Speaking to Fox News on April 21, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed that the government had “no information” to suggest the SPLC had “shared what they learned” from their undercover informant program in hate groups such as the KKK with law enforcement.

The SPLC hit back at Blanche’s claim with a motion to retract his false statement, and refrain from making any others like it.

In a filing Tuesday, the DOJ cited a statement Blanche made days later on Fox News Sunday with Shannon Bream. “It is true that over the years they have selectively shared with law enforcement. That’s well documented and there’s no dispute there. They aren’t charged with any of that conduct,” Blanche said.

“To the extent that any clarification was needed, Acting Attorney Todd Blanche’s remarks on a major Sunday television program certainly suffice,” the filing stated.

This is just the latest bit of graceless leadership from Blanche, who actively undermined the Justice Department’s flimsy case against former FBI Director James Comey on Sunday, and is part of a larger trend of unprecedented prosecutorial missteps in the department, undermining numerous civil and criminal cases.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio attempted to cover for his MAGA boss, telling a reporter at the White House Tuesday that she had mischaracterized Trump’s recent barbs against the Catholic leader.

“The president recently said that the pope is endangering a lot of Catholics as a result of his rhetoric around the Iran war. Is that a sentiment—” the reporter began, before Rubio cut her off.

“I don’t think that’s an accurate description of what he said,” Rubio interjected. “I think what the president basically said is that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon because they would use it against places that have a lot of Catholics and Christians and others, for that matter.”

Reporter: The president recently said that the Pope is endangering a lot of Catholics as a result of his rhetoric around the Iran war.

Rubio: I don't think that's an accurate description of what he said pic.twitter.com/aYRod37pv2

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 5, 2026

But Rubio was wrong—that is exactly what Trump said.

“I think he’s endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people,” Trump said in a Monday interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. “But I guess if it’s up to the pope, he thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

That’s 100% what President Trump said. Here’s the proof. https://t.co/hHSQu2K6kX pic.twitter.com/yFfcoBUU4f

— Christopher Hale (@ChristopherHale) May 5, 2026

It was just the latest in a long string of attacks that Trump has made against the pope. Last month, Trump wrote on Truth Social that the religious leader was “weak on crime and terrible for foreign policy.”

The Chicago-born pontiff upset the president and a number of Trump’s underlings when he advocated for world peace earlier this year. The Pentagon reportedly threatened a Holy See ambassador in January, days after the pope made antiwar remarks during his State of the World address.

Leo has brushed off Trump’s remarks, claiming that he has “no fear” of the Trump administration or of “speaking out loudly of the message of the Gospel,” though the Vatican did reject a White House invitation to host the pope for America’s 250th anniversary on July 4.

“I will continue to speak out loudly against war, looking to promote peace, ⁠promoting dialogue and multilateral ​relationships among the states to look ​for just solutions to problems,” the pope told reporters aboard a flight in April. “Too many people are suffering in the world today. Too many innocent ‌people ⁠are being killed. And I think someone has to stand up and say there’s a better way.”

It’s very possible that Iran wouldn’t have an enriched uranium stockpile capable of developing nuclear weaponry if it weren’t for Trump’s ascent to the White House.

Iran lacked a single bomb’s worth of uranium in 2018, three years after former President Barack Obama brokered the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action to limit the country’s enormous uranium stockpile. That changed when Trump withdrew the U.S. from the pact that year and imposed a series of tough economic sanctions against the Middle East country.

By 2025, Iran had curated an 11-ton stockpile of enriched uranium, the whereabouts of which remain largely unknown. The total stockpile could create as many as 10 bombs if fully enriched, according to a 2025 assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued the newspaper in federal court Tuesday on behalf of a white man who alleged his race and sex were factors in being denied a promotion, violating the Civil Rights Act. A spokesperson for the publication, Danielle Rhoades Ha, called the allegations “politically motivated.”

“The New York Times categorically rejects the meritless and politically motivated allegations that the Trump administration’s E.E.O.C. is pursuing against us,” Rhoades Ha said. “Our employment practices are merit-based and focused on recruiting and promoting the best talent in the world.”

According to the Times, the white employee filed his complaint in July 2025 with the EEOC office in New York, but the office later transferred the complaint to an Alabama investigator. Since then, the commission had been investigating the Times, with the two sides sending information back and forth.

The two were briefly engaged in a voluntary mediation process known as conciliation, the paper said, which usually takes place after the EEOC finds “reasonable cause” that discrimination has occurred. If conciliation fails, then the EEOC decides whether to file a lawsuit.

While the complaint began as a general look at the newspaper’s hiring and promotions, the case, personally handled by EEOC Chair Andrea Lucus, soon became a specific question over whether the white employee did not get a deputy editor job. On April 21, the EEOC told the newspaper that the case had been referred to the agency’s legal unit.

It’s the latest attack by the Trump administration against media outlets that criticize the president, and it’s not the first time they have invoked diversity, equity, and inclusion in the process. The FCC is currently investigating NBC’s parent company, Comcast, over alleged DEI practices, and last month, commissioner Brendan Carr announced an investigation into DEI practices at Disney, ABC’s parent company.

Trump has long hated the Times for how it has covered him, filing a $15 billion defamation lawsuit against the paper last year, and calling the paper “the failing New York Times” for at least a decade. Now, he’s using the power of his office against them.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump expressed frustration with FDA Commissioner Marty Makary on the phone over the weekend and in the White House on Monday. Makary has refused to approve blueberry, mango, and menthol vape flavors from manufacturer Glas out of concern the flavors would be too marketable to young and underage users. This puts a real wrench in Trump’s 2024 campaign pledge to “save vaping,” and in his quest to win back the youth vote. Recent polling suggests that the president has lost virtually all of the gains he made with youth in 2024, sitting at a dismal 24 percent approval rating with Gen Z.

The Journal’s report raises doubts about Makary’s job security, with people familiar with the conversations saying the FDA commissioner is on thin ice. The White House has publicly said otherwise, claiming President Trump is “thrilled with his accomplishments.”

The legal office has steered resources away from criminal cases in order to aid Donald Trump’s personal revenge tour, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.

The decision to explicitly aid Trump’s agenda has triggered a mass exodus of staff, hamstringing the department’s ability to prosecute white-collar crime and narcotics trafficking cases, according to more than a dozen sources that spoke with the outlet.

Several dozen attorneys have already left the Southern District of Florida since Trump returned to office, either by quitting, retiring, or being fired by the current administration. One unit focused on prosecuting economic crimes lost roughly half of its staff, reported Bloomberg.

The Justice Department has issued different figures. So far, the DOJ has recorded just 26 departures since Jason Reding Quiñones took over as U.S. attorney in the Southern District of Florida in August 2025.

Two months after he was confirmed by Congress, Reding Quiñones filed more than two dozen subpoenas to U.S. officials that took part in the 2016 Russian election interference inquiry, which has been internally redefined among Trump loyalists as the “grand conspiracy.” The unsubstantiated theory turns Trump’s legal challenges on their head, positing that the real-life charges—and Trump’s fleeting comeuppance—were a part of a groundless scheme by Democrats and “deep-state” operatives to destroy Trump and his political movement.

The district has become the epicenter of Trump’s political retribution since Reding Quiñones took over, but it’s far from the only office to massively reorient its resources under pressure by Trump’s White House. The Department of Homeland Security has had to move away from other missions in order to abet Trump’s deportation plans; the Department of Defense shifted billions of dollars to fund Trump’s border mission; and more than 6,000 FBI agents were diverted to handling “immigration-related matters,” effectively redefining the agency’s work.

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

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

Democracy Docket reports that Phillip “Bert” Callais, the lead plaintiff in Louisiana v. Callais, has long claimed U.S. elections are rigged on social media. Callais posted photos and video from the scene at the infamous “Stop the Steal” protest prior to the 2021 Capitol riot, and his Facebook page is full of MAGA and right-wing content, including attacks on vaccines and anything to the left of President Trump. 

It’s a sharp contrast to the original legal complaint that ultimately reached the Supreme Court. Callais is described there as a “non–African American voter” from Brusly, Louisiana, whose congressional district changed after his state redrew its districts. Callais also said that he was a member of a local board of supervisors in 2024.  

In reality, Callais seems to be a partisan activist steeped in the right’s conspiracy theories regarding elections. On X, he commented on an Elon Musk post in December 2025, writing, “This is f#€king insane, non citizens voting in our country.” In February of this year, he expressed doubt in election security, and in January, he called the voting system “manipulated,” touting hand-counted paper ballots as a solution. 

Callais also dismissed concerns about how eliminating mail-in voting would hurt disabled or elderly voters, posting in February, “Find someone to haul you to the polls. Don’t let your disability put the rest of the country at risk.” 

On Sunday, only days after the Supreme Court’s ruling, election denier Seth Keshel, featured in The New York Times for his voter fraud claims, posted a photo to X of him shaking hands with Callais. 

All of this seems to reveal a plot by conservatives to change how Americans vote in order to satisfy debunked conspiracy theories. With the right plaintiff, Republican politicians and wealthy donors can push through a tailored legal case to undo laws that protect elections from partisan interference. Callais seems to have been ready and willing. 

The Supreme Court voted 6-3 last week to throw out Louisiana’s congressional map and get rid of its only Democratic (and majority-Black) district. Landry immediately suspended the primary elections for Louisiana’s U.S. House seats in order to implement a new map that could give Republicans an advantage.

By the time the governor pushed the date of the race from May 16 to July 15, more than 42,000 absentee votes had already been received, the Louisiana Illuminator reported Monday.

Landry’s blatant attempt to overturn thousands of votes comes at the bidding of Trump, who has pressured red states to redraw their congressional maps.

Several Democratic candidates and civil rights advocates have urged voters to continue voting in these races, as Landry’s move is subject to an array of legal challenges. Other races in the party primaries on May 16 are going forward, including those for the two Senate contests.

Palm Beach County commissioners will vote on Tuesday on whether to use taxpayer dollars to rename Florida’s Palm Beach International Airport the “President Donald J. Trump International Airport.” If they approve the name change, a trademark deal between the county and DTTM Operations LLC—a company run by Donald Trump Jr.—will force the airport to run all airport-branded merchandise by the Trump family for approval.

Trump would become the first and only president with an airport named after him who has trademarked his own name in this manner.

While Trump’s companies have claimed that the trademark is only for legal protections, and that Trump won’t directly profit, the agreement signed by Trump and reviewed by the Miami Herald would leave loopholes for the president’s companies to sell “President Donald J. Trump Airport” branded merchandise off-site, and even gives the president control over biographical information included at the airport.

The agreement also allows Trump to create the list of “approved retailers” from which airport stores have to buy Trump-branded items. If the county or any retail businesses want to sell DJT Airport merch, they have to buy those products “exclusively and directly from such entities designated by Licensor.” The licensor is DTTM—of which Trump Jr. is the president.

“Normally a license agreement says that the goods have to be of a certain quality. It doesn’t say that you have to purchase them from a retailer that we’re approving them from,” trademark lawyer Josh Gerben told the Herald. “It’s not just a nonpartisan individual that’s going to be able to write marketing materials or talk about Donald Trump. It’s going to be him and his organizations getting to control the messaging here.”

Doubts about the ethics of the deal were raised months ago, with Palm Beach lawmakers stating over email that the airport renaming would confer “a commercial benefit upon the president and his companies.” Even still, the deal may very well be approved on Tuesday, giving perhaps the most blatantly corrupt president yet another free pass.

Would that be illegal or unlawful on Blanche’s part? Would Blanche be subject to sanctions or accountability? The answers turn out to be complicated. And right now, Democrats are starting to think them through. Because if they win back one or both chambers of Congress, passing DOJ reform will be critical as part of an agenda to “fascism-proof” the system against future authoritarian presidents.

“We’re going to explore whether there’s a way to prohibit this,” Senator Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who has also been targeted by Trump, told me in an interview, speaking of Trump’s prosecutions of Comey and other enemies. “There has to be a lawful, constitutional way.”

Blanche’s quotes on NBC News over the weekend about the Comey prosecution underscored the urgency of this for Democrats. The DOJ is prosecuting Comey for allegedly threatening the president, based on his social media posting of an image of seashells arranged to read “86 47,” which doesn’t remotely meet the statutory requirement for such a threat to be chargeable.

Blanche acknowledged in that NBC appearance that “86 47” is commonplace and that others using it on social media or to sell merchandise won’t be prosecuted. “That’s posted constantly,” he admitted. But he insisted that the phrase is only “part of” the case against Comey, suggesting that 11 months of investigation—Comey’s post came last spring—had turned up much more evidence.

The naked absurdity of this has been witheringly dissected everywhere. The term “86” doesn’t even mean “assassinate.” The relevant statute requires prosecutors to prove that a reasonable person would have understood the phrase as a true threat to the life of the president—and that Comey actually did intend to convey that threat. It’s always possible the DOJ has amassed devastating evidence of this intent, but no experts think it’s likely.

Which raises bigger questions: Presuming that this prosecution is utterly baseless, is Blanche allowed to do this? What can be done to stop such prosecutions in the future?

You’ll recall, of course, that Trump has publicly ordered the DOJ to prosecute many of his enemies, from Comey to New York Attorney General Letitia James to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. He frames this as retribution, meaning he’s demanding prosecutions regardless of what the evidence shows.

What’s more, Blanche predecessor Pam Bondi’s transgression was precisely that she failed (after trying very hard) to carry out prosecutions unsupported by facts and law. As The New York Times reports, Blanche is maximizing efforts to prosecute Trump foes because the president wants him to, and it could win him the attorney general slot on a permanent basis. No one is even pretending this is about anything else. So—in the spirit of the above thought experiment—what should be done about it?

In our interview, Schiff said that if granted the majority, Democrats will explore legislative fixes that could limit presidential pardons of prosecutors who carry out corrupt prosecutions, among other things. Schiff allowed that there may be separation-of-powers problems with limiting a president’s ability to direct prosecutions, but he said Trump’s underlings might be further constrained.

One possibility, Schiff noted, might be to codify into law—and further clarify—the guidelines that already exist at DOJ. Those theoretically limit malicious or baseless prosecutions. But prosecutors still enjoy tremendous discretion—so much so that it’s not even clear my thought experiment involves illegal acts or that they would be actionable. Schiff suggests barring the department from bringing charges solely on the order of a president that the department would not have brought otherwise. Another idea: creating new types of limits on knowingly “selective” or “vindictive” prosecutions.

“I do think there’s a way of legislating this that would be constitutional,” Schiff told me, noting that the goal should be “codifying guardrails” into “strict and legally enforceable protections against any future president abusing the office the way Trump has.”

Schiff and other Democrats have already sponsored legislation that would require more reporting to Congress on White House–DOJ communications. In a new book, former federal prosecutor Barb McQuade suggests codifying limits on president-to-DOJ communications about the president’s political rivals in particular, among many other things.

Meanwhile, the Center for American Progress is exploring ideas like new evidentiary burdens for DOJ to meet in cases involving people explicitly targeted by the president for prosecution. Brian Beutler has suggested that the next attorney general launch a major post-Trump fumigation of the department—with concrete accountability for its abuses at its center. Relatedly, law professor Stephen Vladeck suggests an overall posture for Democrats: “If you’re going to act in a way that’s grossly unethical and in violation of individuals’ rights, we’re going to do whatever we can to hold you accountable.”

“The Justice Department is in shambles,” Schiff told me. “There is an unethical culture at the top that’s going to have to change.”

That’s seconded by Ken White, a federal criminal defense attorney who writes a well-regarded blog about the law. He called the Comey prosecution “the single most flagrantly meritless indictment I’ve seen in my entire career” and added that it occasions deeper congressional reforms.

For instance, White said, one reform might direct courts that conclude a prosecution was brought based on misinformation to order the DOJ to reimburse defendants’ legal fees. He also suggested requiring courts that determine a grand jury has been flagrantly misled by prosecutors—as White believes happened with Comey—to report it to the relevant state bar, facilitating professional disciplinary action.

The point here is to establish a forward-looking mindset: that dealing with these levels of flood-the-zone lawlessness and abuses of power will require future Congresses to think big. Richard Nixon’s abuses exposed the need for far-reaching post-Watergate reforms. But much of that architecture—along with many norms of prosecutorial good faith and independence it inspired, at least as an ideal—has broken down in the face of an even more lawless president.

“A lot of the limits on the incredible power of federal prosecutors are normative, rather than legal,” White told me. “Hopefully some of these abuses are appalling enough that a future Democratic Congress will pass hard statutory protections instead of just relying on DOJ culture, tradition, and institutionalism.”

The post-Nixon Congresses were populated by a new generation of eager reformers known as “Watergate babies.” The post-Trump reformers will have to make their predecessors look like, well, babies—by outdoing them in determination, ambition, inspiration, and purpose.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley unveiled the legislative text Monday night for the Republicans’ reconciliation package, directing $38.2 billion to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. The bill also allocates $26 billion for offices under Customs and Border Protection, including $3.5 billion for border security technology and screening, according to Punchbowl News.

Meanwhile, another bill from the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee would provide an additional $32.5 billion, bringing the total package for immigration enforcement to roughly $69.2 billion, with ICE set to receive approximately $38.2 billion, according to Migrant Insider.

Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy for the Center for American Progress, warned on X Monday night that these funds had “enormous flexibility, with far less accountability or oversight than typical annual appropriations for DHS funding has.”

Senate Republicans have framed this massive expenditure as giving ICE and CBP enough funds to be shutdown-proof until the end of Trump’s term. But in reality, ICE already had twice as much funding as it needed to run from the president’s One Big Beautiful Bill, passed in July. Now ICE has roughly four or five times the amount of funding it needs to run until 2029, while CBP only has the funds to make it to 2027, according to Kogan.

There do not appear to be any offsetting cuts to pay for this bill.

Since Trump launched his sweeping immigration crackdown, American voters have borne witness to federal immigration agents’ use of threats and intimidation, excessive force, warrantless searches or arrests, racial profiling, and wrongful detentions. ICE has detained hundreds of children, and families of mixed legal status are being regularly torn apart by the administration’s relentless immigration crackdown. Federal immigration agents were also responsible for the deaths of two U.S. citizens in Minnesota.

Rather than reform these federal agencies, Senate Republicans are choosing to write them a blank check using taxpayer dollars.

On Tuesday, at a signing ceremony in the Oval Office to restore the Presidential Fitness Award, Trump went off on a tangent on the war while thanking some members of his Cabinet, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, whom he praised for a press conference earlier in the day.

“That was really great, and you’re doing very well,” Trump said from his seat at the Resolute Desk, turning to Hegseth. Then he abruptly changed the subject to Iran.

“They don’t like playing games with us. They don’t like it at all, you’ll see that. As time goes by, you’re gonna see it. I think you’ve already seen it; we’ve basically wiped out their military in about two weeks,” Trump added, with kids and senior officials on either side of him. Later, Trump went further, describing Iran’s leaders as “sick people” and “lunatics” that he would not allow to have a nuclear weapon.

the optics of this Oval Office event are absolutely insane. get a load of this. crazytown. pic.twitter.com/CTU1T84Y8Q

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 5, 2026

Then Trump thanked Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but as Kennedy spoke about how “grateful” he was for Trump’s decision to restore the fitness test, the president fell asleep.

Trump, surrounded by kids, is struggling to stay awake as RFK Jr drones on and on pic.twitter.com/hXrfk9uuSU

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 5, 2026

When it became Secretary of Education Linda McMahon’s turn to speak, Trump’s head was bobbing, his eyes opening and closing as McMahon spoke about needing to eat well and exercise to have a “sound mind.”

LINDA McMAHON: In order to have a sound mind, you do have to eat well, you do have to exercise

TRUMP: *sitting, eyes closed* pic.twitter.com/5lMSkmYmJ5

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 5, 2026

All of this shows that Trump is not well, mentally or physically. He is in clear decline in full view to the public, and no matter the subject, he will wander off topic and doze off if he gets the chance.

The MAGA leader’s supposedly astronomical influence over the Republican Party is being tested in the run-up to the November midterms, Politico reported early Tuesday.

There’s plenty of evidence that his pull is fading. Trump’s retribution campaign begins in Indiana, where 21 local Republican legislators blocked his attempts to redistrict their state in December. Eight of them are up for reelection this cycle, and Trump aims to oust all of them. So far, Trump has endorsed primary challengers against seven, and his allies have spent millions of dollars on the relatively tiny races.

Yet his candidates have largely failed to break out on their own, with the strongest only holding narrow leads in polls. Even those close to the president are not expecting all of Trump’s favorites to win, reported Politico.

The president has also backed primary opponents to some of his biggest in-party thorns, including Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy and Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie, the latter of whom has so far weathered the storm. Cassidy, who became an enemy of the far-right movement when he voted to convict Trump on impeachment charges in 2021, is down by just a handful of points, according to the ​​latest Emerson College poll.

It’s another indication that the MAGA movement is turning away from its longtime leader, potentially looking for new stewardship as Trump enters the lame-duck stage of his presidency—even if Trump has no plans to end his reign.

The 79-year-old once again toyed with the idea of extending his time in office while speaking at the White House small-business summit Monday, claiming that he could potentially stay in office for another two terms, or eight years in total.

“He’s hit his max power and now you’re seeing the backside of that power curve,” former GOP Representative Adam Kinzinger told Politico. “This will be his last competitive election cycle that will have any impact on him. And I think the base is starting to think into the future.”

The National Parks Service claims that the soil, even with the presence of lead, is not excessively toxic, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department telling The New York Times that the soil has been tested “multiple times by multiple parties, and this project passed all standards set by law.” But doubts remain.

“There’s no safe level of exposure to lead; it’s one of the most toxic elements we know of,” Harvard exposure assessment professor Joseph G. Allen told the Times. “One of the risks you have to think about with lead is that it doesn’t just stay outside in soil.… We track it on our shoes. So depending on where the soil was placed, golfers and other people could track it indoors.

“We knew that the demolition of the East Wing and the changes to East Potomac were legally toxic; now we know they’re environmentally toxic as well,” said Democracy Defenders Fund executive chair Norm Eisen, who is representing the DC Preservation League in a lawsuit against the dumping and against Trump’s takeover of the public golf course. The group recently sought a temporary restraining order on construction and tree removal at the course, but its request was denied.  

The DOE’s Office of Civil Rights announced Monday that it would investigate Smith College for allowing “biological males into women’s intimate spaces” in violation of Title IX, the landmark 1972 law banning sex discrimination, which the Trump administration has used to rampantly discriminate against transgender people.

“Title IX contains a single-sex exception that allows colleges to enroll all-male or all-female student bodies—but the exception applies on the basis of biological sex difference, not subjective gender identity,” the DOE said in a statement. “An all-girls college that enrolls male students professing a female identity would cease to qualify as single sex under Title IX.”

Smith College is considered a historically women’s college, or HWC, founded as a single-sex education institution. The school accepts “any applicants who self-identify as women; cis, trans, and nonbinary women” and has accepted transgender women since 2015. Many other HWCs also accept transgender women.

As for the DOE’s phony concerns about “intimate spaces,” Smith College’s website says it provides single-occupancy, all-gender restrooms, and an all-gender locker room with private changing and showering areas on campus.

Shannon Minter, an attorney with the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, told CNN that the investigation was an “ominous” government overreach into the workings of private institutions.

“If [women’s colleges] have chosen—as many of them have—to admit transgender students, that’s something they should be able to do freely without being worried about persecution by the federal government,” he told CNN.

“This administration seems hell-bent on eliminating any inclusion of transgender people anywhere in our society.”

In an interview with Fox News Monday night, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham claimed that the U.S. would win the Middle East war if it regained “freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz” and attained relative peace for Iran’s neighbors—something that existed before Donald Trump decided to attack Iran.

“We’re close to victory,” Graham said. “Victory for me would mean regaining freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz, degrading a little bit further—short, big, strong response—their military capability a bit further, threaten Kharg Island with destruction and pull out and try to get Israel and Saudi Arabia back to peace.

“The Strait of Hormuz is the only thing left,” Graham noted, touting White House talking points. “This has been a brilliant campaign by President Trump and our military.

“If we can take back control of the Straits of Hormuz, it is checkmate,” Graham said. “This thing is over.”

Yet even better than a win for the U.S. would be a win for Israel, according to Graham.

“The ultimate victory is that Saudi Arabia and Israel make peace, ending the Arab-Israeli conflict,” Graham continued, continuing to heap praise on Trump’s name by claiming that the president will “go down in history as the greatest peacemaker.”

U.S. involvement in the war was reportedly arranged following a February 11 meeting between Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and several U.S. and Israeli officials in the White House Situation Room. It was reportedly Netanyahu’s direct influence—and the ensuing pressure campaign—that thrust America into the war. U.S. military commanders advised Trump that components of Netanyahu’s plan to attack Iran were “farcical,” but by that point, Trump had already been inspired to go after Tehran’s theocratic regime.

The State Department backed the narrative via a government release penned late last month, detailing how the U.S. “is engaged in this conflict at the request of and in the collective self-defense of its Israeli ally, as well as in the exercise of the United States’ own inherent right of self-defense.”

Nonetheless, the White House has disputed that narrative, repeatedly insisting that Israel had nothing to do with Trump’s decision to involve the country in another unpopular war in the Middle East.

America has so far been at war with Iran for more than nine weeks and spent at least $25 billion in the process (though some estimates put the number at more than $70 billion). The regional conflict has damaged strategic alliances, stalled global trade, and thrust the world into an energy crisis due to the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz.

It is not clear exactly what the war in Iran has accomplished. Together, the U.S. and Israel have killed thousands of Iranian civilians and obliterated Iranian civilian infrastructure, failing to damage Iran’s nuclear capabilities in the process. Meanwhile, 13 U.S. soldiers have died.

The war has also spiked the cost of living for people around the world and agitated international relations—particularly between the U.S. and longtime allies in the Western hemisphere.

It has also sparked a political rejection of MAGA ideology across the U.S. as the American public becomes more and more disillusioned with its increasingly infirm, unstable, and volatile president.

The Fulton County Board of Elections filed a 27-page motion Monday to block a Department of Justice subpoena seeking the personal information of election workers, calling the move unprecedented and politically motivated.

The subpoena, issued on April 17 but disclosed in court Monday, demands that the board’s custodian of records appear in federal court Tuesday with the full election staff roster, including names, home addresses, email addresses, and personal phone numbers of everyone involved in the 2020 presidential election in Georgia’s most populous county.

County attorneys say that this goes too far and could include nearly 3,000 county employees, temporary poll workers, and volunteers. Fulton County Commission Chair Robb Pitts told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the purpose of the subpoena is to “intimidate workers in our county, to discourage people from voting,” adding that the county would fight back with “with every possible resource.”

Trump and his MAGA base have pushed conspiracy theories that Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in Georgia was due to election fraud, even though those claims have been debunked in court. Since winning his second term as president, Trump has weaponized the federal government to go after Fulton County, sending his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, to accompany FBI agents to raid an elections office there in January.

All of this could be a pretext for Trump to interfere in the November midterm elections, and even beyond that. The country could be in for several long legal battles.

According to documents from the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights and Republican Representative Nancy Mace, who recently forced the release of those documents through a subpoena, the federal government paid out more than $338,000 from 2004 to 2017 to secretly settle sexual harassment claims against six House members or their offices. The following year, Congress banned the federal government from paying off settlements for sex pests.

Mace said she plans to release the records publicly “once we confirm that personally identifiable information of victims and witnesses has been properly redacted.... Accountability is not a threat,” she said. “It is a promise.”

According to Mace’s calculations, those implicated include former Democratic Representatives Eric Massa ($115,000) and John Conyers ($77,000), and Republicans Blake Farenthold ($84,000) and Patrick Meehan ($39,000), whose misconduct was already public but not the exact sums. Less public settlements included an $8,000 payout on behalf of the late Democratic Representative Carolyn McCarthy’s office and a $15,000 payout for former Republican Representative Rodney Alexander. Alexander claimed the settlement had to do with accusations against one of his staffers at the time, while a former McCarthy aide did not respond to a query from Politico.

These payouts—which have received even more scrutiny in the wake of allegations of misconduct against former Representatives Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzales—demonstate the massive lack of accountability for members of Congress. Our leaders are hiding behind our money instead of actually having to acknowledge their misdeeds.

So far, America has been at war with Iran for more than nine weeks and spent at least $25 billion in the process. The regional conflict has damaged strategic alliances, stalled global trade, and thrust the world into an energy crisis due to the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz. It has also killed thousands of people.

And yet assessments of Tehran’s nuclear program remain largely unchanged from roughly a year ago, when Donald Trump ordered strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear sites, hitting Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan on June 22.

Prior to the June attack, U.S. analysts believed that Iran had the capacity to build a nuclear bomb within three to six months, according to three sources familiar ‌with the matter that spoke with Reuters Monday night. Afterward, U.S. analysts estimated that the attack—internally referred to as Operation Midnight Hammer—changed the Islamic Republic’s nuclear timeline back to about nine months to a year.

That estimate is still the same, according to Reuters’s unnamed sources.

Since February 28, the majority of U.S. and Israeli attacks have focused on hitting conventional military targets in Iran. The stagnant timeline suggests that such a strategy is not effective at diminishing Iran’s nuclear capabilities. To do that may require the destruction or removal of Iran’s remaining stockpile of highly enriched uranium, or HEU, reported Reuters.

Iran lacked a single bomb’s worth of uranium in 2018, three years after former President Barack Obama brokered the Iran Nuclear Deal to limit the country’s enormous uranium stockpile. But that changed when Trump withdrew the U.S. from the pact and imposed a series of tough economic sanctions against the Middle Eastern country.

By 2025, Iran had curated an 11-ton stockpile of enriched uranium, the whereabouts of which remain largely unknown. The total HEU stockpile could create as many as 10 bombs if fully enriched, according to a 2025 assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Trump has previously stated that his primary objective in the war was to completely eliminate Iran’s nuclear capabilities, but his administration has not been consistent in relaying its mission progress to the general public.

In the immediate aftermath of Operation Midnight Hammer, Trump and his administration claimed that Iran’s nuclear production was set back by multiple “years.” Yet former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent suddenly resigned over the issue in March, writing in his resignation letter that he could not “in good conscience” support the war in Iran because the country “posed no imminent threat to our nation.”

South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster, a longtime Trump ally, is not preparing to call a special legislative session to redraw his state’s congressional map mid-decade, his office told Palmetto Politics.

McMaster’s office told the outlet that he had been in communication with the White House following the Supreme Court’s decision to gut the Voting Rights Act last week, but the governor’s office rejected the idea it was being “pressured” by the Trump administration. His office insisted that it was part of “ongoing coordination” with the White House and the talks were simply part of the “regular communications” the governor enjoys with Trump.

Shortly after the Supreme Court’s decision, McMaster suggested that it could be worth reviewing South Carolina’s congressional map, noting that it had been upheld as recently as 2024. “In light of the Court’s most recent decision on the Voting Rights Act, it would be appropriate for the General Assembly to ensure that South Carolina’s congressional map still complies with all requirements of federal law and the U.S. Constitution,” he wrote in a post on X.

South Carolina currently has six Republicans and one Democrat in the House of Representatives.

Last week, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, another Republican, also said that he wouldn’t pursue mid-decade redistricting in light of the recent Supreme Court decision. Meanwhile, Trump has continued to threaten red states that refuse to rig their elections in his favor.

Senator Chuck Grassley, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, included a request for the funds in a reconciliation package released Monday night. The $1 billion would go to the Secret Service for “security adjustments and upgrades” related to the ballroom’s construction. An additional $30.7 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and $3.5 billion for Customs and Border Protection were also included in the budget item.

In a statement Monday, Grassley said, “Republicans won’t allow our country to be dragged backwards by Democrats’ radical, anti-law enforcement agenda.

“The Senate Judiciary Committee is taking action to help provide certainty for federal law enforcement and safer streets for American families. We will work to ensure this critical funding gets signed into law without unnecessary delay.”

The reconciliation process allows for a simple majority in the Senate, meaning that if there is no Republican opposition, Trump will get the ballroom funds. It’s quite an increase from the $400 million in tax dollars that Senate Republicans asked for last month, and from the zero dollars from taxpayers that Trump promised. But he must have his ballroom, whether the American people want it or not.

Trump attacked the pope unprovoked after Hewitt said perhaps the pope could speak up about China’s detention of Hong Kong billionaire Jimmy Lai.

“Well, the pope would rather talk about the fact that it’s OK for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.… I don’t think that’s very good,” Trump said. “I think he’s endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people, but I guess, if it’s up to the pope, he thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”​

It’s clear that Trump has been extremely bothered by the pope’s very measured criticism last month, and consumed with this one-sided beef ever since. Trump is claiming that Pope Leo is “endangering” Catholics because he wants Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Pope Leo XIV never said anything close to that. Instead, he simply criticized Trump’s war on Iran and his genocidal threats accompanying it, and the president has been crashing out since, calling him “weak on crime” and putting words in his mouth to cope.

The Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision on gerrymandering was the latest example of its disingenuous approach to racial issues, says Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at Columbia University and UCLA. Crenshaw argues that the court’s six conservative justices fully understand why partisan gerrymandering hurts Black Americans but are pretending not to. She said that the ruling is a part of a broad conservative attack against affirmative action, diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, and virtually any policy that acknowledges race and racism in America. Crenshaw also discusses her new memoir, “Backtalker.” In the book, Crenshaw explains the process behind her pioneering legal and intellectual work on critical race theory and intersectionality. She describes how past and contemporary political controversies underline the importance of those concepts.

Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of The New Republic show Right Now. We have a great guest. Kimberlé Crenshaw is a professor of law at UCLA and Columbia, and she’s very well known for writing about intersectionality, but also as a great professor, activist, and expert for decades now. So Kim, welcome.

Kimberlé Crenshaw: Always happy to be in conversation with you, Perry. Thanks for having me.

Bacon: Yes—you were a great guest, I think in November. You have a memoir out, so I want to talk about that—which is great news, hearing from you in this kind of lane—but I want to start with really important news from yesterday, and you’re the right kind of person to ask about this.

We now have another Supreme Court ruling further limiting the Voting Rights Act, and as we’re speaking right now, legislators and governors in Alabama, Louisiana, among other places, are literally talking about, How do we redraw our districts to further limit the number of Black representatives we send to Congress and to state legislatures, and to limit Black voices in our states further? So talk about your reaction to that ruling yesterday, first of all.

Crenshaw: Perry, it was sadly expected. Anyone who has been following the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence over the last two decades knows that we are looking at a deliberate, devastating approach to the infrastructure of the Civil Rights Movement.

The Voting Rights Act has been particularly painful to watch as it’s being destroyed. It’s been called the crown jewel of the Civil Rights Movement for good reason. It’s the only law that actually focuses on results. It focuses on representation, and anything that is done in states that had a history of denying African Americans the right to vote is potentially subject to intervention.

Most other laws are not like that. To take an equivalency between voting and housing, for example—one could say practices and policies and procedures that predictably produce segregated housing, no matter what they are, whether it’s insurance lending, redlining, restrictive covenants—all of these things are suspicious because they produce a particular end that we associate with discrimination, segregation, and white supremacy.

That’s what the Voting Rights Act has done. That’s what it has been. That’s why it is one of the most successful laws in the United States in terms of achieving a particular objective. It has become so much of our fabric in this society that when we look at Black representatives, we don’t think about how much had to happen, and what the infrastructure of voting procedures and policies has to be for that to happen.

Now, unfortunately, as you mentioned, these state legislatures are quickly going about—now that they have the green light—to have at it. We’re going to see how important these laws had been in creating a reality that we have since then taken for granted.

Bacon: I’m not a lawyer or legal expert, but if you read these opinions, not only this one but the past ones ... the idea of critical race theory is in part to look at outcomes and results and not just intent. It seems like Alito and Roberts’s intention is very much to make it so that unless you said the N-word and said, “I want to stop every Black person from voting because [I’m a racist]”—they’re trying to define civil rights law down to express an intent that very few people make in 2026.

Crenshaw: Yes. They are targeting a kind of discrimination—a reflection of discrimination that goes all the way back to a time that was 50, 60 years ago. People don’t discriminate like that anymore. Even when they did discriminate like that, they didn’t often say, “No Black person can come to the polls.”

What they would do is bury their discriminatory intent inside a process, inside a structure, inside a procedure. So when you had to pass a literacy test, or had to guess how many marbles are in a jar, or when you had to recite the Constitution—these were not said to be, “If you’re Black, you can’t vote,” but it gave the power, the authority, and the discretion to individual white people to effectively do what they wanted to do, which is not to let any Black people vote.

Even their telling of discrimination is anachronistic to 1965, when the Voting Rights Act was passed. Now we’re talking a half-century later, and the only thing they think counts as discrimination is something that’s over a century old.

This is why they’ve gone after critical race theory, because critical race theory makes that clear. It says discrimination, exclusion can happen in any number of ways that are presumably race-neutral.

The Voting Rights Act understood that—that’s why it was so effective. The MAGA judges understand that, and that is exactly why they gutted it.

Bacon: Talk about what the results will be. I guess there are two things I want to talk about. The first is you’re going to end up with a state like Louisiana or Alabama where you have very few—almost no—Democratic members of Congress.

The second is: Even if you have one, they’re less likely to be Black than before. So talk about those things differently, because part of what I’m concerned about is Democratic members, but part of it is Black representation—and these things are being conflated in various ways. So talk about why those things are different and why they’re the same.

Crenshaw: Yeah. Let’s be clear about what it is that the Voting Rights Act protected. It protected the right of Black voters to elect someone of their choosing without their preferences being artificially diminished because of the structure of the voting regime. The issue is: Who is it that Black voters are preferring? How is it that their preferences are basically being swallowed up by—in some cases—districts that are drawn in such a way that either pack them all into one district, or crack them across several districts in order to minimize the voting power that they actually have? It’s the choices of Black voters—not necessarily the identity or even the party of the choices that they make.

But because race, identity, Democratic Party affiliation, and voter preference are in many ways an amalgam—it is therefore that much easier to disenfranchise Black people, to say, “This is a party gerrymander, not a racial gerrymander.”

Here’s what’s the real kicker in this: The ability to gerrymander on the basis of party has been one of the ways that Black voters’ choices have been undermined, which in turn created the pressure under law to create corrective district line-drawing so that that political gerrymander doesn’t rob Black people of the right to vote. Now what they’re going to be able to say is that the remediation—the fix—the way in which the party gerrymander is no longer available to undermine Black voters because of the Voting Rights Act—that’s now gone.

So it’s a twofer. They can now freely use party gerrymandering to suppress Black voters, and Black voters don’t have a recourse in the Voting Rights Act. That is what’s so insidious about this decision.

Bacon: We talk a lot about Trump, but in reality we have a Republican—you said “MAGA judges.” What we’re really talking about is a much broader architecture of anti-Blackness. If President Trump didn’t exist, all these six people—most of them were not even appointed by him. Talk about the fact that we talk about racism as if it’s Donald Trump, but this is a much deeper anti-Black project than Donald Trump, right?

Crenshaw: It’s been an anti-Black project that has been in the making for a couple of decades. We’re looking at justices on the Supreme Court who argued in memos against Brown v. Board of Education. We’re talking about justices who attempted to participate in voter suppression. We’re talking about one judge in particular who wrote this opinion, who was known to say that the institutions that he attended were better when they practiced discrimination—Princeton, and gender discrimination, to be specific.

This has been a very long fuse that was inevitably going to result in an explosive moment like this if that fuse was not extinguished, and it was not. So we’ve got a steady drumbeat of dismantling the beautiful infrastructure that was created out of the blood, sweat, and tears—the lives lost—in the 1960s. Now we’re at a point where that fire, as far as the law is concerned, is on the brink of extinguishing—if it has not already happened.

Bacon: I was going to ask you—you’re a law professor; courts and law and legal systems are your field. But on some level, have we lost the law? Is it all about winning elections? With these six people ultimately deciding what the law is, is the law—whatever it was in 1954—is the law no longer a tool that’s of much use for us?

Crenshaw: It’s important to acknowledge that there is no further appeal when the Supreme Court makes a decision. That is the it, and that is the all of it. Now, there are always possibilities of repassing the law. There are always possibilities at a local level of trying to work around this ideology that the Supreme Court has created. Our challenge often has been that when the court sets out a particular pathway—this pathway now is to label anything that is not colorblind as potentially unconstitutional—the tendency has been to give the other side the victory before they’ve had to litigate it.

Here’s the example in the reverse. In 1954, as we know, Brown v. Board of Education ruled that segregation in education was unconstitutional. It was not the case that all the segregating institutions said, OK, we’re done, we’re going to go in the direction that the Supreme Court is leading us in. They resisted massively. They shut down the schools rather than integrate them. They came up with freedom-of-choice plans. They extended their resistance so that each demand to abide by the law had to be litigated.

The question is: Do we have that fight in us? Do we have the ability to say—even though we know what this court is trying to do with colorblindness—each case is its own case? Make them win it in each court. Make them win it each time they’re trying to apply this specious ideology to yet another arena. There is room to fight. The question is whether there’s a will to fight.

And I have to say that the ledger doesn’t look so promising when we see how many law firms that used to be on the right side bending the knee, kissing the ring—universities, without even being asked to, eliminating their scholarships and their programs. We see some foundations scrubbing the support that they give for racial justice. We even see some of our allies listing almost every issue that’s important to a progressive community except anti-Blackness.

