the National Diversity Coalition for Trump, alongside the president’s former attorney turned bitter enemy turned podcast pal, Michael Cohen. After the president defeated Hillary Clinton, Scott was given a role on his presidential transition team. In 2018, Scott called Trump “the most pro-Black president in my lifetime.”

“Pastor Darrell Scott has been with us from the very beginning. He is a GREAT LEADER with a tremendous heart for the people of our Country. Thank you Pastor Scott. MAKE AMERICA HEALTHY AND SAFE AGAIN! President DONALD J. TRUMP,” the president concluded in his announcement.

Although Scott supposedly “understands these communities” impacted by tobacco-related illness, the pastor has zero experience in public health or tobacco policy. His appointment at the CDC is further proof that loyalty, not expertise, is the real qualification for a job in Trump’s administration. That roster includes a former Fox News host running the Department of Defense, a vaccine skeptic in charge of the nation’s health agencies now contributing to the return of measles, and a real estate developer son-in-law tanking negotiations with Iran.

In a sit-down interview with 22-year-old evangelist podcaster Bryce Crawford, Vance said that he’s “OK” if his work on earth brings about a biblical doomsday event.

“Do I think we are in the end times? I don’t know,” Vance said in the interview released Monday, noting that it would be bad for him spiritually if he were to spend too much time thinking about that query. “While I’m fascinated by it, I think that focusing on it too much can be very bad.

“I think there are things about the world that make feel like not shocked if the Antichrist was walking among us,” Vance added.

In another portion of the interview, Vance claimed he’s focused on “doing as much of God’s work as possible,” shrugging that “if that leads to the end times, OK.”

Vance: I'm trying to focus on doing as much of God's work as possible. And if that leads to the end times, okay pic.twitter.com/0HlbsZdDfj

— FactPost (@factpostnews) September 1, 2026

The Christian end times refer to the religion’s interpretations of the final days of humanity. That’s detailed in the Bible as a period involving widespread turmoil and deception (such as wars, earthquakes, and a false prophet), a seven-year stretch of unprecedented hardship known as the Great Tribulation that will end in Armageddon, the emergence of the Antichrist and a cadre of their followers who reject Christ’s teachings, and a final judgment by God.

Vance did not speculate as to who he believed the Antichrist could be.

Ultimately, Vance gave Crawford more than an hour of his time, while the White House aggravates long-standing Western alliances, embraces Russia, wages war on Iran, undermines voting rights, and further divides the American public—among other sordid realities.

Crawford founded the ministry Jesus in the Street and has attracted more than a million YouTube followers via clickbait videos such as “Preaching the Gospel in the Hood” and “Gay Man Encounters Jesus.” Last week, Crawford joined comedian Howie Mandel’s podcast to argue that “homosexuality isn’t love” and that “truth trumps a feeling” when it comes to transgender identities.

According to the Washington Examiner, Beltran’s website used to proclaim that he “stood with President Trump every step of the way.”

“He is one of only seven Republican legislators in the entire state of Florida who never endorsed Ron DeSantis for President, standing firm with Trump from the moment he came down the escalator in 2015. That wasn’t a political calculation. It was conviction,” the removed passage continued.

It certainly seems like Beltran is leaning into political calculation now, as his support for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is missing from his website along with the pro-Trump language.

Beltran’s campaign told the Examiner that the cuts had nothing to do with Trump, or his dismal 33 percent approval rating. There are still some mentions of Trump on the campaign site, mostly related to immigration, as well as a photo of Beltran and his family with Trump.

Beltran isn’t the only GOP nominee to distance himself from Trump after a primary victory. Ralph Alvarado, who was endorsed by Trump in May, has scrubbed the president’s name from his website, touting himself as “independent leadership for Kentucky.”

It seems like Republicans are seeing the writing on the wall and prioritizing their own optics over attaching themselves to Trump’s dirty lapels in the midterm election. Earlier this month, Trump-endorsed Republican candidates Amir Hassan of Michigan, Andy Ogles of Tennessee, and Mike Lindell of Minnesota all lost their primaries. Even still, Trump seems unfazed by his poor midterm performance outlook.

“There’s a theory that I get the vote,” Trump said to Sean Hannity last week. “You know, I see it all the time. ‘When Trump’s on the ballot, they win. When he’s not on the ballot, the people don’t go to vote.’ And I’m asking the people through your brilliant show, number one show, I’m asking the people to get out and vote, pretend I’m on the ballot.”

On Monday night, Hegseth reposted an image from Vernon Cadet Training Center in British Columbia of an officer in the Cadet Instructors Cadre presenting a young cadet with a medal at the end of a summer cadet training session. The defense secretary captioned the image with a Canadian flag emoji and, in parentheses, “(this is real).”

The Canadian Cadet Program is a federally funded youth development program for Canadians between the ages of 12 and 18 focused on leadership, citizenship, and community service. They are not members of the military.

Hegseth’s post was immediately condemned online, as commenters accused the secretary of body-shaming the instructor and young cadet. Fred Wellman, a Democratic candidate for Congress in Missouri’s 2nd district, wrote, “You’re mocking kids. This is a junior cadet program. What a pathetic small man you are.” Amy Coplan, a California State University Fullerton philosophy professor, added, “Is bullying Canadian teenagers more important than attending to our ever-deteriorating situation in Iran?”

Some responses to Hegseth’s post used the defense secretary’s own style against him, writing “(this is real)” with the American flag alongside images of President Trump with Jeffery Epstein and Hegseth himself soaked in champagne.

Perhaps the greatest insult came from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney himself, who said Tuesday that the post was “beneath their office.”

“When the Americans stop doing memes, stop throwing shade, stop trying to be tough and start being serious about having the discussions, we can have those discussions,” Carney told reporters. “It’s not constructive, but that’s their democracy.”

Despite the defense secretary’s blatant body-shaming, the Pentagon stands by his every word. “The X post speaks for itself,” Pentagon deputy press secretary Jacob Bliss said.

The whole exchange marks yet another escalation in the Trump administration’s ongoing feud with Canada, during which Trump has levied a trade war against our northern neighbors, thrown insults across the border, posted ridiculous memes, and changed the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America.”

The General Services Administration, under the White House’s guidance, has awarded government contracts to renovate the two-lane Harry S. Truman Bowling Alley in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Politico reported Monday. On July 28, the GSA awarded nearly $253,000 to Charles Mann Enterprises to do some lighting work in the exclusive recreational spot. Weeks later, on August 18, the agency awarded the contractor another $8,800 for escort services to shuttle workers in and out of sensitive government areas.

Somehow, the development has not rattled budget-conscious Republicans in the slightest, despite the party’s previous aversion to the site’s renovation.

The last major renovation project proposed for the bowling alley was announced under President Barack Obama in 2014. At the time, the GSA told Time magazine that the lanes needed a rebuild as they were “irreparable.”

Hours after the article’s publication, the proposed renovation turned into a Washington brouhaha. Republican opposition to the remodel forced the GSA to cancel the project, and the Republican-controlled House went so far as to adopt an amendment prohibiting funding from being used to renovate the bowling alley.

Former Representative Pat Meehan called the renovation a “want,” not a “need.” Former Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus made a similar mockery of the proposed rebuild on Twitter, publishing a list of crossed-out governmental funding needs such as the economy and “securing the border.”

“Repair WH Bowling Alley✓,” Priebus wrote at the time.

But Republicans in Trump’s second term are comparatively nonplussed by the MAGA leader’s inordinate and unnecessary spending. Beyond the bowling alley job, Trump has razed the White House East Wing, started construction on a $600 million ballroom (the price of which keeps growing), gutted the Lincoln bathroom, transformed the Palm Room from a lush green foyer into a sterile lobby, and mowed down Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s famous Rose Garden in order to pave “paradise.”

The administration has also spent more than $16 million on an unsuccessful and rushed renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, announced plans for a 250-foot arch near Arlington National Cemetery (estimated at more than $100 million), indiscriminately axed trees in the Washington area, and destroyed the Kennedy Center facade. It is also reportedly planning to destroy some 13 historic buildings on the grounds of former psychiatric hospital St. Elizabeths in order to expand facilities for the Department of Homeland Security.

Ohio State Highway Patrol officials reported that Bel had pulled his car over on the right shoulder of I-70 Monday morning and then walked directly into oncoming traffic. He was struck by a large tractor-trailer and died from his injuries at the scene.

Bel had reportedly been distraught after he, like dozens of Haitians in Springfield, was called to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office to be fitted with an ankle monitor following the end of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians. Springfield is home to a Haitian community of about 15,000, and a June Supreme Court decision permitted the Trump administration to cancel their TPS protections, despite the ongoing violence and insecurity in Haiti. Without TPS, Haitian residents have been ordered to wear ankle monitors and travel no further than 75 miles from their homes.

“I came to this country to pursue my education. I didn’t come here to commit a crime or hurt anyone,” Bel wrote on Instagram on July 30. “Yet now I’m walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg, carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience.”

Bel was a recent honors high school graduate and a proud cadet in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. He had just started classes as a freshman at Wright State University, where he wanted to study medicine and play soccer.

After being fitted with the ankle monitor, he was reportedly not given a JROTC uniform and could no longer comfortably play soccer.

“In his last days, I did not recognize him as he was such an energetic kid who loves life, friends and family, and education,” the 20-year-old’s father, Pierre Ronal Bel, told The Haitian Times. “It was his first week of classes, but he didn’t feel like he was learning because he was traumatized, so it’s because of ICE’s ankle monitor.… He would wear long pants or jeans whenever he went out so people wouldn’t make fun of him or look at him differently.”

“He felt like he was treated like an animal,” the grieving father added in a statement to The Washington Post.

Bel’s death has shocked and traumatized the Haitian community in Springfield and beyond. This is the same Haitian enclave that President Trump accused of eating cats and dogs on the campaign trail in 2024, and the community has been living in terror ever since the administration canceled TPS. Bel was scheduled for an asylum hearing in October, and reportedly did not want to return to Haiti due to the violence that caused his parents to flee in 2021.

“I’m supposed to be forgiving,” the Bel family’s pastor in Springfield, Carl Ruby, told the Post. “But right now as I sit with a broken family, I’m crying out to God for righteous judgment in those who made this happen.”

According to the Chicago Tribune, Bovino’s investigation was triggered by Judge Sarah Ellis, who last year called him out for lying on the stand about being hit in the head with a rock by protesters, which he used to justify his brutal use of tear gas against American citizens.

“I find the defendant’s evidence simply not credible,” Ellis said at the time. “Agents pushed, shoved, tackled protesters, pointed guns at them, threw tear gas and deployed smoke canisters. Everyone that agents detained [was] released by the FBI, and none of them are currently charged with assault.”

An internal federal investigator asked Bovino to answer questions about Ellis’s ruling in March just weeks before he retired. In that same inquiry, Bovino was also asked to respond to allegations that he used antisemitic language on a conference call in January. When Minnesota U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen, an Orthodox Jew, couldn’t make the call due to the Sabbath, a frustrated Bovino allegedly said “Do Orthodox criminals also take off on Saturday?” and used the term “chosen people” in a negative connotation.

Bovino’s tenure as CBP head was absolutely horrific. He tear-gassed men, women, and children. He called Latino immigrants “scum,” “filth,” and “trash,” while identifying as Native American (he is Italian American). Most notably, he claimed that Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, had intended to harm the CBP officers who shot him 10 times while he was pinned to the ground with his gun holstered. Since his exit, Bovino has accused the Trump administration of wanting him killed, and Trump himself of betraying his mass immigration goals.