So if anything, we have to hope that this moment is a wake-up call. There’s no pivoting our way out of it. There’s no “unsaying the thing that needs to be said” way out of it. The only thing we have right now is to fight our way out of it. Hopefully the bell has been rung.

Bacon: I hope you’re right, because as you were talking, I was thinking: The universities folded so quickly and preemptively surrendered so much that the idea that other people will fight is not what we’ve seen so far.

OK, so you have a memoir out—it’s called Backtalker. So talk about the title, first of all. I think I know what that word means, but talk about why that’s the title.

Crenshaw: I was raised to talk, and I was raised to talk back against injustice. Those two ideas have come together throughout my career. In thinking about how to express, explain, historicize this moment—the need for us to talk back, the need for us to use some of the tools, the concepts like critical race theory and intersectionality—it was important for me to talk back against one particular idea, which is that all these ideas are foreign imports. They come from other people and are not homegrown reactions to the realities that we here in the United States have faced.

It reminds me of the way that the Freedom Riders and the Civil Rights Movement was framed by folks in the South as outside intervention—of course, our Black people here have no problem going around to the back door, have no problem being denied the right to vote or denied education. It took somebody from outside to come and get them all stirred up. In a way, that’s what a lot of critics of critical race theory and intersectionality have been saying: This is coming from somewhere else.

I thought it was important to say it’s not coming from anywhere else but this country, this land, these places, these spaces that followed a policy and practice—in fact, a cultural politics—that created the recognition that yes, we live in a society that is still dealing with the shadow of segregation and enslavement. And that recognition, that literacy about what that means in our lives, doesn’t come from sitting in an ivory tower with one’s finger to the temple.

It comes from experience up. It comes from the things that we learned from the time we were little babies. It comes from the way that it got reinforced when we were in public school and when we went to college and when we gained career traction. This is a story about how we live in this country as racialized subjects and what knowledge that life has given to us.

Bacon: You write about the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill period, and you knew Anita Hill a little bit before she became nationally famous. So the question would be: That’s a moment where intersectional beliefs and views were not really expressed—it became that defending Black people meant you defended Clarence Thomas, functionally, and not Anita Hill, functionally.

Do you think as a society we’ve gotten better on that, where we recognize that Black women are different and [there are] two sort of distinct identities? Are we getting better on this issue, you think?

Crenshaw: That’s a difficult assessment to make after this last election, for example—where we effectively had a candidate who was a Black woman being called out of her name repeatedly, being framed in such a misogynistic—I have to bring in Moya Bailey here, who calls it “misogynoir.” You take sexism and you take racism, and together they create a debacle. That was what it was to hear the way that Vice President Kamala Harris was regarded.

Then you come out of that election with so few people in the mainstream news environment willing to take up what that meant, what new bottom that created. Then of course you have the purging of Black women from positions of power. You have the undermining of their expertise. You have the idea that just seeing a Black woman in a job that requires expertise and knowledge and skill is, for them, de facto unqualified—the worst stories about DEI.

In terms of the broader political culture, being able to address the intersectional gaps that led to the confirmation of Clarence Thomas—it’s a big, continuing hole into which not only the well-being of Black women has fallen, and the well-being of Black communities, but the whole nation has been driven into this point of destruction.

I never miss the opportunity to remind people who complain about our politics now being owned by oligarchs that the 5–4 decision that defeated meaningful campaign finance reform was made possible by that fifth vote that was won when Clarence Thomas was confirmed. There’s not much that you could look at in this moment of disaster that you can’t point to some rule that the Supreme Court has made that created a permissive environment for precisely this thing to happen. That’s intersectional failure that has undermined us all, including the very republic that we claim to be part of.

Bacon: Another intersectional issue—one where I was surprised by the book. I like Barack Obama, I think he has done a lot of good things. But ... there was a program called My Brother’s Keeper that they started in the Obama White House in 2014. The idea was, “We’re going to help Black men.” Talk about that—you came to the White House and said, “Why don’t we do a program for Black women?” And their response was not yes, which is what it should have been—it was something different. What was it?

Crenshaw: The response was that this program, My Brother’s Keeper, was targeted to the specific ways that—frankly, it was conceived as a response to Trayvon Martin, so Black boys were always front and center—but it was then expanded to deal with all boys of color, and then eventually all boys, in some of the school and educational programs. But the idea was Black men and boys are exceptionally left behind, they’re exceptionally vulnerable, and because they have special needs, there has to be a program that is attentive to those needs.

Our complaint wasn’t that there weren’t specific needs that were racialized and gendered. Our point was that it’s not just Black boys who are experiencing racialized and gendered modes of underdevelopment, of risk, of vulnerability—that the many issues around which there was data that was quoted as the reason for the program applied to girls and women as well.

From the consequences of living in low-resourced communities, to the consequences of early dropping out of school, to the vulnerability to violence, to being surveilled, to being reflected in the culture as people without potential, as people who are a drag on our society rather than a benefit—nearly 80 percent of the data that was cited as just about boys was about all Black youth, and yet only the boys were carved out as a point of intervention, basically leaving their sisters and their mothers behind.

This was not the strategy that we used to get this far. This was not the understanding of what it meant to stand in solidarity with each other as we press for greater forms of equity. What it was, however, was a throwback to a report in the ’60s called the Moynihan Report, that basically said that the problem that Black people were facing was that our homes were in gender disrepair—women were heading up the household, men were not around, thus we cannot compete to be equal. So determined was Moynihan to try to force this framework on the Black community that he advocated against providing Black women—who even then were disproportionately relied on to support their families—from having job training, from actually being able to increase their economic viability.

So Moynihan has always looked with a side eye toward the interests of Black women and girls. Because of that, the entire community has suffered, because we have to rely on all of our incomes and all of our advances to ensure the economic and social well-being of our whole community. We were arguing for inclusion, not exclusion. We were arguing for a gender-integrated program to approach some of the issues that we still struggle with.

Bacon: Two more questions. The first one: I read your book, and I talked to Ibram Kendi a few weeks ago too—it’s even more so for you, though. What is it like when you’ve done all this research, had excellent ideas, validated ideas—ideas that were rigorous, ideas that were well explained, ideas that reflected the reality of the world—those ideas had prominence for a long time, and then people with power banned the ideas on all kinds of disingenuous pretenses. You’re closer to the end of your career than the beginning.

You release this memoir, you’ve had all these ideas—intersectionality, CRT—that are, I would say, correct, but Samuel Alito has more power than you. So how do you feel ... about a world in which Alito gets to write the law even though he’s obviously not as smart as you are?

Crenshaw: Ha, thank you. I appreciate that acknowledgement that it must be difficult—it is. I do complain with my friends sometimes: “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe that some of this idiocy is actually going to go down as the law of the land.” Then my friends will sometimes remind me, “Oh, you know what? Someone had a theory about that. What’s it called? Could it be intersectionality?”

Somebody had an understanding about how power is frequently not based on superior thinking. It’s not based on rationality. It’s often not based on legitimate forms of understanding. It’s based on sheer coercion. It’s based on force. And sometimes that coercion, sometimes that force, is racialized and gendered.

We do not live outside of the history that produced this country. There was never a moment where the whole deck was cleared and we started over. We still live in a society—we can’t say that this society was never a slave society, or never a genocide-based society. It’s a post-slavery society. It’s a post-segregation, post-genocidal society, which means there are elements of those things that still live.

We walk and breathe in a society in which the institutions that we live in, the laws that we are told to abide by, are grounded in and reflective of many of those commitments from the past. It’s not surprising that MAGA goes after these efforts to remember and make that history present to this moment. It’s not surprising that they’re engaging in a process of trying to erase our literacy.

It used to be against the law, and you could be punished by death, even, to learn how to read. So it’s understood that literacy, the ability to think, to reason, to make sense out of our situation—how dangerous that is to oligarchs and those who want to maintain a status quo which predictably delivers privilege and power to some people who look and inherit a certain legacy, and the rest of us who are on the bottom.

So in some ways, this moment does prove the correctness of the theory. The question is: What is the practice that comes out of it?

I have to say—Perry, I feel fortunate that I had the opportunity to write the book to drop in this moment. I was bemoaning it during 2020 and during 2008 that I hadn’t done a memoir. But I had a lot more life to live and a lot more to say about what was happening at the time. Now I feel fortunate that yes, I’m toward the end of my career, and this might not be the mic drop yet, but it’s letting people know: Here is what the project was, here is what it still is, and here is the baton for you to run the next lap with.

Bacon: Yeah, that’s what I want to end on. People like me who are younger than you, who are in the more middle of their career, who are living in this moment where everything we believe seems to be eroding in front of our faces—it doesn’t feel very hopeful right now. I write things and it feels like, you know, John Roberts doesn’t care what I think.

What do you tell people—scholars who are trying to come up with theories that acknowledge CRT, or acknowledge intersectionality, or acknowledge that there’s racism in America—when John Roberts and Alito get to say every day there isn’t? What’s your message for us? We’re people who are doing this work that feels futile right now. Is it futile?

Crenshaw: No, it is not futile at all. We have to remember that we are planting seeds—of trees that might not give us shade. But the seeds nonetheless must be planted. This moment is particularly important to me because I’ve been spending some time trying to gather up the insights, the awareness, that our ancestors who experienced precisely this at the end of Reconstruction thought about. What is the wisdom that they passed on? What did they do? What did they try? What was a no-go? What is something where now, they think, Had we been more prepared, we could have done something different?

We need to be thinking, at minimum, about providing this for the next generation. Did we know? Yes, we knew. Did we try to fight? Some of us did. Were our allies ready to fight with us? Well, there is the problem right there.

Some of them were willing to throw us under the bus, thinking that pivoting away from the great cause of the Civil War, for example, or dialing back the promises of citizenship, or refusing to celebrate the legacy of the Union soldiers, the Black Union soldiers, and the Black enslaved people who went on a strike that defeated the Confederacy. The erasure of that history, done by those who relied on us, is the crime we need to keep focused on—from back then, and its shadow happening right now.

So yeah, there’s going to be fight back. There is going to eventually be someone else in the White House. Whether we go into the White House with that person—whether the eventuality of the collapse of this stranglehold that the MAGA faction has on our democracy will also open up a new possibility to regain what we’ve lost—turns on the fights that we’re having right now: with our allies inside the party that many of us vote for, with the media who cover these issues.

We’re fighting for our lives in this moment—not for something that’s going to happen two years from now or eight years from now. It’s about how these moments are being covered, and whether anti-Blackness is important enough for us to go to the mat to insist that it be discussed, that it be prioritized, and that it be organized around.

Bacon: Alright—I promise, my real last question. OK, right now some people I like—AOC, Ro Khanna, my governor Andy Beshear—some honorable people are thinking about running for president. But the advice they’re getting is: There’s too much wokeness. You saw the Kamala loss. When you talk about race, that means we lose. You can only talk about jobs and the economy. They’re getting this advice every day, even from people who ostensibly agree with you and I.

What would you tell them if they got the memo that says, Anytime you talk about race, you lose 2 percent—you should only obsess about the white working-class person in Wisconsin, wokeness is bad, whatever that means. What would you tell them if you got with these people? Because I don’t think they’re hearing from voices like yours very much—so at least through this podcast they can.

What would you tell one of them? This idea that you can forget about race and we can just win the election—I don’t think it’s correct, but I’d be curious what you would tell them.

Crenshaw: I don’t think it’s correct either. First of all, we have to make sure that they understand that the allegation of wokeness that lost this last presidential election certainly didn’t come from Kamala over-indexing on talking about race. In fact—

Bacon: She never did.

Crenshaw: She couldn’t even talk about the fact that her race was being erased! So for people to think that she was over-indexing is just a false understanding of what happened. The person that did talk about race was the racist in the election.

Bacon: The person who won.

Crenshaw: The person who won! You cannot win an asymmetrical war when one side is weaponizing race, when it is appealing to white Christian nationalists, when it is openly embracing some of the most damaging racial tropes in the history of this country, and we’re mum about it. Our response is like, “What? Who? We didn’t hear that.”

That is not a workable solution. You’ve got the yeehaws happening, and you’ve got nothing on the other side. We have a rich history, we have a rich tradition, we have a history in which we have been able to create winning coalitions who are not willing to sign on to that. But if you’re not willing to call them to the battle, if you’re not willing to say this is not who we want to be, then you don’t deserve to win. You’re not offering an alternative that is getting to the heart of why this country is on the skids in this moment. It’s because of these concerns about replacement. It’s because of the weaponization of resentment. It’s because they’ve been taught to punch down rather than lift up. We cannot win not addressing that, and I don’t think it’s just theoretical.

If we look at my mayor in New York City—he didn’t follow that logic, he didn’t bend the knee in the ways that he was told to, and he won, and it wasn’t close. We have other examples. I would say: Challenge your pollsters, who many times are just asking the same old questions to give the same old answers.

And number two: Ask if you’re really willing to move away from an entire part of the populace, or if you’re willing to leave their votes on the table and to move back into a democracy in which huge parts of the American public are not engaged. If that’s what you want, then that is not a prescription for many of us who are looking for a campaign, a candidate, a possibility that will reconnect us as a people to a democracy that’s worth fighting for.

Bacon: Great place to end. Thanks, everybody. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s book is called Backtalker. It comes out May 5. I’m sure it’s on Amazon and other places. She’s on Instagram and Bluesky and Twitter. She’s a great voice. Kim, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it.

Crenshaw: Thank you, Perry. Always a pleasure.

For background reading on the topic of today’s episode, see this piece arguing that the Supreme Court’s gerrymandering ruling will unleash a massive redistricting arms race.

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

Last week, the Supreme Court gutted a key protection against racial gerrymandering, and Donald Trump is already urging Republicans to capitalize on it. In a Truth Social rant, Trump called on GOP states to gerrymander their congressional maps to the max in time for this fall’s elections. That means eliminating as many seats represented by African Americans as possible. By expressly putting this in the context of the midterms, Trump in essence openly admitted that this new gerrymandering push is all about keeping power in the face of his nose-diving approval, which just hit yet another new low. All of which will simply require Democrats to act in response.

Max Flugrath of the voting rights group Fair Fight Action has been thinking a lot about the roadmap ahead for Democrats. So we’re talking to him about all this today. Max, good to have you on.

Max Flugrath: Greg, thanks so much for having me.

Sargent: So as you all know, the Supreme Court’s ruling gutted the Voting Rights Act yet again, removing a check on racial gerrymandering. On Truth Social, Donald Trump urged GOP legislatures to act on the ruling by redrawing their congressional district maps aggressively, saying, “Republicans will receive more than 20 House seats in the upcoming midterms.”

Now, Max, the idea that Republicans can get 20 House seats in time for the midterms is pure bullshit, and we’ll get to that. But for now, note how Trump doesn’t even disguise that this is about preventing the loss of the House of Representatives. Your thoughts on that?

Flugrath: It’s a shameless paragraph, plain and simple. And it’s something that his advisors have actually been talking to donors about for some time. In December, Axios reported that Chris LaCivita and [Tony] Fabrizio—Trump’s pollster—were at an RNC donor retreat telling them that this case, Louisiana v. Callais, would boost their prospects in 2026 and it would transform the Republican Party’s ability to win elections for years to come. They’re not being coy about it at all.

Sargent: They certainly aren’t. Well, let’s recap the current situation. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, just signed a new map potentially flipping four Democratic seats into the GOP camp. Up until now, the redistricting arms race had been mostly a wash, particularly after Virginia redrew and added up to four Democratic seats. So now maybe with Florida, the ledger tips a little bit toward the GOP. A lot depends on what happens in court with both the Florida and Virginia cases, but maybe it ends up being a wash. Can you sum up where we are?

Flugrath: So yeah, this all started in Texas after Trump demanded they rig their maps. After that, we saw Republicans add more seats to their column in Ohio, in Missouri, and North Carolina. Of course, California responded right after—that was sort of a gut punch in response—and they put it to the voters, which is not what Republican states have been doing at all. Virginia was next in this redistricting war saga that Trump kicked off. Like you mentioned, that’s under review, strangely. Republicans are looking for a court to vacate the will of the voters due to some technical BS, in my opinion.

Now we’re seeing what’s going to happen in Florida. They have an actual constitutional amendment there, which was passed overwhelmingly by voters in 2010 to restrict and outlaw partisan gerrymandering. So it’s unclear, the fate of those maps. DeSantis and others involved have talked about them in a pretty partisan way. So they may have shot themselves in the foot. Of course, the result remains to be seen.

Sargent: Right. So California and Virginia, just to clarify, added seats into the Democratic column, more or less making this a wash. But again, a lot turns on what happens in court with Virginia and Florida. Here it gets a bit complicated.

Due to the high court ruling, several GOP states are going to try to redraw in time for the midterms this fall. Meanwhile, some other GOP states will try to wait and redraw in time for the 2028 election. Just to break this down, let’s start with the first batch. As of now, GOP legislatures in Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina are going to try to redraw in time for this fall. Max, can you walk us through what that entails? I know there’s some doubt about South Carolina, but what’s the general picture?

Flugrath: They’re going to try to ram these maps through and it’ll probably add a couple of seats in the Republican column, leaning it in their favor. But there’ll be a lot of procedural hurdles they’ll have to clear in order to get there.

In Alabama, they might have to do some sort of special primary situation, which could even mean they have to vacate results of the regular primary. Tennessee, they’re going to have to amend their own laws to allow them to do mid-decade redistricting in the first place. In Louisiana, the governor is calling them for a special session to redraw that map. Mississippi had already been called for a special session to redraw state Supreme Court maps, but the governor can amend that call to include other maps.

So all those prospects are on the table and they seem to be rushing to do it.

Sargent: There will be lawsuits all over the place and it’s a little hard to know exactly how this shakes out, but it’s possible Republicans get a few extra seats out of this.

Flugrath: Yeah, that’s definitely fair to say.

Sargent: Now let’s go a little further out to the out years. A bunch of other GOP states will try to redraw next year in time for the 2028 elections. What could that look like and how many seats overall could Republicans pull into their column in time for those elections in 2028?

Flugrath: We released a report in 2025 and we looked at all these states across the South and what would happen if this exact ruling were to come to pass. We found that Republicans could draw 19 new safe Republican seats. So the number is pretty staggering. It seems high, but it all adds up if they go state by state and maximize the amount of seats they can squeeze out of the maps.

Sargent: Nineteen extra seats for Republicans is basically armageddon. There could be a number of scenarios which fall well short of that but are still bad. There could be like 10 or 12, right?

Flugrath: Yeah, “up to 19” is a good way to characterize it.

Sargent: So we don’t know, but no matter how this shakes out, it’s bad for Democrats. And the sheer naked corruption of all this simply requires Democrats to act in time for 2028.

Your group, Fair Fight Action, had another analysis—which I reported on at NewRepublic.com—finding that Democrats can themselves add anywhere from 10 to 22 seats by aggressively redistricting in blue states. Can you walk us through that set of calculations?

Flugrath: Yeah. So we looked at seven states. Four of them, Democrats have trifecta control—they control the governor and both chambers of the legislature. Those are the states where the path is the easiest. Those states total up to 10 additional seats that we found. It’s New York, Colorado, Maryland, and Oregon.

Our second tier could essentially net up to 12 seats, but it’s three states and we need to flip one legislative chamber in order to do it. So it’s Pennsylvania, it’s Wisconsin, and it’s Minnesota.

Sargent: And you’d have to flip both legislative chambers in Wisconsin to make it happen.

Flugrath: Correct.

Sargent: The key to this is that there are Democratic governors in those three states. If you get Democratic control of the legislatures in this fall’s elections, then there’s a trifecta in place to redistrict by these Democratic state legislatures and governors in time for 2028, then you get to a scenario where you could get as many as 22 seats.

Flugrath: Yep. It could effectively nullify the up to 19 seats that our 2025 analysis found could be added for Republicans. You also mentioned that Democrats have been forced into this position. It’s a long-held position in the Democratic Party widely: that we don’t like gerrymandering, we want to ban it. They introduced legislation in 2021 to do just that—they passed it through the House. But Republicans are sort of forcing this gerrymandering war upon the American people.

Sargent: Right, no question about that. In fact, Democrats have modeled an alternate approach in a lot of these states as well. They’ve passed independent redistricting commissions. That’s a better way to do this—by far. It’s fair. Each party treats the other party’s voters with respect instead of with disrespect, which is what gerrymandering does. But Republicans won’t have any of it. They just want to redistrict and gerrymander to their heart’s content because they think it benefits them. They don’t care what it does to the system itself.

I want to underscore this point though. It’s the state legislative elections this year that have the impact on what Democrats can do next year. That’s really essential for people to get. State legislative elections suddenly got much more consequential—people really have to get out and vote in these things because flipping state legislatures now makes it possible to negate the Republican advantage later.

Flugrath: Yes, absolutely correct. There’s going to be an outsized importance in these state legislative races. And luckily that’s beneficial for Democrats widely. We saw a bunch of special elections for state legislative seats across the country last year. Democrats won all of them.

We’re entering an environment where Democrats are poised to win because people widely—whether or not they are Democrats or they support Democrats—are usually very fed up with what’s happening here. It’s being driven by Trump and the Republicans in Washington. That’s why we’re seeing this effort to rig the maps. They don’t want to face the voters in a fair election.

Sargent: Well, speaking of that, not coincidentally, Trump is hitting record lows in polling. Let’s listen to this from CNN polling analyst Harry Enten. Here he’s talking about the new Washington Post/ABC poll, which finds Trump’s approval at 37 percent and his disapproval at 62 percent. Listen.

Harry Enten (voiceover): Trump’s numbers have fallen to a new record low according to the Washington Post/ABC News poll. He is now 25 points underwater on the net approval rating—that is the lowest ever.

Sargent: And on top of that, CNN’s average of polls has Trump at a record high disapproval of 64 percent. Absolutely abysmal numbers.

So here you can see why the desperation is mounting from Trump to get Republicans to gerrymander as many extra GOP seats as possible in time for the midterms. Trump knows a Democratic House will impeach him and investigate him in every way.

He is begging Republicans in these states to redraw their maps in order to prevent the voters from stating their verdict on this disastrous presidency. It’s that simple.

Flugrath: It is that simple. It brings me to something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, which is: Political parties try to compete and earn your vote. Authoritarian movements try to steal it. We’re not really in a time now when there is a Republican Party. It’s become sort of an authoritarian cult that just supports the leader.

Sargent: Well, the way they absolutely scampered in, rushed in—the second the Supreme Court issued its ruling—to say, We’re now going to gerrymander absolutely wherever we possibly can, without the slightest hint of shame—really underscores your point.

This is not a party that’s functioning as an actor in a democracy any longer. And this is tricky, as you pointed out for Democrats. They don’t like gerrymandering for good reason. Again, gerrymandering’s bad. The future that Trump and Republicans want is one where they play by a different set of rules, and Democrats can’t let that happen.

Flugrath: Republicans have also locked themselves into this—if you remember, famously, after they lost the 2012 election, they did the RNC autopsy report. And the conclusion was they needed to broaden their base of supporters by reaching out to minorities, to Black voters, to Hispanic voters.

Then Donald Trump came in and took them in the opposite direction. And although they did get higher levels of support from those types of voters in the 2024 election, it seems to have been an aberration because now voters are seeing the reality of what happens when you elect Donald Trump.

Sargent: It certainly is. Donald Trump is historically underwater. As Trump might say, nobody’s ever seen anything like it. But I want to conclude on an essential point here, which is Democrats are going to be tempted to say something like, We really hate gerrymandering—for good reason, again—what we should be doing is trying to pass reform on the federal level that bars it. Maybe we shouldn’t really gerrymander ourselves.

But the point is: They don’t have to choose between one or the other. They should adopt a two-track approach here. One track is perpetually offer the option of ending gerrymandering for both parties with federal legislation. If Republicans want to join in doing that, great, let’s do it.

If Republicans don’t like the fact that Democrats are gerrymandering in response to what they’re doing, let’s end it together. Awesome. Let’s do that. But meanwhile, if they’re not going to end it, if Republicans won’t agree to that, Democrats have to forge ahead in these states. That makes it more likely and not less that Republicans ultimately end up agreeing to some kind of peace, some kind of détente. They’ll never agree to any kind of détente if Democrats roll over and take it. Can you talk about that?

Flugrath: Republicans have forced Democrats into this position because they have brought a new weapon to this fight—unmitigated, blatant gerrymandering. And even though Democrats are against it ideologically, if we don’t respond in kind, we’re abdicating our responsibility to the voters to protect their rights, protect their freedoms, and make sure that we have a fair representative system of democracy. You can’t win a fight by intentionally choosing not to use stronger weapons that your opponent is using.

Sargent: A hundred percent. To wrap this up, what do you think is the most likely scenario in this fall’s elections and then in the out years?

Flugrath: I think Republicans are running a big risk. If you look at the recent special elections in Florida, Democrats dramatically overperformed. And although I’m a Floridian and I want to believe it’s a purple state, most people consider it a red state, but Democrats overperformed there. They had some really great wins.

If Republicans take up this aggressive map-redrawing, map-rigging approach across the country, they may see Democrats overperforming. I think people see this for what it is, which is a blatant partisan power grab. In Florida, a majority of voters opposed redrawing the maps. When you combine this rigging the game with everything people are seeing and living through—whether it’s higher prices, higher gas prices, the chaos and death of the Iran war, ICE harming people all over the country—they’re going to vote for the people who aren’t doing those things and who want to stop doing those things. So I think Democrats can overperform.

They could take back Congress. And once they do that, I think they have a real center of federal power to obstruct, slow down, and mitigate all the harms that are being done to our country.

Sargent: But even if they do take back Congress, they cannot relax, because again, next year, Republicans in some of these states could start gerrymandering pretty aggressively. And before you know it, the House map is all lopsided again, and in the 2028 elections, Republicans would be dramatically favored. So we’ve got to avoid that.

Flugrath: If they take back power, they have to aggressively start on pro-democracy reforms, which means banning partisan gerrymandering across the country and making it very clear that racial gerrymandering is also illegal, contrary to what the corrupted Supreme Court says.

They need to do Supreme Court reform, enact ethics rules, transparency measures, term limits. The last thing they need to do is sort of shine a light on the real impact that these rigged maps have—by holding committee hearings, you can really point to the human effects. Like what happened in Flint, Michigan—the whole Flint, Michigan water crisis happened because of really gerrymandered maps that allowed a governor and a state legislature to install people there who were not accountable and could do whatever they wanted, effectively.

Sargent: And if Republicans are going to continue gerrymandering, even in the face of all this, Democrats in these states have to respond. It’s just got to happen. Max Flugrath, thanks so much for that overview. We really appreciate it.

Flugrath: Absolutely, Greg. Anytime.

For the last few months, St. Clair has been posting to TikTok about her escape or exile from the MAGA carnies. She sums it up this way: “I became a cringe MAGA influencer for 8 years before I found my brain.” Now she is ready to “talk about my experience within this machine of MAGA” and “speak about the inside of a system that nobody else is.”

Though she makes serious reference to having renounced her previous creed and making earnest amends, St. Clair is mostly conducting her multipart exposé with Catskills-style comedy. She’s well suited to it, as she resembles a young Fran Drescher, and has something of Drescher’s manner, manicures, and nasality.

In this costume, St. Clair delivers MAGA lore and tea to an increasingly intrigued audience. You might call this a redemption tour, except that her shtick is that she’s way, way beyond redemption.

And lately she’s been drawing viewers in with the four words that have become a favorite opener on the app: “Get ready with me.”

To her following, this curtain-raiser signals that St. Clair will put on a millefeuille of makeup in a sublimely expert way, transforming herself from girlish smart aleck to indomitable broad, all while dishing about the women of Mar-a-Lago, the right-wing media group Arsenal, “the rack on Kristi Noem’s husband,” the “Stop the Steal” hoax, the former North Carolina Representative Madison Cawthorn, Benny Johnson, Alex Jones, and how MAGA influence campaigns work.

Why is this at all compelling? I think it comes through in the makeup application itself, as this exhausted and broken-hearted young woman, who has both engineered suffering and suffered herself, self-consciously masks her extreme fragility with extreme bravado. St. Clair is clearly experiencing a form of how-did-I-get-here despair that mirrors the nation’s. In one video (now unfindable) she contrasted images of her heavily made-up self with her private one—raw, red-faced, sobbing.

I find her both insightful and untrustworthy. “Bitch, I’m at rock bottom,” she posted. “There’s not an embarrassed bone in my body. I care about literally nothing.”

So here’s the rock bottom she’s referring to. In 2023, St. Clair’s relationship with Musk rocketed from their D.M.s to her pregnancy to his madness. “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse,” Musk texted St. Clair about his breeding plan for her, according to The Wall Street Journal, “we will need to use surrogates.”

Not long after, St. Clair announced the birth of their son Romulus on X, and named Musk as the father. He had evidently hoped to keep this quiet. A beef ensued. “You withdrew most of [the child support] to maintain control and punish me for ‘disobedience,’” St. Clair tweeted at Musk, saying she was facing eviction.

Musk then decided St. Clair had somehow entrapped him, and went insane. A tsunami of horrific, pornographic, xAI-generated images of St. Clair as a minor hit X. St. Clair sued xAI. Now xAI has bashed back. Or rather, as she puts it, “my ex’s fuck-ass racist robot company is suing me.”

For a new mother in precarious circumstances to go toe-to-toe with Musk, the RMITW, took cojones. To do so on Musk’s own Satan-site, and in the presence of his zillion bloodthirsty acolytes—this gives you a sense of St. Clair’s risk nonaversion.

So she took her rock bottom to TikTok. When she arrived, she mostly lip-synched to internet memes. These videos are surprisingly funny, and she still does them. But only last August when she warned about Palantir, and the dangers of “simping for the military-industrial complex,” did she get true engagement. These days, some 70,000 of us are following.

The tea is hot, as they say. The apparent debauchery, recklessness, and casual brutality of some of the nation’s leading conservatives is really something. St. Clair chips off jokes about everything she did and had done to her in her early twenties, and her tough-as-nails posture is, by design, only half-persuasive.

Then St. Clair can also turn downright somber, as in a video last week. In this one (now removed), St. Clair addressed Erika Kirk, the widow of Charlie who had just released a weird video of her own. St. Clair urged Kirk to log off the internet for a time and get better people to advise her. St. Clair then thought better of the post and took it down. “As a mother,” she said in the next video, she didn’t want to encourage people to “dogpile” on Kirk.

Once a “brand ambassador” for Turning Point USA, St. Clair also wanted to underscore in this follow-up video that she vehemently opposes the ideology of the Kirks—and the whole movement she once embraced. To this end, she has taken her name off an anti-trans children’s book she published a few years ago. She further aims to take responsibility for having, as she says, dehumanized the trans community—and so many others.

“I encourage people within MAGA to really look at what’s happening in this country and what you’re a part of,” she said in a Get Ready With Me video last Friday, with apparent anguish. She went on to say she’s not a grifter or a makeup influencer. She hopes, in fact, to go to law school one day.

“I am speaking openly and honestly about my experiences. I understand that there’s a lot of skepticism and critique, and I am open to that, and I am understanding that there are a lot of people that are still going to be angry at me. And I don’t fault them for that because of my role in harm.”

Gen Z MAGA—how will we ever understand you? The sincerity crossed with the oddball memes with the deep suffering with the mean-girl zingers. But the GRWM video was done. The makeup was done. In the captions, St. Clair had helpfully included a 15-item cosmetics product list, including Rare Blush in Wisdom, Nars Blush in Dolce Vita, and One Size Liner in Outta Line. What a mess. But maybe the list held a clue to Ashley’s, MAGA’s, or even America’s trajectory. Dolce Vita to Outta Line to some Wisdom at last? What was I doing? I finally scrolled away.

The boat strikes that Hegseth has boasted about are a prime example of the former. “Under President Trump for the first time in history, the Department of War is on the offense against narco-terrorists,” he said at the conference. Putting aside the ethical implications of killing at least 185 people without trials, even when they’re clearly surrendering, and the damage such attacks do to our moral standing in the world, the strikes have also proven rather ineffective. While there’s evidence that certain drug routes from Venezuela have been shut down, the cartels have simply shifted to new routes and other methods of export, moving cocaine through cargo ships in multiple ports across Latin America. As Alex Papadovassilakis wrote for InSight Crime, “Concealment within legitimate cargo remains the main method for reaching consumer markets in the United States, Europe, and beyond, with traffickers routing loads through ports in countries like the Dominican Republic.” Papadovassilakis also noted that even people in “go-fast boats” who are actually transporting drugs are likely not direct members of the cartels but instead local fishermen and merchants doing one-off deals.

Gen. Francis L. Donovan, the head of U.S. Southern Command, essentially acknowledged the limited reach of the murderous strikes when he testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in March, saying that, going forward, “boat strikes will be one of the main tools, and probably not the most effective.” It seems the U.S. military’s removal of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, who is now facing narco-terrorism charges in the U.S., has also been ineffective. Because Trump’s gambit didn’t topple the government—leaving key figures like Venezuela’s corrupt interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, in power, “the country’s broader criminal ecosystem remains largely intact,” Papadovassilakis reported. Yet our ineffectiveness has not been cheap, as the military raid and ongoing boat strikes have cost at least $4.7 billion, according to a joint analysis by the progressive Institute for Policy Studies and Brown University’s Costs of War project.

Meanwhile, a recent New York Times exposé revealed that we’re inadvertently supporting major drug cartels in Colombia by purchasing gold from mines they control, despite declaring the end products that move through our mints to be “100% American.” It’s a practice that preceded the Trump administration, but of which it seemed blithely unaware, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent telling the Times he’ll investigate it. There’s no indication that this will in any way affect the release of the 250th-anniversary commemorative gold coin featuring Trump’s phony tough-guy stare.

The fight against drug cartels has been further hampered by Trump’s pardon policies. At the request of Roger Stone, himself a recipient of a Trump pardon, the president pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who’d been sentenced to 45 years in U.S. prison for his role in a massive drug conspiracy. Hernández helped cartels smuggle 400 tons of cocaine to the U.S. in exchange for millions in bribes, but Trump claims it was just a Biden setup. Trump may even be angling to install Hernández back in power, according to a bombshell report published by Canal Red and Hondurasgate.

Fulfilling a campaign promise he’d made to secure Libertarian votes, Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht, whose Silk Road site acted as a trading post for narcotics. Ulbricht had been sentenced to two life terms, plus forty years, and was suspected of involvement in five murders. Trump also pardoned billionaire Changpeng Zhao, the Binance founder convicted of failing to stop money laundering on the site, which was thought to be used by Russian gangsters and Hamas.

The administration’s efforts in Africa have perhaps been even more heinous and counterproductive, worsened by massive cuts to aid that have killed many and destabilized regions. Trump ordered a strike on Nigeria back in December, claiming it was necessary to combat a Christian genocide that right-wing conspiracy theorists wrongfully claim is occurring there. If a genocide were occurring, of course, a single strike would hardly suffice to halt it. As it is, the strike seems to have galvanized the terrorist group Boko Haram and its offshoot, the Islamic State West African Province, both of which are believed to be coordinating attacks against the Nigerian government. In response, the U.S. has ordered all nonessential staff out of our embassy in Abuja.

The Trump administration’s actions in Somalia, on the other hand, have been much more consistent and much deadlier. While presidents have ordered strikes against the unstable African state since the 1990s, under Trump they’ve drastically increased, leading to hundreds or perhaps thousands of deaths (it’s hard to tell exactly, since U.S. African Command conveniently stopped reporting the numbers a year ago). Undoubtedly, both ISIS and Al Shabab maintain a significant presence in Somalia, but West Africa has become the new hotbed of jihadist activity, and yet—with the single Nigeria strike as the one exception—the U.S. has done nothing to combat the rise of terrorist groups there.

Why, then, have we carried out so many operations in Somalia? Well, as former Secretary of State for African Affairs Tibor Nagy Jr. told Vox’s Joshua Keating, “It seems like it’s on autopilot. It’s easier to keep doing something because there’s the institutional bureaucracy in place to keep supporting it.” In other words, it’s administrative laziness. Trump relaxed the rules for U.S. African Command to act independently and has since been uninvolved. We keep hitting Somalia because we have more resources there than in the Sahel region of West Africa, where terrorists are congregating.

Just across the Gulf of Aden from Somalia, in Yemen, the U.S. has been incompetently battling the Houthis. Despite Trump telling the terrorist group in March 2025 that their “time is up,” it quickly became evident that the hundreds of millions we were spending on airstrikes had accomplished virtually nothing. Two months later, Trump claimed the group had “capitulated” by agreeing to a ceasefire. But today, the Houthis are as powerful as ever. In fact, they’re using our withdrawal from the area as evidence of their strength. “By portraying themselves as the only force resisting foreign powers—the U.S. and Israel—the Houthis strengthened their internal support, increased recruitment, and reinforced their image as Yemen’s primary defenders,” reported the Stimson Center. They’ve also slowed traffic through the Bab El-Mandeb Strait by well over 50 percent, limiting petroleum exports in the region.

The Houthis’ ally, Iran, may have taken that as its cue when it closed the Strait of Hormuz, causing a massive oil shortage and impelling the U.S. administration to release $14 billion of Iranian oil from sanctions, thus providing plenty of funding for more state-sponsored terrorism. Humiliated before the world, Trump called for a ceasefire—one that has now been stretched indefinitely—even as he and Hegseth repeatedly claimed that their objectives have been met and that the U.S. has won. Iran’s theocratic regime, in contrast, has only become more hard-line.

While the U.S. continues to flounder abroad, terrorist attacks at home have gone largely unnoticed by the White House, and Trump’s completely unqualified “counterterrorism czar,” the campaign hack Sebastian Gorka, has no plan to combat them. The administration even reassigned terrorism specialists to immigration cases, only to call many of them back to their old roles after hostilities began with Iran. At the same time, Trump has distracted from genuine threats with fictitious accusations about the “radical left terrorists.” It fits a pattern: Fail, point fingers, and never, under any circumstances, take a good long look in the mirror.

In private briefings, attorneys at the White House Counsel’s Office are preparing executive branch staff for a blue wave in the 2026 elections, The Washington Post reported Monday.

The 30-minute briefings feature a PowerPoint presentation detailing how congressional oversight works and best practices for handling it, reported the Post. Other components of the past-due education involve guidance on how to respond to congressional inquiries in a timely manner.

“It’s obvious to everyone that it’s very likely,” one attending official told the Post. “It was a sober-eyed conversation.”

A White House official said that the meetings were “nothing new” and that the counsel’s office has provided oversight guidance to relevant stakeholders since Donald Trump returned to office.

Yet multiple sources that spoke with the Post explained that recent meetings with the office were acutely focused on the midterms and their fallout.

Trump, who was once a golden ticket for the Republican Party at the ballot box, has in his second term cooked up a litany of issues, any one of which could be a death knell for conservatives come November.

In the 15 months since he returned to America’s highest office, Trump has launched the U.S. into a war with Iran, sparking a global energy crisis that has raised the cost of living pretty much everywhere. He also invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its leader, Nicolás Maduro, axed thousands of staffers from the federal government and crippled some government agencies, and used his office to target his political opponents.

He has hobbled America’s press, sowed doubt and distrust in the country’s democratic elections, undermined the judiciary system, pardoned hundreds of people who served his personal interests—such as those who attacked Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021—imposed nonsensical tariffs on U.S. trading partners, aggressed America’s international alliances, abused the purpose of executive orders, and endorsed violent immigration policies and detention centers that have been compared to concentration camps, among other issues.

His lagging popularity has been reflected in nationwide polls: 62 percent of Americans disapprove of the president, according to an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll published Friday, a growth of two percentage points since the poll was previously conducted in February.

Despite the cost of his own influence, the president has placed enormous pressure on his party to win, well aware of the consequences that await him if they don’t.

“You got to win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” Trump said in January. “I’ll get impeached.”

Both the Post and the Gala might look to you and me like philanthropic ventures because, well, they are. Bezos, however, regards the two very differently.

The Post holds governments accountable, both at home and abroad, as my stepdaughter Claire Parker, the Post’s Cairo bureau chief, explained eloquently in January—shortly before she was laid off, along with most of the Post’s foreign correspondents and local correspondents. Holding governments accountable is obviously a societal function of vital importance. But Bezos has said: “This is not a philanthropic endeavor. For me, I really believe, a healthy newspaper that has an independent newsroom should be self-sustaining.”

The Met Gala funds the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, which houses 33,000 objects representing fashionable dress and accessories from the sixteenth century to the present, none of them on permanent public view because aging textiles don’t preserve well when exposed to the light. The Costume Institute doesn’t make the cut for my annual giving list, but to each their own. Bezos hasn’t commented publicly on whether the Costume Institute should be self-sustaining, but if it ceased to be a charity that would deprive Bezos of the opportunity to raise his and Sanchez’s status in the fashion world by giving money to it.

The punch line is that while the Post is nowhere near self-sustaining, and never will be, the Costume Institute is already there. According to a May 1 report by Vanessa Friedman in The New York Times, the Costume Institute has since 2016 been putting Met Gala funds into an endowment that will allow it “to potentially support its own basic operations for the foreseeable future.” The gala raised $166.5 million over the past decade. Operating costs for the Costume Institute are a modest $5 million per year, or $50 million over 10 years, which should mean the endowment has $116 million already. The average annual draw on a museum endowment, the Times reports, is 5 percent, which in this case would throw off $5.8 million per year. The Times’ Friedman says the Costume Institute will need a couple more Met Galas to top off its endowment, but that strikes me as generous. The Met Gala is already unnecessary.

To cancel the Met Gala, however, would be unthinkable. Demand for it among rich New Yorkers and Hollywood celebrities is way too high to contemplate so rash a move. I therefore propose to turn it into an annual fundraiser for The Washington Post, which has no endowment.

Obviously Bezos no longer feels he acquires social cachet through bankrolling what, until recently, was one of America’s three remaining great newspapers. If he prefers instead to bankroll the Met Gala, then why not use its status value to shore up The Washington Post? Attendees could still dress up in expensive fashions, and the event could still be held in New York. There’s a precedent for that: Katharine Graham announced her elevation to Post publisher 60 years ago by letting Truman Capote throw her a Black and White ball in the Grand Ballroom of New York’s Plaza Hotel. People still talk about that party. In similar spirit, Bezos could host an annual charity ball to celebrate that he owns the Post. For legal reasons, he’d probably have to convert the Post into a nonprofit, but as we’ve seen, it isn’t contributing to charity that Bezos minds so much as not extracting social capital from the transaction.

Of all the ways to show off how rich you are, Thorstein Veblen wrote in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), “admitted expenditure for display is more obviously present, and is, perhaps, more universally practiced, in the manner of dress than in any other line of consumption.” That extends well past the demonstration that you can afford to buy an expensive outfit. The manner of dress should also “make plain to all observers that the wearer is not engaged in any kind of productive labor.” The elaborate Met Gala getups that women in particular display don’t stop at demonstrating that the wearer could never work in them. They also raise some questions about whether the wearer is too ethereal to go to the ladies’ room. The Washington Post’s Maura Judkis published a groundbreaking report on this question Monday, revealing that a class of assistants exists whose “path to rising up the fashion and celebrity ranks includes helping stars who are sewn into their own underpants onto and off of the toilet.”

Would the beautiful people come to a dress-up ball in New York whose charity was The Washington Post? Of course they would. It’s doubtful many of these people ever gave a damn about the Costume Institute, and while some might resent this or that Post story about themselves, most would appreciate the free publicity. Politicians would have more reason to boycott the Post, but not many attend the Met Gala now (for instance, Mayor Zohran Mamdani is a no-show this year), so that’s no great loss.

A key to success would be to keep lowly Washington Post staffers away unless they were covering the event. They’ll just have to gratify their own status urges by attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, whose sartorial demands are more achievable. Anna Wintour could still run the gala if she wants, and perhaps the Met could be persuaded to host in exchange for a few free advertorials spotlighting travel-worthy exhibitions like its current Raphael blockbuster.

Every Met Gala has a theme, and every year that theme is lame. This year, it’s “Fashion Is Art” (which it goddamned well better be if the Met spends $5 million per year on it). Last year it was “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” which was an attempt to suggest that fashion had something to do with racial justice, which it doesn’t. Think how much easier it would be to dream up Met Gala themes for annual balls that bankrolled The Washington Post. This year’s could be: “If We’re Going to War In the Middle East Let’s Have Bureaus There!” Next year it could be: “Bring Back Book Reviews!” or “Let’s Cover City Council!” Invitations could stipulate that attending the Met Gala incurs no obligation to read a newspaper or, indeed, to read anything. In fact, the fewer attendees there were who read newspapers, the easier it would be to glamorize newspapers into something exotic and mysterious and available only to an elect few. The business is halfway there already.

A simpler solution, of course, would be for Bezos to stop looking for frivolous charities to waste money on and focus on the philanthropic concern that suffers daily from his stinginess. Yes, the Post is an expensive charity, but Bezos lost one-third as much money this year to the Costume Institute, which didn’t need a cent. Also, give me a break, the man is worth $277 billion. If he peeled off $3 billion to create a Post endowment and then walked away, that would throw off more than enough each year to run the Post properly for the rest of his life. When he died, Bezos could leave it more. He could still live like a pasha until then.

“I feel the same as I felt 50 years ago, I don’t know,” Trump told the audience at a small-business summit at the White House.

“I’ll say, ‘I’m not feeling well’—well, someday, I might say that to you, and you’ll be the first to know. Actually I won’t have to say it, because you’ll be able to see it, just like you did in the last administration,” Trump said.

Trump: I took three cognitive tests. They are hard. Many people in this room couldn’t ace them. The first question is you have a lion, a bear, an alligator, and a what's another good, a squirrel, OK? Which is the squirrel? pic.twitter.com/8GusHR4vy0

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 4, 2026

Americans have already been seeing Trump’s apparent cognitive decline: A recent poll found that 59 percent of Americans don’t think Trump has the mental acuity to serve as president, and 55 percent think he is not in physical shape to do so.

Trump continued ranting about his pitch to require candidates for office to take cognitive tests. “No president has ever taken one except me, and I’ve taken three of them. And I’ve aced each one,” he said.

Trump went on to describe the test, which sounds a lot like the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a 10-minute assessment designed to identify signs of dementia or Alzheimer’s. It is not a test for intelligence.

“You know the first question is very easy. They always show the first question, it’s: You have a lion, a bear, an alligator, and a—what’s another good—a squirrel, OK? Which is the squirrel?” Trump said, claiming the questions got increasingly complex.

He then veered into a tirade against California Governor Gavin Newsom before resuming his point. “I think everyone in this room is brilliant, but nobody’s gonna get all 30 questions correct. Nobody. ’Cause when you get to those last questions they’re pretty hard, you got to be pretty sharp.

“One doctor said, ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever seen anyone get all questions right.’ That’s a doctor, who does this stuff for a living. And I did it three times. So, I don’t know. I think I’m done with those days, I’m tired of taking those tests,” Trump said.

Trump segued again, insisting on the importance of picking an intelligent leader during times of war. He went on to claim that his military campaign in Iran only lasted six weeks, though the Strait of Hormuz has been closed for more than two months; that the Vietnam War lasted 19 years, even though the U.S. was only really involved for eight; and that the war in Iraq was 10 or 12 years long, when, again, it was really only eight.

Cole Allen, who stormed into the Washington Hilton last month, was placed on temporary suicide watch upon arriving in jail in Washington, D.C.—even as he did not appear to be suicidal. He was also placed in a “safe cell,” a padded enclosure extremely similar to solitary confinement, made to wear a restrictive vest, and was only allowed out of his cell to speak to lawyers or receive medical attention.

His treatment in jail has been worse than that of the January 6 rioters, warned Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui, who oversaw many of their cases.

“The Jan. 6 defendants all were moved to the [Central Treatment Facility],” Faruqui said. “Pardons may erase convictions but they do not erase history.… He’s being treated differently than anyone I’ve ever observed.

“He can be both kept safe and treated with dignity. Right now, it’s not working. I think it’s legally deficient and ultimately if the DOC can’t do it, I’ll speak to the U.S. attorney’s office,” Faruqui continued. “I know they have other facilities they can contract with. If you all cannot handle it, we’re going to have to reassess that with the marshals and the Department of Justice.”

Concern is spreading that Johnson has “lost control of his conference,” creating an environment that is unlikely to pass meaningful legislation before the November elections, The Hill reported Monday.

North Dakota Senator Kevin Cramer warned that the caucus’s relentless infighting has hurt the GOP brand, potentially sinking both chambers of Congress.

“It’s not like these things are hard. That’s the thing,” Cramer told The Hill. “I feel like the Senate has teed up things fairly easily for them, even to the point where if they don’t like it, they can blame us. And they still haven’t taken the opportunity to actually govern, and I do think it’s hurting the brand. The House is rowdy.”

Johnson barely kept the party afloat last week amid what Texas Representative Troy Nehls aptly dubbed “hell week.” “We can’t really agree on much of anything,” Nehls said on Capitol Hill Wednesday.

Republicans in the lower chamber struggled to tackle high-priority GOP issues such as extending the government’s warrantless spying powers, passing the farm bill, and funding the Department of Homeland Security. Votes stretched on for hours, and committee hearings flew off the rails. But the squabbles—and the dissent—persisted.

“We’re moving from one fire drill to the next every single week, and then half the time it feels like, why are we even here?” one House Republican told MS NOW on Friday.

Some of the bluster followed weeks of intraparty protests, in which members of the House GOP adamantly opposed bills introduced and passed by their Senate colleagues. Yet House Republicans were all too willing to bend as the clock ticked down to deadline on various policy issues, prompting scorn and criticism from the upper chamber.

“It’s like a wreck over there,” one Republican senator told The Hill on the condition of anonymity, noting that their mainstream GOP colleagues in the House shared their frustration.

“They don’t know if they’re coming or going. Everybody is fighting,” the senator said.

Jeffries directed Representative Joe Morelle, the former majority leader in the New York state assembly, to meet with state leaders in order to redraw congressional districts “for the balance of the decade,” the two said in a joint statement Monday. New York currently has 19 Democrats and seven Republicans in the House of Representatives.

This directive comes less than a week after the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 along party lines in Louisiana v. Callais to effectively dismantle Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race. The court’s conservative majority raised new hurdles for those seeking to prove a racial gerrymandering claim, and gave its blessing to those who would claim partisan gerrymandering as a legal defense.

Within hours of the decision, New York Governor Kathy Hochul had already signaled that she supported a redistricting effort in her state. “The Supreme Court has been chipping away at our elections for years. It is clearly carrying out Donald Trump’s will with this decision,” she wrote on X Wednesday. “New York has always led the fight for voting rights and we’ll lead again. I’m working with the Legislature to change New York’s redistricting process so we can fight back against Washington’s attempts to rig our democracy.”

Jeffries’s order was also given in response to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis implementing a map that his own office specifically drew in order to capture four more Republican seats in time for November’s midterm elections. Meanwhile, Trump has continued to threaten red states that refuse to rig their elections in his favor.

DeSantis signed the map that his own office specifically drew in order to capture four more Republican seats in time for November’s midterm elections, hoping to prevent GOP losses as President Trump’s unpopularity continues to grow.

“Signed, Sealed, and Delivered,” DeSantis posted on X shortly after noon Monday, along with a map of the state’s new districts.

The move occurred without a flashy signing ceremony or press conference, less than a week after Florida’s legislature signed the map into law. That vote took place just hours after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. Now seats belonging to Democratic Representatives Kathy Castor, Jared Moskowitz, Darren Soto, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz are at risk.

The move is already being challenged in court, with a lawsuit filed less than 90 minutes after DeSantis’s post. Florida’s Constitution bans drawing districts with “the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent,” and last week, Florida House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell called out the DeSantis staffer who drew the map, Jason Poreda.

“The man who drew this map testified under oath that he used partisan data to draw up every single district,” Driskell said. “Every single one. And when the governor’s attorney was asked whether Democratic voters were being underrepresented in our congressional delegation, his answer was that ‘this is a normative question.’”

The map, if it stands, could backfire in an election year where Trump is dragging Republican poll numbers historically low, as the new districts aren’t considered entirely safe for the GOP. Florida’s new maps, along with efforts in Republican-led states around the country, were actually spurred by Trump last year, and have set off Democratic redistricting in states like California and Virginia; others could soon join in.

Iran on Monday bombed a South Korean ship and civilian sites in the United Arab Emirates, in the wake of President Trump’s announcement that the United States would be using its Navy to force ships through Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz as part of “Project Freedom.” The U.S. military also stated that it sank six Iranian small boats and that Iran has fired missiles and drones at other vessels in the strait.

This has sent the president into a rage.

If the Iranians try to target U.S. ships in this area, they will be “blown off the face of the earth,” Trump told Fox News’s Trey Yingst on Monday afternoon.

“We have more weapons and ammunition at a much higher grade than we had before,” he warned.

BREAKING: President Trump sends a new warning to the Iranian regime if it attacks any U.S. vessel working to implement Project Freedom:

“They’ll be blown off the face of the earth.”

Trump tells @TreyYingst that Iran has become "much more malleable" in talks.

“We have more… pic.twitter.com/bLqscDAgag

— Fox News (@FoxNews) May 4, 2026

Iran’s attack on the UAE is the first since the ceasefire was declared one month ago, as escalating tensions threaten to once again reignite a wider conflict in the region.

It’s clear Trump’s plan to take control of the Strait of Hormuz wasn’t well thought out. Did Trump really expect the Iranian government to just cave to his demands?

On Monday afternoon, shortly after begging South Korea to join the war following the attack on its ship, the president announced  that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine will hold a press conference Tuesday morning.

The nation’s largest law office has repeatedly asked for delays in arguing its myriad cases, and in doing so has accidentally divulged a massive staffing crisis raging underneath the surface.

In an obscure civil lawsuit dug up by independent journalist Scott MacFarlane, a Justice Department attorney revealed that “the Appellate Section has lost over 40 percent of its attorneys since February 2025, due to retirement, resignation, or temporary transfer.”

“At this time, it is not possible for me to assign this case to yet another attorney, who would need to devote time to learning the issues,” she wrote in a filing dated February 19.

The overwhelming stress inside the agency has seeped through the cracks in other ways, as well. In early February, a lawyer volunteering with the short-staffed office on ICE-related cases in Minnesota begged a judge to put her in contempt of court so that she could “get 24 hours of sleep.”

“The system sucks, this job sucks, I am trying with every breath I have to get you what I need,” said attorney Julie Le when pressed as to why the government had failed to follow judicial orders. Since then, Le was removed from the temporary position and reshuffled back to ICE. She has since leveraged the notoriety of her remarks to launch a congressional bid for Minnesota’s 5th congressional district.

The DOJ’s appellate staffs vary in size but altogether account for more than 150 positions, according to a 2012 write-up in Scotusblog by Al J. Daniel Jr., a former DOJ appellate attorney.

Yet that’s just the tip of the iceberg for the department’s staffing woes. There were an estimated 10,000 attorneys working across the Justice Department before Donald Trump returned to the White House. By September 2025, that number had been nearly halved: Justice Connection, an advocacy group that tracks DOJ departures, estimated that around 5,500 people (not all of them attorneys) had left the department, either by their own volition, by accepting the Trump administration’s buyout, or by being fired.

Just a fraction of those experienced employees have been replaced, causing a massive backlog of work. The immigration court system—which has been placed under tremendous pressure as a result of Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda—has been particularly hampered, experiencing a backlog of more than 3.3 million cases by the end of February 2026, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. That means that the lives of more than three million people are effectively on pause as they await legal decisions that determine whether their future will be spent inside or outside of the United States.

The Justice Department’s rightward shift toward the MAGA agenda has sparked concern inside the legal community, with former prosecutors and ethics directors arguing that the agency’s recent politicization has undermined public confidence in the country’s legal system.

In late January, Trump claimed to reporters in the Oval Office that the Pentagon’s deadly strikes on boats suspected of carrying drugs from South America to the United States had successfully brought down the amount of “drugs entering our country by sea” by 97 percent.

But the Pentagon’s own statements don’t support this outrageous claim, Rear Admiral William Baumgartner, the former commander of the Seventh Coast Guard District, told The Intercept.

“He’s trying to imply that 97 percent of the cocaine that left South America by boat headed to the United States has been stopped,” Baumgartner said. “That’s not true and is contradicted by the administration’s own statements.”

In March, Joseph Humire, a Pentagon official, told the House Armed Services Committee that there had been only a “20 percent reduction of movements of drug vessels in the Caribbean and an additional 25 percent reduction in the Eastern Pacific.” Humire also credited Operation Southern Spear with causing a 20 percent drop in drug overdose deaths as of September 2025—but the strikes on so-called drug boats didn’t start until September.

“I can’t imagine how you could come to some of these conclusions regarding illegal smuggling and drug overdose deaths based on the facts as we know them,” Baumgartner told The Intercept.

As the White House has continued to espouse the strikes’ value as a deterrent against trafficking, there is little evidence that vessels are actually being deterred. Last month, there were eight strikes in the span of 16 days, with five strikes occurring within as many days, according to The Intercept.

Last month, the Coast Guard boasted a record-setting interdiction of cocaine seized in the Caribbean and the Pacific, suggesting that trafficking has not stopped.

Baumgartner pointed to a recent offloading of 1.2 tons of cocaine by the U.S. Coast Guard, which claimed the haul was worth $19.3 million altogether. “This works out to be about a $16,500 per kilogram wholesale price. It doesn’t reflect the major jump in price that you would expect if you really had 97 percent reduction in flow,” Baumgartner said.

It’s also worth noting that the House Armed Services Committee was explicitly told that vessels were not actually transporting fentanyl, according to Representative Sara Jacobs and five other government officials who spoke to The Intercept.

“They had some convoluted reason why it was still impacting fentanyl that was hard to follow and I did not buy,” Jacobs told the outlet, before pointing out that statistics suggest that 99 percent of the drugs that enter the United States come through legal ports of entry, brought by U.S. citizens and permanent residents.

Baumgartner also easily dismantled Trump’s outrageous claim about how many lives he’s saved: about 25,000 per boat, the president claimed.

“The claim that sinking each cocaine smuggling boat saves 25,000 lives makes no sense,” said Baumgartner. “That would probably be more than the number of cocaine deaths in the last five decades combined.”

Politico has reported that if Fetterman does turn Republican, it will be because of Trump’s lobbying, the endorsement and “financial windfall” he’s apparently being promised, and the influence of Republican Senators Dave McCormick and Katie Britt, whom he is close with. One anonymous source claimed that Fetterman was open to the idea of switching sides.

Fox News host Sean Hannity gave up the game to Fetterman while he interviewed the Democrat on his show in March.

“I did talk to President Trump last night, and I told him you were gonna be on the show,” Hannity told Fetterman. “And he said ‘OK. I wanna give you a job. Your job is to tell him: He’s gonna be run as a Republican, he’s gonna have our full support, more money than he ever dreamed of, and he’s gonna win big.’”

But Fetterman says he remains steadfast in his commitment to the Democratic Party—at least publicly.

“I’m not changing,” he told Politico in an interview published Monday. “I’m a Democrat, and I’m staying one.... I’d be a shitty Republican.”

Some would say Fetterman has been a pretty shitty Democrat too, fueling this Republican effort to get him to switch sides.

Since first running for office as a Bernie Sanders–backed progressive eight years ago, and keeping up the facade in his 2022 Senate campaign, Fetterman has gone out of his way to offer rhetorical and legislative support for President Trump’s agenda while spiting the left flank that helped him secure his Senate seat. He was the very first Senate Democrat to meet with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and has defended the actions of federal immigration agents, saying that any calls to abolish ICE were “inappropriate and outrageous.” He is the only Democrat who voted against curtailing Trump’s war powers in Iran, and he is one of the staunchest supporters of Israel in the Senate. In one conversation last year, he reportedly proclaimed, “Let’s get back to killing,” referring to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. “Kill them all.” Fetterman later denied the account.

Earlier this month, not a single one of his Pennsylvania House counterparts could offer a vote of confidence for his 2028 reelection when asked by Punchbowl News. These admissions, while unsurprising, add yet another layer of contention to Fetterman’s relationship to his own party.

These positions aren’t just unpopular among the Democrats rebuking him, they’re unpopular throughout the entire state. Last month, CNN polling showed that Fetterman’s net approval rating with state Democrats has plummeted a ghastly 108 points since he took office, from +68 in 2023 to -40 in 2026. “He’s down there with the Titanic,” CNN’s Harry Enten said. “There’s no historical analog to his unpopularity.”

With all this in mind, it seems only natural that Trump is now actively courting the man he calls his “favorite Democrat.”

The president was roasted alive on Sunday after he revealed via a photoshopped image that he doesn’t understand the rules of the popular card game UNO.

The image, first circulated by Trump and then the White House, depicts Trump holding a handful of “wild” cards. It’s unclear what Trump was referring to, but he has said before that he holds “all the cards” when it comes to negotiating with Iran.

“I have all the cards,” Trump wrote—apparently unaware that the goal of the 55-year-old game is to have no cards.

“In Uno that means you are losing,” quipped MeidasTouch editor in chief Ron Filipkowski.

“I bet this goes hard if you’re fucking stupid,” wrote Jamie Bonkiewicz, a political commentator who was allegedly visited by the Secret Service in January after she tweeted about White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

Other social media users had different interpretations of Trump’s empty flex, using the open-format meme to call the president out on his soft spot for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his failed economic strategies against China and Xi Jinping, his various connections to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and the current state of the war with Iran.

“Starting to think all those 3-D chess analogies were off the mark,” wrote X user @RoguePotusStaff.

That same day, in another ludicrous attempt to frame the president as a relentless victor, the White House official account shared an hour-long loop of Trump saying the word “winning” at one of his campaign rallies. “Can’t stop, won’t stop,” the account wrote.

NBC’s Meet the Press host Kristen Welker asked Blanche what he made of the dozens of products being sold on Amazon that use the slogan “86 47,” the same slogan that landed former FBI Director James Comey with his second indictment for allegedly threatening the president.

“Should individuals selling or buying ‘86 47’ merchandise be concerned that they’re going to be prosecuted by the DOJ?” Welker asked.

“This isn’t about a single incident,” Blanche said.

“That’s posted constantly, that phrase is used constantly, there are constantly men and women who choose to make threatening statements against President Trump. Every one of those statements do not result in indictments, of course,” he added.

“Just to be very clear, you are suggesting the seashells themselves are not at the root of this indictment?” Welker pressed.

“No, I am suggesting that every single case depends on the investigation that’s done. And of course, the seashells are part of that case, I mean, that’s what the public sees,” Blanche said.

“But without a doubt—and it should be evident by the fact that it’s been 11 months since the posting and the indictment—there is an investigation that takes place. And the result of that investigation is the indictment that was returned last week.”

AG Todd Blanche tells Kristen Welker that individuals selling 86 merchandise or posting messages similar to Comey’s seashell post will not be prosecuted:

“Of course not. That’s posted constantly. That phrase is used constantly.” pic.twitter.com/AQHvynlTob

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 3, 2026

A look at the actual indictment suggests that it really is just about the seashells. The indictment alleges that the shells were a “serious expression of intent to do harm” against the president. The document makes no mention of additional materials that supposedly contributed to the legitimacy of that threat. And as Blanche readily admitted Sunday, “86 47” is widely used by Trump’s critics and is not considered to be a serious threat in every case.

So, what made this case different? Blanche didn’t bother to explain, simply pointing to the 11 months it took the DOJ to investigate a highly publicized Instagram post. It seems the only difference is who posted it: someone who Trump has decided is his enemy.

Justice Samuel Alito signed the measure, which temporarily lifts restrictions that mandated visiting a doctor or clinic in person in order to obtain the medication, following a ruling from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday. Both sides of the case have a week to respond before the court weighs in further.

Friday’s ruling from a three-judge panel led by Kyle Duncan, appointed by President Trump, upended years of precedent, including the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone in 2000 and a 2024 Supreme Court ruling unanimously protecting access to the drug. The case stems from a lawsuit from the state of Louisiana alleging that mail access to the pill violates its own abortion bans.

“Every abortion facilitated by FDA’s action cancels Louisiana’s ban on medical abortions and undermines its policy that ‘every unborn child is human being from the moment of conception and is, therefore, a legal person,’” Duncan wrote in his ruling.

Alito is one of the most conservative justices on the Supreme Court, so his ruling is not necessarily a sign of support for mifepristone. He limited his administrative stay on the lower court ruling to one week, while most of the time, his stays are indefinite. Alito and his fellow conservatives have a 6-3 majority on the high court, so he could very well be biding his time, using this stay as a fig leaf. A total ban on the drug, not just on mail-in access, may be coming soon.

This story has been updated.

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes responded to a request from the DC Preservation League to block the administration from taking over the East Potomac Golf Links. During the hearing, she chastised White House lawyers trying to argue that their plans for the golf course simply involve the removal of dead trees.

“We can’t have bulldozers taking down trees … and no one has come to me first,” Reyes said, adding that if the administration wants to cut down more than 10 trees, the court needs to be notified and needs to see plans.

The DC Preservation League is worried that the White House will move quickly to demolish parts of the course, pointing to how fast President Trump took over the Kennedy Center. The Preservation League’s attorney said that they didn’t trust the administration, and when Reyes asked a White House lawyer if they planned to close the golf course, the attorney said, “No closure notice has been issued ... but it’s still under consideration at this point.”

“I didn’t hear a ‘NO,’ your honor!” the plaintiff’s attorney interrupted. The White House’s lawyer tried to claim that they would follow the rules, and that they haven’t closed anything yet. But Reyes was then handed a note stating, “It looks like there were signs on the golf course that there were closures.” The administration’s counsel had no response to this, and Reyes said she was concerned about the White House making a “surprise” move on the golf course.

On Friday, NOTUS reported that the White House planned to take over the course and begin landscaping and tree clearing, with major renovations beginning later. A golf course architect, Tom Fazio, has already been chosen, an unnamed source told NOTUS. While the administration denied the report, the DC Preservation League quickly filed an emergency motion to block any construction.

It’s clear that the preservation group does not trust the administration in the slightest, and for good reason. Trump quickly demolished the East Wing of the White House without legal approval for his ballroom project, after saying publicly that he wouldn’t make large-scale changes. He has also slapped his name on several Washington buildings and government organizations without congressional or legal approval.

Whatever Trump’s plans are for this and other public golf courses in the nation’s capital, Reyes’s decision Monday may just slow him down rather than deter his plans altogether. Trump seems intent on remaking Washington in his own image regardless of what its residents or the courts say.

Recent polling from The Washington Post, ABC News, and Ipsos shows that a brutal 59 percent of Americans don’t think Trump has the mental acuity to serve as president, and 55 percent think he is not in physical shape to do so. That number is a sharp uptick from last fall, when only 45 percent of Americans believed he wasn’t in good enough physical shape to serve as president.

The poll was conducted before an odd medical visit that has raised questions even among Republicans about the president’s health and fitness.

On Saturday, Trump left his Florida golf course rather suddenly for what staff said was a dental appointment that was not previously on his presidential schedule.

“There’s been such lack of candor about the health of the president that even a visit to the dentist raises questions. The WH has a dental operatory (Pres Biden had a root canal there) so why a Sat morning visit in Florida?” wrote Jonothan Reiner, who served as former Vice President Dick Cheney’s doctor. “Maybe he just likes this dentist.”

Representative Nancy Mace also posted a mysterious “pray for President Trump” with no context, only fueling more theories.

“So, yesterday Trump is at his golf course in FL. He’s playing around, and suddenly he leaves for a dentist appointment. His press team says it was a regularly scheduled appointment but it was not on his Presidential schedule,” January 6 insurrectionist Trisha Hope posited. “Today @NancyMace posted this. What’s going on?”

“Why did the White House lie yesterday that Trump’s obvious medical emergency was a ‘scheduled’ dental appointment that was not on his schedule and caused him to suddenly leave his golf course?” conservative commentator Cheri Jacobus mused. “What IV infusion is he getting at the beginning of each month? And what’s wrong with his leg?”

Trump has always maintained that he is in peak physical condition, even though it’s clear that he’s at the very least lost a step since his first term. But the secrecy surrounding his health isn’t just alarming political insiders. It’s alarming most of America. Examples of the president’s questionable health range from Trump falling asleep in public meetings, to his unaired rants on 60 Minutes, to this mystery dental appointment.

Rudy Giuliani was admitted to the hospital Sunday. His spokesperson said the former New York mayor is in “critical but stable condition.” Yet the problem, according to Donald Trump, was leftists.

In a missive on Truth Social Sunday night, the president claimed that Giuliani—his former adviser and personal attorney—was a “true warrior” and the best mayor in New York City history “BY FAR.”

“What a tragedy that he was treated so badly by the Radical Left Lunatics, Democrats ALL—AND HE WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING!” Trump continued. “They cheated on the Elections, fabricated hundreds of stories, did anything possible to destroy our Nation, and now, look at Rudy. So sad!”

Giuliani is recovering from pneumonia, according to his spokesperson. The 81-year-old’s condition is complicated by restrictive airway disease, which he was diagnosed with after 9/11.

“He is now breathing on his own, with his family and primary medical provider at his side,” said spokesman Ted Goodman in a statement.

Giuliani was once a beloved fixture of the Big Apple, earning the title of a “mob-buster” as a vicious U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York in the 1980s. He later gained the moniker “America’s mayor” for seeing the city through the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

But the fading star lost a lot of that adoration when he saddled his political dreams on Trump during the 2016 presidential race, closely aligning himself with the MAGA movement and its myriad political conspiracies.

Since then, Giuliani has served as a mouthpiece for Trump’s whims. He spread baseless accusations of ballot manipulation about Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, a mother-daughter duo of election workers in Georgia, in the wake of the 2020 election. That decision cost Giuliani $150 million in damages (which he tried and failed to worm his way out of), his Manhattan penthouse, and his Mercedes convertible, and almost forced him to give up his Florida condominium.

Giuliani was also indicted—and pardoned—for his alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia and Arizona. Over the course of 2024, the former Trump attorney unsuccessfully filed for bankruptcy, lost his accountant over his insurmountable debts, was legally disbarred, and had his WABC radio show canceled for spewing 2020 election lies.

He also begged Trump for help settling his seven-figure legal fees, though Trump reportedly refused.

Giuliani even started his own coffee brand, “Rudy Coffee,” in an effort to funnel in some extra cash to offset the enormous costs of his unwavering MAGA allegiance. He ultimately lost his bankruptcy case due to his outlandish spending habits, with the presiding New York judge branding the former city mayor a “recalcitrant debtor.”

“Mayor Giuliani is a fighter who has faced every challenge in his life with unwavering strength, and he’s fighting with that same strength now. We do ask that you join us in prayer for America’s Mayor Rudy Giuliani,” said Goodman.

This story has been updated.

Last week, Turning Point USA held a get-out-the-vote event for Brenda Wilson, a Trump-backed candidate challenging state Senator Greg Goode in the upcoming primary election on May 5.

A team from Turning Point USA gathered at the Fairbanks Park Amphitheater in Terre Haute, Indiana, flush with law signs and fliers, blasting a playlist called “Trump Rally,” NOTUS reported Monday.

But only four people came, three of whom were from the same family, according to the outlet.

It seems that Turning Point USA has hosted other events with higher attendance, as part of a wider effort aimed at unseating so-called RINOs and moderates, or anyone who has not supported Trump’s meddling in state elections.

Eight of the Republican legislators who voted against Trump’s congressional redistricting scheme are up for reelection in Indiana’s primary, and seven are being challenged by Trump-endorsed opponents.

In addition to funding promised from Trump’s allies in the state, including Governor Mike Braun and Senator Jim Banks, the Trump-backed challengers have invited an influx of outside spending from groups such as Club Growth for Action, which is spending $2 million across eight races.

But as Trump’s approval ratings have fallen to 37 percent nationally and roughly 49 percent in Indiana, a state he won in 2024, it’s not clear that being tied to the president, his unpopular war in Iran, and his poor economic report card won’t be a liability to candidates instead of a boost.

Iran’s Fars Media reported that a Navy vessel in the southeast sector of the strait was struck for “violating maritime security and navigation norms” and that the ship turned around after being hit. One Iranian official told the BBC that there was one warning shot but could not confirm if there was damage.

U.S. Central Command is denying any reports of serious damage.

“CLAIM: Iranian state media claims that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps hit a U.S. warship with two missiles,” CENTCOM wrote Monday on X. “TRUTH: No U.S. Navy ships have been struck. U.S. forces are supporting Project Freedom and enforcing the naval blockade on Iranian ports.”

This comes as the U.S. begins attempts to enact Trump’s recently announced “Project Freedom”—a bid to escort merchant and allied ships through the strait while continuing to blockade Iranian vessels, something Trump is calling a “humanitarian gesture.” Iran continues to hold its own blockade of the strait, as well.

On Sunday night, Trump took to Truth Social and posted, “We cannot allow there to be an Election that is conducted unconstitutionally simply for the ‘convenience’ of State Legislatures.”

“​​If they have to vote twice, so be it. We should demand that State Legislatures do what the Supreme Court says must be done. That is more important than administrative convenience. The byproduct is that the Republicans will receive more than 20 House Seats in the upcoming Midterms! President DONALD J. TRUMP,” he wrote.

Trump didn’t even bother to repeat the false Republican claim of widespread voter fraud, instead blatantly stating that his goal is additional congressional seats for the GOP. He hopes that these newly redrawn seats would mitigate or even prevent losses in November’s midterm elections.

All of this comes after the Supreme Court basically nullified the Voting Rights Act last week, throwing out decades of precedent and giving many Republican-led states the ability to redraw their districts and disenfranchise Black voters. Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and other states either have already started redrawing their congressional maps or are preparing to do so.

Democrats are scrambling to sue over these new maps, while also fighting efforts from the Trump administration to gain access to voter rolls in blue states. The midterms are six months away (sooner with early voting), and the Republican Party, led by Trump, is doing everything—other than reverse its unpopular policies—to rig the results in its favor.

After we recorded, The New York Times posted a piece disclosing more about GOP angst over the war, reporting that Republicans are beset by “increasing nervousness.”

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

As of this recording, Donald Trump has declared the war with Iran “terminated.” But it’s unclear what’s supposed to happen next. He’s left the military in place there, yet he says he’s unsatisfied with Iran’s latest offer. Now what? We don’t know. During a Newsmax interview, Trump made an accidentally revealing admission, one that seemed to indicate that he has no idea what’s going on between his own negotiators and Iran. This comes as new polling shows the public really souring on the war and specifically on Trump’s lack of clarity around it. MS NOW’s Steve Benen has a good piece arguing that Trump’s inadvertent Newsmax moment captures a good deal about this situation. So we’re talking to him about all this today. Steve, good to have you back on.

Steve Benen: Thank you, Greg. It’s great to be here.

Sargent: So Trump sent a letter to the Hill declaring the war terminated. He did this to circumvent the law that requires a congressional vote on hostilities after 60 days have passed. Trump is now saying he’s dissatisfied with Iran’s latest offer but won’t say exactly why, though it appears to be partly that Iran won’t renounce its nuclear program entirely. Steve, can you try to sum up where we are right now?

Benen: I think what you just said was an accurate and concise summary. We’re in a situation in which Congress is supposed to step up, in the third month of the war getting underway. Donald Trump and his team have decided that they have, quote-unquote, “terminated” the conflict. We heard similar comments from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth during his congressional testimony this week before the House and Senate committees.

It’s a situation in which they basically are saying that the 60-day window is effectively closed because they say so, because of a ceasefire that—we’re waiting to see whether or not it advances. It’s against that backdrop that Iran and the White House are presumably having some diplomatic negotiations. We don’t yet have a sense of the details. We know that the president isn’t satisfied with their offer, but we don’t know what the offer is and we don’t know what the president finds unsatisfying about it. So other than that, everything is crystal.

Sargent: Other than that. So Trump had this astonishing exchange with an interviewer on Newsmax. Here he’s asked about something that his negotiator Steve Witkoff apparently offered to Iran. Listen.

Greta Van Susteren (voiceover): Steve Witkoff told me on this show the United States offered Iran to give them enriched uranium for medical and powerful purposes free if they would give up their nuclear program. Wouldn’t cost them a dime. And they declined that—to me that suggested that they really didn’t want a deal.

Donald Trump (voiceover): Well, and maybe it wasn’t a very serious offer because I wouldn’t have approved that. I wouldn’t have. I’m not giving them anything. I wouldn’t have approved that. They’re going to either have a nuclear weapon or they’re not.

Sargent: Steve, let’s break this up into pieces. First, note that his interviewer brings up Witkoff’s offer to Iran—which was of enriched uranium for medical purposes, I guess—in order to paint Iran as unreasonable, as in, Iran turned down this very generous offer from Trump. That was a setup for Trump to wallop it out of the park, but it flew right over Trump’s head. All he’s able to say here is, I would never give Iran anything like that because I’m tough and strong and totally in control. Your thoughts on that?

Benen: That context is highly relevant. Greta Van Susteren was clearly trying to set up the president for a good point, for an important observation about the nature of the negotiations and about Iran being unreasonable in the context of these diplomatic talks. But Trump didn’t pick up on the cue. Frankly, he was clueless about this.

He was so eager to say that he was against the underlying idea, that he was so reluctant to give an inch to Tehran, he ends up saying something really important, which is that his own negotiator—the envoy that he sent on behalf of the White House to represent the United States at the negotiating table—came up with an idea, and as far as Trump is concerned, he’s against that idea. He’s against what his own envoy offered Iran as part of these talks. I find that to be incredibly important. It is something that he blurted out, something that he’s never said before, never acknowledged to date. Yet he said it anyway. I was surprised that he said it, because it’s so important given the larger context.

Sargent: I would also add that Trump appears unaware of what his negotiator, Witkoff, offered to Iran. Now, obviously, Trump’s not going to be aware of every single detail in these negotiations. But here he’s basically blurting out that he has no idea what his own negotiating team is offering to Iran in a larger sense. It’s a very central thing in these discussions.

This is not a small thing. Trump should know what his negotiators are offering to the country with which we’re at war if Trump wants to negotiate a peace. I think that’s an extraordinary admission, don’t you?

Benen: I do. I think a lot about what happened in 2015 around this time a decade ago when Barack Obama deployed his own negotiators to the JCPOA talks, the Iran nuclear deal talks. Of course, there are going to be granular details that come up through the course of negotiations, and a president isn’t in a position to micromanage from thousands of miles away. But at the same time, the president is supposed to establish an agenda, establish a blueprint of priorities, and deploy his team accordingly.

John Kerry goes to the negotiating table in 2015 with our international partners and Iran—it’s not as if Barack Obama is clueless as to what Kerry’s going to offer. He’s obviously going to be aware of what’s going on, because Obama is the one who sent him.

Yet what we have is a situation in which not only was Donald Trump clueless in this instance, we see a situation in which Donald Trump is clueless in practically all instances. He is what I refer to as a president bystander, where he doesn’t really seem to know what’s going on around him, including within his own administration, within his own White House. It happened just earlier in the week when the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. He was asked about it at a White House event by a reporter. The president had absolutely no idea what had happened, because, in his own words, he’d spent the day working with contractors on his ballroom vanity project.

I realize that a president has a variety of responsibilities over the course of a given day. But if you don’t know what’s going on in terms of what’s going on with the Supreme Court and your own team’s Iran negotiations, then maybe you need to spend less time on the golf course and spend more time getting engaged in day-to-day governance.

Sargent: Right. He threw his own negotiator under the bus on national television. Trump is basically admitting here in a larger sense that there is a major disconnect between what his negotiators think he has authorized them to offer and what Trump wants them to offer. In a big sense, that’s a striking admission. It suggests a level of disengagement that’s quite striking and quite unnerving, no?

Benen: It is. In a practical sense, it just can’t work this way. We can’t have a policy dynamic in which a White House sends an envoy to high-level, sensitive national security talks, and makes an offer on behalf of the United States government, and then has his boss go on national television and say, No, no, no, I would never support that. I’m against what my own envoy said. Don’t listen to my negotiator. Listen to me. I’m telling you that my negotiator is wrong.

We’re laughing about it, but at the same time, it is a fundamental breakdown in how any functioning administration here or anywhere else on earth can reasonably expect to work. In fact, it doesn’t work. And the consequences of that will be significant, because now Iran has fresh reason not to trust the United States or the Trump White House as these talks conceivably, hopefully, maybe continue in some way.

Sargent: With all that in mind, a new Pew Research poll has some striking findings. Sixty-two percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the war, including 45 percent who strongly disapprove—an incredible number. Only 36 percent approve. Fifty-nine percent of Americans say Trump’s decision to attack was wrong. A majority, 51 percent, says the war is not going well. And a plurality of 48 percent says Trump’s goals in Iran are not clear. Only 24 percent—I’m going to do the math for you, that’s less than a quarter—say our goals are clear.

Steve, you can really see here that most Americans basically get the situation, that Trump is disengaged and doesn’t know how to get out of this. Your thoughts?

Benen: It’s not as if anyone at the White House or anyone else anywhere could say that this was somehow an outlier poll or a poll where the data is literally unbelievable. On the contrary, it is consistent with everything we see from the Washington Post/Reason poll, the latest Ipsos poll, and so on. Put together, what we see is a conflict that is clearly opposed by the clear majority—the overwhelming majority—of the public, including many Republicans who are not standing by the White House on this. The more Hegseth and the White House and others pretend that somehow they have the public support, the more they’re humiliated by the data that shows otherwise.

Sargent: Well, you wrote about the Washington Post poll and we should highlight that, because it probed people’s views in a larger context in a way no other survey has done before. And here again, it was very illuminating. You want to talk about what the Post poll showed?

Benen: It really stood out for just that reason. The Post/ABC/Ipsos poll not only showed that there were roughly six in 10 Americans who think that the war was a bad idea, but then it provides this historical context.

There was similar opposition to the war in Iraq under George W. Bush and under Vietnam during Nixon. But the key difference here is that it took three years for Americans to turn against the war in Iraq at this level. It took six years for Americans to turn against Vietnam at this level. It’s not just a question of whether or not Americans are against this. It’s that they’re against this in a historical way.

Looking back over the last several decades, what we often see is that Americans rally around the flag at the beginning of a conflict and then sour on the war as it drags on and conflict continues and casualties rise and costs rise and so on. But in this case, the war started unpopular—in part because Donald Trump was so horrible in terms of presenting a rationale or any kind of explanation for it. It started unpopular and it remained unpopular and it got even more unpopular.

The floor is falling out from underneath the White House, as all this data shows. This historical context is important, because Donald Trump might have been under the impression that Americans would rally behind him and his administration because there’s this new war. He’s now realizing that if he did assume that, he was spectacularly wrong.