Inside Washington

The media are paying attention to the wrong Massachusetts Dem primary

As Massachusetts voters head to the polls for the primary election on Tuesday, the race between incumbent Senator Ed Markey and his younger, more moderate challenger Representative Seth Moulton continues to receive the most attention, even though 80-year-old Markey is nearly certain to win. The race to replace Moulton in the 6th congressional district, on the other hand, is wide open, serving as a microcosm of some of the issues troubling Democrats across the country.

The two front-runners in the five-candidate MA-6 race are Tram Nguyen and Dan Koh. John Beccia, who is self-funding his campaign, could have a chance but appears to be decidedly behind the former two candidates.

In some ways, the race seems a classic matchup between an insurgent progressive and an establishment moderate. Nguyen “is the more progressive, the more grassroots, the more walking the streets, knocking on doors” candidate, said Erin O’Brien, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. “That’s the easy frame to understand her.” Meanwhile, Koh is “a good Democrat,” she said, “more or less a moderate, lots of D.C. connections.”

But perhaps more importantly, the MA-6 race showcases the nationwide split between anti-Trump resistance Democrats (like Koh) and affordability-focused candidates (like Nguyen) who want to create a message that moves beyond Trump. That divide has already played out this primary season, notably in Alex Vindman’s loss to state Representative Angie Nixon in the Florida Senate primary. Vindman gained a national profile for his testimony during the 2019 Trump impeachment inquiry, and made this a focus of his campaign. Other impeachment leaders, like Representatives Diana DeGette and Dan Goldman, lost their races to progressive challengers.

Koh, who served as deputy assistant to former President Joe Biden and deputy director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, has earned the endorsement of both Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris. Nguyen has been a state representative since 2019 and has earned endorsements from state progressives like Representatives Ayanna Pressley and Lori Trahan, as well as state House Speaker Ronald Mariano and state Speaker Pro Tempore Kate Hogan. Her endorsements aren’t just the typical progressive names, which could give her an edge.

“There aren’t necessarily a ton of places in America where people are breaking out the Biden name-drop,” said David Hopkins, a professor of political science at Boston College. But given the more moderate makeup of the 6th district, Koh’s “calculation” to emphasize the Biden connection “may be a correct one,” Hopkins added.

The district includes the northern suburbs of Boston, and is rated D+11 by the Cook Partisan Voter Index. It’s clearly a Democrat-dominated district, and the winner of today’s election is expected to win the general election against Republican Micah Jones. But the district is a far cry from the progressive urban strongholds of Boston and Cambridge. It’s an older, suburban, more middle-income district, which elected the decidedly moderate Moulton six times.

Koh’s strategy seems to be, “I want to be the champion of normie Democrats who still think Joe Biden did a good job and still think Trump is the enemy,” said Hopkins. That strategy is evident as soon as you open Koh’s campaign website, which centers the slogan: “Fight Trump. Lower Costs.” The first three issues on his issues page are Fighting Trump’s Corruption, Protecting Democracy, and Abolish Trump’s ICE. Meanwhile, none of the policy points on Nguyen’s website mention Trump, and she focuses instead on economic justice issues.

At the end of the day, noted Ray La Raja, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the two candidates would likely support the same legislation in Congress on most issues. “She’s trying to run in the lane to the left because she thinks that’s where the energy is,” he said. “He interprets this race as people looking for a fighter.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

The National Park Service confirmed a second death on Monday in the Grand Canyon flash flood in Arizona that occurred over the weekend. As of Tuesday morning, one person remains missing, with some 80 people rescued in the past few days. The Park Service has said there is “no estimated reopening date” for the affected areas. The Washington Post’s Ben Knoll reports that while this is part of the expected monsoon season in Arizona, “a record-breaking El Niño and a marine heat wave in the Pacific Ocean have combined to load the atmosphere with moisture.… On the backdrop of climate change, these factors have driven atmospheric moisture levels 5 to 15 percent higher than average.” Meanwhile, the death toll from flash floods in Nepal and Tibet following a glacier collapse has climbed to over a thousand. Faced with billions of dollars of repairs, Nepal has reportedly appealed to the United Nations’ climate-disaster recovery fund for help.

The Ohio Capital Journal warns that after nearly a third of Affordable Care Act enrollees in the state dropped their marketplace plans following the GOP’s decision to let subsidies expire, the “smaller, sicker clientele” that remains will see their premiums rise an average of 14.7 percent for 2027. Ohio saw the “biggest enrollment drop of any state” following the subsidy expiration. Democrats are hoping to flip the governor’s mansion, a U.S. Senate seat, three U.S. House seats, and at least six Statehouse seats in Ohio.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

“Stop Doomscrolling. Do Something,” Democracy Forward president Skye Perryman urges New York Times readers. “Many of us confuse consuming political news, engaging on social media and participating in group chats with doing the things that we, as individuals, can do to help change our country’s trajectory,” Perryman writes in the paper’s opinion section. But twentieth-century political history, she argues, shows that “ordinary Americans” were the ones who pushed through major reforms. “We can organize our neighbors, work at local polling places or join community groups. We must not be satisfied with watching the decline of American democracy from our phones.”

In case you missed it: Public Citizen condemned the Trump administration’s announcement late last week that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration would be reversing an Obama-era rule establishing fuel efficiency standards for medium and heavy-duty truck engines. “This latest attempted rollback by Trump is yet another giveaway to the oil and gas industry, the effects of which will increase fuel costs for truckers and in turn, raise the cost of consumer goods,” said Public Citizen electric vehicle policy advocate Will Anderson in the organization’s statement.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Political Trivia Question of the Day

What two presidents (1) ordered the construction of the East and West Wings of the White House and (2) ordered and oversaw the East Wing’s significant expansion? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

The CBS article was headlined: “Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s deleted tweets on Sept. 11 attacks invite scrutiny of past remarks.”

The story’s lede was even more offensive, grammatically suggesting that El-Sayed was somehow to blame for 9/11.

“As the nation prepares to mark 25 years since Sept. 11, 2001, Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, may be facing the risk of renewed scrutiny and fresh political attack,” the story began.

That same language was mirrored in an X post from the company’s official account.

The story critiqued several of El-Sayed’s since-deleted Covid-era tweets in which the former public health official compared the pandemic’s early death toll to the infamous terrorist attack and wrote that he hoped the ensuing government response would “spend the next ten years fighting a war for public health & against poverty.” (This was not controversial—many leaders and media outlets at the time compared Covid’s death toll to that of September 11.)

Ultimately, CBS News used the anniversary of 9/11 to damage the Muslim progressive’s chances in Michigan, even though the content of his posts was rather banal.

The Weiss-led network also suggested there was something sinister about the fact that El-Sayed had deleted the posts, even though his campaign has been public about the fact that he had deleted all his posts prior to 2023.

Status’s Oliver Darcy reported Tuesday that Weiss “personally directed” the Islamophobic language and was a driving force in shaping the story’s framing. According to Status, Weiss “praised” the story during CBS News’s daily editorial meeting, and signaled her support of the piece “to the entire network.” She also urged that the “headline be tweaked to specifically mention that El-Sayed had deleted tweets referencing the September 11 terrorist attacks,” according to CBS staffers who spoke with Status.

Senior CBS News staff brought the story to the standards department, though little was done about it due to Weiss’s personal involvement.

“They took a small nugget of news, forced into something much larger, and messed up,” one CBS News employee told Status.

A former senior CBS News staffer who heard about the situation from a former colleague told Status that the article was “shameful” and “the racism is overt.”

A person familiar with the story refuted that there was anything “racist or Islamophobic” about reporting on El-Sayed’s deleted tweets.

They told The New Republic in a message that Weiss “strengthened” the headline, which they said originally read: “For Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, Sept. 11 commemoration invites scrutiny of past remarks.”

They noted that Weiss was not “intimately involved in the reporting process” but confirmed that she did edit the headline and complimented the story during the company’s morning meeting on Monday.

Weiss, the founder of the pro-Israel blog The Free Press and a former New York Times opinion columnist, was tapped to run CBS News late last year, despite the fact that she had never worked in broadcast news, lacked traditional reporting experience, and had also never run a major news operation.

Weiss’s business decisions atop the news giant have unequivocally and singlehandedly divorced CBS News from its decades-long place in America’s prestige news media circuit. What was once crowned the “gold standard” of broadcasting and was the home of some of journalism’s most venerable names, such as Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, has since devolved into a graveyard for journalistic ethics.

Under Weiss’s stewardship, CBS News has killed critical stories in order to save face for the Trump administration. The network has also lost a cadre of veteran journalists, ranging from 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens to Anderson Cooper, to the company’s de facto face, Scott Pelley.

This story has been updated.

During their meeting, Trump was reportedly shocked when Driscoll told him just how many officials had been fired, stepped down, or not selected for promotion under Hegseth—something you’d think the president would already know about. Now, in the midst of a flailing war with Iran, the military is without its highest-ranking civilian leader, two Senate-confirmed head generals, and a confirmed commander.

Driscoll and Hegseth have seemingly been at odds from the moment Trump appointed Hegseth to head the Pentagon. In April, The Hill reported that Hegseth saw Driscoll as a threat to his leadership given Driscoll’s connection to Vice President JD Vance and his more traditional, less aggressive leadership style—with Hegseth’s team going so far as to try to frame Driscoll as a “resistance figure” in an effort to oust him from the administration.

Hegseth had already eviscerated Driscoll’s support network, firing his chief of staff, General Randy George, and two other high-ranking military officials in April. Driscoll’s Monday resignation was a long time coming, if nothing else. It’s unclear what exactly Hegseth’s problem with Driscoll was beyond paranoia and Driscoll’s lack of total capitulation.

“From what I’ve seen in the press, and from whatever it’s worth, what I hear from people in the Army, it’s not like Driscoll is scheming and plotting to make Hegseth look bad. I mean, Hegseth takes care of that himself on a regular basis. It’s just, it’s all just very strange. And it’s just irresponsible,” retired Army reserve colonel and Pentagon staffer Kevin Carroll told The Hill in April.

Either way, Driscoll is gone now, and Hegseth will have one less detractor to his vision of a reckless, hypermasculine, shoot-first-ask-questions-later military to reign supreme over.

The allegations were made public Tuesday morning by way of a letter from Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal to Postmaster General David Steiner. Citing the insider’s testimony, Blumenthal said that the “risky and haphazard” implementation of President Donald Trump’s March executive order—which granted the postal service new gatekeeping responsibilities regarding mail-in ballots—could lead to a “catastrophic failure” in U.S. voting procedures come November.

The executive order was in legal limbo for months—up until last week, when the Supreme Court decided that the lawsuit challenging the order was premature since the administration had not yet implemented it. The Supreme Court was clear that it had not ruled on the legality of Trump’s order, but nonetheless allowed it to move forward.

Still, the postal service’s plan to carry out the marching orders is already fraught with problems, according to the whistleblower report.

The snail-mail carrier has been building an entirely new federal ballot mail portal since June, months before the service was permitted to move forward with the executive order. The portal will screen all incoming ballots, but its development has been “rushed” and “risky” as the service tried to meet “impossible deadlines.”

For instance, the agency has eliminated testing procedures for the portal platform, a risk that could potentially “derail the midterm elections,” according to the whistleblower.

“Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all,” the official said.

Blumenthal told reporters by phone on Monday that “the main takeaway for me is that the Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans. One-third of all Americans cast their ballots by mail, and the USPS puts all of their votes at risk.”

Voting by mail will invariably become more difficult for the tens of millions of Americans who depend on the service under Trump’s new order. Even if a voter does everything right, their vote could still be rejected by the Postal Service’s new portal.