Sargent: In fact, we’re actually seeing some more Republican angst about the war. Senator Susan Collins voted with Democrats to stop it, saying that Congress simply must authorize it if it’s going to continue. Senator John Curtis of Utah said he won’t support any more funding for the war without Congress voting on it. As Politico put it, GOP unity has “started to crack” and Trump could “soon face far more resistance.” Steve, what’s your reading of that? How much longer do you think Republicans will put up with this? What’s your sense?

Benen: It’s frustrating in a way, because we’ve been seeing reports for weeks about how there are going to be Republicans who are anxious about this, who are concerned about this. They see the same polls the rest of us do when they’re thinking ahead to the midterms, and they keep sending signals—Wait a minute, we’re not on board, hold on, watch your step, there are limits here—and yet we haven’t really seen any follow-through. The question for all of us is: When will we see follow-through? When will they step up?

Now, this week we saw Susan Collins flip. That’s a step in the right direction. She joined with Rand Paul. Now there are two. We mentioned John Curtis, and of course there’s Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, who has also expressed some reservations.

Sargent: It doesn’t appear that maximal military force can give Trump the outcome he wants. And he doesn’t seem to know that. Let’s listen to Trump talk about this a bit.

Reporter (voiceover): You have a commander come in here yesterday. Was he briefing you on different approach options? What kind of options? How would it look?

Donald Trump (voiceover): Well, there are options. I mean, do we wanna go and just blast the hell out of them and finish them forever, or do we wanna try and make a deal? I mean, those are the options.

Reporter (voiceover): Do you wanna go blast the hell out of them and finish them forever?

Donald Trump (voiceover): I’d prefer not. On a human basis, I’d prefer not, but that’s the option. Do we wanna go in there heavy and just blast them away, or do we wanna do something—

Sargent: So there you have Trump saying he’s going to blast the hell out of Iran if Iran doesn’t give him exactly what he wants—essentially him retaking his previous threat to erase Iranian civilization. In other words, he’s retaking his threat to commit massive war crimes. But here again, the basic situation, the logic of it, seems unforgiving. Military force alone won’t force Iran to give Trump what he wants. Trump doesn’t seem able to process that thought. Where do we go from here? I don’t understand it.

Benen: Well, the funny thing is: You said you don’t understand it. The more accurate way of putting it is that Donald Trump doesn’t understand it. What he should have learned from that initial month—really the first six weeks of the conflict—is that he can’t bomb his way to success. He can bomb while causing enormous damage, and he can kill a lot of people and he can cause a lot of destruction in Iran. But what he can’t do is bomb his way into a deal that makes him happy, where Iran will just simply give him everything that he wants and allow him to walk away smiling.

Because he has not yet learned that lesson, we find ourselves where we are today, which is him saying either give me a deal or I go back to bombing you. But if going back to bombing will not give me a deal, what is the point? The fact that he’s so frustrated by that is palpable. So when we look ahead, what is the end game here? How do we get out of it? The answer is we don’t know, because Donald Trump doesn’t know. There is no plan. There’s no strategy. It is exasperating to watch this unfold. Frankly, it’s a quagmire that is only getting worse, with no end in sight.

Sargent: Also, it sucks to be an American right now and watch your president threaten war crimes. I don’t want my president to threaten war crimes. His threats are going off the rails one more time. We just have to sit here and wait, and everybody has to dance around and pretend that this guy has any idea what he’s doing. On so many levels, it’s an unideal situation, Steve.

Benen: I agree. Watching his most recent comments that you just played the clip of, I was struck by the fact that he was talking about the prospect for a deal. And one of the things that occurs to me that is especially exasperating is—whatever happened to the Art of the Deal? Whatever happened to the fact that Donald Trump billed himself to voters as this world-class negotiator, world-class dealmaker who can settle any resolution, who can resolve any conflict because of his masterful skills in striking agreements? Where are those talents? Why hasn’t he put them to use?

Well, I think the answer is because it was always a lie, it was always a sham—he’s never earned the role or the rights to call himself a great dealmaker. His own book on negotiating was ghostwritten by someone else. What we’re seeing is a collapse of this myth. We’re seeing this image that he created for himself, of this world-class negotiator, collapsing down because he clearly doesn’t have those skills that he pretended to have. If he did, we would see them on display. And we don’t.

Sargent: Yeah, and making that all the worse, it seems like Donald Trump isn’t capable of any level of shame that might force him to try and find a better way out of this. So we’re really stuck. We may be stuck for a while. Steve Benen, God help us, man. Always good to talk to you.

Benen: Always a pleasure, Greg. Thanks so much.

To my relief, it wasn’t at all bad. The daily experiences, needs, and frustrations of working people received the proper emphasis. Here are the main things they propose to do:

• Establish a government program to sell generic drugs at a discount. This, says the caucus, will lower the price of insulin from $300 a vial to $50. I have long argued that the Democrats ought to make insulin free by paying the manufacturers a negotiated fee, just like they did with Moderna and Pfizer on the Covid vaccine (although that fee would be considerably less than their current crazy profits). But $50 is closer to free than $300. It’s a start.
• Charge oil companies a tax on extra profits collected because of Donald Trump’s war, then refund that money to consumers, which the caucus says could save families up to $324.
• Build millions of new homes, offering new homeowners $20,000 in downpayment assistance, and expand rental aid.
• Require companies to offer double pay for overtime (Barack Obama expanded overtime pay, and Trump reversed that).
• Guarantee every worker two weeks of paid vacation.
• Crack down on price-fixing among big grocers.
• Ban “surveillance pricing,” an insidious algorithm-driven process whereby companies use consumer data to set individualized prices, hoping to locate the maximum price consumers are willing to pay.

These are all good things. Kamala Harris won 43 percent of the non-college (i.e., working-class) vote in 2024, which was five points less than Joe Biden won in 2020. If the Democrats can get back to Biden’s 48, or ideally a few points better, they should win in 2028 and possibly beyond. Efforts like the above, explained and marketed in the right way, should convince enough working-class voters to return to the D column, especially given Trump’s broken promises and tergiversations.

But one promise not mentioned above caught my eye more than all the others: The caucus promises to crack down “on companies that abuse seed patents to make farming more expensive.”

Seed patents? What on earth are seed patents? And why does this vow excite me?

The short version is that conglomerate seed producers—notably Monsanto, which was acquired in 2018 by Bayer, the aspirin people, for $66 billion—have patented various seeds that farmers use, requiring them to buy new seeds every year. Corteva Agriscience is the other seed producer that, with Bayer, controls thousands of seed patents. Their claims aren’t wholly without merit—they invest a lot of money in all this. And it’s true that seeds can be patented not only in the United States but across Europe, as well. But the extent of the U.S. patent claims costs small farmers a lot of money because they can’t reuse seeds, and it has led to intense market concentration. So, as the caucus says, it’s not the existence of seed patent laws that’s the problem. It’s the abuse and overuse of them.

Why should you care about this? Because this is exactly the kind of issue Democrats ought to be stressing and talking about, for two reasons.

First, it speaks to a rural constituency that Democrats have done a horrible job of talking to in recent years. On a substantive level, Trump has done nothing but screw farmers, especially soybean farmers, with his tariffs. But they still support him. They support him because they feel like he represents their “values.” And they feel that in no small part because Democrats never talk about farmers. Farmers basically don’t exist to national Democrats.

So, zeroing in on an issue that resonates in Waterloo, Iowa, but may mean absolutely nothing to the young progressives in Brooklyn is a good thing right off the bat. The Democrats’ biggest electoral problem is that there are vast swaths of the country, congressional districts and entire states, where the idea of electing a Democrat is about as realistic as electing Colin Kaepernick. To have a chance of becoming a true majoritarian party again, Democrats must change that. That means taking the concerns of people like farmers seriously.

Second, it affords Democrats the opportunity to wage a good old-fashioned class-warfare fight, complete with the naming of the bad guys. As I wrote in my big 10,000-word piece for the March print issue of The New Republic, the Democrats need to create conflict. They need to identify villains—the big corporate entities that are making working people’s lives harder and harder. They need to name names. Naming the bad guys is the surefire way to make working people understand: If the Democrats are against those guys—the corporate bad actors who’ve been nickel-and-diming honest working folks—they must be on my side.

Democratic messaging in recent years seems mostly oblivious to this. Democrats try to find the issue that focus groups tell them is already popular. That’s fine to an extent. It works on some matters. It worked last year when they emphasized the Obamacare subsidies during the government shutdown. They “won” that shutdown politically (even though some senators caved, but that’s another column).

But focus groups and polls can’t tell you everything. Sometimes, you have to make something an issue. Politics is a way of creating a new majority where one didn’t exist before, and ripe but under-the-radar policy issues are a good way to do that. In seed patents, we find something that many people had no idea they should care about, because it doesn’t get much press and isn’t discussed daily on cable news. That’s intellectual leadership. That’s political guts. And the Democrats too rarely show political guts.

Spirit Airlines closed over the weekend. The Trump administration was going to bail it out, then decided not to. Obviously, it flip-flopped under pressure from the big four carriers. I carry no brief for Spirit one way or the other, but this week, I’d like to see Democrats raising tough questions about the market power of the big four airlines. It’s the same thing as Monsanto/Bayer and Corteva.

I applaud the 100 or so members of the Progressive Caucus for their class-driven agenda. But I hope they really mean it. I hope the mention of patent seed abuse wasn’t just a sop to one noisy member, to get him or her to shut up. Democrats’ path back to victory runs precisely through aggressive anti-monopoly issues like this one. As I’ve written a thousand times since George W. Bush was president, the point is not to follow the polls. The point is to change them.

The change to Department of Housing and Urban Development regulations would bestow the decision about whether to implement these requirements upon local housing authorities and private property owners. These authorities and owners could institute term limits for as short a period of time as two years, as well as new work requirements mandating a 40-hour workweek. The proposal would be applicable to “work-eligible” individuals between the ages of 18 and 61 with some exemptions, including recipients with disabilities, caretakers of those with disabilities, and parents of children under 6 years old.

President Donald Trump included a two-year limit on assistance in his budget last year—along with a 40 percent cut to rental aid—but Congress did not pass any such legislation. This rule would bypass Congress, which could open it up to legal challenges. HUD argues that instituting these restrictions would encourage low-income households receiving rental assistance to find a more permanent home, and increase turnover in public housing such that more people currently on the waiting list are able to be served.

Critics counter that rather than encourage upward mobility, the proposed rule would simply make it more difficult for low-income households to maintain stable housing.

Renee Williams, senior policy adviser at the National Low Income Housing Coalition, argued that the proposed rule is predicated on the “false idea” that Americans reliant on rental assistance are not employed. For those recipients who already work but do not necessarily meet the 40-hour threshold, this proposal could add significant complications to their daily lives.

“What is trying to be accomplished here is not actually getting at the root causes of housing instability and poverty,” said Williams. In areas with higher rents, if a household is unable to meet those work requirements or find affordable housing within the time limit, they could lose their subsidies and be forced to reapply to the program.

“Even if you are able to get 40 hours a week—which is not a given in a lot of variable, low-wage jobs—the rent is still unaffordable, and so a lot of folks are going to need and rely on rental assistance to be able to stay housed, even if they are working,” said Williams. The work requirements could also add a significant administrative burden both on those who are mandated to meet them and on those who need to verify the paperwork.

Erik Gartland, research analyst on housing and income security at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, or CBPP, also worried that even those who may be exempt from the requirements would struggle with the additional hurdle of verification—for example, proving that they have a disability.

“Even if they’re technically exempt, they could lose their rental assistance anyway, for all the additional red tape that it would require to verify compliance and exemptions,” said Gartland. “It’s quite possible, especially for people with lower incomes, that it’s difficult to get all that paperwork to prove that exemption.”

According to recent research authored by Gartland, nearly 3.7 million people—including roughly 1.9 million children—could be at risk of losing their housing assistance. These projections would occur under the most extreme-case scenario, if this rule was applied universally by every local housing authority and private owner, and with the most stringent possible requirements.

Howard Husock, senior fellow in domestic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, noted that most people relying on rental assistance have lived in public housing for several years, and many jurisdictions have sizable waitlists—in theory, the increase in turnover helps address the backlog. Husock also argued that the price of rents varies across the country, and said that local housing authorities can decide what requirements to impose based on specific circumstances.

“Maybe some are going to say, ‘Well, we have such a high vacancy rate here that I think we think a two-year limit is fine.’ Another may say, ‘Well, no, we need a seven-year limit so they may adapt to local housing conditions,’” he said.

To demonstrate the potential benefits of such a program, the Trump administration has cited a program instituted by the local housing authority of San Bernardino, California, which has a five-year time limit on public housing. The authority has found an increase in earnings and full-time employment since this policy has been in effect.

There are ways to ensure the rule is most effective; for example, Husock believes that the rule should not be applied to people currently living in public housing. He also argues that such policies should be accompanied by fixed rents and the creation of automatic savings accounts that would allow renters to accrue interest and create a “nest egg” while they are living in public housing. These accompanying policies are not included in the proposed HUD rule, however—and depending on the decision of the local authorities, the rule could apply to those currently living in public housing.

The research on the impact of such a proposal is relatively scant. Out of more than 3,000 public housing authorities, only 138 are permitted to test time limits and work requirements through HUD’s “Moving to Work” demonstration program, and only a small subset have actually tested these policies. Claudia Aiken, the director of new research partnerships at the Housing Solutions Lab at New York University, noted that the San Bernardino example had mixed results. The majority of families gained some income but exited public housing below the poverty line. In addition, the San Bernardino housing authority has not tracked the experiences of families after exiting the program. Several of the public housing authorities that have implemented this kind of program nationwide have ended their policies, making it difficult to appreciate the larger impact.

Research by the Housing Solutions Lab found that 69 percent of “work-able” households reliant on rental assistance have been in the program for longer than two years, meaning that if the rule was applicable to current participants, they would be at risk of losing their aid. Moreover, the average household receiving assistance in counties with higher rents tends to stay in public housing for longer periods of time than in counties with lower rents.

“This kind of assistance is very scarce. It’s not an entitlement at this point. Only a fraction of those who apply will ever receive it, even fewer will be able to effectively use it,” said Aiken about rental assistance. “It is a totally valid thing for housing authorities to be thinking about how they give more people a chance at this kind of assistance. That said … we just really don’t have a lot of evidence on what amount of time is going to be the most effective, much less for different kinds of households.”

Most of the research on the impact of work requirements and time limits is related to other social safety net programs, such as Medicaid and food stamps. Evidence suggests that work requirements and time limits for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, may result in decreased participation in the program without significant increases in employment or earnings. When Arkansas briefly implemented work requirements for Medicaid in 2018 and 2019, more than 18,000 adults were disenrolled from their benefits, and Harvard University researchers found there was no significant effect on employment.

Unlike in the Medicaid or SNAP cases, the small number of housing authorities that have voluntarily implemented these kinds of requirements have typically done so alongside supportive services; however, those kinds of policies come with a price tag. Aiken said that the few housing authorities that have implemented such time limits or work requirements have ended them in part because of the expense of the additional administrative burdens.

HUD has estimated that the aggregate cost for public housing authorities, private owners, and renters would have the dramatic range of $2.7 million to $55.3 million. The proposed rule does require housing authorities and owners to implement supportive services if they impose time limits or work requirements, although it “does not propose any specific or new monitoring requirement,” or a clear penalty if an audit or monitoring review finds that they are not in compliance. HUD has yet to release guidance on potential sources for funding these supportive systems.

“Unless you have housing providers who are going to, on their own, provide the funds to stand up these supportive services, I just don’t really see how that’s going to work, because the type and amount of investment you need is not really something that I feel like a lot of housing providers who are providing HUD-assisted housing can support,” said Williams.

Even with the voluntary nature of this rule, some advocates worry that states or the federal government could force their implementation. Arkansas and Wisconsin, for example, have “trigger” laws on the books that would mandate that public housing authorities institute a work reporting requirement if permitted on a federal level. Fischer described a potential future where more conservative states could pass measures through their legislatures to force housing authorities to impose either the time limits or the work requirements. The federal government could also, in theory, threaten federal funding to agencies that choose not to implement these requirements.

Implementation of this rule would likely face some legal challenges. Will Fischer, senior fellow and director of housing policy at CBPP, said that it has been “generally understood that HUD does not have authority to allow or require work requirements under current law.”

“HUD all of a sudden now is saying that they can just issue a regulation that allows work requirements and term limits, but that’s not what has been understood and what the law appears to show,” Fischer said.

It’s unclear when the new rule would go into effect, although the 60-day period for public input ended at the beginning of May, with more than 1,000 comments submitted. For now, the outcomes of proposing such a rule are simply unknown, given the uncertainty about when, where, and how these requirements could be implemented. But for those low-income households that are affected, the potential loss of rental assistance may also come at a time when their ability to access other benefits is uncertain, given pending cuts to Medicaid and SNAP.

“You’re having to readjust your budget, and figure out, ‘OK, well, if I’m not able to afford food this month, does that mean I’m not going to be able to afford the 30 percent of income that I’m supposed to pay in rent for my housing?” said Williams. “If one part of your life is particularly financially stressed, or you’re losing a particular source of income, then that’s going to affect all aspects of your life.”

May 5: Indiana’s 5th Congressional District

There’s a crowded field in the race to unseat Republican incumbent Victoria Spartz, and early-voting figures suggest that Democrats in the district—which has an eight-point GOP lean, according to the Cook Political Report—are energized.

Though no polling has been conducted on the race, J.D. Ford appears most likely to win the crowded primary. The first and only gay member of the Indiana Senate, Ford has centered his campaign on affordability and his local name recognition. And he is committed to the fight, having given up his seat to challenge Spartz. “People are going to tell me that the 5th District is unwinnable,” Ford told the Indiana Capitol Chronicle. “I would just tell them, ‘Watch me.’”

Jackson Franklin, along with his two triplet brothers, serves as a combat medic in the Indiana National Guard. Franklin was deployed to Kosovo in 2023, and says he was inspired to run for office after seeing his fellow veterans refuse medical care because they couldn’t afford it. At 26, he’d be the youngest member of Congress if elected (the current title holder, Maxwell Frost, is 29). If Franklin’s presidential-sounding name doesn’t sell Hoosiers on his political panache, his policies might: A Bernie Sanders fan since age 15, he’s rejected all corporate money and pledged to fight against Washington lobbyists.

Another legitimate contender is Dylan McKenna, who works in technology sales and has already raised a surprisingly large amount of cash. McKenna was motivated to run after Renee Good’s killing in Minneapolis, and describes himself as “a boring dad trying to do the right thing.” There’s also chiropractor Steve Avit, who posts low-budget videos on Facebook about helping working families, and Phil Goss, who operates his family farm while somehow also managing a pub in Gdansk, Poland.

May 12: Nebraska Senate

In this Democratic primary, a potential Republican plant is facing an actual Democrat who has no intention of holding office.

Let’s back up. Two years ago, a veteran and mechanic who had never run for office came within seven percentage points of unseating GOP Senator Deb Fischer. Dan Osborn was a progressive, populist, pro-gun challenger—but not a Democrat. He ran instead as an independent, and he’s doing the same this year in a bid to unseat the state’s other Republican senator. State Democrats believe he can pull it off, and stands a better chance than anyone with a D next to their name. Their unorthodox plan was to abandon their own primary and endorse Osborn.

But then a 79-year-old pastor named William Forbes quietly signed up for the primary at the last minute. Things got completely out of hand after CNN discovered Forbes was a Trump voter who frequently espoused MAGA talking points in his sermons. State Democrat Party Chair Jane Kleeb alleged Forbes’s campaign was a “political maneuver engineered by Pete Ricketts to split the opposition vote,” which the two men denied.

Forbes getting the de facto Democratic nomination would take a significant number of votes from Osborn in a race where the latter is trailing in polling by just one point. State Democrats countered through Cindy Burbank, who filed for the primary solely to defeat Forbes. Burbank admitted that if she won, she would immediately drop out and endorse Osborn. Nebraska’s secretary of state initially removed her from the ballot, arguing she wasn’t running in good faith, but Burbank took her case to the state Supreme Court and was reinstated.

May 19: Pennsylvania’s 7th Congressional District

A true swing district in the country’s most important swing state, Pennsylvania’s 7th is represented by Ryan Mackenzie, a boilerplate MAGA politico who formerly served with his mommy in the state House of Representatives. Mackenzie won his seat by less than a point in 2024. The latest polling, taken in December, shows a wide-open race.

Front-runner Lamont McClure has been a “near constant presence” in local politics since 2000. He has defeated MAGA politicians before, winning a contentious county executive election against Steve Lynch in 2021. The barrel-chested Lamont is running on a platform of improving public mental health services while reducing taxes and the size of government. He took out a $200,000 loan to fund his campaign, which he said represented “most of his life savings.”

Bob Brooks, though, has a chance to be McClure’s worst nightmare. The progressive head of Pennsylvania’s Professional Fire Fighters Association is racking up high-profile endorsements from the likes of Bernie Sanders and Governor Josh Shapiro. Brooks being a firefighter with a cute bulldog is a large part of his appeal. No joke—once Pennsylvanians are presented with biographical information about the candidates, Brooks takes the lead in polling, with 30 percent of the vote. Sometimes politics is simple.

Carol Obando-Derstine, a supervisor at an energy company, is running for office for the first time. She is endorsed by Susan Wild, the Democrat who lost her seat to Mackenzie in 2024. A naturalized Colombian citizen, she is a longtime resident of District 7. That’s a contrast to Ryan Crosswell, who’s been cast as a carpetbagger by his opponents since he moved to the district last year. Like Brooks, though, Crosswell has a biography that appeals to the working class: He is a former Marine who quit his job at Trump’s DOJ and switched his party affiliation last year.

June 2: New Jersey’s 7th Congressional District

If you recognize the name Tom Kean Jr., it’s most likely because of the recent revelation he has not voted in the House since March 5. Kean belatedly revealed he was having health issues and would be back soon, but his radio silence likely makes this swingy district—which Trump carried by one percentage point in 2024—even more winnable for Democrats.

The four candidates vying to defeat Kean are tantalizingly close to each other in polling. Each has committed not to accept corporate PAC money, but small donors are proving hard to come by; all but front-runner Rebecca Bennett are largely self-funding their campaigns.

Bennett is a former Navy helicopter pilot who focuses on issues like national security and gun safety. Physician Tina Shah has made lowering health care costs a core tenet. Businessman Brian Varela—the subject of a Politico investigation in which he was busted trying to dig up dirt on Bennett—is perhaps the most progressive candidate, expressing support for campaign finance reform and Medicare for All. Michael Roth, a Small Business Administration official under Joe Biden, has been endorsed by five Indivisible chapters and touted his experience providing aid to New Jersey businesses during the Covid-19 pandemic.

In a state where AIPAC was roundly rebuked during a recent special election, but a district that contains around 30,000 Jewish residents, candidates will be tested more than usual on their positions on the Middle East. All four candidates are supportive of Israel. Bennett is endorsed by J Street, a progressive pro-Israel PAC, while Shah is “the only candidate to say she supported continued military aid to Israel without conditions.”

June 2: California Governor

Governor Gavin Newsom is considering running for president, and term limits prevent him seeking reelection anyway. Left in his slippery wake (because of all the hair gel) are no fewer than 10 candidates from both parties. The state’s open primary system means the top two candidates advance to the general regardless of party, and Democrats are worried they’ll be left out of that contest altogether—with all the Democrats splitting the vote, the two top-polling candidates are currently Republicans.

Front-runner Eric Swalwell dropped out of the race (and resigned from Congress) amid reports of sexual misconduct last month, leaving billionaire Tom Steyer (who appeared on one of this magazine’s fine podcasts in March), former state Attorney General Xavier Becerra, and former Congresswoman Katie Porter as the Democrats with the best chances.

Funnily enough, it’s the billionaire who’s probably the furthest left of the three. Steyer champions environmental causes and hiking taxes on the rich, and has come around on universal health care. He seems equal parts embarrassed and proud of his money, driving an outdated Honda while making his campaign the most expensive in the country. There’s plenty to be skeptical of here—Steyer has had to disavow his former hedge fund’s investments in fossil fuels and private prisons—but he has an impressively populist appeal for a one-percenter.

The whiteboard-wielding Porter has a strong electoral record, winning toss-up House districts three times as a progressive, and has made waves for her interrogations of Trump officials in Congress. Porter’s biggest obstacle might be her personality: She recently apologized on the debate stage for incidents in which she lashed out at reporters and staffers. Ready to play spoiler is Becerra, a moderate Democrat who was polling in the single digits before Swalwell’s exit saw him surge in the polls. His chief draw is his governmental experience—he sued the Trump administration no fewer than 122 times as state attorney general.

June 23: New York’s 17th Congressional District

Ten miles north of Manhattan in vineyardy Hudson Valley, New York’s 17th is one of three Republican-led districts that Kamala Harris won in 2024, so Democrats know they can topple incumbent Mike Lawler with the right candidate. And Lawler is not exactly undergoing a surge of popularity at the moment, mostly making headlines for his heckletastic town halls. Six Democrats have filed for the June primary, though what sparse polling has been conducted suggests only two moderates have a real chance.

Beth Davidson is a legislator in reddish Rockland County—a large part of her pitch is that she can defeat Lawler with interparty appeal. She is also Jewish, which represents a strong voting bloc in the district. Cait Conley, a National Security Council official under Joe Biden, is leaning on her experience as evidence she can improve things quickly once elected. She is even more centrist than Davidson, or at least eager for voters to think so: A memo obtained by a local journalist stated that her campaign is trying to cast Davidson as a “far left political operative.”

With Peter Chatzky dropping out after his “bawdy” old Facebook posts were unearthed by The New York Times, progressive hopes lie with Effie Phillips-Staley. The daughter of a Salvadoran immigrant has received the blessing of Representative Jamaal Bowman, while also being condemned by all Democratic Party chairs in the district for the cardinal sin of appearing on a Hasan Piker stream.

A final mention in this colorful primary goes to Mike Sacks, a TV reporter whose unofficial campaign slogan is “unfuck our country.” Sacks launched a Tinder profile as part of his campaign, which seems counterintuitive given his catchphrase.

June 30: Colorado’s 8th Congressional District

While the general election for Colorado’s “famously fickle” 8th was expected to be close, the Democratic primary wasn’t supposed to be. Yadira Caraveo, who won a House seat in 2022 before losing to Republican Gabe Evans by less than a percentage point in 2024, is running for a third time, and late last year had a healthy lead in polling.

But then Caraveo dropped out, citing mental health issues. (Staffers have also alleged mistreatment at the hands of Caraveo.) Shannon Bird and Manny Rutinel—both formerly polling in the single digits—are now the Democrats’ top candidates, and they’re beginning to act like it. Both are attorneys; Bird worked in corporate law, Rutinel environmental. Rutinel, a state representative, has come after Bird, a former state representative, for voting alongside Republicans against two immigration bills that would have limited Colorado’s cooperation with ICE. In turn, Bird has suggested Rutinel’s past as a student activist, as well as his criticism of the meat and dairy industries key to the local economy, makes him an easy target for Republicans.

Cook Political Report rates the general election as a toss-up, and the primary’s no easier to predict. The first post-Caraveo poll was released last week: Bird’s at 25 percent, and Rutinel’s at 24, with 45 percent of voters still undecided.

August 4: Michigan Senate

Dramatic wording helps juice clicks and subscriptions, so articles calling state primaries things like “a referendum over the future of the Democratic Party” are common. But the Michigan Senate might be the rare race deserving of the puffery.

Hark back to 2018, and you’ll find Haley Stevens on top of the world, after the former Obama staffer defeated Republican Lena Epstein to flip a key House seat. Stevens’s style of liberalism typified a year in which Democrats reclaimed the House through the strength of center-left candidates (one Politico retrospective was titled “Down Goes Socialism”). A Hillary Clinton robocall even reportedly helped Stevens win her primary—what a thought!

But eight years is a long time. Today, Stevens is not running for a measly House seat but for Senate, and being backed by Chuck Schumer and AIPAC is not the boon it once was.

Opponent Abdul El-Sayed already has a multitude of accomplishments under his belt—Rhodes Scholar, Oxford graduate, physician, former TNR columnist—but becoming the country’s first Muslim senator might be his toughest feat yet. He’s been criticized by liberals for hosting campaign events with Hasan Piker and seemingly lacking moderate appeal. But El-Sayed is an impressive speaker, popular with young people, and his pro-Palestine positions will net him votes with Michigan’s large Arab community.

Attempting to ideologically straddle Stevens and El-Sayed is Mallory McMorrow. A two-term state senator, McMorrow has taken up some progressive positions: She supports a congressional stock-trading ban and is rejecting corporate PACs and AIPAC funds, though she did take money from corporate PACs during her earlier state-level campaigns. (Personal growth or insincerity? Depends who you ask.) She is more moderate on subjects like Gaza, Medicare for All, and ICE reform.

This Senate primary fight is probably the tightest in the country. Most polls show McMorrow and El-Sayed even, with Stevens not far behind; Stevens is even on top in a few recent polls. In a state as nationally predictive as Michigan, the winner of this primary will carry momentum—and nerves—into a general election against presumptive Republican nominee Mike Rogers, who lost the 2024 Senate election to Elissa Slotkin by a mere 19,006 votes.

August 6: Tennessee’s 9th Congressional District

Tennessee is deep red, but its 9th district, which incorporates Memphis, is just the opposite. A Republican hasn’t held the seat since 1973, meaning whoever wins this neck-and-neck primary can book their plane tickets to D.C. right away.

This primary will be another referendum for the Dems on age and ideology. Justin Pearson, 31, is a fiery contender who made waves as a state representative in 2023 for protesting the state’s gun control laws following a school shooting (he was temporarily expelled from the House). While still in his twenties, he founded an environmental advocacy group and helped defeat a planned crude oil pipeline (Al Gore and the Memphis-born Justin Timberlake co-signed the cause). Pearson is understandably popular with leftist groups like Justice Democrats. If he wins, look for plenty of articles to be written about his rise.

Representative Steve Cohen—who is 76 and has held the 9th district since 2007—seems far less interesting at first glance, but that would be doing his career a disservice. The first Jewish person to represent Tennessee in the state House, he is a popular progressive, repeatedly winning reelection by large margins despite critics who argue that the heavily Black district should not have a white representative. Having swatted away various challengers over the years, he can seem aloof, telling Axios in September that it would “be a mistake for somebody to run against me. Whoever succeeds me will probably ... be somebody whom I choose to endorse.” Pearson, though, is only one point behind in the latest polling, so Cohen should watch his back.

One final, more depressing bit of intrigue: Following the Supreme Court’s further gutting of the Voting Rights Act last week, Republicans are pushing to gerrymander the district away before the primary even happens.

The experiment is gruesomely successful. “Suddenly the puppy shrieked, and they set him on the floor, and he went staggering around, with his head all bloody, and the master clapped his hands and shouted: ‘There, I’ve won—confess it! He’s as blind as a bat!’” Twain wrote. “And they all said: ‘It’s so—You’ve proved your theory, and suffering humanity owes you a great debt from henceforth,’ and they crowded around him, and wrung his hand cordially and thankfully, and praised him.” Aileen, the dog that had saved her owner’s child, is rewarded with the killing of her own. Confused about why her puppy is buried in the yard, she grows sick with grief and dies.

Twain’s tragic fable poignantly articulated the writer’s concerns about animal experimentation—his fear, in some cases justified, that men of science were blithely maiming innocent creatures to settle banal scientific disagreements. The National Anti-Vivisection Society, a group that formed in London in 1875 to protest animal experimentation, reprinted A Dog’s Tale in its campaigns to shut down laboratories.

For peak emotional impact, the society’s choice to highlight dogs was smart, as the animals have been human companions for thousands of years. Research even suggests that their brow bones evolved so that we might register their facial expressions more sympathetically. In February of last year, a similar choice was made at a congressional meeting of the Committee of Oversight and Government Reform.

At the hearing, which was called “Transgender Lab Rats and Poisoned Puppies: Oversight of Taxpayer-Funded Animal Cruelty,” three beagle puppies—Nellie, Oliver, and Beasley—sat behind the witnesses testifying. Led by Republican Representative Nancy Mace from South Carolina, the hour-long meeting harshly critiqued the use of taxpayer dollars going to research that uses animals, particularly dogs. “The beagles are a reminder of the real costs of animal experimentation,” Mace said in her opening statement.

As a conservative who once described herself as “Trump in high heels,” Mace may seem an odd champion of animal rights, an issue stereotypically associated with left-leaning groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, which opposes animal testing as well as hunting, eating meat, and wearing fur or leather. But since Donald Trump first took office, the right has increasingly embraced ending the use of animals in scientific research and toxicity testing. In a 2021 press conference, Mace said that animal testing unites the “QAnon side of the party and the socialist squad.” PETA recently sent flowers to the director of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya, and issued a press release with images of posters that said Thank You, President Trump.

During Trump’s second term, the Navy ended testing on dogs and cats, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention started phasing out its monkey research. In April 2025, the United States Food and Drug Administration announced a goal of replacing the animals on which new drugs are tested with “new approach methodologies,” or NAMs, over the next three to five years. In March of this year, it released draft guidance for how companies could include NAMs in new drug applications. (NAMs include human organs-on-a-chip, which reproduce the microenvironment of an organ inside a plastic computer chip; organoids, which are miniature versions of human tissue; computer modeling; AI; and other technologies that mimic the body.) The NIH announced that it wouldn’t fund new grants that use only animal models; proposals must also use human-focused approaches, like NAMs. And in early 2026, the Environmental Protection Agency, which helps determine whether pesticides or other products are toxic, promised to end mammalian animal testing entirely by 2035.

What exactly is going on with the right’s focus on animal welfare? The exact number of animals involved per year in the United States for testing isn’t well accounted for, but it is certainly in the millions. Although the majority are rodents, others, including rabbits, guinea pigs, dogs, cats, and nonhuman primates, are used, too. There are plenty of reasons to want to reduce this number. Not only can experimentation lead to the suffering and death of the animals involved, but the findings from nonhuman animals don’t always translate to humans—especially when it comes to drug development. Many medications fail when they move from animal models to humans, and scientific advancements have dramatically improved the available alternatives to animal testing. The government’s latest moves have “opened up possibilities that I, for one, never imagined,” said a senior policy adviser at the American Anti-Vivisection Society, Eric Kleiman.

But the question of why the government has taken such an interest is complicated. The push originates from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has said he is “deeply committed to ending animal experimentation.” “I actually believe he cares,” Sam Halabi, a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Health and the director of the Center for Transformational Health Law, told me. “He’s been on record for a long time saying he cares about the treatment of animals.” At the same time, scientific decision-making in the Trump administration has been fraught, to say the least. It’s often mixed with politics, as Halabi and his co-authors pointed out in a 2026 paper in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law: “The current period is defined by an alarming intensification of partisan antagonism, administrative disinvestment, and strategic delegitimization.”

Animal testing hasn’t been immune to that trend. At the congressional hearing, Mace repeatedly fixated on “transgender mice,” or mice used in studies on transgender-related health issues, such as susceptibility to HIV and drug overdoses. “The Biden-Harris administration spent 2.5 million taxpayer dollars to study the fertility of transgender mice,” she said, referencing studies that examine the reproductive health of rodents given hormones. “Let that sink in.” Republican Representative Lauren Boebert raised concerns about animal experiments that incorporated fetal tissue from elective abortions and called for more investigation. (It’s worth noting that the fetal tissue would otherwise be medical waste; no abortions are performed in order to obtain it.)

A meaningful reduction in animal testing would require massive investment and policy innovation in drug testing and basic research. Instead, the Trump administration has cut millions in scientific grants. As of March, the FDA had given 74 percent fewer new grants this fiscal year compared to the fiscal years between 2021 and 2024, in part as a result of sweeping layoffs, according to an analysis from Johns Hopkins. The proposed NIH budget has been slashed by billions of dollars. It’s reasonable to wonder whether the rightful desire to reduce the use of animals will be paired with the appropriate resources needed for it to happen at all.

Humans have relied on animals to gain scientific knowledge at least since ancient Greece, when it was forbidden to dissect humans, and physicians turned to beasts instead. Sometimes the use of animals introduced errors into anatomical knowledge, but much of what we know about the human body came from animal dissection. To take one example, William Harvey, a doctor to Kings James I and Charles I, performed experiments on many live creatures, including dogs, eels, and crows, which showed, in 1628, how blood circulated, contradicting accepted facts that went back to Galen. When he removed the beating heart from a living animal, he saw that it was more like a pump propelling blood than an organ sucking blood in. His experiments took place before the invention of anesthesia.

As investigations into physiology and anatomy multiplied, Enlightenment thinkers began to consider the animals’ role in the studies. In Of Duties to Animals and Spirits, Immanuel Kant wrote that vivisection was cruel, but its aim was “praiseworthy.” Any cruelty to animals for “sport” was not justified. Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian who believed that people’s actions should lead to the greatest happiness, concerned himself with the misery of such experiments. He wrote, “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”

Often led by women, the anti-vivisection movement gained prominence in the nineteenth century. Adherents opposed, among other practices, the dissection of animals in public lectures by figures like François Magendie, a French physiologist. Practicing in the 1830s, Magendie seemed to be completely immune to, if not to relish, the act of cutting into awake animals. One medical student who observed his work wrote, “When the animal squeaks a little, the operator grins; when loud screams are uttered, he sometimes laughs outright.” Physiologist Claude Bernard studied thermoregulation by gradually heating animals in ovens, and tested the effects of curare, a neurotoxin that leads to paralysis, by slicing open animals while they were awake and immobile. Bernard wrote in 1927 that he used animals because he did not want to experiment on humans. “If it is immoral, then, to make an experiment on man when it is dangerous to him, even though the result may be useful to others, it is essentially moral to do experiments on an animal, even though painful and dangerous to him, if they may be useful to man.” His wife left him, took the kids, and became a prominent anti-vivisectionist.

The National Anti-Vivisection Society, which was the first body of its kind, protested what it saw as increasingly grisly and careless dissections. The first law to regulate animal testing was England’s Cruelty to Animals Act in 1876, but it angered both sides of the animal experimentation debate. Rather than outlawing the practice, it merely regulated it. Those who dissected animals had to have the proper license, the law stipulated, and the animal must be anesthetized. The experiments could go on as long as “the proposed experiments are absolutely necessary … to save or prolong human life.”

The basic argument of those who experimented on animals was that it was necessary to learn about the human body and disease, and that the knowledge would benefit both man and animal. The argument gained traction as advancements in medicine began to more widely benefit the public. Approximately 1,500 rhesus macaques died for every million doses of the polio vaccine, which saved thousands of lives. Other nonhuman primates gave their lives as scientists learned about organ transplants, lead poisoning, diabetes, and more. The microbiologist Louis Pasteur, who developed the germ theory that revolutionized medicine, proved his ideas by infecting animals. By the mid-twentieth century, polling showed that the public had largely begun to agree that scientific progress required animal experimentation—in part because the fruits of scientific labor had become so obvious.

Benefits also became clear in emerging drug regulation. In 1937, a Tennessee drug company released a raspberry-flavored liquid antibiotic called Elixir Sulfanilamide. The medication was not tested for toxicity before it was sold, and it turned out that the solvent it was made with, diethylene glycol, was poisonous. More than 100 people died before the recently formed FDA could reclaim every bottle. Many of the victims were children, who had taken the medicine for ailments like strep throat. Shortly after, the 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act mandated testing drugs for safety on animals before they were sold.

The carelessness toward animal suffering that characterized some of the earliest stages of medical experimentation eventually gave way to a more thoughtful approach. Twain might be relieved to know that, in the late 1950s, laboratories that used animals adopted the “Three Rs”: replacement, reduction, refinement. The approach is still in place. By this rule, whenever possible, animals should be swapped out or their numbers reduced, and inhumane practices should be minimized as much as possible. Nevertheless, in research and drug testing, animals are by and large still the default.

Animal models are fundamental to experimentation in several areas, said Paul Locke, an environmental health scientist and attorney at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. They’re required by laws that govern bringing cosmetics to market and those regulating environmental chemicals, and they’re necessary for testing drugs and medical devices, as well as basic scientific research. (The EPA handles environmental chemicals, the FDA’s purview is drugs, and the NIH covers basic research.) In cosmetics, however, a shift away from using animals has already taken place. The European Union imposed a market ban on any cosmetic product that was tested using animals, and in the United States, a bill that’s been circulating in Congress for many years, the Humane Cosmetics Act, would do the same.

Change has been slower in drugs and basic research. Indeed, given the long history of pressure to restrict animal testing and the slow pace of progress on that front, it is remarkable that the NIH, the FDA, and the EPA all issued policy pronouncements on animal testing over the last year. The difficulty, Locke said, will be in turning those pronouncements into practice. “How do you do that?” he asked. “If we do want to move away from animals in research and animals and testing, which is something I advocate for, what does the transition have to look like?”

Locke’s interest is not merely academic. He leads a policy lab at Johns Hopkins, where more than a dozen students explore the legal changes that could facilitate the reduction of animal testing. On top of their list is the way alternatives are funded and shown to be effective. “If you want to move from a world where you’re using animals to a world where you’re using these new systems, you’ve really got to invest in that science,” he said.

The federal agencies are making efforts to signal their support. In an emailed statement, the NIH told me that it “increasingly encourages” alternatives to animal testing. The planned Office of Research Innovation, Validation, and Application, or ORIVA, will coordinate NIH-wide efforts to validate and scale nonanimal approaches in partnership with institutes and centers. One example is the NIH Standardized Organoid Modeling Center, which is doling out $87 million for organoid research. But the NIH’s announcements last year left some scientists confused. In a joint FDA and NIH workshop last summer, Nicole Kleinstreuer, an NIH official known as the “animal testing czar,” who is leading the reduction efforts, said that any new funding opportunities should include “language” about the consideration of alternative models to animals. Nevertheless, new grants using animals have been awarded this year.

But even leaders in alternatives to animal testing have received mixed messaging. Last April, Don Ingber, a bioengineer and the founding director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, lost $20 million in grants during the federal freezes on scientific funding. Ingber helped develop a multicellular structure of a human liver-on-a-chip. A week after the freeze, he said, the FDA announced it wanted to reduce animal testing—highlighting his own research.

Ingber believes that the reasons to develop NAMs go beyond minimizing suffering; in many cases, alternative models will be better tools for making medicines for humans than animals are. When tested with 27 drugs, Ingber’s liver chips were more accurate than rodents in determining toxicity. Such chips can focus on different genetic populations, testing how an individual with cancer will respond to drugs or studying a person’s microbiome.

Ingber’s work offers a good example of the onerously slow pace of developing alternatives to animal testing. His chip is currently being evaluated by the FDA’s Innovative Science and Technology Approaches for New Drugs, or ISTAND. ISTAND is a pilot program that was launched in 2020, but evaluation is an arduous process. Furthermore, when the liver chip is qualified, it will be eligible for use only with the specific drugs with which it was tested. If anyone wanted to use the liver-on-a-chip for screening a different medication, it would have to be rigorously qualified all over again. For Locke, streamlining the investment in NAMs and creating policies for their approval are fundamental to any sort of transition away from animals. Ingber agrees. “It’s going to be baby steps,” he said.

A reduction in animal experimentation has been taking place in some places organically. In the U.K., where there’s better data on the use of animals in research, animal experiments went from 4.14 million in 2015 to 2.64 million in 2024. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which agrees on international guidelines for testing chemicals, accepted a computational tool that uses data from previous studies on 430 chemicals as a way to test if a compound will cause an allergic skin reaction. A 2023 generative AI model used data from 8,000 experiments done on real rats to correctly assess the liver toxicity of drugs in 100,000 virtual rats.

But in the U.K., the stated governmental strategy is much more modest than that proposed in recent announcements in the United States. The country aims to quickly phase out those tests where replacements exist, and says that tests in dogs and nonhuman primates will be reduced by at least 35 percent by 2030 using NAMs.

That pace isn’t good enough for some advocates, including Justin Goodman, who has been Mace’s strongest collaborator. Goodman is the senior vice president of White Coat Waste Project, a nonprofit that’s attempting to end all animal testing by attacking the cost of such experiments. Last July, he went on Loomer Unleashed, a streaming show hosted by conservative political activist Laura Loomer. During the conversation, he criticized the NIH for moving too slowly on animal testing, calling out Kleinstreuer in particular. “What’s her name?” Loomer asked. “We want to put her on blast.” Loomer showed a screenshot of her LinkedIn profile. Kleinstreuer later received death threats and had to get 24-hour police protection.

Kleinstreuer’s fatal flaw, according to Goodman, is that she doesn’t believe animal testing can be stopped overnight. Kleinstreuer could not be reached for comment, but shortly after the Loomer show, she posted a response on Facebook: “My statement that NIH cannot phase out animal testing overnight is simply an unfortunate truth based on a complex landscape of legal, scientific, and regulatory requirements.”

On a rainy day in March, I met Goodman at the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in the Annapolis Mall, where abandoned or abused pets from the area are up for adoption. Goodman, who is bald and has tattoos, wore a dark blue Ralph Lauren sweater with the teddy bear mascot on it. He came to veganism through the punk scene, he told me. He has spent time in San Diego, where I grew up, and in his vibe, he resembled a grown-up version of the animal advocates I saw around at vegan restaurants in the early 2000s. He combines a combative anti-authoritarian streak with a sincere morality, plus hand tattoos. At the mall, we walked past caged guinea pigs making their meditative squeals. An employee was cleaning out the rabbit cages. The rabbits stood up on two legs, scrunching their noses at us.

In college at the University of Connecticut, where Goodman studied sociology, he and his wife helped shut down a monkey research lab on campus that used inhumane practices. (“Monkeys were being dragged so violently by their necks that their eyes bled,” he said.) After graduate school, he realized that his heart was in advocacy. At PETA, however, he felt that he was “playing a game of whack-a-mole.” Months of work would go into shutting down a single lab and liberating a few animals.

Eventually he met Anthony Bellotti, a Republican consultant, who founded White Coat Waste in 2011. Bellotti’s speciality is defunding; he advocated cutting spending on both the Affordable Care Act and Planned Parenthood. In a 2014 interview, Bellotti said that, while animal rights is a bipartisan issue, WCW focuses on center-right outreach for strategic reasons: “Taxpayer-funded animal experimentation is a big government program. And if someone thinks big government programs are inherently inefficient, ineffective, and wasteful, then they must also question the government’s $12 billion annual animal experimentation budget.”

In 2016, Goodman joined as WCW’s second full-time employee. He said that he and Bellotti were “totally simpatico” about the approach to target funding. He started going to Republican offices. “They’d be like, ‘Do you know that no animal group has ever even approached us for a meeting?’” In 2020, WCW got its big break: It spread the news that federal funding had gone to a lab in Wuhan, China, during the pandemic. The Trump administration promptly cut the grants. In 2021, WCW doubled down on its focus on Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was an object of ire on the right for his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, and exposed what it called “Beagle Gate,” research funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases on biting sand flies that used beagles as its test subjects. The study, which had led to the death of five beagles, ended early, sparing the lives of 19 dogs. WCW has been partnering with Mace since then. “White Coat Waste has been tremendous,” she said in a recent interview. “They’ve been with us every step of the way.”

Mace may feel genuine concern for animals—she declined to be interviewed—but her support clearly comes with strings attached. In 2024, she introduced a bill to ban transgender women from using bathrooms on federal property, saying that the law was in response to the election of Delaware Democrat Sarah McBride, who is transgender. In response to a comment from another representative, who pointed out that she had used a slur—“tranny”—she repeated the word multiple times. “I don’t really care,” she said. “You want penises in women’s bathrooms, and I’m not going to have it.”

In this context, Mace’s outsize focus on animal experiments related to transgender health begins to make more sense. At the congressional oversight hearing last year, she said, “The Biden-Harris administration was so eager to propagate their radical gender ideology across all facets of American society that they were surgically mutating animal genitals—like, taxpayer money went to that.” Mace questioned Goodman on this topic several times. “I will continue to fight to end all animal testing, including by introducing legislation that prohibits use of federal funds for these cruel animal sex change experiments,” Mace said.

For Goodman, because of his impatience with the pace of government and science, hitching his wagon to a politician like Nancy Mace was a no-brainer. “Regardless of what you think of them about other things, both Trump administrations have done more than any other in history for animals,” he told me.

That claim applies only to research animals, however. The administration has treated animals in general inconsistently. The USDA has reduced enforcement of the Animal Welfare Act, which, among other things, regulates the treatment of animals in research; the agency’s farm animal research department was trimmed to just one remaining staff member. The new dietary guidelines feature a large steak at the top of an inverted pyramid, and Trump has gotten rid of laws that are unfriendly to factory farms, such as regulations on emissions. The U.S. Department of Agriculture proposed increasing the slaughter speed limits at pig and chicken farms, meaning more animals can be killed. Goodman personally cares about factory farming, he said, but in his professional role, he keeps his focus tight on animal testing. In his view, marshaling outrage about costly research that affects animals people like, such as cats and dogs, is a far more effective tactic than alienating meat-eaters.

Mace has indeed been speedy in proposing legislation that combines her fervor to stop transgender research and her opposition to animal testing. In July, she introduced the Transgender Research on Animals Now Stops and Money for Ideological Cruelty Eliminated Act, or the TRANS MICE Act. It would defund any transgender-related animal experiments—cutting, in other words, basic research on transgender health that theoretically could be applicable to other people with hormonal irregularities. Recently, WCW has partnered with anti-abortion groups that are against the use of human fetal tissues in research. Since those tissues are often used in combination with animal models, Goodman said, the groups are “natural allies.” In January, the NIH announced that it would no longer fund studies that use human fetal tissue from elective abortions. I asked Goodman if he worried that politicians might be embracing limitations on animal testing, a popular issue, as a means of bolstering other possibly less popular views, such as distrust of science, or opposition to transgender research or abortion. He said he didn’t care. “I think we’ve saved tens of thousands of animals by talking about transgender animals,” he told me. “For me, that’s worth it.” He was more concerned about how much could be accomplished before Trump leaves office. “Policies are great,” he said. “But they could be reversed on a whim, mostly for political reasons.”

At the mall, Goodman and I paused by a cage of white rats, which were piled in a corner, napping. A small sign revealed that, oddly, the rats had pharmaceutical names: all allergy medications, like Zyrtec or Claritin. The rats’ distant relatives had been used to test those drugs before they were given to humans, I realized. We walked over to look at the cats. A child holding a bag from Lush cosmetics stood next to us. The bag read “End Animal Testing.” Goodman said he had received a $50,000 prize from the cosmetics company. “At the end of the day, I care about being effective,” he said. “I don’t care about anything else. I don’t care about alienating people who care about other issues more than this issue. I’m going to do anything I can and work with anybody to do it. And I don’t care what the collateral damage is.”

One of Goodman’s most radical beliefs is that we should end animal testing before we secure replacements for it. Other advocacy groups are not so dismissive of the imperatives of science. The American Anti-Vivisection Society, for instance, formed a sister nonprofit called Alternatives Development & Research Foundation, which funds projects like brain organoids or chip-based systems. The day after I went to the mall, I met one of its grant recipients, Fenna Sillé, at the Johns Hopkins Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing in Baltimore.

Sillé studies developmental immunotoxicity, looking at how environmental components influence the development of the immune system. There are situations where alternatives aren’t ready yet, Sillé said—usually when complex systems interact with each other. Scientists are working on this technology; for example, you can connect lymph nodes-on-a-chip together with a brain organoid and a liver-on-a-chip. One recent experiment uses stem cells that can develop into basic immune cell types. She and others believe it could be a first-line test to see how chemicals or drugs affect immune cells before the substance is put in an animal. If it is highly toxic, it wouldn’t be given to a mouse. Sillé said that one of the center’s biggest needs is the funding necessary to prove that NAMs work as well as or better than animals.

Goodman’s wishes for speed notwithstanding, it’s unlikely that federal agencies like the NIH and FDA will abruptly put a complete stop to animal testing. They will want replacements for animal models that test toxicity and drugs, and basic research will need proven alternatives. Most likely, some animals will always be necessary. To minimize the number as much as possible requires both additional regulation and generous funding—exactly the type of thing the right typically shies away from. The Trump administration has cut millions in funding for research that it finds unsavory, such as studies on vaccine hesitancy, misinformation, or infectious disease in minority groups. Federal science agencies lost about 20 percent of their staff in 2025. The proposed budget for the 2026 fiscal year includes cuts of 35 percent to any research and development not related to defense. Last year’s 2026 budget proposal for NIH cuts references the funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as exposed by WCW, as part of its reasoning.

When I told Sillé what Goodman had said about NAMs, she paused. “Did you ask him if he takes medication?” Alexandra Maertens, a computational scientist who is developing computer models to test toxicity, chimed in: “I have a pacemaker,” she said. “How are you going to test the safety of a pacemaker in vitro?” Maertens told me that she is unimpressed by the current administration’s support for ending animal testing. “They are using it as a Trojan horse” for other political motives, she said.

But Halabi, the Georgetown professor, thinks that the focus on animal testing is not quite as simple as the administration’s wanting to gouge scientific funding. “There are inconsistencies across the board,” he told me. Yes, the NIH has cut billions of dollars in grants, but those cuts are not actually tied to whether the grants had anything to do with the use of animals. The EPA’s scientific branch, a division that arguably could have helped develop nonanimal models, was just shuttered.

The funding that has been cut was largely for research related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, he said, such as research on the health of minority populations. The administration also cut funding to research coming out of academic institutions that are warring with the administration, such as Harvard University or Columbia. “I think the brandishing of administrative policies against research is a separate and independent priority,” Halabi said.

Nor should the emphasis on ending animal testing be understood as a “political peace offering” to the left, Halabi added. “I haven’t seen this administration seem to care about any of the opinions of anybody in that way,” he said.

It makes more sense to see the effort to limit animals as the pet priority of one idiosyncratic man: Secretary Kennedy. There is a pattern within the current health administration of making quick decisions that are poorly thought through. Halabi said he believed it was reasonable to worry about transitioning away from animal models before alternatives are ready. When it came to ending U.S. Agency for International Development projects, for instance, “virtually no thought was given to the interruption of medical treatment for very poor people in very poor countries,” he said. “And then later, it was a kind of, ‘Oh, whoops.’”

Although NAMs are a remarkable scientific achievement, in some cases they are still a work in progress. At the Johns Hopkins Center, I saw brain organoids with a fourth-year Ph.D. student, Alex Rittenhouse, who is using them to study autism. The organoids look like tiny white specks in a small plastic tube, but each one has almost all the cell types of a brain. To make a brain organoid, Rittenhouse uses donated skin fibroblasts that are turned into stem cells, and then neuronal progenitor cells. The cells begin to self-aggregate on their own, and spontaneously turn into neurons and other cells.

The organoids behave in many ways that brains do: They form synapses and create networks. They have electrical activity that changes over time. They are missing some crucial aspects, however, like a blood-brain barrier, or hormones that fluctuate over the course of a day or month. And, of course, a body.

The organoids do have a major advantage, however: They come from people. “A mouse doesn’t get autism the same way a human does,” Rittenhouse told me. She is using human data, like brain imaging and postmortem brain analysis, and comparing it to how immune cells called microglia behave in the organoids. “If your question is on a cell level, like how microglia are changing in response to different environments, you don’t need a whole animal,” she said.

Still, she conceded, there are obvious cases where it isn’t yet possible to take animals out of the picture. If she were studying how autism affects gut motility, she couldn’t do that with an organoid alone. One of her classmates is using pigs to study spinal regeneration after trauma, research that involves the whole body and requires regrowing intricate parts of the nervous system. “That is obviously a very complicated question,” she said. Using pigs is “sad, but I get it.”

My parents are scientists who developed new medicines for cancer and other diseases when I was growing up. While they didn’t directly test on animals, I know that the drugs they made were tested first in rodents to make sure they weren’t toxic. Many of the compounds weren’t, but they also didn’t work as expected in humans in clinical trials. I’ve felt both grateful that vulnerable patients weren’t the first to try out experimental compounds and frustrated that solving diseases in rodents doesn’t easily help the people who need those cures.

When I was eight, my parents went to a scientific conference in Hawaii, and I tagged along. At a dinner on the beach one evening, the hotel staff dug up a pig from an underground steam oven, a traditional Hawaiian meal. The face of the cooked pig startled me. I hated seeing its open mouth and blank eyes, and yet I couldn’t look away. I became a vegetarian in my early teens, then a vegan in my twenties. In my thirties, I lapsed. Now, although I eat eggs and fish again, I struggle with the choice.

It’s discomfiting to think about the suffering we inflict upon other creatures for our own gain. Even when the research is justified and the benefits are clear, another animal is still losing its life and undergoing what may be a terribly painful experience. If Goodman’s “ends justify the means” actions are too extreme, it seems equally risky for science to adopt the same philosophy about animal research. We should be wary of growing too comfortable testing on animals without considering the alternatives. Yet it’s also obvious that there is political baggage that comes with the current advocacy. Did it matter? I called Peter Singer, the utilitarian philosopher and author of the influential 1975 book Animal Liberation, who writes that we allow ourselves to eat animals, make jackets from their skins, and use them as test subjects in research because we give them a lower moral status than humans. He calls this view speciesism. For him, it’s a type of prejudice similar to sexism or racism.

While it was obvious to Singer that animals should not be consumed as food, he told me, it took him more time to consider the animals used in research. “I accepted the argument that there could be experiments that were justified because of the great good that they did, minimizing, as far as possible, the harm to animals, but maybe not being able to minimize it entirely,” Singer said. He opposes a majority of animal research today, but he is not an absolutist. Indeed, he has gotten flak, he said, from those who are upset that he won’t say it’s always wrong to experiment on an animal. At the same time, he told me, he believes that if we used animals only in cases where there are no alternatives and the benefits to humans are obvious, such an approach “would very dramatically reduce the number of experiments we did on animals.”

But what if the price to pay for mass support for phasing out animal testing is cuts to research on the health of minority populations and an increase in anti-transgender and anti-abortion sentiment? Singer said that, while motivations can help you assess who is doing an action, it’s not crucial to assessing the action itself. “People can do things for good intentions that actually are not justified,” he said. “I think that happens very often, and people can do things for bad reasons that turn out to be the right thing to do.”

Singer lightly scolded me—and all Americans—for being too partisan in my thinking. “I think you can be very worried about cuts to climate science and cuts to vaccine research—some of that is, in my view, crazy—but supportive of cuts to animal research,” he said. “People from across the political spectrum have been saying for years that it is not translating into benefits for humans.” Recently, he co-wrote an opinion piece praising the Trump administration’s recent moves to reduce animal testing. Singer’s critique was a fair one, but I wondered if animal testing, as an issue, could remain unscathed by politics. I couldn’t help but feel that it wouldn’t be quite as easy as Singer was suggesting. Later, when I rewatched Goodman’s testimony, I noticed something I hadn’t before: One of the beagles, rescued from a research study, was playing with a chew toy. The toy was a caricatured figure of Anthony Fauci.

This article previously misstated the following: the founding date of White Coat Waste; Justin Goodman’s title; WCW’s first employee; the date of the Huffington Post interview with Bellotti; Goodman’s post-graduate degree; and the nature of the EPA plan to end some animal testing.

The result was the arrest of a total of 19 people on a mix of federal and state charges, including at least eight who were not present at the demonstration. Of the 19, nine went to federal trial in Fort Worth in February on a range of charges: five for multiple counts of attempted murder of a police officer and unarmed correctional officers; eight for providing material support to terrorists, rioting, and using and carrying explosives; and two for “corruptly concealing” and conspiracy to conceal documents. In the end, Song was convicted of attempted murder, and he and the others of providing material support to terrorists. Daniel Sanchez Estrada, a green-card holder, was not even present at the protest. The government charged him with transporting “a box that contained numerous antifa materials.” In fact, he simply moved a box of anarchist zines, all unrelated to antifa, from his parents’ house to a different house in his hometown of Dallas. He faces up to 40 years in prison.

It may sound like a story from, say, the days of the Palmer raids or Hoover’s FBI. But this time, the government has a new, extremely worrisome arrow in its quiver: the charge of “domestic terrorism” related to its accusation that the protesters were members of a “North Texas antifa terror cell.” “Antifa,” despite what you may have heard about Minneapolis nurses or Iranian mullahs, qualifies as the Trump administration’s Public Enemy Number One, and the administration is preparing to deploy the entire capacity of the U.S. system of justice to destroy not only antifa but also every means of support it can locate anywhere in American society, going so far as to invent an entirely new category of crime to do so.

What is perhaps most important to note about these events is the fact that, despite the prosecution’s consistent claims to the contrary, not only did the government fail to produce any evidence at all tying “antifa” to this protest and the ensuing violence, but there is also no crime anywhere in the U.S. legal code defined as “domestic terrorism.” It’s a made-up category invented by Donald Trump and company to try to criminalize any and all forms of domestic dissent they find overly troublesome. And given the lack of respect for due process, standard procedures, and even common sense inherent relating to so many aspects of Trump’s vengeance-mad political prosecutions, these powers could soon be leveled at literally anyone.

What Is “Domestic Terrorism”?

The MAGA obsession with “antifa” is nothing new, but only recently has it become clear just how profoundly it had affected Trump supporters’ perception of reality. In the wake of the January 6, 2021, Trump-led insurrection, Trump adviser Jason Miller had texted a suggestion that Trump should tweet that “Bad apples, likely ANTIFA or other crazed leftists” had “infiltrated” the alleged “peaceful protest” by Trump supporters. This line was echoed by Fox News. Laura Ingraham reported that night that the rioters “were likely not all Trump supporters, and there are some reports that antifa sympathizers may have been sprinkled throughout the crowd.” Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson told the same lie, as did Republican Representatives Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, and Mo Brooks, all followed up by Rush Limbaugh. It spread roughly 8,700 times across cable television, social media, and online news outlets, according to Zignal Labs, a media insights company. Zignal Labs also found that, in less than 24 hours, the lie that the rioters were actually antifa was mentioned more than 400,000 times online. A single tweet reading, “Remember, Antifa openly planned to dress as Trump supporters and cause chaos today,” received 41,100 likes and shares. By the end of February, fully 58 percent of Trump voters said they viewed the events of January 6 as “mostly an antifa-inspired attack that only involved a few Trump supporters.”

With Trump out of the White House, the alleged problem lay relatively fallow for four years. But it returned with a vengeance following the assassination of right-wing hero Charlie Kirk on September 10, a tragedy that Trump blamed, of course without any supporting evidence, on “Radical Left terrorists.” This time, however, it was more than just talk. Twelve days after Kirk’s killing, Trump signed an executive order designating antifa to be a “domestic terrorist organization.”

Three days later, on September 25, he issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, on “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” In it, Trump attempted to assert that pretty much every single act of political violence since his second presidency began as a “pattern of violent and terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described ‘anti-fascism.’” He blamed what he called “[t]his ‘anti-fascist’ lie” for being “the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties,” insisting that “the groups and entities that perpetuate this extremism have created a movement that embraces and elevates violence to achieve policy outcomes, including justifying additional assassinations.”

Next, on December 4, former Attorney General Pam Bondi followed up with a memo outlining the order’s proposed implementation. While widely leaked, it has never been officially published. In it, she describes antifa as “domestic terrorists” who “use violence or the threat of violence to advance political and social agendas, including opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, or anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality; and an elevation of violence to achieve policy outcomes, such as political assassinations.”

Remember, “domestic terrorism” is a made-up crime. Thanks to the post-9/11 USA Patriot Act, U.S. law enforcement does operate under a much expanded legal designation of “terrorism,” which allows the government to freeze foreign groups’ assets and criminalize support for them; but of course this would not apply to antifa, even were it said to exist in the way that Trump and company pretend it does. And of course, there are already plenty of laws against shooting people or the destruction of property, harassment, and the like. Texas law enforcement officials had no shortage of potential charges to level against the Alvarado protesters. It’s the alleged antifa connection that allowed them to try, and convict, people who they merely claim have provided “support” for the shooting, employing the most tenuous definitions of the meaning of that word.

Trump had tried this same gambit during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, but was stymied by the fact that, back then, even Trump-appointed law enforcement officials still insisted that such designations make a modicum of sense. Then-FBI Director Christopher Wray explained that antifa was less an organization than “a movement or an ideology.” His boss, Attorney General William P. Barr, apparently sought to assuage Trump by insisting that “the violence instigated and carried out by antifa and other similar groups in connection with the rioting is domestic terrorism and will be treated accordingly” and then proceeding to go back to work, pretending that the entire incident had never happened.

Not so Pam Bondi. Her memo instructed the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, or JTTF—made up of multiagency teams of agents, analysts, and other specialists responsible for preventing terrorism and prosecuting terrorism-related crimes alongside local law enforcement—to investigate not only those groups Trump imagines might be guilty of these alleged crimes, but also “institutional and individual funders, and officers and employees of organizations, that are responsible for, sponsor, or otherwise aid and abet the principal actors” as well as “non-governmental organizations and American citizens residing abroad or with close ties to foreign governments, agents, citizens, foundations, or influence networks engaged … funding, creating, or supporting entities that engage in activities that support or encourage domestic terrorism.”

As analyzed by Thomas E. Brzozowski, a lecturer at the George Washington University School of Law who spent 10 years as the Justice Department’s counsel in the Counterterrorism Section, what Trump and Bondi did was “quietly [turn] domestic terrorism authorities into a standing program for targeting one broad ideological camp.” The memo defines the alleged enemy—just as it described the Texas protesters—as “antifa aligned extremists.” Trump and Bondi deemed these people to hold “extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment” and have made pursuit of them the priority focus for JTTF. This approach, Brzozowski writes in Lawfare, “reduces the domestic terrorism picture to one favored antagonist, ‘Antifa,’ a term so elastic it can be stretched over protest movements, community defense groups, and online networks that have never engaged in violence.” In an interview, Brzozowski told me that this framing carries “the potential for groups and individuals to be delisted, debanked, deplatformed,” to suffer “reputational harm,” and to have the JTTF even go after their funders, be they individuals, foundations, labor unions, or whatever, without any crime having been committed.

In a conference call in late January, Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh urged his department to “go big and go loud” with antifa-related indictments. He apparently included in his instructions, according to a New York Times report, a demand that federal law enforcement do more “to attack the funding of these groups,” and he included an order to a group of U.S. attorneys to craft a plan to launch an investigation of George Soros (and, presumably, his son Alex) and their philanthropy and political giving.

State and local government officials who decline to channel resources into these priorities, Brzozowski noted, may be painted as “soft on Antifa” and discover that their access to certain grants or cooperative programs suddenly depends on their willingness to feed the antifa pipeline with tips and referrals. What’s more, it can all be done in secret.

Karen Greenberg, a future security fellow at New America and the author of Subtle Tools, Rogue Justice, and The Least Worst Place, has additional concerns. She told me: “What the administration is doing is essentially decreeing a domestic terrorism statute replete with the willy-nilly targeting of individuals and groups for political reasons, as in the cases of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who were immediately labeled ‘domestic terrorists’ absent any references to fact.” She is especially worried about what she terms a “reliance on the unacceptably broad application” of the term “material support,” as applied to members suspected of belonging to so-called domestic terrorist organizations as defined in NSPM-7. This is “particularly alarming,” Greenberg explained, “as ‘material support’ to officially designated ‘Foreign Terrorist Organizations’ has already been used in overly broad ways to prosecute those accused of being foreign terrorists after 9/11.” Greenberg wondered: “Will individuals who are accused of associating with and sympathizing with so-called domestic terrorists now be subjected to … free-floating persecution without evidence?”

In other words, using any interpretation of an idea or ideology it desires, and based on a made-up category of law, the justice system under Trump can prosecute any individual or institution it so chooses.

What Exactly Is Antifa?

When the FBI’s Michael Glasheen testified before the House Homeland Security Committee last December, three months after Trump’s executive order, he struggled to respond to the most basic questions imaginable about the nature, structure, size, or really anything at all about antifa. Democratic Representative Bennie Thompson asked him, “You said antifa is a terrorist organization. Tell us, as a committee, how did you come to that?” He replied, “Well, the investigations are active.” Glasheen called antifa “our primary concern right now” and insisted that “the most immediate, violent threat” we faced was from these domestic terrorists. When Thompson followed up with the simple question of how many members the group was understood to have, Glasheen replied, “We are building out the infrastructure right now.” Pressed to elaborate, the best he could do was: “Well, that’s very fluid…. It’s ongoing for us to understand that. The same, no different than Al Qaeda or ISIS.” Keep in mind that Glasheen is a professional. He was the Biden administration’s head of the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, and is now, in the Trump administration, one of the bureau’s current five operations directors. (Asked if the FBI had made any progress in its research on antifa-related issues, its press office said it would have no comment.)

In fact, much of what many of us think we do know about antifa is false. Its anonymous, leaderless, and decentralized structure allows outsiders and potential insiders to pretend to speak about or on behalf of the group without any recognized authority to do so. According to the Rutgers University historian Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, who recently felt it necessary to move his family to Madrid after receiving a series of direct threats in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, antifa is, alternatively, an “ideology, identity, tendency, or activity of self-defense practiced by people who seek to combat such social ills as racism, sexism, homophobia, and oppression, which they understand to be the building blocks of fascism.” Its members, Bray told The Washington Post, include “all kinds of radicals, from different kinds of socialists to communists, anarchists and more independent radicals,” united in an extremely loose ideological coalition without anything resembling a national headquarters or even a vertical structure.

“Sometimes I compare it to feminism,” he explained. “There are feminist groups, but feminism itself is not a group. There are antifa groups, but antifa itself is not a group.” As far as what they actually do, Bray said it mostly involves monitoring far-right groups and counterprotesting them, though these actions sometimes devolve into violent confrontations with the same far-right groups, as happened in Charlottesville in 2017. Bray estimates that there are anywhere between 10 and 25 such groups in various localities in the United States where people openly identify with antifa, with the number of those involved in single digits. (My inquiries to various antifa-identified groups online went unanswered.)

Bray traces antifa’s contemporary roots to the efforts in the United States and Canada of activists of Anti-Racist Action, or ARA, who pursued Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and other assorted white supremacists from the late 1980s into the 2000s. Their motto was: “We go where they go.” If Nazi skinheads at a punk show in Indiana handed out leaflets about how “Hitler was right,” ARA was there to kick them out. If fascists plastered racist posters in downtown Edmonton, Alberta, ARA tore them down and replaced them with anti-racist slogans.

Antifa’s tactics inspired a national debate when, on January 20, 2017—Trump’s Inauguration Day—the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer was caught on video getting punched in the face by someone whose identity remains unknown, but who was clad entirely in black and therefore signaled to many an identification with antifa. The question of whether and under what circumstances it was OK to “punch a Nazi” gripped many in the punditocracy, who mostly decided it wasn’t OK, albeit perhaps not that big a deal.

Not long afterward, on the evening of February 1, the group’s prominence rose further, at least in the mainstream media, when former Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos—at the time, among the most prominent of “alt-right” propagandists—was scheduled to give a talk at the University of California, Berkeley.

Yiannopoulos was known to use appearances to publicize his misogyny (“feminism is a mean, vindictive, spiteful, nasty, man-hating philosophy”), Islamophobia (“Muslims believe: when in Rome, rape everyone and claim welfare”), and transphobia ( “I make no apologies for protecting women and children from men who are confused about their sexual identity”). That night, black-clad antifa activists showed up at a larger demonstration against Yiannopoulos, tore down police barricades, launched fireworks, smashed windows, and spray-painted graffiti, all of which was alleged to have resulted in approximately $100,000 worth of damage and the talk’s cancellation, which led to a spontaneous dance party among the demonstrators.

A series of violent clashes also took place in Portland, Oregon, during this period between alt-right groups and antifa with police usually intervening against the latter. Claims and counterclaims make it difficult to know who started what. The highest-profile clash involving antifa, however, took place on August 12, 2017, in Charlottesville during the “Unite the Right” rally. Despite a massive police presence, a series of clashes ensued when the white supremacists, Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and members of various militias who had been chanting “Jews will not replace us” a day earlier were now met with a massive counterdemonstration that included anti-fascists who had prepared for a confrontation. During the chaos, James Fields Jr., a 20-year-old self-proclaimed admirer of Hitler, drove his car into the crowd, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring nearly three dozen others. Famously, three days after the rally in which video clearly demonstrated where the aggression arose, Trump had trouble distinguishing between the guilty and innocent in the melee, insisting that there was “blame on both sides” for the violence, and that there were “some very fine” people among the neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Soon afterward, Merriam-Webster added “antifa” to its dictionary, and The Oxford English Dictionary short-listed it for its “word of the year.”

Christopher Mathias, author of the recently published To Catch a Fascist: The Fight to Expose the Radical Right, has gotten to know many members of antifa, having gained their trust over time by reporting on them sympathetically in HuffPost, where he worked for 14 years. He told me, “Antifa is a network of everyday people from different walks of life with perhaps a couple of demographics overrepresented.” These include trans and queer people, who Mathias believes see anti-fascist work “as kind of an urgent form of community self-defense,” together with “neurodivergent people,” who he said are “very good at this type of research, and who see the kind of recruiting the far right does as targeting neurodivergent spaces online,” and who see “anti-fascist work as also an urgent form of community self-defense.”

To be clear, self-identified antifa partisans are not “liberals” in any of the term’s connotations. They are unimpressed by foundational liberal commitments to ideals such as the right to free speech and free assembly. Anti-fascists will not defend to their deaths anyone’s right to say whatever they want however much they disagree with it. They prefer to disrupt fascist advances, Bray wrote in Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, in ways that range from “singing over fascist speeches, to occupying the sites of fascist meetings before they could set up to sowing discord in their groups via infiltration, to breaking any veil of anonymity, to physically disrupting their newspaper sales, demonstrations, and other activities.” Violence, when anti-fascists do resort to it, is without exception presented as a means of countering or preventing fascist violence. It does not include terrorist violence. There will be no antifa murdering of innocents as a means of advancing the cause in the manner of the old anarchist adage about “the propaganda of the deed.”

The Torch Network today is perhaps the most “organized” of antifa organizations. The group is a renamed successor to Anti-Racist Action that initially began in 1987 as a group of punk anti-fascists who, if this be the word, “organized” around opposition to punk skinheads in Minneapolis. They rebranded, according to Mathias, to appeal to the younger generation with a focus on digital communication. Among their favored tactics was to go dumpster-diving outside the homes of neo-Nazi skinheads, find their true names via the mail they threw out, and then put up “Meet Your Local Nazi” posters in their neighborhoods. The goal, according to their website, is to “disrupt fascist and far-right organizing and activity.” They do so without “rely[ing] on the cops or courts to do our work for us.” They don’t rule out going to court, but they have little faith in the system. “This doesn’t mean we never go to court,” says the website, “but the cops uphold white supremacy and the status quo. They attack us and everyone who resists oppression.” They rely only “on ourselves to protect ourselves and stop the fascists.”

What anti-fascists do best, and most often, is dox. They infiltrate far-right chat groups, both (quite riskily) in person and online and then publish the names and faces of allegedly respectable citizens who participate in fascist forums, demonstrations, and other actions. The point, as Mathias put it in a Guardian piece, is that “antifa’s doxing tactic leveraged existing societal taboos against explicit white supremacy or neo-Nazism to create a social cost for being a fascist. ‘Oh, you want to join a Nazi group? We will name and shame you. You will lose your job. You will lose your girlfriend. Your family will shun you.’” Mark Bray told me that a second “Unite the Right” rally had to be canceled after Charlottesville because “leaders of the far-right groups told their members to stay home because they’re going to get doxed and it’s going to screw your lives up.”

Of course, doxing potentially exposes its targets to violence. At the same time, it’s true that in its doxing campaigns, antifa goes to considerable lengths to protect the innocent. Mathias notes in his book, “When antifa publishes a photo of a fascist with their family, for example, they’ll often blur out the family members’ faces to not make them subject to harassment or other ramifications they might not deserve.” (Antifa will also, as a running joke, often blur out a dog’s face.) He finds their standards for accuracy exacting, noting that antifa-style organizations are “usually made up of working-class and middle-class people” who “typically don’t have a good First Amendment lawyer in their contacts, or the disposable income to pay for one.” The result is that they tend to apply “exacting editorial standards” to their doxing efforts. “Everything has to be right. If anti-fascists do get even a minor detail wrong, a correction and an apology are quickly appended to the top of the article.” All of this has the effect, he averred, “of making a bunch of anonymous anti-fascists, almost all working other jobs, into really good journalists, even if they are almost never recognized as such by the mainstream media.”

The (Mostly) Proud History of Global Anti-Fascism

Regardless of whether one shares their values or approves of their strategies, antifa partisans have every right to be proud of the anti-fascist traditions they feel themselves to be a part of. The first “antifa” organization historians tend to credit was the Arditi del Popolo (the People’s Daring Ones), founded in Rome in 1921 in response to Mussolini’s Blackshirts. It is also perhaps the closest antecedent to what antifa is—and isn’t—today. Bray wrote of the group: The “entire range of anti-fascist militants (communists, anarchists, socialists, and republicans) joined together under the Arditi’s decentralized, federal militia structure.” Joseph Fronczak, a Princeton historian who has written on fascism, noted that unlike, say, another frequently mentioned antecedent, Germany’s Antifaschistische Aktion (Antifascist Action, nicknamed “antifa”), which arose more than a decade later, the Arditi was a truly independent organization that “was about people of different ideologies joining together,” without any specific guidance from any political party, who felt compelled to confront the threat of fascism by whatever means they could find. (The German group was largely a Communist front group, and its members were sent underground by Hitler, using the 1933 Reichstag fire as his excuse.)

Another chapter that deserves to hold a special place in anti-fascist history is “Antifa of Palestine.” The group arose in 1934 on behalf of a vision of a shared Arab and Jewish future and, like the Arditi, was unconnected to any political party. Fronczak explained in his book The Five Ages of Antifascism, “They stressed that local acts of solidarity, exchanged among Arab and Jewish comrades, could bring about liberation for all in Palestine and also could contribute to the global struggle against fascism. They portrayed fascism as a particularly bellicose and terroristic ideology of exclusionary nationalism; they argued that both Zionism and Arab nationalism had succumbed to its influence and further argued that the British Empire had intentionally propagated fascism on the ground in Palestine so as to divide its peoples and thus more easily rule over them.” In July 1935, the group called for joint Jewish/Arab general strike against British rule, which occurred in April 1936 but, alas, ended in violence. An antifa pamphlet blamed the violence on “Jewish fascists, overexcited by the provocations of the Arab coreligionists.” Members traveled to Paris for a conference presented by the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism in September 1936 and to New York in February 1937 to give speeches and to try to drum up support. These events were sponsored, according to a contemporaneous Jewish Telegraphic Agency report, by “the American Antifa Committee,” which included Roger Baldwin, who had co-founded the ACLU 17 years earlier. This visit marked the very first appearance of “antifa” in the United States.

The country saw its first homegrown antifa-style demonstration on November 20, 1934, when, just outside the City College of New York, student demonstrators burned effigies of Benito Mussolini and of the school’s hard-line conservative president Frederick B. Robinson, because he’d invited a group of Italian fascist students to campus. (Robinson called their conduct “worse than that of guttersnipes,” which led CCNY students to wear buttons saying “I AM A Guttersnipe I FIGHT Fascism.”)

In March of the following year, anti-fascists arose in protest of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia at Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church. Its assistant pastor, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., called on the crowd to take up the “struggle against fascism,” adding, “Fascism is eating into the very vitals of our people!” Both events were tied closely to the efforts of the U.S. Communist Party and so were of limited appeal beyond its ideological confines, though independent anti-fascist groups did arise in response to black-shirted marches by Mussolini supporters in Italian neighborhoods in New York and elsewhere.

As Mark Bray observed, one can point to certain small “successes” on the part of these groups, but they obviously failed to stop the rise of fascism. The Republic lost the Spanish Civil War, and fascists arose to state power in Spain, in Italy, in Germany, and elsewhere. But “from the point of view of militant antifascists of recent decades,” Bray said via email, “the question is not whether previous iterations of their politics always won or lost but whether they kept fighting and did everything they could to stop the threat of fascism whether mainstream society approved of it or not.” Certainly, they were on what activists like to term “the right side of history.” And so, given the fact that these groups were not at all afraid to fight violence with violence, “When militant antifascists carry out violent acts, they think of themselves in that tradition.” Joseph Fronczak, on the other hand, calls upon the arguments of the great (anti-fascist) German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, articulated in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” The value of the past in this context is as a means of “appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger.” Those “memory flashes,” Benjamin believed, help with “fanning the spark of hope in the past.”

How the Media Play Into Trump’s Framing

Donald Trump claims that “the radical left causes tremendous violence,” asserting that “they seem to do it in a bigger way” than those they oppose. As is so often the case with Trump and company, however, their accusations can be best understood as accidental admissions. Actual domestic terrorism, or “domestic violent extremism,” as the FBI describes it, has been almost exclusively a right-wing phenomenon in the United States. As sociologists Art Jipson and Paul J. Becker write: “Based on government and independent analyses, right-wing extremist violence has been responsible for the overwhelming majority of fatalities, amounting to approximately 75 percent to 80 percent of U.S. domestic terrorism deaths since 2001.” More recently, the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism stated that, for the three years ending in 2024, all “extremist-related murders” it found were tied to “right-wing extremism.”

These facts have never prevented Trump, his aides, and the right-wing media from asserting the opposite, loudly and frequently. In June 2020, for instance, as Black Lives Matters rallies erupted spontaneously in virtually every city in the United States following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a Buffalo, New York, police officer shoved 75-year-old Martin Gugino to the ground while enforcing a city curfew. Thanks to someone’s phone video, millions of people could watch as the senior citizen’s head hit the pavement, hear the horrific noise it made in doing so, and then watch the police march past him, leaving him lying there, bleeding, eventually causing what his lawyer said was a brain injury. What was Trump’s reaction? Gugino “could be an ANTIFA provocateur,” he opined. His evidence-free musing continued, insisting that Gugino was “appearing to scan police communications in order to black out the equipment” and claiming that Gugino “fell harder than was pushed.” The New York Times reviewed dozens of arrest records and found “no known effort by antifa to perpetrate a coordinated campaign of violence,” notwithstanding “vague, anti-government political leanings among suspects.” Even so, Trump’s Attorney General William Barr joined in the fun, terming violent actions by protesters as “antifa-like tactics.”

The MAGA playbook, as Mark Bray told Al Jazeera in 2017, is pretty consistent. “They have a pretty simple formula: They find something that is uniformly agreed upon as horrific and then photoshop images and claim Antifa is complicit.” When 26-year-old Devin Patrick Kelley murdered 26 people and injured 20 others in a church outside San Antonio that November, for instance, far-right websites created a phony image of Kelley holding a flag reading “anti-fascist action.” Alex Jones made the same claim on his Infowars podcast, describing Kelley as “an atheist [pedophile] obsessed with death” who matched what they called the “classic Antifa profile.” Much the same happened in October 2017, when Stephen Paddock shot and killed 58 people in Las Vegas, and Infowars and others insisted on Paddock’s imaginary affiliation with antifa.