Part of the problem is the system’s 0 percent failure rate, which processes ballots in large batches but rejects the lot if one fails to pass muster.

“For example, if a state election official brings a batch of 10,000 ballots to USPS and USPS is unable to match just one of those ballots against the portal—because, for example, someone has recently changed their name after marriage or they’ve moved—then USPS would refuse to mail the remaining 9,999 ballots as well,” Blumenthal wrote. USPS would then expect the state to “take back the entire batch to cure the issue with the single ballot,” according to the whistleblower.

The whistleblower claimed that developing such a portal and the infrastructure to support it should take the service a year or more, but USPS leadership nonetheless demanded that the electronic processor be launched by September 1—less than six months after the executive order was signed, and just two months before the midterm election cycle.

Prosecutors had sought a 13-year sentence, which would have essentially meant life behind bars for the aging leader of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, or FFWPU, formerly known as the Unification Church. The sentence was something of a surprise, as the church had expected the court to agree to the prosecutors’ request. Han was found guilty of political bribery of former first lady Kim Keon Hee and another conservative politician, with the church apologizing for causing “big concerns and disappointment to the people” but vowing to appeal Han’s conviction.

Han, her chief of staff, Won-ju Jeong, and former church deputy Yoon Young-ho were accused of embezzling over $7 million in church funds through false accounting between 2017 and 2025, with investigators seizing a further $26 million in funds hidden in a safe in Han’s bedroom. Han was acquitted of these charges, leading to the greatly reduced sentence. The church has repeatedly sought to place blame on Yoon for the corruption, claiming that Han had been drawn into a case driven by religious persecution. Jeong was given a suspended sentence, while Yoon received an additional six months to the 18 months he received in a separate trial.

Adding to the intrigue, the two women at the center of it all were brought together by Jeon Seong-bae, a court shaman known as Geon Jin, in a web of quid pro quo that saw an exchange of money and political backing, such as inflating membership lists and attending rallies, in order to further the church’s business activities. Geon Jin is a self-proclaimed Buddhist monk who draws on ancient Korean shamanistic practices and specializes in geomancy—the interpretation of markings in the ground as a form of fortune telling. According to prosecutors, Geon Jin approached the first lady and her husband, former conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol, seeking favors for the church’s business empire, given the church’s long-stated goal of achieving “unity of politics and religion”—that is, bringing all world governments under the rule of the church.

Ostensibly an investigation into Korea’s former president and his wife, it instead revealed two women up to their necks in a scandal of their husbands’ making. Thirty-two people in all were indicted over the wider corruption affair, including another controversial sect leader, Lee Man-hee of the Shincheonji Church, which is more infamously known as the epicenter of one of the first outbreaks of Covid outside of China.

The affair came to light after Yoon spectacularly declared martial law in a late-night television address in December 2024, sparking mass protests. He said his “self-coup” was a response to what he claimed was a North Korean conspiracy to overthrow him, but it was widely seen as a bid to save his unpopular presidency from protests, a Congress controlled by the opposition, and mounting corruption scandals, many of them relating to his wife’s perceived hand in government and suggestions that she could be bought. Said to have been conceived over a night of heavy drinking, a related plot reportedly saw Yoon and his defense minister order drones flown into North Korea in a bid to provoke conflict, unbeknownst to the military.

Eleven days later, he was impeached by the country’s national assembly. In January this year, he was sentenced to five years in prison after being found guilty over the decree, and he awaits further trials that could result in the death penalty if he is found guilty of insurrection.

Much of the intrigue surrounding the affair is to do with his wife, Kim Keon Hee, who styled herself as a first lady cosplaying as a Korean Jackie Kennedy–Hillary Clinton type but was viewed as a Lady Macbeth by many Koreans. Twelve years younger than her husband, she took an unprecedented, outsize role as a first lady in Korean politics, even once claiming she was “the man” of her household, shocking a deeply patriarchal society. Her critics were wide-ranging: She made enemies as she helped ban dog meat as food in the country and defended a politician accused of sexual assault. More lurid allegations proliferated in tabloids, which reported that she met her husband when she worked as a nightclub hostess under the name “Julie.” After vigorously denying the claims as fictional sleaze, asserting that she was an academic and a “workaholic,” she was later embarrassed into apologizing for embellishing her résumé and had two of her degrees retracted for plagiarism.

The scope of her role as the hand behind the throne is contested, even by prosecutors. On the night of Yoon’s failed self-coup she was at a plastic surgeon’s office and, they say, screamed at her husband for “ruining everything.” Facing three separate criminal trials, she has so far been sentenced to a total of 11 years in prison.

In a similar vein, Han Hak-ja’s notoriety, and criminality, stems from her role as wife of a man of immense power and influence. Han, who was detained in September last year, was helped from a car into her wheelchair and into a Seoul courtroom, eyes closed against the barrage of flashing cameras and the cries from supporters of “I love you, Mother Han.” She is the wife and successor of the late Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church.

Moon famously declared himself the Messiah, blending Christianity with Eastern spirituality, placing Moon and his family at the center of God’s third attempt to perfect humans after the failure of Adam and Jesus before him. In this interpretation, God’s will also means accumulating exceptional wealth and power, which for decades saw Moon play an outsize role in politics in the United States, Korea, Japan, and several South American countries. The church is infamous for its mass weddings, sexual rituals, and exploitation of members’ labor and donations, particularly in Japan, as well as for its political activities and its multinational business empire, which involves everything from sushi ingredients to military arms.

Moon married Han, his second wife, when he was 40 and she was just 17, and she bore him 14 children. After Moon’s death in 2012, she became the bitterly contested heir to his empire, battling several of her children for control of the church and its considerable business holdings. Today, Moon’s legacy continues to haunt all three nations where its political imprint is greatest.

Throughout Moon’s life, the church was most popular in Japan, where it exploited postwar guilt to trick the bereaved into donating huge sums, which it used for political influence and to build a multinational business empire. The full nature of that relationship was brought to light in 2022, when former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated by Tetsuya Yamagami, whose mother had given away the family fortune to the church, a substantial backer of Abe’s party. Earlier this year, the church was stripped of its religious status in Japan, losing its tax exemption and forcing the liquidation of its assets—although some members are already moving behind the scenes to reestablish the church under a different name.

In a twist of fate, just as Yamagami’s trial was taking place last October, so too was Han’s. Knowing she was likely to be convicted, Han made public appeals for leniency that went well beyond potential well-wishers in Seoul. The church has embarked on a campaign to convince the Trump administration to intervene on the grounds of Christian persecution, a cause it has frequently embraced around the world. Unlike many other petitioners, Han’s pleas rest on more than her faith. They bring into focus the church’s 50-year ties to the Republican Party and the fact that many senior figures in the Trump court—including the president himself—have been lavished with the church’s largesse in recent years for appearances at its conferences.

Moon’s fervent anti-communism and seemingly endless pots of money helped the church gain substantial influence during the Cold War across Korea, Japan, Latin America, and the United States. The Moonies came to prominence in the United States in the 1970s through their support for Nixon during the depths of Watergate; they maintained their allegiance to the Republican Party throughout a rolling series of scandals that reflected poorly on, but benefited, all involved. They were mired in a corruption scandal of their own, known as Koreagate, in the 1970s, which exposed ties to Korean intelligence and to both political parties in Washington, and which faded from collective memory thanks to its complexity and its embarrassment to both sides of the aisle.

The church publishes The Washington Times, a precursor to Fox News during its heyday in the Reagan administration, when the president proclaimed it the first thing he read each day. Despite being imprisoned for 13 months in 1984 for tax evasion, Moon’s influence extended into the George H.W. Bush administration; after leaving office, Bush and his wife toured the world with Moon and Han, preaching peace, love, family values, and robust American capitalism—lending their reputation to the rehabilitation of the wildly unpopular church leader, netting millions in the process with speaking fees of $80,000 a pop.

Trump gave three speeches for the church’s front group, the Universal Peace Federation, between 2021 and 2022, for which he was paid $2.5 million—including one appearance that took place just 17 days after Abe’s assassination. At a church conference in 2021, Trump appeared in a prerecorded message to praise Han as a “tremendous person” who had done “incredible work on behalf of peace all over the world.” Last year, Trump denounced the “vicious raids on churches” involved in the scandal, while the conservative media star Charlie Kirk visited the country shortly before his death and spoke out about the perceived persecution of Christians.

Newt Gingrich remains the star columnist at The Washington Times and posts frequently on X about the case. Paula White Cain, the senior adviser to the Trump White House’s Faith Office, continues to attend church conferences where she calls Han “Holy Mother Han,” the title used by her followers, and has acted as an intermediary between Trump and the current Korean administration.

Two of Han’s estranged sons, Sean and Justin, were present at the January 6 insurrection and are Mar-a-Lago regulars. They run the offshoot Sanctuary Church. Based in Pennsylvania, the church is also known as Rod of Iron Ministries, infamous for worshippers clutching semiautomatic rifles—and for Sean wearing a crown of bullet casings on his head. The two brothers host MAGA events that have been attended by figures including Michael Flynn and Donald Trump Jr.

Trump’s recent re-embrace of Kim Jong Un hasn’t helped matters for any side. The current administration in Seoul feels ever more isolated from its greatest ally, and Korea’s powerful conservative Christian right is dismayed that the president is embracing its great foe and the longtime source of its strong military alliance with Washington. Last week, Trump further inflamed tensions with a Truth Social post attacking South Korea for refusing to join his war against Iran, noting that he has “a very good relationship” with Kim Jong Un.

For the church, however, their position is clear: Their multibillionaire leader should continue to enjoy her lifestyle on the backs of church members’ work and donations. In a statement, the president of the American church, Demian Dunkley, said that “the Mother of Peace should be free to travel the world.” Following her arrest last September, her estranged son Sean, who has called her the “Whore of Babylon,” said in a statement that “this is only the beginning of the Judgment.”

For many church critics, Han’s conviction has the air of Al Capone to it: She’s been nailed for relatively minor charges, while long-standing allegations about embezzlement of church funds and exploitation of members’ labor continue to go unexamined by courts under the guise of religious freedom. So far, Han’s allies in Washington have remained conspicuously quiet—but given their long-standing financial arrangements, that’s unlikely to last long.

Others were put aboard commercial ships that normally carried bananas from Mexico to Texas. On their return voyages, the ships carried deportees south. The head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, a retired general named Joseph Swing, liked the arrangement because “I understand they get a little sea sick and they are a long way from home.” A congressional investigation eventually condemned the vessels as “penal hellships.”

The government called it “Operation Wetback.” Even the plainly racist name was deliberately publicized by President Dwight Eisenhower’s administration. Officials wanted Mexicans to believe agents could appear anywhere and that they had better leave the country before they were caught. The Eisenhower administration later claimed that more than a million people had been expelled, but the real number was probably far smaller.

Donald Trump has long understood the political power of Operation Wetback, and has repeatedly praised Eisenhower’s crackdown as proof that mass deportation could be done. “Dwight Eisenhower, good president, great president, people liked him,” Trump said in a 2015 Republican debate. Eisenhower had “moved a million and a half illegal immigrants out of this country,” he claimed. “They never came back.”

The history was considerably messier than Trump suggested. The purpose of Operation Wetback was not solely to deport migrants. Its other aim was to encourage American employers to change the way they hired workers by forcing them to instead use the tightly controlled Bracero Program, which admitted Mexican men temporarily and tied their ability to return for work to the approval of employers. The government terrorized Mexicans into a coercive labor regime designed to make them cheaper and more controllable. Trump drew a simpler lesson: The government had once mobilized enormous power against immigrants, and he could do so again.