These interventions have partially succeeded in creating an alternate reality in the minds of millions of Americans about antifa’s abilities. Research shows just how central Trump is personally to all this. Curd Knüpfer, a political researcher at the University of Southern Denmark, undertook a study back in 2020 in which he collected 437 articles that mentioned “antifa” from 29 U.S. right-wing or far-right websites, ranging from Fox News and Breitbart to ones most of us have never heard of. He found that without Trump labeling individuals or organizations as antifa, about 20 percent of right-wing media outlets described antifa as “terrorists.” But after Trump did this, they all followed suit.

Last October 23, Trump announced to the country, “I looked the other night, Saturday night, Portland is like burning to the ground and these people are saying it’s just friendly stuff, the whole place is burning to the ground…. That’s like an insurrection.” What Trump had almost certainly seen was a Fox News segment on Portland that used footage of violence and property destruction in that city from five years earlier during the far more intense and widespread protests in support of Black Lives Matter. One of these showed a man getting tear-gassed in the face; the other shows the burning of the base of a downtown fountain. Until he saw the videos, Trump admitted that he “didn’t know that was still going on” in Portland, “but when I watched television last night,” he discovered that “they’re walking and throwing smoke bombs into stores.” He then added a favored false conspiracy of the far right: “These are paid terrorists, OK? These are paid agitators, these are profess—I watched that last night. I’m very good at this stuff—these are paid agitators.”

CNN’s Daniel Dale, like a disembodied voice in the wilderness, has continued to do whatever one person can do to track Trump’s lies, while most of the mainstream media has decided they are not important or just part of the landscape like the sunrise and sunset. Dale tweeted: “Portland isn’t burning. There’ve been protest clashes near one ICE building in a 145-square-mile city. Federal agents used tear gas and smoke Saturday; The Oregonian reported their canisters sparked small fires that rain quickly put out. Fire dept. wasn’t even summoned.” The rest of the mainstream media cannot fairly be said to have ignored the facts described in this story, but they have, crucially, failed to provide the necessary context to understand why they matter and what exactly is the nature of the threat they pose to our freedoms and the Constitution itself. Part of the problem is that historic bugaboo, “false equivalence,” or as it is most frequently practiced among American political journalists, “bothsidesism.”

A Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting study during the month following Charlottesville found that in the six best-read broadsheet newspapers in 2017—The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, The Mercury News of San Jose, and The Washington Post—pundits produced virtually equal amounts of condemnation for both fascists and anti-fascists.

Even more worrisome than this annoying tendency has been the media’s inability to focus on how the pieces of the administration’s assault fit together. Remember, Bondi was driving virtually the entire U.S. federal justice apparatus toward enforcing Trump’s made-up category of crime, which can take in any person or institution that can be said to support it in virtually any fashion. If you hold views that Trump and company believe to constitute “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, or anti-Christianity” or “extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders” while opposing “traditional views on family, religion, and morality,” you are already at risk. That “antifa” does not exist in anything like the fashion that Trumpers and their MAGA minions imagine is beside the point. Virtually all opposition can be attributed, indirectly, to what the Trumpers profess to believe to be a part of an alleged antifa-support network described as “antifa” no matter how tenuous or even imaginary the connection.

Remember, also, none of the nine people convicted in Texas under the “antifa law” have been shown to have a connection to any antifa organization. Bondi’s fantastical depiction of this ragtag group of societally disaffected individuals as “no different” from the MS-13 drug gang ignores the facts that the 19 have no known history of trafficking drugs or engaging in gang violence. Stephen Miller somehow believes that ICE officers are forced to “street battle against antifa, hand-to-hand combat every night, to come and go from their building in Portland.” And Mike Johnson thinks that supporters of the peaceful “No Kings” rallies across America on October 18 last year were “Marxists, the socialists, the antifa advocates, the anarchists, and the pro-Hamas wing of the far left Democrat Party.”

A series of reports earlier this year by Talking Points Memo’s Josh Kovensky demonstrates that “across the country, federal prosecutors are upgrading what would have been routine prosecutions into terrorism cases when they involve people President Trump has cast as his political enemies.” And there can be no question anymore, as The Wall Street Journal put it in a March 7, 2026, headline, that “Americans Are Now a Target in Trump’s Immigration Crackdown.” What lies beneath the Trump administration’s phony antifa panic is the creation of a one-stop-shopping option for the Trump assault on virtually every aspect of American civil, legal, and public institutions he thinks are arrayed against him. So far, we’ve seen him go after universities, law firms, and media companies that he disapproves of; employing the definitions Bondi outlined, he can now accuse them of aiding and abetting alleged antifa “domestic terrorism.”

Don’t forget, moreover, that Kristi Noem stuck to her guns in her final appearance before Congress when called out for her ridiculous claim that both Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed owing to having been caught in an “act of domestic terrorism,” when, in fact, millions of people all over the world saw the videos that clearly disprove this transparently false allegation.

Noem and Bondi may be out, but their departures had nothing to do with these claims. Bondi’s handling of the Epstein files reportedly caused Trump to sour on her, and Noem goofed when trying to pin her self-promotional advertising budget on him. Noem’s replacement, Oklahoma Senator and 2020 election denier Markwayne Mullin, took the same position on the Minneapolis slayings, calling Pretti a “deranged individual” and insisting that Good’s killer “didn’t have an option” and had to “engage.” Rather than an official investigation into those incidents, he suggested instead, “If they’re investigating anything, they need to be investigating the paid protesters, and who’s paying them to obstruct federal officers from doing their job.”

There you have it. U.S. law enforcement has now been directed to go after whomever it wishes to pursue on the basis of a made-up crime tied to an “organization”—if that be the word—that is effectively little more than a nuisance to local cops and actually does some good when it comes to exposing neo-Nazis. And they are doing so with a near-complete lack of transparency regarding their choice of targets and the methods they choose to pursue them. “Antifa,” in this context, Thomas Brzozowski noted, functions as little more than merely “a stand-in for a set of ideas that … the administration is broadly characterizing as effectively progressive, radical, [and] left-wing.” The government is right to investigate crimes. But now, it will be investigating and potentially prosecuting beliefs—and only one kind of beliefs at that.

I know, this is probably not something that you need to be told. Murder is, after all, inherently immoral and a criminal act to boot. Murdering the president of the United States also comes with a high degree of difficulty given his 24/7 protection by a posse of well-trained armed guards. In just about every conceivable scenario, you will likely fail and you will definitely not be able to go back to living your previous life. Still, there are some additional things to consider that are specific to the Trump era itself: whether killing the president won’t make matters much worse, and whether there is a better way to channel your discontent.

Allen is an unusual would-be assassin. There’s nothing about him that reminds me of any number of mass shooters of recent vintage. There’s no air of glory-seeking; no meme-sludge in his rhetoric. In his manifesto, he spends quite a bit of time apologizing to various people in his life for betraying their trust and takes no evident pleasure in the task he’s put himself to doing. (He also seems prematurely disdainful of the security measures that ultimately foiled his plot.) What’s most unique, and perhaps most troubling, is that his decision to try to take the president’s life is, as TNR contributor Elizabeth Spiers noted on Bluesky, rooted in a sense of moral injury.

The Huffington Post’s David Wood, who has written extensively about how soldiers often suffer from moral injury after their tours of duty have concluded, describes the condition as the “sense that [one’s] fundamental understanding of right and wrong has been violated, and the grief, numbness or guilt that often ensues.” In his manifesto, Allen wrote, “I am a citizen of the United States of America. What my representatives do reflects on me. And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” For all intents and purposes, he is saying that he is implicated in Trump’s evident corruption and misrule. “Turning the other cheek when *someone else* is oppressed is not Christian behavior,” he wrote, “it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.”

This is perhaps the most worrying part of this story—that there might be others out there who feel this way, and who might be compelled to take the same action. These are the natural consequences of our current age of elite impunity, in which a corrupt president transforms the government into an instrument of self-dealing and revenge, and justice is perceived as slow in arriving, if it arrives at all. Allen spends a considerable amount of time in his manifesto building the moral scaffolding necessary to accommodate his decision to travel to Washington, D.C., to dole out a quick dose of accountability. Based on his writing, I think he works harder than most would-be mass shooters to illuminate a humane logic for his actions. I still think he draws all the wrong conclusions.

One thing that Allen gets badly wrong is the idea that killing Trump might have provided a short cut to putting things right. I think many people believe this about the efficacy of political violence, even if they would never engage in it themselves. But I’m unconvinced, at least as it pertains to Trump, because MAGA is something of a cult movement, steeped in its own byzantine mythology and awash in conspiratorial thinking. The one thing you probably don’t want to do if you want to bring the country back from the brink of this madness is to give this movement a martyr.

At the moment, MAGA is cracking up under the weight of the Trump administration’s many failings. As Greg Sargent noted about a recent Fox News poll, Trump’s coalition is contracting: “On both his general approval ratings and many major issues, his numbers among voter groups that have reliably supported him in the past are awful. They’re also terrible among the non-Trumpy groups that he pulled into the coalition in 2024.” It seems the worst possible thing anyone can do is interrupt this free fall. Don’t shoot a man who’s busy shooting himself in the foot.

Had Allen been successful in his attempt to kill Trump, he might have altered the thermostatic chemistry of the electorate, goosed Trump’s support, and brought back morally affronted fence sitters who were ready to leave Trump behind. It also might well have touched off a wave of political violence in the other direction—which was a thing he really should have considered before he acted. As it is, I worry that TNR contributor Ana Marie Cox is correct that Cole’s attempt will bond Trump and the White House press corps together in a shared trauma, further eroding the latter group’s already withered sense of duty in holding the administration accountable, thus exacerbating the original problem.

So, at the risk of stating the obvious, don’t attempt to—or even daydream about—assassinating the president. The best path to thwarting Trumpism lies in the deliberations of lawful democracy. This is not a path that favors quick fixes and instant gratification. We must organize in numbers to boot Trump and the GOP from power and install leaders who can command a majority to put things right, up to and including possible impeachment and putting people in jail.

On a more personal note, I was saddened to read that Allen felt alone in his grave misgivings. While he enumerated a community of people surrounding him—family, friends, work colleagues, his church—he separated himself from what sounds like a vibrant network of people rather than seeking them out. Had he done so, he might have found a better path to take that might have relieved his moral injury and contributed much more to the anti-Trump cause.

Around the same time Washingtonians were preparing for this weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, I was catching up with an acquaintance from Minneapolis, who was giving me an intimate view of what it’s like to participate in anti-ICE resistance in the Twin Cities. Her phone was a warren of group chats and text chains in which concentric orbits of organized citizens went about the daily business of protecting their neighbors and keeping watch over their neighborhoods. In Minneapolis and St. Paul, democracy is a well-oiled machine with regular training sessions from skilled political organizers.

One thing she mentioned about those trainings has stuck with me after the events of Saturday night. The trainers told the people they were organizing that sometimes they’d end up on the front lines of ICE violence—that they’d bear witness to some terrible sights, see things that would make them angry. The trainers, she said, made it clear that anyone who did not think they could handle these circumstances without succumbing to violent, retributive impulses needed to find some other role—that there were plenty of other ways they could help where their despair or anger wouldn’t get the better of them.

Given the success of this faction of Trump resistance, we’d do well to heed this advice. There are plenty of things we can do, right now, to fortify our communities and protect our neighbors—to materially impact the lives of others for good, find fellowship along the way, and absolve any sense of moral injury that may be creeping into our psyche. It’s more lethal to Trumpism long-term if we organize in opposition than it is to grab a gun and take a run at the president. I’m sorry that Allen couldn’t find his way to this realization. He might have done some good.

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

CBS News, citing a letter from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, reports that government funds can’t be used to purchase the strips anymore, increasing the risk of drug overdoses. The strips also test for other dangerous substances such as xylazine and medetomidine, which are normally used to sedate animals and have been linked to overdose deaths in people. 

Public health organizations are shocked at the move, because test strips only cost about $1 each and can be used to check illicit drugs in powder or pill form. The director of federal policy  at the Drug Policy Alliance, Maritza Perez Medina, called them a “critical, lifesaving tool.” 

“People are just astonished,” Medina told CBS. “There has been a lot of confusion about where this came from.”

The letter cites a July 2025 executive order from President Trump that prohibits SAMHSA, a branch of the Department of Health and Human Services, from using its funding for programs that “only facilitate illegal drug use.” An HHS spokesperson told CBS that the letter clarifies what SAMHSA funding can be used for, which excludes “practices that facilitate illicit drug use and are incompatible with federal laws.”

In 45 states as well as Washington, D.C., test strips are not considered drug paraphernalia, and Nevada as well as California provide information on where to find them online. Congress protected their use in 2018, and as of last July, the agency still allowed its funding to pay for test strips. 

But that’s over now, and organizations around the country will lose badly needed money to prevent drug overdoses. The executive director of the Kentucky Harm Reduction Coalition, Shreeta Waldon, told CBS that the organization was told it would lose a $400,000 grant, and only has a month’s supply of test strips left after distributing 48,465 strips in the first quarter of 2026. 

“It doesn’t make sense that one day something is an evidence-based protocol, and you decide, because of political climate, it is no longer evidence-based,” Waldon said. “If they follow the science and the data, we would never move in this direction.” 

The Trump administration’s public health decisions, from discouraging vaccines to cutting cancer research, don’t seem to be based on preventing deaths. Drug overdoses occur everywhere, including in rural areas where support for the president is strongest. Now many of those places won’t have a critical tool to save lives. 

On Friday, several civil rights organizations, including the ACLU, the Louisiana chapter of the NAACP, and the National Council of Jewish Women, sued to block Landry from suspending the May 16 primary election.

“Under Louisiana law, the legislature, not the Governor or the Secretary of State, sets the state’s election schedule. Yet, Governor Jeff Landry, aided by Secretary of State Nancy Landry, has purported to unilaterally cancel Louisiana’s 2026 congressional primary election after it has already begun,” read the lawsuit from the National Council of Jewish Women and Louisiana voters. “Ballots were sent to military voters and overseas voters as required by federal law a month ago. Mail ballots were sent to other voters entitled to vote by mail under Louisiana law almost a week ago. As a result, many voters—including among the Petitioners here—have already voted.”

The lawsuit also cited other Supreme Court decisions to argue that Landry cannot change the map this close to the election. “Quite to the contrary, the Supreme Court has historically found that when voting in an election is within months of beginning—and, here, it has already begun—the state must proceed under the invalidated map, and any infirmities must be corrected for future elections,” the suit read.

The lawsuit from the ACLU, the NAACP, and other voting rights organizations is requesting that a state court block Landry’s decision on the grounds that the Supreme Court ruling did not constitute an “emergency” under state law. Landry had already been hit with another lawsuit on Thursday from Democratic House candidate Lindsay Garcia, who argued the suspension infringes on the First, Fourteenth, and Fifteen Amendments.

The aggressive backlash is no surprise, given that this is perhaps the most egregious example of the GOP’s attempt to force through its own congressional maps, no matter how many Black and brown voters are disenfranchised. Prepare for more to come, and from both sides.

The president is now worth an estimated $6.5 billion, up from $2.3 billion in 2024, economic analyst and former Obama administration adviser Steve Rattner told MS NOW Friday. Between August 2025 and January 2026, Trump profited to the tune of $3.02 billion from crypto. It all started a few days before his inauguration in January 2025 when he released his $TRUMP meme coin. 

MAGA supporters rushed to buy the coin, which quickly shot up to a $30 billion valuation and peaked at a price of $45. The president was able to cash in, but many of his supporters were left holding the bag as the price plummeted to only $10 four months later. Now, it is worth less than $2.50, according to Rattner. 

“It is a coin that means nothing,” Rattner said on Morning Joe. “It is like buying a pet rock, except you don’t even get a rock. It has no value. It has no trading value. It’s not used in commerce—nothing.”  

In contrast, Trump’s net worth actually went down during his first term as he restricted his company from making international deals. This time around, his sons Eric and Donald Jr. created World Liberty Financial to handle cryptocurrency assets, including the USD1 stablecoin. The venture has taken in billions from funds connected to foreign governments, including the United Arab Emirates,  

Trump’s business activities, whether they pertain to cryptocurrency or his real estate investments, are blatantly unethical for any government official, let alone the president. His family is taking in billions from foreign governments and profiting off the presidency itself, violating the Constitution’s emoluments clause. Thanks to the Supreme Court giving him near-total immunity and Republicans in Congress purposefully turning a blind eye, he won’t face any consequences. 

Republican Governor Kay Ivey called Friday for a special session next week of the Alabama state legislature to pass new congressional and state Senate maps, and prepare legislation to hold special primary elections.

The move came one day after Alabama’s Attorney General Steve Marshall asked the Supreme Court to allow the state to implement new congressional and state Senate maps that were redrawn in 2023 before being barred by the Voting Rights Act.

In Wednesday’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, the court’s six-justice conservative majority effectively dismantled Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race. While the decision did not eradicate it entirely, the court has raised new hurdles for those seeking to prove a racial gerrymandering claim, and gave its blessing to those who would claim partisan gerrymandering as a legal defense.

The new maps would effectively redraw Alabama’s two Black-majority districts: the 2nd district and the 7th district.

Alabama’s 2nd congressional district, led by Representative Shamari Figures, contains Mobile and Montgomery and would see its Black population shrink from 49 percent to 40 percent, according to the Alabama Reflector.

Alabama’s 7th congressional district, led by Representative Terri Sewell, is Alabama’s oldest majority-Black district and has consistently sent Black Democrats to Washington since 1993. This district includes Selma, as well as parts of Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, and Montgomery.

CJ Pearson, a right-wing influencer, wrote on X that the decision “will likely lead to a COMPLETELY REPUBLICAN DELEGATION!” Pearson, who was one of the first to report Ivey’s move, said that it had been the result of lobbying by Marshall, attorney general candidate Katherine Robertson, and Secretary of State Wes Allen.

Evelio Menjivar, a formerly undocumented immigrant, will be the new bishop for the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston in West Virginia, and Gary Studniewski and Robert Boxie III will be auxiliary bishops in Washington, D.C. The appointments indicate a deliberate choice on the pope’s part to select representatives in the United States who will be similarly unafraid to raise their voices against the Trump administration.

Menjivar, who immigrated from El Salvador to the U.S. in the trunk of a car when he was a teenager, decried Trump’s immigration crackdown last year in the National Catholic Reporter. “The federal government has pursued a ‘shock and awe’ campaign of aggressive threats and highly visible operations of questionable legality that go far beyond mere immigration ‘enforcement,’” he wrote. “We must stand with those at risk … and we cannot let the dark side of anti-immigrant animus take hold.”

Father Studniewski, a former U.S. Army chaplain who serves in the Chevy Chase area, called the January 6 insurrection “very disturbing, very disheartening.”*

“It was a normal day, until all that sickening unrest in the afternoon,” he told Today’s Catholic in 2021. And Father Boxie, who serves at Howard University, was deeply critical of Trump’s war on diversity, equity, and inclusion last year.

“In a lot of ways we have made great progress, but in so many ways, I feel like we’re regressing,” said Boxie. “It’s really frustrating—especially this moment that we’re living in. The attacks on ‘DEI’—I don’t even know what that means anymore. It’s a term that’s been hijacked. It means a lot of things to a lot of different people.”

* This article previously misstated the location of Father Studniewski’s church.

Speaking to the press outside the White House, Trump whined that he should not have to comply with the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which requires the president to withdraw his forces from a conflict after 60 days unless Congress declares war or approves an extension.

“There’s no other country that’s ever done it, it’s never been uh, as you know—most people consider it totally unconstitutional. Also we had a ceasefire so that gives you additional time,” he falsely claimed.

Trump claims it's unconstitutional to seek congressional authorization for war pic.twitter.com/W2rnTOXbDn

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 1, 2026

“We’re on our way to another victory, a big victory. And I don’t think that it’s constitutional what they’re asking for. These are not patriotic people that are asking,” he said.

The irony is that the War Powers Resolution is the only reason Trump’s reckless military campaign in Iran could even be considered constitutional in the first place. According to Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the United States Constitution, Congress has sole power to declare war. The 60-day window is an exception to that rule.

If the War Powers Resolution were totally void, Trump’s war in Iran would be illegal. (It already is, according to international law.)

Trump has simultaneously tried to sidestep Congress’s 60-day deadline by buying into the argument that the clock stopped when a ceasefire was announced halfway through April.

However, the U.S. is already testing the boundaries of its tenuous ceasefire with Iran by installing a military blockade on Iranian ports, an act of war according to international law, and even seizing an Iranian cargo ship. Meanwhile, Israel, America’s ally in its joint military operation, has not stopped its intense strikes in Lebanon, in violation of the ceasefire agreement.

Trump on Friday officially informed Congress that the war was “terminated,” writing, “There has been no exchange of fire between the United States and Iran since April 7, 2026.... The hostilities that began on February 28, 2026, have terminated.”

The War Powers Resolution states that a president must formally alert Congress of any new war they entered into within 48 hours of hostilities. After that, they have 60 days to end the conflict before Congress steps in and either orders them to stop or allows them to continue. Trump’s 60 days are up on Friday, and it appears that even Republicans want to hold him accountable.

“That deadline is not a suggestion; it is a requirement,” GOP Senator Susan Collins said. “Further military action against Iran must have a clear mission, achievable goals, and a defined strategy for bringing the conflict to a close.”

To avoid any of that, Trump is insisting that the war actually ended with the ceasefire announcement in early April, even as Iran continues to block the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. continues to block Iranian ships from leaving, and Israel continues to bomb Lebanon. The ceasefire seems to be holding on by a thread, and does not appear to be an end to the conflict in any way.

Trump on Friday called it “unconstitutional” for Congress to try to rein in his powers.

“We’re on our way to another victory, a big victory. And I don’t think that it’s constitutional what they’re asking for,” he said on Friday. “These are not patriotic people that are asking.... Even the losers, even the ones that say all the wrong things admit that it’s been amazing what we’ve done. The strait is totally shut down, it’s flawless.”

Trump on members of Congress and his war on Iran: "I don't think it's constitutional what they're asking for. These are not patriotic people that are asking." pic.twitter.com/8lrVQvLhcx

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 1, 2026

If this truly is the end of the war, then it’s unclear who the victor even is.

In a Truth Social post, Trump announced that he is “pleased to announce that, based on the fact the European Union is not complying with our fully agreed to Trade Deal, next week I will be increasing Tariffs charged to the European Union for Cars and Trucks coming into the United States.”

“The Tariff will be increased to 25%. It is fully understood and agreed that, if they produce Cars and Trucks in U.S.A. Plants, there will be NO TARIFF,” Trump posted. “Many Automobile and Truck Plants are currently under construction, with over 100 Billion Dollars being invested, A RECORD in the History of Car and Truck Manufacturing. These Plants, staffed with American Workers, will be opening soon — There has never been anything like what is happening in America today! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Why Trump would be “pleased” with the move is one thing, but his claim that several auto plants are currently under construction is misleading at best. Industry experts say that most automakers are not building new plants, but are instead planning to shift their investments years from now. While some car manufacturers have pledged to spend more money in the U.S., they haven’t announced new facilities or manufacturing plants, and their plans may not even happen.

“They will be looking at models that will be coming to the end of their natural cycle, something that occurs at five or so year intervals, and getting ready to announce ‘investments’ to continue the new version of the model at those plants,” Greig Mordue, a manufacturing policy professor at McMaster University, told Al Jazeera.

On top of that, Trump’s decision to roll back much of President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act killed projects to build domestic auto plants, including a $200 million hydrogen fuel cell factory in South Carolina and a $2.5 billion battery factory in Georgia.

It also forced American car companies to eat investments they made in electric vehicles. Ford canceled a $1.5 billion investment in electric vehicles while General Motors had to absorb a $6 billion hit. Meanwhile, Chinese electric vehicles are the most popular in the world, and are beginning to dominate the market.

All these tariffs will do is drive up prices in the U.S., and consumers will have to resort to buying more used cars, or hold off on purchases altogether. Fuel prices are still high thanks to the war in Iran, which Trump is trying to wish away without any real action. This move, at best, is a long-term plan, and at worst, won’t bring any relief or benefits to the average American.

This story has been updated.

More than 6,000 FBI agents were diverted to handling “immigration-related matters” during the first nine months of Donald Trump’s second term, reported The Intercept Friday. The seismic shift has practically redefined the agency and its work.

Prior to January 2025, just 279 agents were assigned to immigration cases. By September, that number was above 6,500, growing the task force by a factor of 23. In total, 9,161 people at the FBI—nearly a quarter of the bureau’s 38,000 staffers—worked on immigration during Trump’s first nine months in office.

The change is larger than previously understood. In October, The Washington Post reported that some 3,000 agents had been reassigned to cover immigration, based on FBI data obtained and circulated by Senator Mark R. Warner.  

“That is a huge, huge number of people,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, told The Intercept of the 6,500-plus figure. “This is just a somewhat shocking scale that we’re looking at.”

The structural shift toward immigration cases is monumental: As the nation’s premiere law enforcement agency, the FBI has historically focused the bulk of its resources on crime. The bureau expanded to include counterterrorism and national security in its purview after 9/11. It has never dedicated this much time and attention to civil matters, sparking concern that the new modus operandi could hinder its criminal investigative work.

“That’s a striking diversion of resources away from public safety,” David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian thinktank the Cato Institute, told The Intercept. “We’re talking about the FBI diverting people away from criminal investigations and ongoing criminal activity and into civil immigration enforcement. 

“This is showing the extent to which the resources of the FBI were put at the disposal of Immigration and Customs Enforcement contrary to the intent of Congress, and the abuse of the funds that Congress grants the FBI to accomplish its mission,” Bier noted.

The FBI is not the only federal agency to massively reorient itself toward immigration since Trump’s inauguration. The Justice Department dropped thousands of criminal cases last year in an attempt to funnel its efforts—almost singularly—toward convicting immigration cases. Altogether, the chief law enforcement agency closed some 23,000 criminal cases in the first six months of Trump’s term, including investigations into terrorism, white-collar crimes, and drugs, while prosecuting 32,000 new immigration cases.

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

At least 16 American installations across eight countries have been struck as part of Iran’s retaliatory strikes against the U.S. and Israeli military onslaught. A U.S. source familiar with the situation told CNN that the scale of the damage was unprecedented.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before.… These are rapid, targeted strikes, with [advanced] technology,” the source said.

The main targets appeared to be multimillion-dollar aircraft. At the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, a Boeing E-3 Sentry aircraft, which provides surveillance, command, control, and communications to the U.S. military, was destroyed. That aircraft is worth nearly half a billion dollars, and is currently out of production.

Other targets of Iranian strikes include critical communications systems. At Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, satellite photographs showed that Iran had destroyed all but one ray dome, a structure designed to protect satellite dishes.

Radar systems will also prove the most difficult to replace. “Our radar systems are our most expensive and our most limited resource in the region,” a congressional aide familiar with damage assessments told CNN.

It was previously reported that 13 U.S. bases in the Middle East had been rendered all but uninhabitable, forcing U.S. military service members to work remotely from hotels and office spaces. Within the first two weeks of the war, Iran’s attacks on U.S. military bases caused an estimated $800 million in damage, according to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a BBC analysis.

During a House Armed Services Committee hearing on Wednesday, Undersecretary of Defense Jules Hurst finally produced a price tag for Donald Trump’s military campaign: $25 billion. But that number does not include the cost of repairing the damage to bases, CNN reported Thursday.

At the same time, Trump has continued to claim that the U.S. has nearly obliterated all of Iran’s military assets—though reports indicate that’s just not true.

Perry Bacon: Good morning, everybody. I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of the New Republic show Right Now. We have some breaking news—this is unusual today. Our guest is Alex Seitz-Wald. He’s the deputy editor of the Midcoast Villager, which is a paper in Maine, and he was already scheduled as a guest.

We were going to talk about Janet Mills versus Graham Platner. But it appears that that is no longer a race going on—Janet Mills, the governor of Maine, has decided to suspend her primary campaign, conceding that Graham Platner is leading and likely to win. Alex wrote the story for the Midcoast Villager, and he’s here to join us now. Alex, welcome.

Alex Seitz-Wald: Hey, Perry. Thanks for having me. Yeah, the news gods must have known that we had this scheduled, and to drop it right before we got online.

Bacon: So this happened about an hour ago, around nine o’clock Eastern time. From what I can see, Mills has made some comments—I’m not sure if it’s a statement or an interview—but she’s saying that she basically has run out of money, or doesn’t have enough money.

I’ll be blunt—does she not have enough money, or is she going to lose and ducking that? The primary is on June 9, and she’s been down in the polls.

Seitz-Wald: Yeah, this is a massive, totally unexpected development. I’ve been following this race closely—I’m shocked, honestly, by this.

I think the money is real. It’s a reminder that in politics you don’t drop out because you have bad press or bad polling—unless you have extremely bad press, like Eric Swalwell—it’s when the money runs out.

I don’t know that she was totally dry, but she had been outspent two to one and out-raised two to one by Graham Platner. She pulled all of her digital ads last week, which was a big tell that money was tight. She pulled TV ads a little while ago. But the writing has been on the wall for a while.

I just noticed today, when I was driving to drop my daughter off at school—I always look at the yard signs—I saw one new Janet Mills yard sign, which brought the grand total to three that I am aware of. Meanwhile there are dozens of Graham Platner yard signs. I’ll pass 25, 30 before I see a single Mills one.

The polling has been pretty consistent, showing Platner up by various margins. Then on Friday—

Bacon: Like 15, more like three—I’ve seen it vary. What’s your sense of it? The numbers have varied a lot.

Seitz-Wald: Primary polling is super tough, super volatile, especially a race like this where everyone thinks you’re going to get voters who don’t typically vote. And the way you do primary polling is you screen out people who typically vote in primaries, but a race like this is going to bring in new voters.

How many new voters? I just look at the direction or the consensus, and I can’t really say how big Platner’s lead is, but when you have nine or 10 polls in a row that show an outside-the-margin lead, that tells you something. There was also—

Bacon: In other words, you think he was ahead and likely to win. He was the favorite, for sure, based on the polling.

Seitz-Wald: Yes, absolutely. He was definitely a favorite based on the polling. He was the favorite based on fundraising. He was the favorite based on the enthusiasm of who turned out—consistently getting these massive crowds at events that he’s doing.

She’s done very few public events, but at the handful that she has, there are empty seats. The vibes, so to speak, were not great. And when you don’t have perfect data, you have to look at all these things, including yard signs.

There was also—and I don’t know if this was the straw that broke the camel’s back—but there was a big development on Friday where Mills vetoed this important bill. There was a first-in-the-nation moratorium on data centers. Maine had gotten out in front of the country, and Mills vetoed it for an understandable reason—I think a very defensible reason—in that there was this one project that was already underway that this town really wanted.

Still, she put herself on the opposite side of an issue that almost all the Democrats in the legislature supported, and most of the Democrats in the voting base supported, as far as we can tell. I heard a lot of plugged-in Democrats telling me, Did she just commit political suicide with that veto on Friday? So that might have been an inciting incident to get her to make this decision.

Bacon: One view is that maybe she was leaving the race already and just decided to do what she thinks was policy right.... Janet Mills is not a bad politician. There’s an anti–data center movement across the country. In a certain sense she must have known this would not be a popular thing.

Seitz-Wald: Absolutely. Maybe she didn’t anticipate how sharp the reaction was. I moderated a forum on Saturday for the Democratic gubernatorial candidates—that’s also an interesting race that’s been totally overshadowed.

First question I asked was: “If you were governor, would you have signed this moratorium? What do you think of Mills’s veto?” And four out of five of the candidates were very aggressively against Mills’s veto, in favor of the moratorium, and the fifth one dodged and didn’t take a pass on it. So she was getting a ton of flak and not a lot of support for that veto.

Bacon: We’re not doing a data center segment, but let me ask: I would assume a state like Maine—Microsoft or Apple is not moving to Maine, probably, no offense to Maine. I’m in Kentucky—we’re in the same situation. But in a certain sense, data centers probably do bring in some jobs. Are people in Maine more anti- than pro–data centers, even though data centers do create some jobs? What’s your sense of the sentiment about data centers on the ground there?

Seitz-Wald: It’s pretty broadly anti, and the big argument that I hear is electricity rates. We already have some of the highest electricity rates in the country. It’s cold in Maine—breaking news—and fuel costs, heating your home, is a huge cost-of-living issue. A lot of people have heat pumps, which run on electricity.

It’s also a very environmentally conscious, conservation-minded state, and that’s both in the progressive hiking-and-kayaking way and also in the more conservative hunting-and-fishing way. And it’s a very NIMBY, anti-development, keep-things-as-they-are state. So there’s a broad consensus against it.

The biggest argument in favor is more about the tax revenue that it would bring, and that’s also a big issue. Some of it is jobs—but this was going to be put in an old paper mill. A lot of parts of the country, industry has gone, and there are huge parts of the state that are really struggling economically.

It would bring some jobs—it would have been a hundred jobs or so on an ongoing basis. But what the local town council, the school board, and the local officials were really excited about was the tax revenue, to take a little bit of the burden off of residents. But that wasn’t enough—

Bacon: It’s hard to ask this question, but Mills leaving this race, is it ... before she entered this race, I looked at the polling—she was a mid-range popular governor. She wasn’t extremely popular, but she wasn’t unpopular at all.

To me, this feels more like a result about Platner being a strong candidate than Mills being a bad one. But there’s a balance there—it’s zero-sum on some level. What drove this result? Why has Platner done so well? Is it because of him, or because of her, or because of both?

Seitz-Wald: I think it’s absolutely both. Platner is—the timing, the man, the moment—it all worked out. He looks like coastal Maine. I know a million guys who look like him. He talks the right way. He straddles that populist-but-also-appeal-to-conservatives divide. So that’s all true.

But a huge part of this—maybe the bigger part—is that Mills frankly ran one of the worst campaigns that I’ve ever seen. It’s shocking to me, as somebody who’s covered a lot of campaigns. She’s been a much better governor than she has been a Senate candidate. She had issues with Democrats where she disagreed with labor or the tribal nations on certain things, but nothing that would have prevented her from getting the Democratic nomination.

But it’s just been this very lackluster, very dated campaign. She’s still running as if it’s 2001, not at all adapting to the new media environment. Last summer, there was this question—is she going to run, is she not going to run—and no one knew. She didn’t put out word to her allies. She waited a long time to get in. A bunch of people who would have supported her were looking around for someone else, and then Graham Platner comes along.

A small thing—she tweeted her announcement on a Friday when she was supposed to go out on a Monday, and it took them four hours to take the tweet down. It’s little—but when you’re the two-term governor, you’re supposed to be the adult in the room.

These basic blocking-and-tackling things just don’t work. Then she just has not held public campaign events. She’s held these private talks where she meets with local leaders. Having covered the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016, it reminded me of the early Clinton campaign stuff, and I kept waiting for her to kick into a higher gear, but it just never really came.

It did her a disservice, because everyone made this connection—her age was the big thing—and everyone made this connection to Joe Biden. This is not a Joe Biden situation. She is not doddering, she is not being protected. I’ve spent time with her—I think she’s very sharp, she’s physically able. I saw her last month, and all her aides wanted to drive from one event to another. It was cold out, and she said, “No, let’s just walk,” and she just walked over.

But voters didn’t see that. I saw that because I was a reporter, I was one of three people with her—the voters didn’t see that because she just was not out and about.

Then she decided to go negative in her TV ads against Graham Platner, which I think really backfired. All her ads were about Donald Trump and not her. So it just felt very disconnected and very dated.

It’s unfortunate—in a small-d democracy sense, voters should get a good, honest choice of all the candidates. She and her campaign didn’t do her that service. Maine Democrats got a disservice too, in not getting a real choice between Mills and Platner, because her campaign was so lackluster.

Bacon: Let me ask two related questions, because you’re saying she didn’t campaign well. One is: Did she want to run, or did Schumer and Gillibrand encourage strongly, and it was their campaign that she was reluctantly running?

And then two: Did she expect to win because she’s the two-term incumbent governor and this guy has never run for anything before, and therefore she assumed voters would rationally come to her?

Seitz-Wald: Those are excellent questions that many people are asking. I don’t know what’s in her head; I can’t say what’s in her heart. But I can say that she did not do nearly enough to combat either of those perceptions, which both became—

Bacon: She didn’t want to do it, she could coast to winning. OK. Interesting.

Seitz-Wald: Yeah. Those became accepted truisms—her heart wasn’t in it, she didn’t really want to do it. I heard Democrats who supported her saying, Maybe she secretly wants to lose, and she’s just doing this to go through the motions. It did seem wishy-washy on whether she wanted to run, and Schumer was pushing her so hard.

Two weeks before she jumped in the race, she praised Susan Collins and said, Susan Collins is doing the best job she can as senator. Things like that. And the perception that she felt entitled to it, or that she was just going to coast to victory—by not holding campaign events, not aggressively campaigning, she didn’t really do anything to combat those notions.

She was going to come into that race with the age issue, with the perception that she felt entitled to it, with the perception that her heart wasn’t really in it. She should have been working from day one to show that she was in it, that she wanted this, that she was going to fight for every vote. And she just didn’t do that.

Bacon: You and I were talking about the comparison between Platner and Fetterman. What do you think about this? This has come up a little bit. The one thing about him that’s been buzzed about has been that maybe we can’t—maybe he—we don’t know. Fetterman has become this more conservative person. Fetterman is also a white guy who doesn’t dress in suits all the time. Talk about that, because—

Seitz-Wald: Working class–coded.

Bacon: Yeah.

Seitz-Wald: Yeah. I could see the comparison coming out of left field—the aesthetics-forward candidates. The biggest thing, maybe, is that they share—or used to share—consultants. The big masterminds behind Platner’s campaign—Rebecca Katz, a longtime New York strategist, and her firm, the Fight Agency. They also do Ruben Gallego. They were the Fetterman people early on.

So I see the concern, and this kind of broader concern that you hear about, that Democrats shouldn’t fall for viral candidates, for candidates who produce a great video—like Amy McGrath, in your neck of the woods—and then end up flaming out.

There was just a story about McMorrow in Michigan deleting all these tweets about how Michigan sucks and she wishes she still lived in California. Another cautionary tale. Go for the tried and true. Maybe these career politicians are boring or not as exciting, but you can trust them—that’s the idea. I totally get that comparison. But if you spend a little bit more time looking at it, it doesn’t really stand up.

First of all, because Fetterman has totally nuked Graham Platner and said, He should get nowhere near the Senate, and I hate him. And Graham Platner has said basically the same thing about John Fetterman. Fetterman’s big issue where he’s broken with the left—there’s a lot of things—but Israel is the big one.

Platner has been incredibly vocal on Israel, to the point that some of his supporters have even been like, a little bit, chill out. If you go way back in Platner’s résumé to his high school yearbook, he was given the superlative “most likely to start a revolution,” and he is holding up a sign saying, “Free Palestine—Free Tibet—Free Chechnya.” The idea that he’s some kind of dark-horse secret AIPAC conservative—I just don’t see it.

It’s different for me here—I know people who grew up with him. His wife is from one town over from me. I know people who were best friends with her in high school. She used to teach at the high school that my daughter will go to when she goes to high school. Not everyone can have that level of understanding, but, you know, not all white men.

Bacon: Haha. I wasn’t going to say it, but I’m glad you said it.

Seitz-Wald: Not always a good defense, but in this case, yeah.

Bacon: The question I was going to get at was: The nationalization of this primary has become a proxy for this progressive versus moderate thing. Senator Warren and Bernie Sanders endorsed Platner. Schumer and Gillibrand endorsed Mills. So that’s nationally how this is playing out. So some of my friends who don’t live in Maine are texting me—who are progressive—Yay, Mills lost.

On the ground in Maine, are these dynamics playing out—the progressives versus the moderates? It seems like Platner’s doing well enough that he’s not just getting the progressive vote, because it can’t be that big. Are those national dynamics playing a big role there, or is this more about local factors on the ground?

Seitz-Wald: Yeah, that’s definitely a factor. More progressive people are more aligned with Platner, and more—establishment-y, moderate, whatever you want to call it—are more aligned [with Mills]. It’s really people who have been in politics more, regardless of their views. That’s definitely a factor, but it’s not the whole thing, and like anything, it’s not as simple as that dynamic.

There have been specific issues where Mills has alienated specific progressive interest groups, especially organized labor, which is not huge in Maine, but there’s not a lot of progressive infrastructure, so they play a big role in what infrastructure does exist.

The tribal issue—she’s vetoed tribal sovereignty bills. There are a number of issues where the median Democratic Party has moved on from where she was, maybe a few years ago on those specific issues. So it’s more about those. But the age factor is really the biggest thing.

Bacon: The age thing is happening nationally—the Biden thing has glommed onto her on some level. Is that what you’re saying?

Seitz-Wald: Absolutely. The age alone, in a different election cycle, maybe would not have been as big of a deal—but put yourself back a year, last summer, when this was all coming up fresh. Trump was still new in office. Those wounds about the Biden fiasco were very fresh, and people felt like this might be Biden again.

I heard many times, people say, I liked Mills as governor, I thought she did a good job, but I think it’s time for somebody newer and fresher and younger.