This June, federal agents arrested more than 43,000 people, the highest monthly total since Trump returned to office. By July, ICE was holding more than 65,000 people in detention, and the administration claimed it had deported more than 590,000 people since January 2025. Unlike the border surges of earlier years, much of this enforcement has been taking place inside the country, through arrests at workplaces, homes, traffic stops, court appearances, and required check-ins.

It is tempting to see this enormous crackdown as a distortion of immigration enforcement, a system bent to authoritarian purposes by a president unusually willing to test its limits. UCLA historian Kelly Lytle Hernández’s new book, Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control, offers a more disturbing explanation: Trump did not have to build this apparatus. America built it for him. The reason a president can exercise powers over a group of people that would be constitutionally shocking in almost any other setting, Hernández argues, is that over the course of several decades, American immigration law was deliberately constructed as an exception to ordinary constitutional protections. Trump inherited a machine assembled over two centuries by slaveholders, eugenicists, and segregationists.

Hernández’s first book, Migra! (2010), told the history of the U.S. Border Patrol, and ever since she has been a major figure in a field that has refuted the sentimental story of the United States as a nation made by welcoming newcomers. Mae Ngai’s Impossible Subjects (2004) showed how federal law produced the modern category of the “illegal alien.” Erika Lee’s America for Americans (2019) traced xenophobia across American history. Jia Lynn Yang’s One Mighty and Irresistible Tide (2020) recovered the political struggle that led from the national-origins quotas of 1924 to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine (2020) showed that expulsion has been a central, durable practice of the American state. And Michael Luo’s Strangers in the Land (2025) returned readers to Chinese exclusion—the racial crucible in which modern federal immigration power was formed. Building on this scholarship, Hernández takes the history further back: Before Chinese exclusion, the Border Patrol, or national-origins quotas, she finds enslavers using migration control to protect slavery itself.

Beginning in 1791, enslaved people in Saint-Domingue rose against French colonial rule and created Haiti, terrifying American slaveholders with proof that Black liberation could succeed. Southern states tried to bar free Black people, and Congress reinforced their restrictions. The Immigration Act of 1803 prohibited free Black people arriving in the country from entering states that barred their presence. America’s first federal immigration ban, Hernández emphasizes, was not designed to police a modern national border. It was to ensure the enslavement of Black people.

The federal government acquired another extraordinary instrument in 1798, amid fears of war with France. The Alien Friends Act allowed the president to expel foreigners considered dangerous, but it soon expired after becoming notorious. The Alien Enemies Act survived, allowing the president to detain and remove nationals of a hostile foreign power. For most of American history it remained a wartime power.

The more consequential transformation came when Congress began restricting the entry of Chinese laborers in 1882 and continued tightening those restrictions for years. The Supreme Court then offered something even more powerful than exclusion: constitutional exceptionalism. In a series of decisions involving Chinese Americans, the court developed what became known as the “plenary power doctrine.” Immigration, it held, belonged to the federal government’s sovereign authority, and the political branches deserved exceptionally broad discretion over it. In Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889), the court upheld the exclusion of a longtime Chinese resident whose return certificate Congress invalidated while he traveled, and described the power to exclude foreigners as an inherent attribute of national sovereignty.

In Fong Yue Ting v. United States (1893), the court extended that logic, from keeping people out to expelling those already here. Deportation, the majority reasoned, was an administrative procedure rather than criminal punishment. In a dissent, Justice Stephen Field, who had helped establish broad federal authority in Chae Chan Ping, recoiled from where the Fong Yue Ting decision led: The majority had placed a “dangerous and despotic power” in the government, an apt epigraph for the present.

In Wong Wing v. United States (1896), the court granted jury trials to immigrants facing criminal punishment but called detention pending deportation “not imprisonment in a legal sense.” The state could apprehend rather than arrest, detain rather than imprison, and deport rather than punish. Such semantic engineering moved familiar acts into a civil category with fewer protections. Decided the same day the court sanctioned segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson, Wong Wing helped complete an immigration regime that was also organized along racial lines. While Plessy was later repudiated, the immigration precedents survived.

The exceptional power described by Justice Field soon merged with a new racial science. In the early twentieth century, eugenicists argued that nations could improve themselves by controlling reproduction and migration. Border restriction became a form of racial engineering. Harry Laughlin, one of the most influential American eugenicists and an adviser to Congress, described immigration control as a tool for preserving the nation’s racial composition. The Immigration Act of 1924 translated those ideas into national policy. Its national-origins quotas overwhelmingly favored Northern and Western Europeans, while Asians were largely barred. The same year, Congress created the Border Patrol, and soon granted its officers warrantless arrest and search authority. Agents focused that authority on Mexicans and frequently swept in Mexican American citizens, as well.

In 1929, Congress made unauthorized entry a federal crime. One of the leading forces behind the law was South Carolina Senator Coleman Livingston Blease, a white supremacist who said of Mexicans, “I want them kept out.” The descendants of that law survive as Sections 1325 and 1326 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, criminalizing improper entry and illegal reentry. Prosecutions became so common that the government had to expand prison capacity near the border. By 2011, illegal reentry had become the most frequently prosecuted federal crime.

Whites, on the other hand, encountered a different arm of the state. Hernández shows that the Border Patrol devoted far less time policing the Canadian border and tracking European migrants. The Registry Act of 1929 allowed immigrants who had entered before 1921 to pay a fee and become permanent residents, while a companion program let migrants cross into Canada and reenter legally, a route geographically closed to Mexicans. By 1940, Canadians and Europeans made up 80 percent of the immigrants who had legalized themselves under the law.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished national-origins quotas, prohibited racial discrimination in visa allocation, and transformed the country by allowing millions from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere to enter legally. But Congress removed explicit racial categories without dismantling much of the machine. Plenary power, deportation, criminal penalties for unlawful entry and reentry, the Border Patrol, and officers’ expansive authority all remained.

Later presidents and Congresses added powers. Bipartisan laws enacted in 1988, 1994, and especially 1996 expanded detention and the crimes triggering deportation, deputized local police, and enabled removal without ordinary hearings. George W. Bush put enforcement in the new Department of Homeland Security; Barack Obama oversaw enormous numbers of removals while protecting some undocumented immigrants. Hernández’s argument reaches beyond another indictment of Trump’s racism: His terror campaign depends on powers built and preserved by governments that would have rejected his rhetoric.

Trump has exploited those powers more eagerly than most predecessors. In March 2025, he revived the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to send Venezuelan men accused of belonging to Tren de Aragua to a notorious El Salvador prison. (No matter that many of those deported had been wrongly identified as gang members on the flimsiest suspicion.) The president called the gang’s presence an “invasion” and “predatory incursion,” converting a problem of crime and migration into an act of war. The wartime logic has a history: The Supreme Court used remarkably similar ideas during Chinese exclusion, treating the arrival of a racially alien population as a threat against which the nation could defend itself. Trump is speaking a language the U.S. immigration system already understands.

A government that can designate immigrants as enemies, arrest and deport them, and imprison them beyond the reach of courts could turn on people like me. I am an immigrant. I have lived in the United States for decades, built my life here, and remain a lawful permanent resident, a green card holder. For most of my adult life, that distinction from citizenship seemed important but settled. I was here legally; I belonged. The political division between “legal” and “illegal” appeared to put me safely on one side of a bright line. Recently, that line has become less reassuring.

In June, the Supreme Court decided Blanche v. Lau, involving a lawful permanent resident. The Court ruled 6–3 that border officers need not have clear and convincing evidence of a qualifying crime before treating a returning green card holder as seeking admission. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned that the decision gave the government a “massive blank check” and could leave permanent residents in years of uncertainty. Even the most secure noncitizen status remains governed by a regime with rules of its own.

I do not expect agents at my door tomorrow. My fear comes from discovering how much of Trump’s desired power already exists and has been normalized against people with fewer political rights. That fear is smaller than the danger facing undocumented migrants, asylum-seekers, and those already deported, some to countries where they may never be free again. But that is Hernández’s point: Immigration law trains Americans to imagine concentric circles of belonging, each with different constitutional claims. The person at the border has fewer rights than the person inside; the undocumented immigrant fewer than the green card holder; the green card holder fewer than the citizen. Each group is reassured that the machine is meant for someone further outside. Trump depends on that reassurance. We cannot simply move a fortunate few into a safer category while preserving arbitrary power over everyone below it.

A country can regulate its borders without preserving powers created for racial exclusion or treating immigration as a constitutional exception. It can distinguish citizens from noncitizens without exposing the latter to government powers that would horrify Americans if applied generally. Trump’s terror program demands a larger reckoning than whether this president has gone too far. We cannot merely wait for a different president to operate the same machine more humanely.

Congress should reconsider criminal provisions born in the Blease era. Chinese exclusion precedents should no longer provide a constitutional foundation for sweeping immigration power. The courts should reject the proposition that by calling migrants invaders, a president can seize powers created for war (an issue that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit recently sidestepped). Most importantly, the court should bring the immigration system back under ordinary constitutional discipline: with meaningful hearings, access to counsel, genuine judicial review, limits on detention and warrantless policing, and laws stripped not only of racist language but of racist design.

Trump’s responsibility for the cruelty of his immigration program is direct, but treating that cruelty as his invention lets his predecessors off too easily. Trump will eventually leave office, but simply defeating his abuse is no longer enough. America has to decide whether any president should possess these powers at all.

Mullin was not referring to the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, but rather to a widespread conspiracy-driven theory about hundreds of thousands of “unaccompanied alien children,” or UACs, who entered the United States during the Biden administration and are falsely described by the Trump administration as missing and potentially trafficked.

Now under intensified pressure to increase deportations and with a seemingly unlimited budget, DHS is using its $150 billion windfall to incentivize local law enforcement to assist in confirming the locations of UACs across the country via the 287(g) program, which deputizes police, sheriffs, and some constables to act as immigration agents. According to documents from DHS, these financial incentives can add up to tens of thousands of dollars for each UAC found and verified.

Immigrant children are facing multiple attacks by the Trump administration, including decimation of legal services and ramped-up detention. Added to that mix, local police are getting in on the action under the guise of protecting children and fighting human trafficking. As part of the overall web of silent mass deportations, the supposed search for UACs blends QAnon-style conspiracy theories with an overfunded and supercharged deportation machine that has been targeting immigrant children and families without regard to the human rights consequences.

“Sending armed agents to the homes of immigrant children is not a safety check. It is a serious threat of enforcement,” Mary Miller Flowers, the director of legislative affairs at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, explained. The results are likely to be nothing short of disastrous for everyone involved.

When young people enter the country seeking asylum without their parents, they are generally released to a sponsor, often a family member already living in America. Unlike adults, children are processed by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, or ORR, which is under the auspices of Department of Health and Human Services, not DHS. According to a 1997 consent decree and the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, child immigrants are entitled to certain rights and protections, including safe and sanitary conditions as well as prompt release from detention. Unlike DHS, a law enforcement agency, ORR was intentionally kept separate. Jen Smyers, the deputy director of ORR during the Biden administration, explained that ORR was intended to be about child welfare—not immigration enforcement.

After ORR places immigrant children with their sponsors, most UACs receive a court date for their pending immigration case. These youth are supposed to keep their addresses current in order to follow up on their applications for asylum and immigration court dates, but not all of them do. Under the Biden administration, large numbers of UACs entered the country, largely as a result of changes to draconian immigration policies imposed by the first Trump administration. Detention facilities for these children filled to capacity, presenting dangers to young people’s health and safety. As required, the Biden administration released children to sponsors living in the United States.  