The other big thing—which has been somewhat captured nationally, but kind of underestimated—is the extent to which Platner has been everywhere. He has been omnipresent. He’s done 65 town halls.

It’s a small state where everybody knows everybody—it’s one or two degrees of separation. When you’re doing 65 town halls where you get 300, 400, 1,000 people at them, you start to hit a critical mass where you are reaching a significant chunk of Democratic primary voters.

He’s gone on every podcast, every Instagram influencer, every local media, every national media. He’s answered all the questions that people feel like have been thrown at him. I know there are a lot of people who feel like he hasn’t answered some questions. But he’s ubiquitous in a way that Mills is not, and that makes people feel at ease with him and connect with him.

Then the aesthetic thing, I think, is totally real. I’ve heard a lot of women say they find him attractive, and a lot of men. The Austin Powers line: “Women want him, men want to be him.” At least in coastal Maine, that look says a lot.

And in a place where there’s a lot of outside money that comes in, and there are all these kind of micro–class dynamics, and people are constantly sizing each other up based on how tall your boots are and how messy your beard is and whether you work with your hands or not—he can connect with working men and women in a way that Democrats often don’t.

Bacon: Let’s finish up by talking about the general election, because I think now we can talk about that a little bit. Talk about this as an observer. What are the advantages Collins has coming into this, and what are the advantages Platner has coming into this?

Seitz-Wald: Collins has a lot of advantages, and I would not undercount her at all. She’s easily the most vulnerable Republican. It is a blue state—it’s not an extremely blue state, but it votes [Democratic] at the presidential level.

But it’s elected Collins a lot. She has massive name ID. People tend to like incumbents. People like to cross party lines and feel like they’re independents and they’re not doing straight-ticket voting.

She has these deep relationships. She doesn’t do them the same way that Platner does; it’s not in public, it’s in private. But she works so hard. I know because I hear from people who are like, “Oh, I was talking to Susan last night,” or, “I got an email from Susan last night at two in the morning.”

She’s just one of these workaholic people who seems to be aware of everything going on at any time in the state, plugging in and contacting people—making that kind of personal connection.

The last thing is seniority. She’s the chair of the Appropriations Committee. This is an old-school dynamic, but in certain states like Alaska or Maine or West Virginia that really do depend on a lot of federal money for infrastructure projects, it goes a long way.

And she has called in all her chips—the Republican Senate leadership, the White House, clearly interested in getting her reelected. So she has just been making it rain all over the state. Hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure projects: A historical society near me just got $100,000 to repair their building, a new bridge, a museum near me just got a new STEM center from money that she organized, the street that I used to live on got a new culvert from money that she supported. She’s put up this map on her website, and it’s saturated with pins of places where she has sent money to.

And that hurt Mills in the primary, where she said, “I’m only going to serve one term,” to try to allay the age concerns. But then Collins and Platner turned around and said, “One term in the Senate—you’re not going to get any seniority.”

Bacon: Reasonable.

Seitz-Wald: Collins has definitely made the gravy train run. I’m sure she’ll take a couple of high-profile votes where she’ll break with Donald Trump, to prove that she’s a moderate—I’m doing air quotes here.

But it’s going to be a really tight race, and I don’t trust the polling. In 2020, Collins was outspent two to one by the Democrat who ran against her and still won by nine percentage points—all the polls had her losing.

This is going to be a really bitter, really tight-fought race. The super PACs are already here. From here on out, until November, it’s going to be [one] political ad after another.

Bacon: What are his advantages? Obviously the age [of Collins] is the big one. And what else—what are you nervous about with Collins? Because Platner’s a little bit—he has a tattoo, he has some disadvantages, obviously—but what are his advantages?

Seitz-Wald: The vulnerabilities are very obvious with Platner. And I wouldn’t discount that other things could come out between now and then—there might be things that the Mills team found, but they didn’t want to put out, just in case. I don’t know—things can come out in a new light.

But the energy, the campaign cadence, the willingness to go everywhere—he’s held 65 town halls. He could do another 100 before November. And again, at some point, you’re reaching a meaningful number of voters and having a personal connection, shaking somebody’s hand, and I do think that goes a long way.

He’s already out-raised both Mills and Collins, and I suspect he will continue to, especially once the institutional Democrats get behind him. And then the kind of fresh-facedness, check on Donald Trump—it’s going to be a Democratic election year. We don’t know if it’s going to be a wave yet, but the winds should certainly be at his back. And that potential for cross-party appeal.

The one big caution I will say, that I think has not been given enough attention nationally: The real swing voters in Maine are not white working-class men the way we often think about them in the Rust Belt or the former union voters. That’s a piece of it.

But the ones that have really mattered are women—educated, middle-aged and older women—who will vote either way. They might be registered Democrats or independents, but they have voted for Susan Collins in the past. They find her reasonable. They find her a good leader who fights—

Bacon: She’s kind of one of them. She’s an educated white woman of a certain age.

Seitz-Wald: Yes. And she’s a very reasonable choice. She brings federal money that keeps your local tax dollars down, and everyone here—no matter how progressive you are—cares about their local taxes, their property taxes. We have an unusually high share of property tax burden, just the way our system works.

I don’t know. It’s a big open question for Platner—does his aggressive maleness, his macho-ness, the anger—does that push some of those women into Collins’s camp? And are there enough men, progressives, or women who feel differently, to make up for it on the other end? I don’t know yet.

Bacon: But the good news is he’s got some of the people who worked with Zohran working with him. He’s got some of Zohran’s fans. But—we wrote a piece in The New Republic about this—Zohran is a very smiley, happy progressivism, and Platner’s more, Things are burning, we need to destroy the bad and rebuild. He’s much more aggressive in a certain way and much less positive, I would say. Is that fair?

Seitz-Wald: A thousand percent. He talks openly about his anger. He was a Marine—he has killed multiple men in combat. He did four combat tours. He was a machine gunner in Fallujah. The tattoos, whether you believe him at his word or not—regardless of the Nazi tattoos—the whole thing speaks to that kind of aggro male thing. He says he’s calmed down, he’s found peace, he’s different now.

But the anger is still very much there, and that excites a lot of progressives in the Bernie wing who are more eager to burn it all down. But it can also turn off a lot of other people. I don’t want to just broad-brush and say “women”—but in Maine, based on the historic trends, coastal educated women—that’s the key group to watch.

Bacon: So Alex, Midcoast Villager—talk about how you all will cover the race. You’re a local outlet, you’re a new outlet. What does it mean to cover a general election that’s going to be covered by everyone?

I’ve learned a lot from this interview because you are there on the ground, but we’re going to have a lot of us coming in from outside. What is your approach to covering this race going to be?

Seitz-Wald: It’s a great question—it’s one that we think about all the time. We are pretty new. We started in September 2024, rolled together with four historic newspapers that go back to the 1800s. As our publisher says, we’re a new newspaper with an old soul—which I love.

We cover Knox and Waldo County, which is the middle of the coast, between Portland and Acadia—or Bar Harbor. For statewide races like this, that’s not really our bailiwick. We are part of the state, but we have limited resources—in case you haven’t heard, things are rough out there for local news.

We need to be prioritizing school board races, select board races, city council races. There are important ballot measures going on, because no one else will be covering those if we don’t. Plenty of people will be covering the Platner–Susan Collins race.

That said, we have some local connections—Amy Gertner, Platner’s wife, is from here. We broke the news on her IVF treatment, going to Norway for that, because she wanted it to go to her local newspaper. Our sister publication, the Ellsworth American—we have the same owner—is Graham Platner’s local newspaper. So we will find our ways to come in.

And given my background covering national politics, it’s going to be targets of opportunity on the big statewide races. But we’re not going to feel like we have to cover the latest developments in the Senate race or the governor’s race, because that can be handled by the Portland Press Herald, the Bangor Daily News, and by all the national folks that are coming in.

But then personally—because I do talk to people like you and other national folks—I do feel like I have a bit of a role to Maine-splain for the rest of the world, because it is a weird, unique place. I know everybody feels that way about their state, but Maine has some strong claims to being especially weird and unique.

And the Villager—the region that we reach has locals with families that go back generations, but we also get these summer people, as they’re called, who come in, national people—we do also feel like we want to educate those people from a local perspective. But it’s always local first and foremost. That’s what local news is all about: doing the stories that no one else can do.

Bacon: Great way to finish—I don’t want to add more to that. Alex Seitz-Wald, thanks for joining me. Thanks everybody for tuning in. We’ll have Kimberlé Crenshaw later this week to talk about the Voting Rights Act ruling from the Supreme Court yesterday, and her new memoir. So Alex, thanks for joining me. Thanks everybody for tuning in. This is Perry Bacon—see you soon. Bye-bye.

Seitz-Wald: Thanks, Perry.

The Washington Post reports that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, which is run by Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, made the error while creating a directory last year to help senior citizens find doctors and medical providers that accept certain insurance plans. In the process, the agency ended up using a publicly accessible database that contained some of the providers’ Social Security information, linked to their names and other personal data.

The numbers were publicly exposed for weeks until the Post flagged it for the agency on Tuesday. CMS did not respond to the paper’s inquiries on whether it had notified any of the providers, or exactly how many numbers were exposed (the Post identified at least dozens).

A CMS spokesperson did tell the Post that the agency was working to fix the problem, blaming it on the providers for entering their information in the wrong fields.

The problem “stems from incorrect entries of provider or provider-representative-supplied information in the wrong places,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “The agency has taken steps to address it promptly and reinforce safeguards around data submission and validation.”

“I don’t even know how [Medicare officials] would get my Social Security number,” one doctor told the Post anonymously out of fear of identity theft.

The issue may have been created thanks to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which laid off hundreds of CMS employees last year, including those who assisted the elderly. On top of that, the directory was full of errors when it was introduced last October, displaying contradictory and incorrect information.

All of this is a recipe for disaster for the disabled and elderly Americans who rely on Medicare, not to mention those whose personal information was leaked to the public. It’s another black mark on the record of Oz, the snake-oil salesman and daytime TV host tapped by President Trump to head the agency.

Satirical outlet The Onion bought the far-right conspiracy network, ending what was arguably Jones’s most successful endeavor and marking the beginning of his descent into irrelevancy. But as the minutes ticked down to dead air, Jones vowed to return to the limelight—even if he doesn’t make a dime.

“They’re turning the power off at midnight,” Jones said, surrounded by people toasting the network. “Private detectives are coming in to close the doors. And they’re gonna act like they’ve got their big ass victory.”

Jones pledged that he already had a new venture in the works where he would continue to air his controversial and baseless beliefs.

“And I will sit there and live in a modest house with a modest car, which I love. And they think, ‘Oh, we’ll take your money,’ Joe, shut up. I’m ready to die for this,” Jones said. “You think taking money from me does something? It makes me want to strangle you spiritually. It’s a joke. It, like, empowers me.”

As Jones rose from his seat to exit, he declared: “The next phase starts, the real war begins now. It’s the nuclear age.”

Jones, of “they’re turning the friggin’ frogs gay” fame, was forced out of his studio as The Onion proceeded with its purchase. The parody company had hoped to obtain legal approval to license the network’s name and brand to turn it into a mockery of itself by Thursday, but instead, the legal case passed to the Texas Supreme Court in what The Onion CEO Ben Collins described as an “insane, unprecedented legal stalling.”

Proceeds from the sale of the network were intended to go to families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, whom Jones still owes some $1.3 billion in damages after he repeatedly branded the tragedy a “hoax.”

The Onion tapped veteran Adult Swim comedian Tim Heidecker to reinvent the conspiracy network. So far, Heidecker has floated a multi-stage redesign, which would first see InfoWars become a parody of itself, mocking Jones’s various money-making schemes in which he aggressively advertised “hacky supplements” or bilked “grandparents out of their life savings.”

“Then we just think that that’s going to get old, but we’ll have built this little brand, or sort of re-established a brand and turn it into a destination for good comedy—a new streaming site, a new comedy platform,” Heidecker told Time.

Sixty-one percent of Americans said that using military force in Iran was a mistake, according to a Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll Friday, placing how Americans feel about Trump’s campaign in Iran on par with attitudes about the Iraq and Vietnam wars.

In May 2006, three years after U.S. forces invaded Iraq, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 59 percent of Americans said that the war was a mistake.

By that point in the war, more than 2,400 U.S. troops had died and the U.S. military was embroiled in some of the bloodiest fighting of the entire conflict. But the Iraq War was still more popular than Trump’s so-called “excursion” into Iran, which has killed an estimated 13 service members.

In January 1973, the same year that U.S. troops withdrew from Vietnam, 60 percent of Americans believed that it had been a mistake to send troops there in the first place, according to a Gallup poll.

Trump has repeatedly bragged about how quickly he would have ended the war in Vietnam—despite the fact that he dodged the military draft multiple times—because of his supposedly resounding success in Iran. But only 19 percent of Americans say that the U.S. military campaign in Iran has been successful, according to the Friday poll.

It’s not entirely clear how that 19 percent arrived at that conclusion. While Trump has repeatedly declared victory, so has Iran.

Georgia’s Brian Kemp said Friday that he isn’t going to cancel the state’s May 19 primary elections in order to draw new maps in time for November, following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais Wednesday, which severely weakened the Voting Rights Act.

Kemp still praised the decision, telling The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the ruling “restores fairness to our redistricting process and allows states to pass electoral maps that reflect the will of the voters, not the will of federal judges.” But it’s too late for the midterms, he added.

“Voting is already underway for the 2026 elections,” Kemp said. “But it’s clear that Callais requires Georgia to adopt new electoral maps before the 2028 election cycle.”

Several Republican-run states, particularly in the South are scrambling to make changes to their congressional maps due to the high-court ruling, including Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, and South Carolina. Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry even announced that he was suspending his state’s May 16 primary elections in order to redraw the state’s congressional map.

Still, Trump is not likely to be happy that one Republican governor won’t follow along with his efforts, especially in Georgia, where the president still claims that Joe Biden winning the state in 2020 was rigged due to fraud. Kemp was in his first term as governor at the time, and Trump held him responsible for not overturning the results. Kemp might see an angry Truth Social post directed at him pretty soon.

It was a lie. He was there, as we have subsequently learned many times, to bat. And not to spray dinky little singles—to swing for the fences. You may recall Jeffrey Toobin’s stunning 2012 article in The New Yorker detailing how painstakingly the chief justice orchestrated the 2010 Citizens United decision to make sure that it went as far as possible in removing limits on the financing of campaigns. The John Roberts of that article was no umpire. He was Mark McGwire juiced up on steroids, trying to smash the ball out onto Clark Avenue.

The subsequent 16 years have shown us the consequences of that decision, which will go down in U.S. history as one of the most corrosive and reactionary holdings of all time—if not right up there with Plessy and Lochner, then awfully close. It has handed our democracy on a silver platter to men who have nothing but contempt for it (Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, etc.).

The other quote is one that I suspect many people will remember, although they may forget the context: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Ring a bell? He said it early in his tenure, when the Roberts court handed down one of its first major decisions, concerning public school integration efforts in Seattle and Louisville.

The court had already restricted forced integration efforts in a 1991 ruling. Then, in 2007, in two joined cases emanating from the above-named cities, the court went further: It ruled that even voluntary desegregation efforts were out the window. Roberts uttered his famous line while reading his 5–4 majority opinion from the bench.

I remember well the predictions in the decision’s wake. Liberals warned that the public schools would likely resegregate. Conservatives said, Oh pshaw, you delicate little flowers; we’re such a different country from 1954, the year of Brown v. Board of Education. Things will be just fine.

Well, guess what happened? In the 19 years since that ruling, the public schools have resegregated. Not to a mild degree. Not to a “concerning” degree. They have resegregated to a shocking degree.

In 2024, Axios published an article based on two recent academic studies and its own review of official data from 1988 to 2022. In the former year, about 7.4 percent of the nation’s schools were “intensely segregated,” meaning at least 90 percent white. By the latter year, that figure had vaulted to 19.8 percent. In addition, Axios’s Russell Contreras wrote at the time, “several states saw about a 20-percentage point or more increase in intensely segregated schools, from 1988 to 2021.”

Mind you, this happened while the racial demography of the United States went from 67 percent white to 58 percent white. In other words, you might have thought that in an increasingly diverse country, the schools would also become increasingly diverse. Instead, the opposite happened.

Now, fast-forward to this week’s Louisiana v. Callais decision on gerrymandering. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the 6–3 majority, assures us that there’s nothing to worry about in the evisceration of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. We’re a different country. We don’t need it anymore. “Vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South,” Alito wrote.

The country has changed for the better in a number of ways, no doubt about that. But has it changed enough that laws to protect minority representation aren’t needed? We’re about to find out.

Consider the following statistics. Mississippi today has a Black population of 38 percent. One of its four congressional districts is majority-minority, for a representation rate of 25 percent. Black Mississippians are ergo underrepresented in Congress. In South Carolina, Blacks make up 25 percent of the population, and one of seven congressional districts was cut for Black representation. That’s 14 percent. So Blacks are underrepresented in that state, as well. And in Tennessee, Blacks are 17 percent of the population but hold zero seats in Congress (0 percent, obviously).

In some other states of the old Confederacy, Black representation is more on par. In Alabama, Blacks are 27 percent of the population and hold two of the state’s seven congressional seats (28 percent). In Louisiana, those population-representation figures are 33 percent and 33 percent (two out of six seats). In North Carolina, they are 21 percent and 21 percent (three out of 14 seats).

Hooray for those three states, I guess. But the question is this: What will those numbers be come 2029, or 2031? It’s hardly going out on a limb to guess that Alabama, Louisiana, and North Carolina will reduce or even possibly eliminate their majority-minority seats. They probably can’t quite get away with that right now in North Carolina, where there’s a Democratic governor. But Alabama and Louisiana, where the GOP controls the governor’s mansion and dominates both legislatures? Louisiana is already licking its chops: After this week’s SCOTUS ruling, its governor announced he was suspending the House primaries on May 16 so the legislature can redraw districts more favorable to the Republicans. It’s hard to believe they’d really have the gall to cut them down to zero. Then again, a lot of things have been happening lately in this country that once seemed hard to believe.

Speaking of which, I find it kind of hard to believe that Roberts, Alito, and other conservative justices this week did not think back to the aftermath of their fateful 2007 decision on school integration. Can they possibly be unaware that schools aggressively resegregated in the wake of that ruling? That seems impossible. And if I’m right, that leaves only one explanation for this week’s decision. They understand the potential consequences quite fully. They just don’t care. Mark McGwire has hit another one, and the bleak outcome, similar to the one liberals predicted in 2007, awaits us.

This article previously misstated the percentage of North Carolina congresspeople who are Black, the number its congressional seats, and which party controls the state Senate.

At least two companies tied to Don Jr. and Eric Trump have won large government contracts, setting the stage for the Trump family to make a sizable chunk of change from their involvement in the federal government.

Powerus, a drone manufacturer led by former U.S. Army Special Operations veterans, was founded last year. Trump’s two sons became tied to the company’s board after it merged with a golf club in March, a decision that took the company public via a reverse merger. The brothers’ investment firm, American Venture, has backed the combined entity, and their boutique investment bank, Dominari Securities, was also involved in the transaction.

This past week, the U.S. Air Force agreed to buy an undisclosed number of drones from Powerus as America’s war with Iran hits the 60-day mark. The company’s co-founder, Brett Velicovich, claimed the decision had nothing to do with its investors’ obvious ties to the White House.

“They’re not going to pick a system because of who’s on an investor list,” Velicovich told Bloomberg. “They’re picking because they need it now.”

There are at least 187 drone manufacturers based in the United States, according to a November report from Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

But that isn’t the Trump family’s only financial coup this week: A shell company backed by Don Jr. and Eric agreed to merge with a major tungsten mine in Kazakhstan that just last year secured $1.6 billion in U.S. government support.

The two brothers bought into a construction company, Skyline Builders, last August, through a special-purpose vehicle arranged by Dominari Securities, sources told the Financial Times.

Weeks later, in September, Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev told Donald Trump that he intended to award a major tungsten project to U.S. investment group Cove Kaz Capital, an entity backed by the U.S. government, to compete against Chinese and Russian mining companies. That story emerged in the press on October 21.

By October 28, Eric and Don Jr. had added almost $24 million to their Skyline investment. On October 31, Skyline paid $20 million for a 20 percent stake in Kaz Resources, a subsidiary of Cove Capital, an investment company that controls Cove Caz.

Cove Capital’s deal with the National Mining Company of Kazakhstan became public on November 6, with an announcement that they would jointly develop “the largest known undeveloped tungsten resource in the world.”

Cove Kaz Capital and Kaz Resources agreed to merge with the brothers’ investment firm, Skyline, on Thursday, reported the Financial Times, which noted that there was no mention of either Trump brother in the merger announcement.

A representative for Don Jr. denied that he had any knowledge of his father’s dealings prior to the initial investment or the merger.

“Don is a passive investor in American Ventures and has no operational involvement in the company,” his spokesperson told the Financial Times. “He does not interface with the federal government on behalf of any company he invests in or advises.”

The War Powers Act Resolution of 1973 states that the president can deploy armed forces in a hostile environment for up to 60 days, but must withdraw if he does not then receive congressional approval for an extension.

As that deadline arrived Friday, Hegseth claimed that the clock on Trump’s 60 days had actually paused when a ceasefire was announced halfway through April. But Republican lawmakers aren’t convinced, The Wall Street Journal reported.

“It stopped from the ceasefire? Which ceasefire? Does the ceasefire still count if they don’t cease firing?” Indiana Senator Todd Young told the Journal Thursday. “I don’t know. Is there any legal precedent to this? I mean, these are the sorts of questions members would ask.”

The U.S. tested the boundaries of the ceasefire by installing a military blockade on Iranian ports, and even seizing an Iranian cargo ship. Meanwhile, Israel, America’s ally in its joint military operation, did not stop its intense strikes in Lebanon.

North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis questioned whether Hegseth understood the legal guardrails placed on his military campaign.

“I’ll let my legal experts tell me if they agree.… I felt like the War Powers Resolution says in 60 days you have to take some action,” Tillis told the Journal.

Missouri Senator Josh Hawley also pushed back on Hegseth’s casual delivery of the claim that congressional approval would apparently not be needed. “The right way to make that argument to Congress would be to put that in writing and send that up here to us,” he said.

Hawley said that if the White House did not officially request an extension, it would be up to Congress to debate legislation to authorize the war. “I don’t really want to do that, because I don’t want to open up further conflict. I want to wind it down,” he said.

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

Public polls are starting to show that Democrats are now more trusted on the economy than Republicans are—a milestone with major implications for the elections. Strikingly, a new memo from Republican operatives just conceded this as well, while sounding a loud warning that the GOP is in danger of losing the Senate. All this is also underscored by fresh economic data. It suggests that the struggles of ordinary Americans could be getting worse.

New Republic staff writer Monica Potts has been doing some really good reporting on what ordinary voters are thinking and feeling about the economy. So we’re talking to her about all this today. Monica, nice to have you on.

Monica Potts: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: So let’s start with the new data. GDP grew at 2 percent during the first quarter of this year, which is better than last year, but still came in under expectations. And inflation just had its biggest spike in nearly three years by one metric, driven in part by gas prices and the war. Monica, it just seems like we’re economically stuck. Is that the right way to think about it?

Potts: I think so. The economy was on a path to recovery at the end of the Biden administration. I think people conveniently forget that the post-COVID era was a really unusual time and we hadn’t seen anything like it in our lifetimes, and a lot of the ways that people consumed changed. Their incomes changed.

The way that we thought about what we needed and what we wanted to spend our money on changed throughout that period. And of course, inflation rose really rapidly. So things were heading back to normal, and actually a report earlier this month from economists at the Federal Reserve found that inflation might have been back to normal had we not had the new tariffs from the Trump administration and some of the other shocks to the economy under his tenure.

Sargent: Yeah, well, this economy is largely the creation of one person, Donald Trump. And I want to get into that in a bit. Politico reports on this new Republican memo that shows striking findings. It’s from Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-backed group. And that’s its own story, which we’ll get to. But for now, I want to read this line from it: “Our internal polling in several battleground states and one-on-one conversations with voters show that for the first time, Democrats are more trusted on the economy and inflation.”

Monica, that’s striking. Other polls have shown this as well. Trump’s 2024 victory was all about the economy and inflation, and Democrats were in just terrible shape on both due to what you talked about, the post-COVID inflation shock. How do you account for this turnaround?

Potts: Well, I think that Trump was riding a long-term advantage that Republicans had on the economy—at least since Reagan, American voters have tended to think that Republicans are better for the economy, largely because of their rhetoric on small businesses, on cutting taxes, and people tend to think that that’s good.

So I think that he came into office with a huge advantage on the economy that he really blew—the first few things that he did as president were to kind of squander that trust that people had. People saw right away that the things he was doing weren’t what they wanted from him. And so I think that that has given an opening for people to think about the Democratic rhetoric on the economy more and to maybe start trusting the Democratic Party more on what they say the economy needs.

Sargent: It’s just kind of amazing because not only did Republicans have this deep built-in advantage on the economy that you talked about, which is largely unearned but goes back many decades, Trump also had this big unearned advantage on the economy. And I was doing some reporting up in Reading, Pennsylvania about what happened with the Latino vote there in 2024, moved towards Trump.

And what I was struck by was how deeply this cultural picture of Trump as this crack businessman who builds big things and makes things happen and is an entrepreneurial spirit, how deeply that had taken hold with a lot of low-information voters. That’s just something that I think Democrats were really unable to do anything about, and yet that’s been pissed away too.

Potts: Yeah, that’s right. And I think people forget that the vast majority of voters aren’t reading the really long investigative pieces that show that Trump actually wasn’t a very good businessman. I mean, you can find all of the evidence that you want to show that Trump inherited most of his wealth. He squandered it—his early successes as a builder or as a real estate person really based on his father’s work. And he was never really the businessman he portrayed on TV, but people still had this idea, this really long-held idea of him as a businessman.

That was his public persona that was really ingrained. And I think that it was always going to take a lot of work to try to chip away at that. I’m not even sure the Democratic Party even really tried. And I don’t know if it would have worked if they had. A lot of people had an idea that he was a businessman. They have an idea that the country needs a businessman—or at least someone who thinks like a businessman—to run it, which is really not how the country runs, but that’s a whole other story. And so it’s kind of amazing that he really has squandered that in just a little over a year, but he has. People don’t believe that about him anymore. They think he’s making the wrong decisions.

Sargent: Yeah. And also the other cultural picture of him is as the guy who fires people, who just makes things happen really quickly, you know? And so—well, here’s another line I want to read from the memo: “As it stands today, our view is that the Republican Senate majority is at risk.”

Monica, I think the Senate map is still awfully hard. Democrats have to net four seats in some really tough states for them. But if there’s anything that can get Democrats there, it’s this kind of widespread economic distress. Can you talk about that?

Potts: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we talked about it a minute ago, but the truth is that there was a pretty substantial number of voters who thought at the end of the Biden administration, the economy is not where I want it to be, Trump’s a businessman and he can get us back. And so that was his huge advantage with a lot of voters in the middle, a lot of independents, a lot of swing voters to the extent that they exist, and a lot of people who were upset about Biden’s economy and so who just didn’t turn out to vote for Kamala Harris, Vice President Kamala Harris.

And so, I think that the fact that Republicans are in this position is completely attributable to Trump squandering that trust with voters. And I think it’s really kind of amazing because Democrats always probably had an advantage in the House—the party that isn’t in the White House has an advantage in the House in the midterms, it’s kind of one of the things you can take to the bank for the most part.

The Senate map is really difficult, but if the candidates are right, if the winds are right, if we are still stuck in Iran, if we’re still stuck in a lot of conflicts globally, if tariffs are still bad, if the price of oil stays high, if inflation is up, if people don’t have faith that the economy is going to get better—you really start to see where Democrats have an opening, I think.

Sargent: So let’s just talk a little more about that point you’re making, which is that Trump created this economy and Trump is the reason that Republicans are in such bad shape on it. It really is an odd situation because for the most part, presidents don’t have that much control over economies. And yet Donald Trump managed to figure out a way to really damage it in just about every conceivable way.

You mentioned the tariffs, which really had an inflationary effect for a lot of people. And then there’s immigration, which I don’t think people usually connect to the economy, but that also had a negative economic effect—it’s had a negative effect on jobs by just reducing the number of immigrants in the country and so forth. And then of course there’s the war as well, which has really spiked prices and we’re really stuck.

He doesn’t seem to be at all aware of the fact that he doesn’t really have a lot of leverage in this situation. He’s just tweeting that he’s got all the leverage and he’s happy to wait—I don’t know, as long as it takes—until Iran finally realizes that he’s the boss and concedes. But if I’m a Republican officeholder, like a vulnerable incumbent Republican in the House, I’m like, dude, you’ve got to stop this war already, we’re just going to get wiped out. Can you talk a little bit about how Trump did this?

Potts: Yeah, it is one of the ironies of our time that people blamed Biden for the economy that was largely out of his control. A normal president who is doing what the job of a president is, is trying to create the conditions for a good American economy, for people to share in economic growth. And it’s kind of hoping that private industry takes us the rest of the way, because America very much believes in its free-market economy ideals.

What Trump has done is a number of things. He enacted tariffs unilaterally, which have had a really big impact both on the price of goods in America and also the impact on our trading partners globally—which has had an effect as well, because people don’t really know what’s going to happen next with Trump.

Some writers have called it the Trump chaos tax. And you could call it the chaos economy because businesses, consumers, anyone who interacts with the economy wants to have some idea of where we’re going. They want to know if it’s a good idea for them to buy a car this month, or if they should refinance their mortgage because rates are going down and they’re going to stay down.

So when you’re making big decisions or even small decisions, you kind of want to have a sense of where we are in the economy. And because Trump is so erratic—he announces policies on his social media platform, he keeps changing his mind about tariffs constantly, he just started wars in Venezuela and Iran kind of overnight without taking his justifications to the American people—all of those things have both real and kind of perceived effects that become real because it changes the way people interact with the economy.

Sargent: Well, related to all this, one of the things that’s interesting in this memo is it calls on Republicans to focus much more on the economy. But everyone knows at this point that Trump isn’t mentally capable of focusing on anything really, except for maybe the ballroom. But he certainly doesn’t have much of an interest in the economy. You can just visibly see that at these events that they try to set up where Trump’s supposed to refocus everyone on the economy—and you just can’t do it.

But even if he were able to, he couldn’t do it effectively because of what we’re talking about here. And what’s just so amazing to me about this is that Republicans all know that Trump is no longer a credible voice on the economy, but they just have to pretend not to know that. You know what I mean? Like they have to say, we really want the president to talk more about the economy, even though they know it wouldn’t do them any good.

Potts: Yeah. I don’t know why they—I feel like they still are relying on Trump to be kind of this magic interlocutor with the American people, that he has some ability to kind of sway them. But you know, some of this too is the inability of the Republican Party to come to terms with the ways that their other policy priorities do clash with the economy. You mentioned before—and I didn’t comment on it before, but I should—is that a lot of the immigration policy is hurting the economy.

There was just an American Tax Fairness report that came out today that a lot of the industries that rely on Latino labor, that employ a lot of Latinos, are suffering because immigration enforcement and immigration policy is so draconian and up in the air. So all of the things that Republicans have concentrated on, that they wanted Trump to concentrate on, are also hurting the economy. And so at some point they have to say, we are actually doing this. Our president is doing this and we are doing this with our policies. It’s not just a side effect or it’s not just circumstances. It’s our policies.

Sargent: Right. And I think the report you just talked about on immigration is really important because it highlights how Trumpism as an ideology is getting us here as well. Because for Trump and for Stephen Miller and for the anti-immigrant nativists around him and so forth, they think that having fewer immigrants in the country is an inherently good thing—like it’s intrinsically good, even if the negative effects on the economy persist, right?

To them, it’s worth it. Like it’s so important to have fewer immigrants in the country that they’re willing to have lower job growth as a result. Like they actually kind of almost say that openly. And so there you have the ideology of Trumpism having a directly negative impact on everybody’s material fortunes basically, right?

Potts: Yeah, and I think the fact that they say it openly—that the effects of their policies are having such an obvious impact on people’s lives—people are seeing it in their local economies. Local business owners are having trouble because their employees are disappearing or people aren’t buying because they’re worried about what’s going to happen down the road.

That sort of makes it clear to voters in a way that nothing else possibly could have. And I think that that’s going to be hard for Republicans too, because they were trying to do kind of like doublespeak for a long time—just to say, immigrants are taking your jobs, which was part of the rhetoric from the Trump campaign at least since 2015. It’s been kind of the core of his identity. I think people have to see now that that’s not true.

Sargent: Yeah, that has certainly been disproven. So just to go big picture and talk about your reporting—there’s this nugget in the memo that I want to bring up. It hails Trump’s tax cut as a landmark piece of legislation. And then like in the next sentence, admits that people’s economic concerns are really profound.

Of course, that tax cut represented a massive upward transfer of wealth, which is exactly what Americans for Prosperity, the authors of this memo, wants. And so what that tells us is that people are struggling under the economy that the plutocrats want. It seems like there’s a big opening for a more populist economic program from Democrats now, right? You did some reporting on this. Is there a way that Democrats could talk about a new direction entirely?

Potts: Yeah, I did reporting earlier this week on a report from Way to Win. It’s a left-leaning strategic group that does polling and kind of strategy for Democrats. And one of the things that they found was that messages that concentrated on a kind of populist economic message—saying, we need to tax corporations, we need to make the economy fairer for the working class—messages like that really did sway people. And people are open to that kind of messaging because they can see now, I think they can feel and see, that there’s an economy right now where the wealthy are looking out for each other, the tax cuts are helping the wealthy, that some of Trump’s billionaire friends are benefiting the most from this economy.

And in the meantime, people are drowning in debt, just trying to pay their energy bills and trying to pay their grocery bills. And so I think that there’s an opening to say that we need to tax corporations more, corporations are treating working people unfairly. There’s a lot of polling, even in swing states, even in states that are kind of more approving of Donald Trump’s presidency than the nation as a whole—voters in those states, voters that are gettable, voters that need to be persuaded to vote for Democrats—they’re swayed by messages like that that say, you know, we need to kind of resort our economy and refocus our economy.

Sargent: And it seems like there’s really an opening in another way too, which is that like everything is really in flux to an unusual degree, I think, right? Because if you sort of think about the trajectory from Reagan to now, like all of a sudden, everything’s kind of up for grabs and up in the air.

We had the COVID shock and the inflationary shock of that. And that was a really profound experience for a lot of people. I think it was really disorienting and dispiriting and shook people up a lot. It allowed Trump to swoop in and do this amazing comeback or whatever.

But then you have a right-wing populist—to put it in polite terms—coming in and actually doing the stuff, like doing the agenda of right-wing populism. Tariffs, immigration restrictionism, America First, pissing on our alliances and so forth. And that’s a disaster. So is there sort of a different kind of opening now to take charge of people’s understanding of these big questions that maybe wasn’t there before?

Potts: Yeah, I think so. I think there’s a new kind of hunger from voters—and especially younger voters who don’t remember Reagan—to focus on workers, to think about worker power, to focus on government provision of expensive services like childcare. You know, a lot of millennials now—the youngest millennials, I think, are in their 30s almost, or are there already—these are people who are ready to buy homes and start a family, and they’re kind of seeing the long-term effects of the Reagan-era policies that concentrated power among a lot of big businesses, that diminished worker power, that diminished wages over time.

And I think that there’s a new opportunity then to tell a different story about the American economy, which is one that allows for thinking about building the economy from the worker up, to think about the kinds of institutions that can be countervailing forces against big corporations, to think about refocusing political power on the working and middle classes. I think there’s a lot of people, but especially young voters, who are very hungry for that.

Sargent: Yes. And the younger voters are among the constituencies that moved to Trump, just like the non-white working class. And so to those voters, maybe the right-wing populist stuff sounded somewhat credible, right? Like it’s anti-elite, it’s about workers, it’s about power, it’s about worker power in some way, even though we know that it’s sort of a sham.

And so has it been sufficiently discredited? Has Trumpism, has right-wing populism—have those things been discredited enough to create an opening to do something new?

Potts: I think so. I mean, at least right now, a lot depends on what happens in the next year or the next two years. And a lot probably depends on what happens with how the Democratic candidates and the Democratic Party as a whole take up the story. Because there were a lot of things that Trump said that did sound good to people. And he’s not putting his money where his mouth was. He’s not fulfilling that.

And the people around Trump are traditional Republicans doing traditional Republican things—tax cuts to the wealthy, concentrating power, taking away rights from women, taking away rights from minorities, immigration enforcement that’s draconian and not in accordance with American ideals. And I think that that just really does give an opening for the Democratic Party to potentially solidify those young voters as their voters for life because they’re kind of gettable, I think, in a lot of ways now still.

Sargent: I think that’s really well put. Folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to check out Monica Potts’s stuff at NewRepublic.com. It’s great—it’s on these topics very regularly. Monica, thanks so much for coming on. We really appreciate it.

Potts: Thanks so much for having me.

Soon, this mounting human and economic disaster will crash into another climate-changed summer. Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency, warned last week that the world faces “the biggest energy security threat in history.” Surging jet fuel prices and shortages threaten everything from commercial air travel in Europe to fighting wildfires in the western United States. Making matters worse, a potential super El Niño could trigger heat waves across Asia, further increasing demand for air conditioning and, accordingly, fossil fuels. Droughts or flooding from that weather pattern could force hydropower stations to shut down or reduce output, compelling hydropower-dependent regions to increase their demand for increasingly scarce, pricey supplies of oil and gas. The combination of extreme weather and shortages of gas-derived fertilizers that typically flow through the Strait of Hormuz stands to exacerbate a looming, climate-fueled global food crisis.

While the Trump administration certainly doesn’t seem too concerned about the crises its reckless, illegal war of choice is exacerbating in other parts of the world, the war is continuing to influence one of the few things Trump genuinely seems to care about: gas prices. In the U.S., they have soared to almost $4.30 per gallon. For the U.S., though, war in Iran risks a lot more than pissing off voters who are paying more at the pump. As the war drags on, more countries are souring on the idea that oil and gas are reliable and necessary ingredients for a thriving economy. The White House, meanwhile, is going to elaborate lengths to safeguard the fossil-fueled growth model its war is endangering.

The Trump administration’s recent wave of foreign interventionism has arguably been impelled by its booming fossil fuel production. If the U.S. were still a net importer of oil and gas, that is, the White House might have seen the prospective closure of the Strait of Hormuz as an unacceptable risk. Well before Trump, the U.S. saw its ability to export these fuels as an essential part of its economic vision, locking other countries into dependency on its oil and gas in the name of energy security. With plenty of attractive alternatives on the table, though—and from much less petulant sources—that’s starting to look like a bad deal.

Some nations are starting to chart out energy futures that depend less on fossil fuels and the U.S. Leaders from nearly 60 countries gathered this past week in Santa Marta, Colombia, to discuss getting off of fossil fuels. Part of the inspiration for the meeting was that powerful fossil fuel producing countries—namely Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the United States—have made such discussions virtually impossible at U.N. climate talks. Selwin Hart, special adviser to the U.N. Secretary-General, pointed out in Santa Marta that three-fourths of the world’s population live in countries that are net importers of fossil fuels. For every $10 increase in the price of oil, the energy consultancy Ember noted recently, net-import costs rise by about $160 billion annually. “So today,” Hart continued, “the urgency of transitioning away from fossil fuels is no longer only a climate or environmental imperative. It is a security imperative, an economic imperative, and a development imperative.”

This kind of talk isn’t new: Climate advocates have long argued that ditching coal, oil, and gas can help insulate economies from fossil-fueled volatility. Wars in Russia and Iran, however, have helped underline the urgency of that message. Steep declines in the price of renewable energy—thanks largely to China—have made it much more possible for even fast-growing countries to reduce their reliance on imported hydrocarbons in key sectors like power and transportation. For the first time last year, renewables provided more power than coal worldwide.

The war in Iran has helped accelerate shifts that were already underway—and confirmed any and all suspicions that the U.S. is an unreliable partner for energy security. The New York Times’ David Wallace-Wells pointed out recently that China’s solar, battery, and electric vehicle exports grew by 39 percent between February and March of this year. Its exports to India, Laos, and Malaysia more than doubled; exports to Kenya, Ethiopia, and Nigeria more than tripled. Chinese solar exports to Africa grew by 176 percent. In Australia—which imports nearly 80 percent of its gasoline and diesel—battery E.V. sales doubled compared to March 2025, and Japan’s E.V. sales nearly tripled. Climate pledges that a few years ago might have sounded like watery virtue signaling now seem to have a bit more heft behind them. At the Colombia conference, France announced a “first of its kind” fossil fuel phaseout plan, which aims at transitioning off of coal, oil, and gas by 2030, 2045, and 2050, respectively.

These developments don’t amount to anything like a smooth glide path toward a clean energy future. Countries that have fossil fuel reserves are rapidly drawing up plans to tap them. Bloomberg reports that Malaysia’s Petroliam Nasional Bhd., for instance, “will reinvest a potential windfall from higher oil prices into its domestic gas fields” to try to reduce the country’s reliance on imported liquid natural gas. Many countries in Asia are boosting output from aging coal-fired power plants.