Republicans have claimed, with little evidence, that UACs were being placed with unvetted or unfit sponsors, arguing that this amounted to “human trafficking.” These rumors gained popularity as anti-immigration groups used alleged “human trafficking” as a reason to limit migration. As soon as Trump came into office for the second time, his administration claimed that nearly 450,000 UACs were potential victims of trafficking and that some 300,000 were considered “missing.” Immigration experts agree that this number is an utter invention—most UACs live with their sponsors, and some are now adults.

Nevertheless, Trump’s DHS has prioritized locating these young people alongside other policies that have ramped up mass deportations, including by requiring ORR to turn over all the information it has to DHS for law enforcement purposes. According to a memo Immigration and Customs Enforcement released just days after Trump’s inauguration, DHS would “commence an operational initiative” to locate UACs who entered the country during the Biden administration. This included ensuring “UAC’s immigration obligations are met” as well as “investigative activities to ensure UAC are not subjected to crimes of human trafficking or other exploitation.”

The initial phases of the initiative, according to the memo, were focused on locating UACs who were threats to public safety or flight risks, including young people who had run away from shelters. Later stages of the program appear intended to locate UACs and charge their sponsors with potential crimes—such as trafficking, violations of the Mann Act, or making false statements. Other publications have reported that ICE has hired private companies to locate immigrants, including UACs. DHS agents have also been engaged in these “wellness checks,” including in at least two Los Angeles elementary schools. It is not clear exactly what is happening to the children the agencies do find, but in most cases, they are still in deportation proceedings.

In November 2025, DHS announced that 287(g) agencies would also have the option to participate in locating UACs, beginning in Florida, an example of the mission creep for 287(g). The memo reads, “The primary focus of this initiative is to conduct welfare checks on these children to ensure that they are safe and not being exploited.” Information about these UACs was sent to law enforcement, and the 287(g) partners are expected to return “an electronic form” to an email address, UAC287g@ice.dhs.

Mullin and DHS have made “locating” these children a priority, transferring reams of information about UACs and their sponsors from ORR to DHS, as Reuters just reported. Attorney General Todd Blanche has instructed prosecutors to prioritize charges against UAC sponsors as part of this program. In reality, this so-called “verification initiative” has led to more arrests, mostly of adult sponsors. “They are trying to lay the predicate to do more removals,” Scott Shuchart, an immigration attorney and a former DHS official, explained. ICE, he said, was “spending like a moron with lottery money.”

Since Trump took office in January 2025, 287(g) agreements have exploded. Most of the agreements are “task force” agreements, a program that allows local law enforcement to act like roving immigration agents with the same powers to question, arrest, and detain. Thanks to DHS’s supersized budget, 287(g) task force agencies are eligible for compensation, including reimbursement for officer time and stipends for vehicles and other equipment.

There is no real way to track which 287(g) partners are also locating UACs as part of DHS’s program, because DHS has largely forbidden them from disclosing specifics. (The Young Center filed a lawsuit this week for records on the UAC verification initiative.)

The information we do have suggests that agencies are being paid (or at least seeking payment) for each UAC verified. A reporter from the Chattanooga Times Free Press found through public records that an elected constable in southeastern Tennessee was assisting with locating UACs in other states. He had already received $107,500 for a vehicle and equipment, and he billed DHS for additional time. A document from the constable explains a payment structure that resembles a bounty—agencies are paid up to $2,500 for confirming the address of UAC as well as up to $20,000 for “verify[ing] the child’s safety and living conditions,” as well as school enrollment status.

The mission is presented in the documents thus: “The UAC Safety Verification Initiative builds a unified framework among law enforcement partners to ensure every unaccompanied child is safe, accounted for, and protected from harm. It’s about coordination, accountability, and shared duty—every officer, every agency, working together for every child.”

Information about agencies participating in UAC verification has been difficult to find. The impact of this “safety verification initiative” has been done with little notification or alert.

On the few occasions that members of the public obtain information, officials have reacted fairly quickly. In Ohio, for example, a police chief from the township of Gratis went to a Cincinnati public school in an attempt to verify the location of some children there, according to school officials. Not only did the school principal deny access, but the officer was placed on administrative leave.

In Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the local district attorney Heather Adams signed a 287(g) agreement with ICE in September 2025 and trained one detective through a 40-hour online course for the “task force” 287(g) program. Adams told the public, “No one in our office is conducting immigration ‘sweeps’ or stopping cars as a part of our 287(g) agreement to assist in immigration enforcement.”

It was not until March of this year that community members learned that this 287(g) task force agreement included a provision that allowed the trained detective to assist with the Unaccompanied Alien Children Safety Verification Initiative. (Trex Profitt, a member of Indivisible Lancaster, said that he thought the disclosure was an inadvertent slipup by Adams.) Adams issued a press release claiming the detective’s involvement was “minimal.”

With 287(g) programs reaching historic heights—according to one researcher, there are now over 2,000 agencies with at least one agreement around the country—more local law enforcement agencies may become involved in locating immigrant children, often without clear guidelines or public notification. Plus, since it is back-to-school season, advocates told me that many people are concerned about the safety of sending children to school. “Giving the task of ‘child wellness checks’ to local law enforcement only exacerbates the widespread fear and distrust that immigrant families and communities experience when they consistently see local law enforcement engaged in immigration arrests and enforcement,” Nithya Nathan-Pineau, policy attorney at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, said.

The greatest risk, according to advocates, is the arrest of adult sponsors and other family members. Once a child’s sponsor is arrested, that child returns to the custody of ORR and is still placed in deportation proceedings, according to Smyers. Under Trump, the ORR has added additional hurdles before it places kids with a sponsor, including complete background checks, which has led to children spending more time in ORR custody and has further separated parents from their children.

Combined with the ongoing crisis over the lack of lawyers for young immigrants and hurried mass deportation hearings, children face an unprecedented risk of deportation. The Trump administration recently gave a no-bid contract to OUR Rescue, an “anti-trafficking” nonprofit formerly known as “Operation Underground Railroad,” to represent immigrant children in court. The founder of OUR Rescue, Tim Ballard, was ousted over accusations of sexual assault and trafficking.

It’s plain that DHS’s main concern is not human trafficking; instead, it appears to be using a manhunt for UACs, under the guise of protecting children, as yet another way to locate immigrants to deport. None of this keeps children safe, Flowers emphasizes: “We know what keeps kids safe: being with family who loves them, living in a home and not a detention facility, and having a lawyer who represents them.”

I can’t believe I have to write this! I know there’s a perpetual war over the soul of the Democratic Party. But it can, and must, be paused until November 3.

Let’s start with Texas and Crockett. Talarico defeated Crockett 52–46 percent in a tense March primary. The congresswoman has a legitimate beef that she and other Black female Democratic candidates are treated unfairly by a party that is obsessed with “electability” and often views the most viable candidates as those who are white and male like Talarico. A party both committed to racial and gender inclusion and heavily reliant on getting more than 90 percent of Black women’s votes to win elections should be trying to get more Black women into office, not essentially practicing pre-discrimination. “We will oppose you based on your race and/or gender in the primary because we fear voters in the general election will reject you based on your race and/or gender,” is the position of many Democratic voters and elites toward Black and female candidates. They need to abandon that. Talarico’s race and gender alone may have been what put him over the top in the primary, which I suspect grinds at Crockett. (It’s worth noting that some voters may have felt that even a white male candidate couldn’t win in Texas if they are as partisan as Crockett.)

That said, Talarico would be a much better senator than Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican candidate. So Crockett should be trying hard to ensure that Talarico wins. She’s not. “I personally don’t feel like the excitement necessarily exists within the Black community. Right now, I don’t feel like they’re excited,” Crockett said on the Front Page podcast recently of Talarico’s candidacy. That might sound like Crockett just giving a political analysis. And it’s likely that Talarico (like most candidates) has work to do to improve his standing among Black voters.

But Crockett has suggested several times over the last few months that Talarico is running a lackluster campaign, particularly with regard to appealing to Black voters. She could air those critiques in private. Or she could campaign aggressively for Talarico to Black voters, to address this shortage of excitement that she is asserting. She’s doing neither. She refused to speak at the Texas Democrats’ convention in June, even after Talarico reportedly personally called and asked the congresswoman to give the keynote address. She has suggested that she will campaign for other Democratic candidates in Texas but not Talarico.

Crockett is acting like a sore loser. That’s not unusual in politics. But Crockett shouldn’t be taking this approach now. This November is perhaps the best chance in decades that Democrats have had to win a Senate seat in Texas. Winning that seat could help flip the Senate and put a key check on an authoritarian president. Talarico needs all of the support he can muster, particularly from Black voters who might be influenced by Crockett. (Polls suggest Black voters overwhelmingly chose Crockett over Talarico during the primary.)

So if the congresswoman can’t bring herself to enthusiastically campaign for Talarico, she could at least stop implying that Talarico can’t connect with Black people, the kinds of remarks that get lots of media coverage and will make it harder for him to … connect with Black people. Talarico is actually trying quite hard to connect with Black Texans, fully aware many of them were disappointed that Crockett lost in the primary.

In Michigan, Representative Haley Stevens, who lost to El-Sayed, fully embraced him right after the primary. But Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel and Representative Hillary Scholten have refused to endorse him. Outside of the state, a number of Democrats continue to attack El-Sayed, most notably Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, in an appearance on Fox News and an op-ed in The Free Press. And numerous other Democrats and MSNBC hosts continue to link El-Sayed to podcaster Hasan Piker.

The main fissure here is over Israel policy. Piker and El-Sayed have cast Israel’s military actions in Gaza over the last several years as a genocide, called for the U.S. to stop providing military aid to Israel, and questioned if Israel should remain as a state where Jewish people control the government. Nessel, Scholten, Gottheimer, and many other Democrats are less critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza and want Israel to remain a Jewish state. Some pro-Israel Democrats say that many of Piker’s remarks and a few of El-Sayed’s have veered into either antisemitism or at least intolerance of Jewish Americans.

The other tension is over which factions in the party have power. El-Sayed’s victory over Stevens was a big win for the party’s progressives over the Democrats’ center-left bloc. And if El-Sayed wins the general election, progressives will seize on that win to argue that Democrats can ignore the center-left’s usual electability arguments against the left and nominate someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2028. So some in the center-left are sore about their primary defeats.

Democrats shouldn’t always automatically fall in line with the party’s nominee. I would be wary of backing a Democratic candidate who opposed abortion rights or raising the minimum wage. I understood Democrats who felt that they could not support Kamala Harris in 2024 because she embraced the Biden administration’s policies in Gaza. If Gottheimer or Nessel feel strongly that the U.S. should keep offering military aid to Israel or that Israel must remain a Jewish state and that they can’t support anyone who doesn’t hold those views, I would respect that stance. Those are serious and legitimate policy differences.

But other rationales for not fully backing El-Sayed are unacceptable. Considering how important this Senate race is, no Democratic official should oppose El-Sayed based on lingering resentment from this year’s primary or because of this race’s implications for 2028.

The obsession with Piker is also misguided. If Piker says something that El-Sayed disagrees with, the candidate should state his disagreement (and he has). But the idea that Piker is some Hitler-like villain that El-Sayed must completely disavow as a person is crazy. Piker is not running for office in Michigan; his statements and policy views aren’t at issue in this race. This is an attempt by center-left Democrats to punish Piker for boosting El-Sayed and other progressive candidates during primaries and to silence a prominent left-wing voice in the party. I would be opposed to such a shaming campaign anyway, but particularly now. Why are Democrats spending time talking about a lefty podcaster who isn’t influencing their candidate much when they could talk about an autocrat president who is very much influencing the Republican candidate (Mike Rogers)?

Finally, the vague, floating, and hard-to-dispel antisemitism accusation being lodged at El-Sayed (and Zohran Mamdani last year) should be dropped. If there are specific comments or policies that pro-Israel and/or Jewish Democrats want El-Sayed to address, that’s legitimate. El-Sayed rightly apologized this weekend for remarks that he made in March, in which he said, “Hurt people hurt people” when discussing an attack on a synagogue in the Detroit suburbs.

But much of this criticism is falsely implying that a strong critic of the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians has malice toward American Jews.

What connects the Michigan and Texas cases is the kind of racial and identity politics that Democrats desperately need to move on from. There are legitimate questions about the role of Black women in Democratic politics and what the party’s stances on Israel-Palestine issues should be. But the way to debate those questions isn’t to lodge vague accusations that Talarico can’t connect with Black people or that El-Sayed hates Jewish ones and use those as wedge issues to tank the party’s Senate candidates. I welcome an extended conversation about the role of Black women in the party and its Middle East policies in November—and I would assume Talarico and El-Sayed would, as well.

Let me close with my own accusation. It’s fairly obvious that suggesting that a white candidate doesn’t connect with Black voters or that a Muslim candidate is antisemitic might hurt those candidates in a general election. I worry that Crockett doesn’t actually want Talarico to win; same for Gottheimer, Scholten, and Nessel in El-Sayed’s case. They would prefer a pro-Trump senator to one from a rival faction of their own party. That’s a strong accusation, but it’s pretty in line with their recent behavior. These politicians have two months to prove me wrong. I hope they do.

Clyburn is not the only prominent Democrat to endorse Supreme Court expansion in recent years. Former Vice President Kamala Harris, the party’s 2024 standard-bearer, also agreed that Congress should add four more seats to match the 13 federal circuit courts of appeal. (The First through Eleventh Circuits hear cases from the 50 states, while the D.C. Circuit hears cases from the nation’s capital and the confusingly named Federal Circuit hears specialized appeals on patents and whatnot.)

Support from Clyburn stands out because he is, as Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall notes, the first member of Democratic congressional leadership to endorse the idea. That would, in turn, give cover for more rank-and-file members to support court expansion. Clyburn is also, notably, not exactly a radical member of the Democrats’ upper ranks. In 2020, his support helped swing the Democratic preisdential primary toward then-candidate Joe Biden, the most moderate choice in the race at that time.

I do not know whether the justices particularly care about Clyburn’s position on anything. But they should take stock of what it reflects: a deep and implacable desire among Democrats to break the conservatives’ grip on the Supreme Court through extraordinary means. I cannot stress enough how much the Supreme Court’s conservative majority have brought this on themselves.

The turning point in the high court’s trajectory came in 2018, when Justice Anthony Kennedy retired from the Supreme Court. Kennedy was the last remaining Republican appointee who was not, strictly speaking, a member of the conservative legal movement. He did not identify as an originalist or a textualist, instead hewing (for better or for worse) to his own idiosyncratic vision of how the Constitution should be interpreted. Thanks to the vicissitudes of fate, he also served as the court’s median justice from 2005 until his retirement.

In that role, Kennedy maintained an ideological balance of power of sorts on the high court. It was still undoubtedly a conservative Supreme Court. He wrote or joined some of the most consequential decisions of the era, from 2010’s Citizens United v. FEC to 2013’s Shelby County v. FEC. In less high-profile cases involving federalism and regulatory power, he was more likely to join his fellow conservatives than not.

At the same time, Kennedy also moved in ways that led to major liberal victories or prevented major defeats to the causes liberals support. Kennedy voted to uphold some restrictions on abortion over the years but declined to provide the fifth vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. He regularly sided with the court’s four liberals to protect affirmative action in higher education and to narrow the scope of capital punishment. Most notably, Kennedy played a singular role in advancing LGBT rights in the Constitution from the 1990s onward, culminating in the landmark 2015 decision that struck down same-sex marriage bans nationwide.

The Kennedy court, as one might call it, was a conservative court where many liberals could still expect that they would get a fair shake. Kennedy’s moderating presence also ensured that the court did not drift too far to the right. Conservative litigants and interest groups presented narrower arguments and positions to advance their causes 10 years ago, fearing overreach and adverse rulings. Everybody who brought their case before the high court had reason to believe they might win.

Now nobody thinks they do. Public approval of the high court has cratered in recent years, fueled by growing dissatisfaction on the right and outright hostility on the left. Only 33 percent of Americans said they approved of the high court’s job performance in July, according to Gallup. Almost nine in 10 Democrats registered their disapproval, along with two-thirds of independents and just above 40 percent of Republican voters.

Gallup’s survey is instructive in other ways, particularly about trends on the right. The modern-day nadir for conservative support came in July 2015, when a mere 18 percent of Republicans told Gallup that they approved of the court’s work. One can hardly blame them. The 2014–15 term was the apex of the Kennedy court’s liberalism, with banner victories on gay rights, climate change, gerrymandering reform, and the like. But their outrage didn’t last. Two years later it had rebounded to 67 percent, and three years later it cracked 72 percent, even as the court remained temporarily deadlocked by Antonin Scalia’s death in 2016.

After Kennedy retired and Justice Brett Kavanaugh replaced him, a brief two-year interregnum saw Chief Justice John Roberts in the pilot’s seat. Again, the court lurched to the right. In 2019, for example, Roberts closed the doors of federal courthouses to partisan-gerrymandering claims after two decades of reluctance from Kennedy to constitutionalize the sordid practice. Even then, there still seemed to be a handbrake on the court: Roberts voted to uphold an abortion-related precedent in 2020 that he had voted against a few years earlier.

Then Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, in September 2020, and Republicans rushed to install Justice Amy Coney Barrett the following month, on the eve of the presidential election. Now the conservatives were fully and completely in control of the court, and everything began to change as soon as right-wing litigants could get the right cases to the nine justices. This happened to coincide with the collapse of Democratic control of Congress and the Biden administration’s practical ability to pressure the court through expansion proposals, which were buried with a presidential commission shortly after Biden took office.

Roe v. Wade was overturned two years later. Affirmative action in college admissions fell the year after that. So too did the last glimmers of nonpartisanship. The justices rewrote the Fourteenth Amendment’s disqualification clause to pave the way for Trump to run for a second term despite his plain-text ineligibility, and blocked federal courts from considering the question again if he won. The conservative majority invented presidential immunity out of thin air in the summer of 2024, freeing Trump from an election-eve criminal trial and setting the stage for his second-term corruption and criminality.

Roberts, who once vowed in 2005 to only call “balls and strikes,” ruled that the president could climb into the stands and bludgeon people to death with a baseball bat. Sean Wilentz, a prominent historian of the early republic, compared Trump v. United States to Dred Scott v. Sandford. That infamous 1857 decision that struck down the Missouri Compromise, ruled that free and enslaved Black people could never be citizens, and precipitated the Civil War. In a similar way, Wilentz wrote, the court’s immunity ruling “has radically changed the very structure of American government, paving the way for MAGA authoritarianism just as the Taney Court tried to pave the way for enshrining the Slave Power.”

Clyburn also invoked the specter of Roger B. Taney, Roberts’s distant predecessor as chief justice, and Dred Scott in Sunday’s interview. His support for court expansion came because the Supreme Court “has decided to reverse course and take this country back to those rulings of Justice Taney, that said, ‘No Black man has any right that white man must respect,’” a paraphrasing of one of Taney’s most infamous lines in the 1857 ruling. That is likely a reference to the court’s shameful decision earlier this year in Louisiana v. Callais.

In a 6–3 ruling along the usual lines, the court’s conservative majority completed its demolition of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by making it virtually impossible to challenge racial gerrymandering under Section 2 of the historic law. Southern state legislatures practically sprinted over the summer to gleefully wipe out as many majority-Black congressional districts as they could. Clyburn’s own district, the only one of its kind in his state, was spared only because South Carolina Republicans feared dissolving it would make it easier for Democrats to win the surrounding districts.

Now there is nothing left for even the most milquetoast and diffident liberal to defend from this majority. Gone are the days when liberal law professors at Ivy League schools would write op-eds in major newspapers framing the court or individual rulings as neutral, nonpartisan, or more complicated than it seemed. Legal pundits, having been burned before, gave up on seeking the hidden liberals within the right-wing jurisprudence. Nobody to the left of Mitt Romney is risking their credibility on a runaway right-wing bench. The conservative majority has demolished century-old precedents that made progressive governance possible with unalloyed zeal, while also rewriting the Constitution in Donald Trump’s image. Everything is what it looks like now.

The amusing part, were it not so serious, is that the Roberts court has also botched its relationships on the right. By securing a six-justice conservative majority, legal conservatives and rank-and-file Republicans alike believed that they had essentially secured a win button for American politics. In theory, they can do whatever they want while liberals will have to climb uphill both ways in the snow while carrying 50-pound sandbags on each shoulder just to pry away a single conservative vote, let alone two of them.

Except that hasn’t happened, in large part because there is now a serious ideological mismatch between the court’s conservative justices and American conservatism writ large. Even the justices appointed by Trump are members of the Bush-era generation of legal conservatives, not the Trump-era one. They had to prove their ideological bona fides in right-wing legal circles on issues like abortion and affirmative action, not mass deportations and birthright citizenship.

Indeed, looking at the court’s most recent rulings from the latest term—the first full term of the second Trump administration—as a fervent MAGA acolyte must be infuriating. Roberts voted 14 years ago to save Barack Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement (the Affordable Care Act) while writing the majority opinion that struck down Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, neutering a core pillar of his economic and foreign policy agenda. Trump himself is largely volcanic toward the court these days, occasionally accusing some of the justices of insufficient personal loyalty toward him for appointing them.

That turn of events is also unsurprising. The president, like every abuser, is angrier about what he can’t do than happier about what he can do. Can he impose his beloved tariffs on anyone for any reason at all? No, says the Supreme Court. Can he fire Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve’s board of governors? No, says the Supreme Court. Can he send troops into American cities? No, says the Supreme Court. Can he rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause in Stephen Miller’s image? No, no, no, no.

Nor do these bit-by-bit rejections of Trumpism spur any goodwill or reassessment on the left. If anything, they only underscore how far to the right the court has moved. Yes, it’s true that Roberts’s sterling opinion in Trump v. Barbara upheld birthright citizenship. But it also exposed that only two conservative justices (Roberts and Barrett) would endorse the citizenship clause’s plain meaning without reservation. The high court’s ruling in Learning Resources v. Trump kneecapped Trump’s plans to levy tariffs without Congress’s assent. It also reaffirmed the long-standing suspicion that the “major questions doctrine” exists only to sabotage Democratic presidents, when only half of the conservatives would vote to use it against Trump. The president can fire any Senate-confirmed official in the executive branch, frustrating liberals who favor independent regulatory agencies, but can’t seize control of the Fed, enraging a president who probably wishes that he could install a big dial that says “INTEREST RATES” on the Resolute Desk.

The Supreme Court is not an elected branch of government, obviously. The justices enjoy lifetime tenure, so they don’t have to worry about their approval ratings on a day-to-day basis. But they do have to keep an eye on them in the long run. The court’s role in our constitutional order depends on the assent and approval of the legislative and executive branches, which can wipe out much of the court’s power or simply ignore its ruling. Those branches are only kept in check, at least for now, by a deep cultural respect for the American judiciary that is older than the republic itself.

Now, in their ideological zeal, they have sailed into the abyss. The post-Barrett flood of right-wing rulings has completely drained the reservoir of liberal reverence that was filled by the Warren court in the 1960s, with the Callais ruling squeezing out the last few drops. Trump’s personal vehemence toward a court that won’t give him everything he wants, even when it gives him far more than it should, is also decaying its support on the right.

The result is a Supreme Court that nobody trusts and where everybody loses. Thanks to Trump’s cascading second-term failures, Democrats may get a second chance to expand the court in 2029. If Clyburn’s own changing stance is any indication, the push toward court reform may be irresistible for the party this time. And if it happens, the conservative justices will have no one to blame but themselves.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced 26 notices for food products this August alone (not including pet food). Including drugs, that total increased to 46 recalls. That’s a notable increase from August 2025 when just 26 products were recalled, including 18 food products, and from August 2024 when 24 products were recalled, including 19 food products.

A lot of it was due to salmonella. In the past month, the FDA issued 12 different product recalls for potential salmonella contamination—a six-times increase from the month before. In July, the FDA recalled only two products for potential salmonella contamination. In August 2025 and August 2024, only one product was recalled for potential salmonella contamination.

The latest products recalled due to salmonella concerns include radishes, mangoes, alfalfa spouts, granola, and jalapeños and the many, many premade dishes that include them as ingredients. A number of food products were recalled this month for other concerning reasons, including glass in fruit popsicles; metal in sourdough; and, most recently, ink in tofu.

Salmonella’s just the tip of the iceberg—lettuce, that is. American consumers are still reeling from the past few months’ deadly cyclospora outbreak linked to iceberg lettuce sourced from Taylor Farms facilities and recalls of frozen blueberries for potential E. coli contamination.

Obviously, there has been a sharp increase in the number of recalls. It’s not immediately clear whether this can be attributed to increased enforcement or more hazardous food—but the rapidly rising rate of recalls makes you wonder: Is this what making America healthy again looks like?

Here’s a complete list of (human) food recalls in the month of August 2026:

• Hodo Chilli Crisp Lightly Fried Tofu for potential ink contamination (the recall was initiated on August 7 but not widely reported until August 31)
• Kofinas Garlic Mediterranean Infused Extra Virgin Olive Oil for containing essential oil not approved for culinary use (August 31)
• Little Temptations Chocolatey Eyeballs for containing undeclared milk (August 31)
• Everything Sprouts Robust Radish Mix for potential contamination of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli or salmonella (August 29)
• Martina mangoes for salmonella (August 29)
• Jaime’s Spanish Village Jalapeño Ranch Dressing for containing undeclared eggs (August 26)
• Momchipz’s Veggie Chips Broccoli Florets & Cauliflower for containing undeclared wheat (August 24)
• Donutful Chocolate Dipped Vanilla Cake Donuts for containing undeclared milk (August 24)
• Everything Sprouts, Calco alfalfa sprouts for potential contamination of salmonella or Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (August 22)
• A variety of breads produced by Prince for undeclared milk and sesame (August 19)
• Potato sourdough bread from Grand Central Bakery for potentially containing pieces of metal (August 19)
• Fruit popsicles from Outshine for possible glass contamination (August 18)
• Apulian Almond & Cocoa Spread from Prolon for undeclared cashews, pistachios and/or hazelnuts (August 17)
• Jalapeños from Dairyland Produce LLC for potential salmonella contamination (August 17)
• Salad dressing from Salata for potential salmonella contamination (August 14)
• A variety of premade vegetable products from NatureBest, including pico de gallo, stuffed mushrooms, and soup mix containing jalapeño for potential salmonella contamination (August 14)
• Granola from the Hampton Grocer for potential salmonella contamination (August 14)
• Tomato Bisque Soup Kit from Marketside for potential listeria monocytogenes contamination (August 13)
• Vitasia Chinese Style Asian Style Wok Spice Mix for potential salmonella contamination (August 12)
• Frankie’s Organic Vegan Cheddar Puffs for undeclared milk (August 12)
• A variety of premade food products from Whole Foods Market containing jalapeño for potential salmonella contamination (August 12)
• A variety of premade food products from Trader Joe’s containing jalapeño for potential salmonella contamination (August 9)
• Green powder products from Food to Live for possible salmonella contamination (August 7)
• Sura Tanmen Hot and Sour Flavor Premium Japanese Noodles & Soup Base for undeclared fish (August 6)
• Vegan Non-Dairy Frozen Dessert Coconut Fudge Sandwiches from Blank Slate Creamery for undeclared egg allergen
• Pistachio nut butter from BetterGoods for possible salmonella contamination
• Ukrops Homestyle Foods Baked Spaghetti and Bread Pudding products for potential presence of aluminum slivers

In a 5–4 decision that broke somewhat along traditional ideological lines, the court granted an emergency request filed by the Trump administration to proceed with construction on the president’s controversial plans for a White House ballroom. Justice John Roberts joined all three of the court’s liberal justices in dissenting.

“Construction of the ballroom has proceeded apace for the better part of a year,” Roberts wrote on behalf of the four dissenting justices. “That construction is likely unlawful. Pursuant to its plenary constitutional authority over the District of Columbia and federal property, Congress has explicitly prohibited the construction of any ‘building or structure … on any reservation, park, or public grounds of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia without express authority of Congress.’ … The ballroom is a building or structure being erected on federal park grounds—President’s Park—in the District of Columbia. Yet Congress has not passed any law resembling ‘express authority’ for the Executive’s construction of it.”

The conservative majority, in an unsigned decision, rejected the challenge from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which was seeking to halt construction of the ballroom indefinitely. The five justices did not rule on whether construction of the ballroom was in fact legal, but determined that the National Trust lacked the legal right to challenge the project.

“This Court has not found standing in circumstances like these before,” the court’s opinion read. “To the contrary, we have repeatedly held that mere offense, disagreement, or distaste does not qualify.”

While the court didn’t rule on the legality of the ballroom’s construction, the decision is still a major win for Trump—and an infringement on the powers of Congress.

“The White House is not just any building,” Roberts noted in the dissent. “In failing to appreciate as much, the court misconceives the plaintiff’s injury, allowing the executive’s likely infringement of the legislature’s power of the purse and authority to regulate federal property in the District of Columbia to continue.”

Trump has tried to push forward his 90,000-square-foot ballroom by arguing that it will provide a secure underground facility in case of a national emergency, but a recent report revealed that a bunker already exists under the White House to protect the president and his team if necessary. Meanwhile, the skyrocketing costs of the ballroom keep escalating. What Trump originally claimed would be a $200 million project funded by donors has now turned into a $600 million boondoggle, with taxpayers on the hook for half that amount.

This story has been updated.

These are just a few of the messages that President Trump’s supporters have sent him on Truth Social after his Monday morning attack on opponents of data centers.

Trump had defended data center projects, saying communities who oppose them “want to end up being backwards and poor.” “If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign,” he posted, adding that China “could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement.”

Some of his supporters on Truth Social were incensed.

“This statement is insane,” said @FLBeachbird. “I’m already on a water restriction.”

“You’re an idiot. You’ll be making money I suspect. Meanwhile our lives get shittier with no water, more noise,” commented @Seigfried75.

Trump’s followers on Truth Social are outraged at him for supporting data centers:

“I regret ever supporting you” https://t.co/rp1rzgxUEK pic.twitter.com/FcTdLXM1pb

— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) August 31, 2026

Trump has consistently backed data centers, which are proliferating amid the artificial intelligence boom, during his second term as president. Last month he said, “You have communities that really want the data centers, and frankly those are the smart communities because it means a tremendous numbers of jobs, very little actual disruption.”

In reality, people living near data centers complain about the negative effects on their lives, from the drain on water supplies to increased noise and utility costs. Most data centers only provide a few dozen permanent on-site jobs too. Public opposition to data centers has united people on the left and right.

Earlier this month, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed a new rule removing requirements that data centers would have to disclose how much they pollute, blocking residents who live near them from knowing what substances they’re being exposed to and denying them evidence to cite in any legal challenges.

It seems that Trump is will continue to stubbornly promote data centers, regardless not only of the environmental and economic costs, but the political ones too.

Donald Trump was caught on camera getting some shut-eye Monday afternoon—in the middle of a health care announcement at the White House.

Surrounded by several Cabinet members and a host of health care executives, Trump started slouching in his chair after he finished speaking. Then, while Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. addressed the cameras, Trump fluttered his eyes closed.

Trump’s slumber was intermittently interrupted by a jolt awake, followed by a darting glance around the room. But the president repeatedly returned to a drooped position, resting his hands on the Resolute Desk while slowly nodding his head along to the meter of his crew’s speech, rarely blinking or flexing his eyelids.

Trump appears to be nodding off not a minute into RFK Jr speaking. pic.twitter.com/G14WKHmA2y

— Donk Media ♻️™ (@donkoclock) August 31, 2026

The president’s entourage has bragged for years about Trump’s supposedly endless supply of energy, claiming that he routinely works into the early hours of the morning and that they are themselves surprised by his short sleep habits.

But the MAGA leader’s often bizarre conduct in the public eye has spurred calls for a health examination as medical experts, politicians, and voters alike fret over symptoms of Trump’s potential cognitive decline.

Over the first year and change of his second term, Trump’s speeches have become more disjointed and incoherent, his behavior increasingly erratic, and his appearances more unwilling and unpredictable. Trump has spent hours at Walter Reed Medical Center, fallen asleep during more than a dozen critical meetings, appeared lost and disoriented around foreign heads of state, frequently slurred his speech, and appeared with discolored and bruised skin on several occasions.

So far this year, he has undermined several of America’s oldest alliances, started beef with Pope Leo XIV, and thrust the U.S. into war with Iran without a feasible game plan.

The Daily Mail, citing anonymous sources, reports that the 46-year-old Florida congressman has decided to spend time “blowing off steam” at a $2 million beach house on New Smyrna Beach with 27-year-old aspiring model Catherine Chils. According to the tabloid, Chils and Mills have been spending time together for the last three years.

The day after the primary, August 19, Mills and his companion spent the whole day sitting in chairs on the beach, a neighbor told the Daily Mail. “He had just sat outside and had kind of taken the day for himself,” the neighbor said. Mills was reportedly there through the weekend, although Chils denied to the publication that she was at the house and said she and the congressman are just friends.

However, Mills’s staff is concerned because he has stayed out of communication since his defeat. Even before the election, Mills missed scheduled TV appearances on Fox News and on a local TV station.

It’s not the first time Mills has disappeared, though. “The fact that he went missing and the staff can’t find him or hear from him is pretty bad but not surprising. He does this all the time,” another source told the tabloid. Mills reportedly has his own campaign bus that he sometimes sleeps in, making his whereabouts harder to ascertain.

The New Republic has emailed Mills’s press staff for comment and will update this story if they reply.

Mills is facing investigations from the House Ethics Committee and Department of Justice over alleged wire fraud and other financial misconduct, as well as allegations that he assaulted an ex-girlfriend, Republican state committeewoman and former Miss United States Lindsey Langston, at his apartment last year. Langston also alleges that Mills threatened to release revenge porn of her and violently attack men she dated after they broke up.

More recently, Mills has refused to deny that he dated a 19-year-old while serving in Congress, and President Trump pretended he didn’t endorse the congressman and knew he was going to lose all along. It seems like Mills is now just trying to run out the days until he leaves office in January.

The Tarrant County Commissioners Court will vote Tuesday on a plan to reduce the county’s voting stations ahead of the midterm elections, the Associated Press reported. If approved, the key battleground county will scrap 92 polling stations just weeks ahead of the midterm elections.

Talarico, who is running against Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, voiced his concerns about the plan at a news conference Sunday. “The most powerful people in this county, the most powerful people in this country, don’t want us to be able vote easily,” Talarico said.

Tarrant County Elections Administrator Clint Ludwig insisted that the reductions would focus on low-turnout polling sites. Voters would still have more than 200 locations where they can cast their votes.

“We’re clearly not trying to suppress the vote,” said State Representative Matt Shaheen, the Republican chairman of the House Elections Committee. “That’s a silly accusation.”

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund and American Civil Liberties Union joined other voting rights groups to strongly condemn the proposal as a blatant “voter suppression tactic.”

“This proposal is a voter suppression tactic designed to impede Black voters and other voters of color from exercising their right to vote at the polls,” Demetria McCain, director of policy at the Legal Defense Fund, said in a statement.

This isn’t the first time Tarrant County officials have tried to gut the number of polling stations. In early August, they tabled plans to cut 140 sites amid overwhelming pushback.

Russia’s finance minister, Anton Siluanov, attended alongside representatives of the Russian Central Bank at the invitation of Donald Trump. But the diplomat’s presence was not welcomed by all—European leaders spent much of the morning scorning Siluanov.

German vice chancellor and finance minister Lars Klingbeil scolded Siluanov, demanding that Russia end the war.

“I find the signal sent ​by ​receiving the ⁠Russian finance minister here quite troubling,” Klingbeil ​told reporters following the encounter, according to a translation provided by Reuters. “I ​would ⁠have wanted greater clarity from the American side that he ⁠should ​not be received ​here as a normal guest.”

“You cannot simply return to normality,” Klingbeil emphasized.

Tensions boiled again on the matter of the summit’s historic group photo, as European officials unanimously demanded that Siluanov not be included, else they would boycott the photo altogether.

The photograph was eventually taken without Siluanov. Instead, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent posed for a solo picture with the Russian official.

Siluanov’s attendance and invitation were not announced by the Trump administration prior to Monday’s assembly, according to The New York Times, though the White House’s affinity for Russia should not come as a surprise. It was reported in April that Trump was planning to personally invite Putin to the G20 leaders’ December summit in Miami, and Trump has advocated for Russian participation in other Western alliances throughout his presidency. In 2018, he argued that Russia should be “at the negotiating table” of the G7. The following year he said the same, claiming that turning the G7 into the G8—with Russia—would be a “positive thing.”

The idea reemerged in 2025, when Trump said it was a “mistake” to keep Russia from the G7 and that Russia never would have invaded Ukraine if it had been included in the economic conference.

As Siluanov attended the G20 summit, Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared at another summit in Kyrgyzstan, where he was set to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian.

CNN reports that Republican campaign groups made an emergency appeal to the high court Monday to be able to air their television ads at a discounted rate, citing a Federal Communications Commission ruling earlier this year that political parties and associated entities are allowed to purchase ads at lower rates, just like politicians themselves can under federal law.

The rule change is arguably more beneficial to Republicans, who raise significant amounts through party committees, whereas Democrats typically raise funds through candidates themselves. Last week, though, a three-judge panel on the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that federal law only allows discounted ad buys for candidates, not for organizations and parties.

“The term ‘candidate’ means ‘candidate,’” U.S. Circuit Judge Robert King, a Clinton appointee, wrote in his ruling. The decision came in response to a lawsuit from four Democrats running for office this year: Representative Kristen McDonald Rivet of Michigan, former Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, and former Governor Roy Cooper of North Carolina.

In response, House and Senate Republican Party committees appealed to the Supreme Court, saying that they had “budgeted tens of millions of dollars in ad buys” under the FCC rule change, but because of the federal court ruling, “broadcast stations are already rescinding those rates.” The Trump administration quickly supported their appeal.

“The notice does not grant favored treatment to one side or the other; instead, the notice’s interpretation offers the same benefit to all sides, including the challengers themselves and the committees and parties supporting them,” said Solicitor General D. John Sauer on behalf of the White House to the Supreme Court.

With the midterms just two months away, the high court is expected to rule quickly. In the likely event that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority sides with the Republicans, voters are likely to see an even greater flood of pro-Trump ads between now and November.

Speaking at a press conference Monday, the two officials declared the emergency shutdown of 110 commercial driver’s license, or CDL, schools, claiming they were responsible for 5,000 violations of federal safety standards requiring licensees to demonstrate English proficiency. “If you’re an illegal trucker, this is your worst nightmare,” Duffy wrote in a post on X Monday.

It didn’t take long for journalists at the event to pull apart the preposterous announcement.

One reporter pointed out that foreign-born drivers holding non-domiciled CDLs were responsible for just 17 fatal crashes in 2025. “The slant here has been strongly about illegals, foreign drivers, but yet it accounts, according to U.S. [Department of Transportation] stats I see, for one percent of the issue,” one reporter said.

Duffy pretended that the move had little to do with undocumented immigrants.

Sean Duffy gets brutally fact-checked by a reporter, immediately changes topic pic.twitter.com/iExWbc6OyM

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 31, 2026

“You could have migrated to this country, you could have done it legally, but if you don’t speak English, you’re still violating our long-standing safety rules that you have to speak English,” Duffy said. “So this is not just about people who have come into the country illegally.”

Numbers from previous years suggest that licensing status, rather than immigration status or national origin, is the more relevant factor in deadly crashes. In fatal large truck crashes in 2021, 22.5 percent of drivers reportedly had no CDL at all. So the secretary’s decision to shutter schools, undermining access to essential safety training, has the potential to make roadways more dangerous.

About 20 percent of truck drivers in the U.S. are immigrants, and just 5 percent hold non-domiciled licenses, issued by states to people who are legally authorized to work in the country but do not have a permanent legal residence in that state. In March, the Trump administration revoked the non-domiciled commercial licenses of 200,000 truck drivers.

Last month, Trump ranted that his administration would soon take action against undocumented immigrant truck drivers, who were “killing a lot of people.”

“They can’t read signs. Many of them are on drugs or alcohol, and they shouldn’t be driving these things,” Trump claimed, vowing that his administration would enforce English proficiency requirements. At the same time, the Department of Transportation made it easier for U.S. military veterans to acquire CDLs by allowing them to bypass certain requirements.

Duffy announced that DOT would shut down another 160 schools that were previously certified to train truck drivers, but lacked classrooms, adequate space for driving tests, and employed unlicensed instructors.

Donald Trump argued on Truth Social Monday that the only reason to oppose a data center in your community is if you don’t want to be rich.

“The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor,” Trump wrote. “If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign.”

Trump further claimed that China would be the ultimate benefactor of the pushback, claiming that if Americans “kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame.”

“The good news is that there are plenty of other places that want them,” he continued. “China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement. Actually, they can’t believe it is happening!”

Recent polling indicates that the vast majority of Americans—including Republicans—have no interest in permitting the tech industry to build the facilities in their backyards: A survey published earlier this month by Heatmap revealed that 75 percent of Americans oppose data center development in their communities.

That hasn’t always been the case. Heatmap has asked the same question four times in the last year. This time last year, public perception of the issue wasn’t so bad—Americans were actually evenly split on whether they supported or rejected data center development.

But the tech industry has not done a good job at marketing its product, and Americans have become attuned to the inordinate resource drain data centers create. A medium-sized facility can use 110 million gallons of water per year for cooling its hardware—the same amount needed to support a 1,000-household community, according to a 2025 analysis by the nonprofit Environmental and Energy Study Institute.

Nonetheless, some of America’s biggest tech companies—including Meta, Amazon, and Google—have funneled billions of dollars into data center development to power the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence. This year alone, the sum is expected to top $700 billion.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Santos received the ban after he allegedly made over $17,000 from bets he placed about his attendance at President Trump’s State of the Union address earlier this year. Kalshi said in a filing on its website that Santos didn’t cooperate with the company’s investigation and also has to pay a $71,356 penalty.

Santos mocked the company on X on Monday morning, writing: “Hey @Kalshi thanks for the lifetime ban from your gambling platform. Let’s see how much longer you guys are around for.” In a follow-up post, he complained about not abiding by a “30 day notice” the platform issued to him on August 7, “and today they leaked/announced once again their frivolous nonsense.”

In July, Santos agreed to pay $35,000 in fines to settle claims from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the agency the Trump administration claims has authority over prediction markets. The agency accused Santos of leaving out or misrepresenting key information on his social media accounts in order to influence the price of his positions related to the State of the Union address, and also of betting on an event that he had the ability to influence. Last month, Santos’s attorney, Joseph Murray, said that the former congressman only agreed to pay the fines to avoid litigation and did not admit to any wrongdoing.

Santos was expelled from Congress in 2023 amid revelations that he lied about key details of his life and while facing a 23-count federal indictment on charges including conspiracy to commit offenses against the U.S., making false statements to the government, identity theft, and wire fraud. He pleaded guilty to the latter two charges in 2024 and was given a sentence of 87 months in prison, which was cut short when Trump commuted it last year.

Election officials are sounding alarm bells that the snail-mail service may not be fit to handle the volume of mail-in ballots this midterm cycle. An analysis published Monday by The New York Times revealed that more mail-in ballots were tossed in 2026 and 2025 than in other years.

The Times examined some of the most heavily contested battlegrounds in 12 states—California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Nebraska, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Utah, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Washington—and found that ballots were discarded for lateness at a higher rate than previously recorded.

In Wisconsin, the Times noted that late votes accounted for roughly 78 percent of all the tossed ballots during the spring primary season. In the last spring cycle in 2023, late ballots accounted for just 47 percent of the reject pile.

And earlier this month in Michigan, more than 10,000 ballots were thrown out for arriving after the state’s 8 p.m. Election Day deadline, nearly double the number rejected in 2024.

The disparity has forced regional election officials to try to find new solutions to ensure Americans’ votes count this November.

In Colorado, officials have built more mail-in ballot drop boxes so that denizens can have their ballots mailed early, increasing the total number of boxes by 78 percent since 2018.

“We did change the law last legislative session,” Jena Griswold, the Democratic secretary of state, told the Times. “Mail ballots are going out sooner, and drop boxes are going out sooner. That is in direct response to the uncertainty coming from D.C. and Trump’s attacks on our democracy.”

The Postal Service rebuked the claim that its election-season services had become unreliable, telling the Times that more than 95 percent of mail-in ballots were received in time during recent elections.

“There are any number of factors that may impact the timeliness of a returned ballot,” the statement said. “As such, our consistent message to voters who choose to vote by mail is to mail early.”

The U.S. Postal Service is practically as old as the country. It was developed by the Second Continental Congress during the American Revolution, and Benjamin Franklin was appointed as its first postmaster general. Since then, the Postal Service has reinvented itself again and again, keeping up with the myriad shipping demands of the American public and supporting trillions of dollars in commerce while receiving zero tax dollars for its operations.

Still, that hasn’t prevented America’s public mail system from becoming a favorite target of the president. Since the throes of the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump has repeatedly argued that the Postal Service should be dismantled to prevent mail-in voting—a practice that he has repeatedly accused of fraud despite his own apparent preference to vote by mail.

Last week, the Supreme Court buoyed one of Donald Trump’s more aggressive voter-suppression efforts, permitting the White House to move forward with an executive order that effectively transferred control of the mail-in voting process to Postmaster General David Steiner, who was appointed by Trump in July 2025.