Whether consciously or not, the Trump administration is resorting to increasingly desperate measures to ward off a future where its carbon-intensive products are less important. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has now spent nearly $2 billion bribing developers to ditch offshore wind projects. At the end of March, the Agriculture Department announced it was halting the Rural Energy for America Program, which has helped tens of thousands of farmers and rural business owners install solar power. Congressional Republicans want to impose an annual $250 fee on E.V.s. Abroad, U.S. officials are mounting a full-court press at the International Maritime Organization to halt plans for a quasi–carbon tax in the global shipping industry.

The irony, of course, is that the Trump administration’s reckless war on Iran has imposed an implicit carbon tax that’s leagues more ambitious than anything the IMO might hope to enact. The continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz is driving up fuel and commodity prices, forcing drillers to halt production, pushing governments and consumers alike to consider lower-carbon alternatives, and endangering what not too long ago had been considered promising growth markets for U.S. companies. In attempting to cling onto U.S. hegemony and global energy dominance, Trump might be ending both.

But if there is one millennial archetype that the media cannot resist, it is the try-hard girl-woman. Just this spring, writer-performer Lena Dunham published Famesick, a memoir about how being the “voice of a generation” meant working her mortal, chronically ill body into the ground. And earlier this year, in Life After Ambition: A “Good Enough” Memoir, writer Amil Niazi lays out the particularities of being a Pakistani Canadian millennial in a family without money, navigating atmospheres that left no room for error. “Did those gold stars or participation trophies really warp me,” she asks, “or did the promise that anything was possible if I was ambitious cause me to self-destruct?”

Looking back to the 2000s and 2010s, no one raised her hand higher or completed more extra-credit assignments than Anne Hathaway. Breaking through in 2001 with The Princess Diaries and going on to play a Cinderella figure in the 2004 Ella Enchanted, Hathaway came on the scene as the girl next door ready for her makeover montage. This positioned her perfectly to play the role of Andrea “Andy” Sachs in the 2006 film adaptation of Lauren Weisberger’s Anna Wintour–inspired roman à clef, The Devil Wears Prada. Under the unwilling tutelage of first assistant Emily (Emily Blunt), journalism grad and second assistant Andy struggles to gain the approval of Runway magazine’s Wintour-esque Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep). “This place that people would die to work, you deign to work,” scolds Runway’s fashion director, Nigel (Stanley Tucci). “And you want to know why she doesn’t give you a kiss on the forehead and put a gold star on your homework?”

Here we go again with the gold stars. The Devil Wears Prada had all the favorite tropes of the 2000s: a women’s magazine writer who aspires to serious journalism; a cute boyfriend who, subsequent rewatches reveal, is a self-absorbed jerk; an older woman supervisor-mentor whose tough love inspires the heroine to be true to a new and improved version of herself. It is also relentless in its attacks on women’s bodies, with Hathaway’s character flippantly referred to as the “smart, fat girl” in the office. It’s a satire of the fashion world, fine, but it also bought into many of the pressures placed on young women at the time.

The original Devil Wears Prada is a time capsule in a multitude of ways, down to the statement necklaces and the pageboy hat. The new sequel arrives after a long cultural reckoning with the toxicity of the turn of the millennium, and appeals to a demographic that is definitely older, potentially wiser, and demonstrably interested in exchanging generational nostalgia for cold, hard cash. Everyone here is slightly more understandable, more human—it would be hard not to be after 20 years of being a beloved character in a cult movie—and, as a result, the sequel never hits the unforgettably confident stride of the original.

First off, it must be said: All sequels are try-hards. Sequels need to serve the fans while striving to attract a new audience; to exploit what people most loved about the original by upping the ante (but leaving room for a third installment); and, if possible, to issue any corrections for the original. The Devil Wears Prada 2 aims for all of these except, perhaps, attracting new viewers. There are too many references to the original—from Andy’s blue sweater (“cerulean”) to the warning to “never go upstairs” in Miranda’s brownstone—to suggest new fans are a priority.

The film starts when Andy, now an accomplished writer for the New York Vanguard, is laid off by text—just as she is winning a journalism award. Her stirring acceptance speech on behalf of the fifth estate goes viral, attracting the attention of higher-ups at Runway. The magazine, and Miranda especially, is under fire for a poorly sourced feature on fast fashion, so Andy is brought in as their new features editor. Miranda doesn’t remember Andy—or, at least, that’s her head game of choice—and proves initially hostile to her old protégé’s return.

A lot has changed in 20 years: the magazine “book” that must be delivered to Miranda’s home is treated less like a biblical scroll than a DoorDash delivery, as Runway is largely digital; Miranda is no longer permitted to belittle employees within earshot of H.R. and has been reduced to hanging up her own coat, a move Streep executes with clumsy, yet regal, aplomb. Nigel is still executing Miranda’s vision without credit or approval, whereas Emily has moved on to a leadership role at Dior, one of Runway’s biggest advertisers.

But it’s not just the characters or the circumstances that have shifted, but the storytelling itself. Even as Streep stole the show the first time around with her frosty performance, the first Devil Wears Prada was entrenched in Andy’s point of view and her character arc. Would Andy become one of the fashion girls—what she and her boyfriend call the high-heeled “clackers”? And was joining the so-called “dark side” at Runway smart or just sad? In the midst of Andy’s fairytale journey, Emily was her rival, Nigel her fairy godfather, and Miranda the ostensibly evil stepmother shrouded in mystique.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 reserves top billing for Hathaway, but, now, the film is jointly told for and by all the leads from the original. Blunt has the most to do as a divorced mother of two who is just as determined as ever to succeed but might, this time around, want a friend too. Nigel’s long-suffering status as Miranda’s right-hand man is, unfortunately, one of the only notes Tucci gets to hit, though he plays it to the tune of some hefty screen time. (If Benoit Blanc can have a famous boyfriend cameo in Glass Onion, the second Knives Out film, why not our Nigel?)

And by getting too close to the Dragon Lady herself, the movie paints Streep into a corner, never allowing her to go too big and mean nor satisfyingly soft and vulnerable. (The millennial try-hard can’t quit a toxic boomer boss. Maybe she’s born with it; maybe it’s mommy issues.) She still tosses out her cutting remarks and politically incorrect insults, but the movie is so solidly Team Miranda that it grants her both a sexy yet age-appropriate partner (Kenneth Branagh) and the gift of empathy, a trait she never exhibits in the original.

To recount the plot points of The Devil Wears Prada 2 would be both dull, as exposition always is, and pointless, since no one watches these movies for narrative. The impeccably styled Hathaway, Streep, and Blunt can stride down city streets, through glamorous parties, and across helipads with the best of them, and that’s what the people have come to see. But, ultimately, the movie tries to do too much. Critiques of corporate consolidation in journalism (though film studios are tactfully never mentioned) and artificial intelligence are interspersed with various B-plots, including a budding romance for Andy, the teasing possibility of an Andy-authored Miranda Priestly exposé, and more than one crack at the frozen egg game. Some of it comes together, and some of it doesn’t.

The original Devil Wears Prada, for all its millennial blind spots, was as tight as an on-trend bandage dress, every scene working in service of a modest tale about ambition. It was a story in which women’s careerism is somehow both the hero and the antagonist—an ambivalence that the sequel resolves to resolve, once and for all. The Devil Wears Prada 2 just tries to do too much in its two-hour running time. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a cargo pant.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 does one thing better than its predecessor: It explains the why behind the work.

In the first Devil Wears Prada, Andy accidentally walks in on Miranda having a fight with her soon-to-be-ex-husband. Piqued beyond reason, Miranda demands that Andy get the unreleased manuscript of the upcoming Harry Potter book for her twin daughters, poised to fire her if she cannot complete this impossible task. Still, with the help of a sexy jerk in publishing, Andy gets the book, xeroxed and bound, a copy for each girl, and presents it coolly to her boss. “Anything else I can do for you?” Andy asks, a smile on her lips and an expletive in her eyes.

This is the try-hard’s revenge: to overdeliver, to achieve the unachievable, so as to be rewarded with … what exactly? If she hadn’t gotten the manuscript to Miranda, she would have been fired, but because she did, a different strain of misery and self-esteem erosion inevitably follows. The first prize for the pie-eating contest, as you well know, is more pie.

The Devil Wears Prada captured its millennial audience with the story of a recent graduate, a perpetual A student, still finding her way. Two decades later, these characters might still be chasing success, even the approval of others, but at least they know why they work as hard as they do. It is not just Andy and Miranda but new characters like Andy’s art dealer friend (Tracie Thoms) or the reclusive ex-wife of a billionaire (Lucy Liu) who express a keen appreciation for art and beauty. This second film is not just about fashion, then, but vision, taste, and craft in an era that values none of those things. It’s no wonder, and no accident, that one of the major set pieces of the film takes for its backdrop Leonardo da Vinci’s mural The Last Supper, a testament to artistic genius that can now be rented out for swanky events.

If girl-on-girl violence is the driving force of the first film, it is a passing threat in the sequel, where the bad guys are literally bad guys. The heterosexual male villains include an athleisure-wearing executive (B.J. Novak) and a space-obsessed, water-phobic billionaire (Justin Theroux) whose only endearing quality is that he thinks the model’s name is “Candle Jenner.”

Theroux’s character in particular, at turns goofy and chilling, dreams of a world in which fashion magazines would not be just paperless but people-less, literally soulless. A mix of Musk and Bezos, his monologue on art without humanity is probably one being uttered in studio boardrooms all over town, as makers and even performers are making the choice to embrace artificial intelligence.

But the women of The Devil Wears Prada 2 want to use their time, their effort, and their money to make things that are special and unique. If this is what it means to be try-hard, then good. To butcher a Mad Men quote: That’s what the trying is for. Even if the film itself cannot live up to its own lofty proclamations of artistic excellence, this sentiment alone is enough, I have to believe, to warrant more than the perfunctory gold star.

Rick Hasen, a UCLA law professor who specializes in election law, described Wednesday’s court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais as “one of the most pernicious and damaging Supreme Court decisions of the last century.” Hasen, whose research was cited in Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent, is hardly a firebrand. He argued that Democrats must now “consider reform of the Supreme Court itself, a conclusion I had been resisting until the Court made this unavoidable.”

I agree. On racial and political gerrymandering in particular, however, there is another important reform that a Democratic Congress and president could also implement at the next opportunity: abolishing the House’s current system of single-member districts and electing members by proportional representation instead.

Article 1 of the Constitution gives Congress the power to set the “time, manner, and place” of federal elections. States administer elections within the bounds that Congress sets for them. For the first half of the nineteenth century, Congress allowed states a certain amount of discretion to devise their own electoral system, so long as it elected the apportioned number of representatives to the House. (The Senate, which would not become elected until the early twentieth century, is not at issue here.)

Many states adopted single-member districts. Under this method, which survives to this day, state lawmakers divide the state into congressional districts, each of which elects a single representative to the House. Like any electoral system, this approach has some benefits—greater regional diversity, direct constituent representation, and so on.

It also has some drawbacks. The most obvious of these is gerrymandering. The term derived its name from Elbridge Gerry, an early American statesman who served as governor of Massachusetts from 1810 to 1812. His tenure coincided with the 1810 census and the reapportionment of House seats that occurs every 10 years. To maintain control of Massachusetts’s state legislature, Gerry’s fellow Democratic-Republicans drew an obviously manipulated map to maintain their majority. After Gerry signed the new map into law, Federalist denunciations ensured that the practice became forever associated with his name, to Gerry’s great consternation.

This is fairly rote stuff for high school American civics. What is less well known is that single-member districts weren’t the only method of electing House members in the early republic. One common alternative was known as a “general-ticket” election. Under this system, voters would cast votes for as many candidates as there were seats, and the candidates who received the most votes would be elected to those seats.

General-ticket voting had problems as well. For one thing, it essentially transformed each state’s House races into a winner-take-all system, with one party often able to win an entire state’s delegation with a simple majority of votes. While Northern and Southern states both used general-ticket elections at first, the method was eventually associated with Southern states that wanted to maximize the Democratic Party’s control of Congress.

Some larger states also used what were known as “plural districts.” Under this method, a single district would elect the top two candidates to the House on a general ticket. Some states, like New York and Pennsylvania, mixed plural districts in urban areas with single-member districts for rural ones. Others, like New Jersey, divided themselves into multiple plural districts.

Perhaps the best example of the early republic’s patchwork system is the Thirteenth Congress, which served from 1810 to 1812. Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, New Hampshire, and Vermont used the general-ticket system, with each one resulting in one-party slates. Maryland, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania elected representatives through at least some plural districts, producing a mixture of party representation. Massachusetts, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia exclusively used single-member districts, with similarly diverse results.

Only in 1842 did Congress begin to standardize House elections. Until the 1920s, lawmakers would adopt a new Apportionment Act after each census to expand the House of Representatives to match the nation’s population growth. The Apportionment Act of 1842 was a milestone because it sought to reduce, not grow, the number of House seats for the first time. It also sought to constrain how each state elected its representatives.

With the new act, Whig lawmakers sought to dismantle single-party rule in the South and increase their own chances of securing a House majority in the future. By this point, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Rhode Island still used the general-ticket method. Southern Democrats argued for a greater role for states in determining how federal elections could be run, but the Whigs’ reading of Congress’s election powers won out.

The 1842 act was less successful than its drafters had hoped, in no small part because Democrats retook the House in the following election and seated members elected by general-ticket systems anyway. But the law hastened the country’s drift toward single-member districts. Only a few states retained statewide at-large districts into the twentieth century. Finally, in 1967, as part of a legislative negotiation over reapportionment after the Supreme Court’s “one man, one vote” rule, Congress formally forbade any other method of electing representatives to the House.

This diversity of House electoral methods shows that single-member districts, though now ubiquitous, are not an intractible constitutional command. What Congress makes, it can also unmake. Democratic lawmakers in recent years have proposed bills that would require states to elect members via proportional representation instead. Proportional representation can take a number of different forms, but in the general strokes, it would allocate each state’s House delegation according to the ratio of votes that each party received.

Abolishing single-members districts would re-enfranchise tens of millions of Americans who have no real opportunity to cast a meaningful vote for a House candidate. In the 2024 elections, voters in Texas cast roughly 6.2 million ballots for Republican candidates and 4.3 million ballots for Democratic candidates. Thanks to the state’s harsh gerrymander, Texas Republicans won 65 percent of the seats despite obtaining only 58 percent of the vote. Some states had even wider disparities: North Carolina Republicans won 10 of the state’s 14 congressional districts despite only obtaining 52 percent of the vote.

Under single-member districts, millions of voters in each state are effectively disenfranchised by preordained outcomes in their House seats. Proportional representation’s benefits would not be exclusively felt by Democrats, of course. That same year, California voters cast nine million ballots for House Democratic candidates and 5.9 million ballots for House Republican candidates. Though Democrats only received 60 percent of the vote, they captured 76 percent of the state’s House delegation.

Since many House seats are only competitive in the primary elections, single-member districts also produce more extreme candidates by insulating lawmakers from a broader segment of the electorate. Most Americans do not live in a competitive House district, giving them little influence over their own representation. Since 2010, when the GOP embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering on a national scale, the Senate has arguably become more representative than the House since its candidates must answer to a broader, more diverse electorate.

A group of House Democrats introduced a bill in 2025, for example, that would require any state with six or more House seats to create multimember districts under proportional representation. For states with five or fewer House seats, members would be elected at large instead. It would also require ranked-choice voting, which is not strictly necessary for proportional representation but may be incorporated into it.

I’ve called for Congress to adopt some form of proportional representation for the last few years. But reforms are particularly urgent after the Supreme Court’s malfeasance on gerrymandering. It was no surprise that the conservative justices demolished what was left of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais this week. But the way in which they did it suggested that the nation’s ongoing redistricting wars may have played a role.

The court originally appeared set to decide that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act’s limits on racial gerrymandering were no longer needed now that Jim Crow had been dismantled and Black electoral participation had risen far above its pre-1965 levels. While that reasoning was present in the final opinion by Alito, it played a secondary role to his interest in protecting partisan gerrymandering.

The Supreme Court had ruled in 2019 that federal courts could no longer hear partisan-gerrymandering claims. What was framed as a lamentable practice that courts could not solve in 2019 was now an important state interest that must be protected in 2024. “The upshot of Rucho [v. Common Cause] was that, as far as federal law is concerned, a state legislature may use partisan advantage as a factor in redistricting,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court. “And litigants cannot circumvent that rule by dressing their political-gerrymandering claims in racial garb.”

I will not claim to have any special insight into Alito’s private thinking on this case, nor that of any other justice who participated in it. But it is hard to escape the sense that Democrats’ embrace of partisan gerrymandering over the last year—driven in response, of course, to Trump’s own demands to retain power in this year’s midterms—may have played a role in how the Supreme Court framed Callais.

After all, Democrats in California, Illinois, and Virginia can pursue extreme partisan gerrymandering without risk of Voting Rights Act litigation because their own states are much more racially diverse. But Republicans face an inherent hurdle when trying to maximize their own seats, particularly in the South: They can only gerrymander away so many seats before they eventually run into the majority-minority districts created through past VRA litigation. Since Black voters typically vote for Democrats in unusually lopsided margins, partisan gerrymanders tend to become racial gerrymanders, as well, past a certain point.

Given the choice between the VRA and the court’s racial gerrymandering precedents on one hand, and the prospect that the GOP might face a structural asymmetry in American elections on the other hand, the conservative justices sided with the GOP. The results will be catastrophic for Black electoral representation in the South, both in the House and in state legislatures, where Congress has no power over redistricting.

Proportional representation may not be the panacea for all that ails our nation’s politics. But it stands the best chance of ensuring that Americans will have competitive congressional elections no matter the state in which they live. It is indisputably constitutional, derived both from Congress’s own Article 1 powers as well as past diversity in electoral methods. And it would make it impossible for state legislatures to deny fair representation to any American because of their race ever again by making gerrymandering—whether racial or partisan—a thing of the past.

With Donald Trump’s active encouragement, Republicans are already seizing on the ruling—which essentially dismantled protections against racial gerrymandering—to threaten to redraw maps in the South to eliminate numerous congressional seats with Black representatives. While it’s largely too late to do so this cycle, Republicans will likely launch mid-decade redistricting in many Southern states heading into 2028, eliminating as many as 19 more Democratic seats in hopes of locking in a near-permanent GOP majority.

In substantive and legal terms, this outcome is awful—see this overview from TNR’s Matt Ford for a full rundown—but in a purely political sense, is this Armageddon for Democrats? Not necessarily. The reason? Democrats can move to redraw maps in time for the 2028 elections in states where they control the legislatures.

Which points to one big takeaway from the court ruling: State legislative races—which already attract too little attention—just got a lot more important. Many races underway now will help determine the party’s long-term prospects in the scorched-earth conflict that’s about to unfold.

According to a new analysis by Fair Fight Action, a voting rights group, Democrats could redraw anywhere from 10 to 22 additional congressional seats for the party in time for the 2028 elections if they push hard with redistricting in seven blue and swing states. The analysis—which is circulating among Democratic leadership aides and outside groups and was obtained by TNR—concludes that being aggressive could theoretically offset Republican gains, even in a maximalist GOP redistricting scenario.

“Democrats have a clear path to neutralize this GOP power grab if they want to take it,” Max Flugrath, senior communications director of Fair Fight Action, told me. “This is the ‘break glass in case of emergency’ moment for American democracy.”

The range of potential Democratic gains is so broad because so much depends on which party controls key state legislatures after the fall elections. Strikingly, even if Democrats flip zero chambers, they can redraw up to 10 additional congressional districts for the party, the analysis finds, by maximizing gerrymanders in New York, Colorado, Oregon, and Maryland, where Democrats control governorships and state legislatures.

But even more strikingly, Democrats could redraw as many as 22 additional congressional districts for the party overall if they flip legislative chambers in other states and redraw aggressively in them, the analysis finds.

Take Wisconsin, where the governor is a Democrat and Republicans control the state legislature. Democrats think they have a good shot at flipping both legislative houses, due in part to dramatic Democratic overperformances in recent special elections.

Notably, Republicans control six congressional seats in Wisconsin while Democrats control two. But the state is evenly divided, with Democrats winning recent statewide elections there. Ironically, precisely because Wisconsin has long been heavily gerrymandered for the GOP, Democrats can now redraw three additional House districts for themselves, the analysis finds, by unpacking current urban districts and linking up Democratic voters in the north.

Then there’s Minnesota, where Democrats control the governorship and state Senate. The state House is tied, but Democrats are bullish on flipping at least one seat, which would mean a trifecta. While the state constitution may bar an immediate redistricting, that could theoretically be amended in time for Democrats to redistrict for the 2028 or 2030 elections.

Another possibility is Pennsylvania. This would require flipping one legislative chamber, the Senate—and redrawing aggressively by concentrating Republicans in central rural districts and spreading around urban Democratic voters more, the Fair Fight Action analysis finds. It argues that three congressional seats are gettable in Wisconsin, three in Minnesota, and up to six in Pennsylvania.

“Twenty-two House seats across seven states may sound like a heavy lift,” Flugrath told me. “But our analysis shows it’s well within reach if blue-state governors and legislatures squeeze every potential seat out of the maps.”

This blueprint attempts to quantify the very outer range of what’s possible. Many challenges loom, such as that of protecting minority voting while spreading votes around to maximal benefit. “This analysis assumes that any responsive maps protect—not weaken—the voting power of Black and Brown communities,” the memo says, urging Democrats to avoid “splitting up voters of color or diluting their representation.”

What’s more, much will be decided by how hard Democrats push. But they are gearing up: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told Politico that Democrats will seek gerrymanders at minimum in New York, Colorado, Maryland, and Illinois.

Flipping more legislatures this cycle is also essential, however. “The only path to ensure communities of color aren’t silenced into perpetuity and Democrats have a shot at a durable U.S. House majority is to win more statehouses,” Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, told me. “This is an all-hands-on-deck moment.”

Meanwhile, contests like the Georgia gubernatorial race have suddenly taken on new importance. Republicans control the state legislature there, and they’re already threatening a gerrymander next year, but a Democratic governor could thwart it. “As governor, I will veto any map that dilutes the voices of Black and Latino voters,” Keisha Lance Bottoms, a leading Democratic candidate in the state, told me in a statement.

To be clear, none of this should have to happen. Though Democrats have gerrymandered, themselves, over the years, Republicans went full throttle and never looked back after capturing many state legislatures in their 2010 midterm rout. Democrats have attempted for years to model an alternative path with independent redistricting commissions in many states and with federal legislation ending gerrymandering for both sides.

The Democratic position, then, has long been that neither side should gerrymander. It disrespects the opposition’s voters and allows lawmakers to insulate themselves from accountability. But if Republicans insist on it, Democrats have no choice but to do the same.

The vain hope of many good-government liberals had been that charting a path toward mutual de-escalation just might entice Republicans to join them. But with Republicans openly threatening to maximize their own gerrymanders after the court ruling, such hopes of mutual forbearance are now plainly dead.

Yet if Democrats have a good cycle on the state legislative level, there will be real opportunities to mitigate the GOP advantage. We don’t know how willingly Democrats will undertake all this, but they will undoubtedly come under intense pressure to do so. If Republicans make good on their threats, the choice for Democrats will be stark: Push forward, or perish. If Republicans don’t like it, too bad: This is the world they wanted, and it is they who are now inflicting it upon us.

Answers since then have been hard to come by, but on Thursday, another sliver of information was revealed: Epstein may have written a suicide note the previous month. The New York Times interviewed a cellmate of Epstein, Nicholas Tartaglione, who claimed he found a note after an incident in which Epstein was found unresponsive a few weeks before his actual death.

The note said it was “time to say goodbye,” Tartaglione said, and contained a line similar to, “What do you want me to do, bust out crying?” Tartaglione said it was written on a legal pad and found in the pages of a graphic novel.

Epstein survived this first incident, and in fact told jailers afterward he was not suicidal and the marks on his neck came from Tartaglione. Then he walked that accusation back, telling Bureau of Prisons investigators on July 31 he did “not have any issues” with his cellmate.

Epstein’s purported suicide note has not been reviewed by the public. The Times found that it was sealed by a federal judge during Tartaglione’s own criminal case. (Tartaglione has been charged with a life sentence for a quadruple homicide, and is appealing his conviction.)

On Thursday, the paper asked the judge to unseal the note. “Investigators scrutinizing Mr. Epstein’s high-profile death lacked what could have been a key piece of evidence,” the Times concluded.

A Department of Justice spokeswoman told the paper that the agency had not seen the note. It was also not mentioned in the DOJ’s investigations into Epstein’s death.

Information surrounding Epstein’s death continues to fuel a conspiratorial fire. Back in 2019, a 4chan user posted about his death before any media outlets had gotten word of it. In Donald Trump’s second term, the administration released an 11-hour surveillance video, which they claimed proved no one entered Epstein’s cell on the night he died. Reporters quickly found discrepancies in the footage.

Donald Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Thursday that he’s open to the idea of pulling troops from other allies Italy and Spain due to the European continent’s lacking support for his invasion of Iran and the subsequent blockade in the Strait of Hormuz. Trump already threatened Wednesday night to withdraw from Germany, and verbally attacked German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

“You talked about possibly pulling some troops out of Germany. Would you be considering the same thing for Spain and Italy?” asked a reporter.

“Yeah, probably,” Trump said. “I probably will. I mean, look, why shouldn’t I?

“Italy has not been of any help to us, and Spain has been horrible,” he continued. “Absolutely horrible. As has NATO.

“It’s not even the fact that they’re better, it’s one thing if they said it nicely, or if they said, ‘OK, we’ll help but the help’s a little slow,’ but the level. And we helped them with Ukraine. You know they made a mess out of Ukraine, a total mess. Ukraine is nothing to do—we’re an ocean apart, it has to do with them,” Trump said, calling it “insane” that former President Joe Biden provided aid to the war-torn, Russian-invaded country.

“But uh, when we needed them they were not there. We have to remember that,” Trump continued. “And so if we ever have a big one, because we didn’t need any help with Iran. We had Iran right from the first day, it was over. It was over.”

That’s not true. The war with Iran is currently in its eighth week with no end in sight. The ramifications of the war, including the total blockade to Iran’s oil trade, have thrust the world into a global energy crisis that has raised the cost of living practically everywhere.

Furthermore, Trump has repeatedly asked for assistance from America’s European allies to help reopen the strait. Just yesterday, the Trump administration floated the possibility of building an international coalition in order to restore freedom of navigation along the critical waterway.

Within the same answer, Trump then claimed that he only asked for foreign participation in the effort to “see if they’d do it.”

“In all cases, they said, ‘We don’t want to get involved,’” he said.

Trump’s Wednesday announcement that he was considering pulling U.S. troops out of Germany stunned the Pentagon as much as it did U.S. allies.

The Defense Department “was not expecting it and has not been planning any kind of drawdown,” a congressional aide familiar with the situation told Politico. “But we have to take him seriously because he was serious about it during his first administration.”

In July 2020, Trump proposed pulling 12,000 troops out of Germany in order to punish Berlin for its low defense spending. That order was never implemented.

The bill, passed by a voice vote in the House, is a win for Democrats, as it still includes no money for ICE or Border Patrol, and is now headed to President Trump’s desk to be signed into law. House Speaker Mike Johnson reportedly decided to finally support the bill after a private meeting with his fellow Republican leaders earlier in the day, where they agreed that the situation couldn’t continue.

The GOP will still try to fund ICE through the reconciliation process, which takes much longer but only requires a simple majority in both chambers of Congress. Previously, House Republicans had criticized their counterparts in the Senate for passing the measure with a voice vote, which doesn’t record individual members’ votes, only to adopt the same method on Thursday.

Conservatives were not happy with the decision, but didn’t see any good options. Representative Chip Roy said, “I think it’s asinine that we’re funding the government this way,” but Representative Clay Higgins said, “The speaker, I think, handled, under the circumstances, very well.”

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin complained last week that the department was almost out of money and soon wouldn’t be able to pay its employees. Now, assuming Trump doesn’t veto the bill, employees will still be paid. But the question of ICE’s future is still unanswered, as Democrats want the agency reformed at a minimum, with some calling for its abolition, and Republicans seem to be fine with the violence it visits on American cities. For now, at least, ICE won’t get any more money.

“Anybody running for President or Vice President should be forced to take a Cognitive Examination prior to entering the Race!” Trump posted on Truth Social Thursday afternoon. “By doing so, we wouldn’t be surprised at people like Barack ‘Hussein’ Obama, or Sleepy Joe Biden, getting ‘ELECTED.’ Our Country would be a much better place!”

Trump had demanded former Vice President Kamala Harris take a cognitive test while on the campaign trail in October 2024, and he has previously suggested Biden should have taken such a test before being allowed to take office.

“I took the Exam three times during my (‘THREE!’) Terms as President, and ACED IT ALL THREE TIMES—An Achievement that, even on a single Exam, according to the Doctors, has rarely been done before!” he added.

But Trump’s health isn’t actually that impressive—particularly as it relates to keeping his eyes open. Just last week, the president was caught falling asleep during another White House event, slumping over in his chair and fluttering his eyes for nearly a minute as his aides announced a new pharmaceutical deal.

Trump has an oddball history with reportedly “acing” cognitive exams. Since 2024, the self-styled “stable genius” has taken several such tests, but his recollections of their contents has called into question whether he actually took them at all.

While bragging about his results to the press, Trump would invariably tweak the questions he allegedly nailed, at times boasting that he had correctly recited five words and performed basic multiplication while at other times insisting that he had passed thanks to correctly identifying a whale. That is, in spite of the fact that the test’s authors reported that none of the three versions in circulation actually had a whale on them. Other test creators have said their exams are to check for dementia, not cognitive speed.

Since then, the MAGA leader’s health has become a much graver topic. Over the first year and change of his second term, Trump’s speeches have become more disjointed and incoherent, and his behavior has grown increasingly erratic. The 79-year-old 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.

Just this month, Trump attacked several of his longest allies, pledged to annihilate Iranian civilization via a social media post, and started beef with Pope Leo XIV, claiming that the Catholic pontiff was “weak on crime.”

He also forgot when Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, and that one of his most fervent GOP critics—North Carolina Republican Thom Tillis—is still in the Senate.

His escalatory behavior, particularly as it relates to the Iran war, spurred new calls for the president to have his brain tested yet again, though White House physicians missed the April 25 deadline demanded by Representative Jaimie Raskin.

The tech mogul and fascism enthusiast is suing Sam Altman and OpenAI, the organization he co-founded, for moving the nonprofit organization to a for-profit company. Musk took the stand three days this week in Oakland, and his testimony is not helping his cause.

Throughout his time on the stand, Musk didn’t answer yes or no to yes-or-no questions, claimed to forget his earlier testimony, and lost his temper at Altman’s counsel, William Savitt, accusing him of trying to trick him. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, after the jury had left Wednesday, said that “[Musk] was at times difficult.”

On Thursday, things got so bad that the judge had to remind Musk that he isn’t a lawyer after he accused Savitt of asking “leading” questions.

“He can lead,” Rogers said, referring to the opposing counsel. “That’s not how it works. Let’s remind everyone in the courtroom that you’re not a lawyer.”

A day earlier, Musk appeared to undermine his entire case. During direct testimony, Musk’s lawyers tried to paint a positive picture of the executive. He said that “I don’t lose my temper,” and “I don’t yell at people,” adding that he may have once called someone a “jackass,” but only to say, “Don’t be a jackass.”

But Savitt easily demonstrated that this wasn’t true, as Musk openly lost his temper in the courtroom. He nitpicked simple questions and contradicted an earlier deposition. The opposing counsel was trying to make the case that Musk wasn’t suing over his desire to keep OpenAI nonprofit but because he wanted to control the company—and Musk made their case for them.

Defense presented an email Musk wrote in 2016 to a colleague at Neuralink, one of his companies, where he said, “Deepmind is moving very fast. I am concerned that OpenAI is not on a path to catch up. Setting it up as non-profit might, in hindsight, have been the wrong move. Sense of urgency is not as high.”

When asked about this on the witness stand, Musk said he was merely speculating. Savitt asked him, “Those are your words, yes or no?” Musk replied that “this is a hypothetical.”

“So you thought it might have been a wrong move? That’s what you said?” Savitt followed up. Musk finally admitted yes.

Savitt later caught Musk testifying that he didn’t read a 2017 document about OpenAI shifting to a for-profit company.

“I didn’t read the fine print. We’re going into the fine print of this document,” Musk claimed, saying he had only read the first section or paragraph.

“It’s a four-page document,” Savitt replied.

Savitt then referred to Musk’s deposition, where he said he didn’t even read one paragraph. “I don’t think I read this term sheet,” Musk had admitted. “I’m not sure I actually read this term sheet.… I did not closely look at this term sheet.”

This got Musk to raise his voice and contradict his earlier claim that he never lost his temper, shouting in the courtroom, “I said I didn’t look closely! I read the headline!”

All of this is more proof of Musk’s own ego being the real reason for his biggest problems, and shows how his time in the federal government also went badly. The case is not looking good for the world’s richest man.

Governor Janet Mills’s decision to suspend her campaign effectively hands the Democratic nomination for Maine’s U.S. Senate seat to Graham Platner. In the latest edition of Right Now, Alex Seitz-Wald, deputy editor of the Midcoast Villager, explains how Platner surged in the polls and made it almost impossible for Mills to win. The governor, according to Seitz-Wald, ran a terrible campaign. She didn’t hold many events and failed to convince voters why they should send a 78-year-old to the Senate. In contrast, Platner was “everywhere” in the state, Seitz-Wald said. Looking forward to the general election, Seitz-Wald said that Platner will benefit from his youth and energy. But Republican incumbent Susan Collins will point to her relatively moderate record and success in bringing federal funds back to the state. The swing vote in this race, according to Seitz-Wald, will likely be college-educated white women who often back Democratic candidates in presidential races but also vote for Collins. The big question, says Seitz-Wald, is how those women respond to the at times angry and fiery rhetoric of Platner.

The media, the parties, activists, and even average voters across the country have been captivated by Mills vs. Platner in part because the Maine election is one of the most important contests of this year’s midterms. Democrats must flip four seats this November to gain control of the Senate. Maine is their most obvious target because incumbent Susan Collins is the only Senate Republican up for reelection in a state Kamala Harris carried in 2024. There is almost no path for a Democratic Senate majority that doesn’t involve the Pine Tree State.

But this race is also a proxy for broader tensions within the Democratic Party. Mills is a 78-year-old in a party where many voters blame the American authoritarianism of the last year on an 80-something president who insisted on running for reelection despite bad poll numbers and diminished faculties. She was recruited into the race by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and endorsed by a broader party establishment that younger, more progressive Democrats think is weak and ineffective. She doesn’t take many bold policy positions.

In contrast, Platner has taken left-wing stances on most hot-button issues. He’s endorsed by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and advised by some of the consultants who worked for New York City Mayor Zorhan Mamdani. Some Democrats think his service in the Marines, his working-class job as an oyster farmer, and other personal attributes are the way for the party to connect with white men without college degrees. Other Democrats think elevating Platner is the latest sign of a party doing ham-fisted and ineffective pandering to white men.

Once Mills started her campaign in October, with Platner already in the race, this primary became another fight in the war between progressives and moderates both in Maine and nationally. But Platner didn’t outpace her simply on the merits of his ideological arguments. In the latest edition of Right Now, the TNR show I host, Midcoast Villager deputy editor Alex Seitz-Wald said that Platner surged ahead of Mills in the polls in part because he was out-hustling her, holding far more campaign events than the governor. But these national themes were factors, as well, according to Seitz-Wald. Mills was dogged by criticisms that Democrats shouldn’t give a major role to another person in their upper seventies and that she would largely align with the party establishment in Washington. Polls showed Platner with a massive lead among voters under age 35, the bloc most hostile to the establishment and supportive of progressives.

Seitz-Wald argued that Mills’s veto last week of a proposed moratorium on the construction of data centers in Maine was the final nail in the coffin for her campaign. That move deeply irritated Democratic activists. And artificial intelligence, which is driving the boom in data centers, is another issue entangled in the party’s center-versus-left tensions, as Sanders has been a leading proponent of greater AI restrictions.

Mills, in her statement on leaving the race, said that she was dropping out because of a lack of money. It’s true that Platner had raised far more than her. But I suspect Mills also saw the prospect of her political career ending with a 20 or more percentage point primary defeat and decided to spare herself that embarrassment.

Now comes the real test for Platner and progressives. They argued that Platner is as strong a candidate for the general election against Collins as Mills would have been. That’s a very controversial claim, considering that Mills was twice elected governor of this state. It’s an even more controversial claim since Platner spent months last fall apologizing for sexist and racist things he wrote on message boards in his pre-political career and a tattoo that included a Nazi symbol. The left’s theory is that voters these days are looking for relatable people with normal lives (including faults) instead of career politicians. I’m not sure. Yes, Donald Trump is president, but Democrats are well positioned for Senate races in Alaska and North Carolina because they have battle-tested politicians running in those states. Mills might have lost to Collins anyway. But she would have lost for normal reasons. Platner introduces a whole host of unknowns.

Democrats have nominated more traditional candidates against Collins before, and she has defeated them. I don’t think there is anything wrong with trying a different approach this year. But for progressives, Platner is a big bet. He wins in November, and it’s harder for the Democratic Party to dismiss outsider candidates with progressive views in key Senate races and even for president. He loses, and centrist Democrats will claim that the party would have won a Senate majority if the left hadn’t insisted on pushing a political neophyte with a Nazi tattoo. Either way, what happens in Maine won’t stay in Maine.

The results of the war were apparently beyond explanation during a Senate Armed Service Committee hearing Thursday, when Hegseth stumbled trying to rationalize his decision to nix the critical department during a heated exchange with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.

“Let’s talk about how you’re prosecuting the war. What is your response to targeting that has resulted in the destruction of schools, hospitals, civilian places? Why did you cut—by 90 percent—the division that’s supposed to help you not target civilians? And do you know the impact of a strategic failure in a war when you have so many civilian casualties?” pressed Gillibrand.

“You may have tactically completed a mission well, but strategically [it] is not meeting your goals because of the casualties,” the New York lawmaker stressed. “What is the cost of that?”

But Hegseth did not have an answer for her. Instead, he ducked the line of questioning entirely, opting to repeat a vague principle rather than address the fallout of his decisions.

“No military, no country, works harder at every echelon to ensure they protect civilian lives than the United States military,” Hegseth said. “And that is an ironclad commitment that we make, no matter what systems we use.”

“Well then why did you cut the department by 90 percent?” repeated Gillibrand before Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker—the committee’s Republican chairman—cut her off.

Hegseth has no response to Gillibrand's question about why he cut the Pentagon division that's supposed to help the US military avoid targeting civilians pic.twitter.com/Vq04GEA2vp

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 30, 2026

The war has killed at least 1,701 civilians in Iran, according to an analysis by the Human Rights Activists News Agency released last week. That figure is even higher in Lebanon, where Israeli strikes have killed more than 2,496 people, according to the Lebanese health ministry. The war has also claimed the lives of 13 U.S. service members throughout the region.

Meanwhile, the ongoing blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has caused a global energy crisis, choking off a critical tradeway for the Middle Eastern oil trade. In the U.S., the lagging oil and gas deliveries have caused transportation costs to surge, affecting virtually every commodity on the market. At the time of publication, the average cost for a gallon of gas was above $4.30, according to a AAA analysis. In some areas of California, such as San Francisco, Napa, and San Jose, gas was at least $6 per gallon.

The economic consequences have sparked concerns within the Republican Party—and in the White House—that the wildly unpopular war could bode poorly for conservatives and their majority in Washington come November.

In a post on Truth Social, the president announced that he had named Dr. Nicole B. Saphier to take the new post, calling her “a STAR physician who has spent her career guiding women facing breast cancer through their diagnosis and treatment while tirelessly advocating to increase early cancer detection and prevention, while at the same time working with men and women on all other forms of cancer diagnoses and treatments.”

Trump had previously nominated wellness influencer Casey Means as his surgeon general, but announced on Thursday that he was dropping her nomination because of opposition from Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, a doctor who questioned Means’s anti-vaccination stance and her lack of an active medical license.

“Despite Senator Cassidy’s intransigence and political games, Casey will continue to fight for MAHA on the many important Health issues facing our Country,” Trump said in a Truth Social post.

While Saphier is a radiologist, she’s not much better than Means. She has weighed in culture war issues on Fox, railing against movies with “woke ideologies” like Inside Out and Elemental, and engaging in bigotry by accusing Ms. Rachel and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani of being antisemitic.  

Aside from that, her medical expertise has been colored by right-wing panic, complaining about “social bandwagons with the whole transgender ideologies” in February after the Rhode Island shooting. Her stance on vaccination is also troubling, as she has criticized mask and vaccine mandates and and praised Trump for allowing military servicemembers expelled for refusing the Covid-19 vaccine back into the service. She has locked her account on X, where she has likely made many more concerning statements. It seems that she is being chosen as the surgeon general because her ideas are in lockstep with the administration. 

This story has been updated.

The Commerce Department revealed Thursday that prices increased 3.5 percent since last year, thanks to surging gas prices amid the Iran war. Even if volatile energy and food prices are excluded, the inflation rate was still a shocking 3.2 percent.

Republican Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina suggested the public should live more in the future than the depressing present. “The fact of the matter is that all of the cylinders are kicking,” he told Fox Business. “You can even feel in our environment how good things are getting. Gas prices continue to come down, which means that your groceries will come down a little bit as well. We’ve got a lot of good signs in the economy.”

Representative Tim Burchett of Texas admitted that gas prices are rising, but claimed Republicans were innocent in the matter.

“It has to do with the greed of the oil companies,” he said. “We buy zero oil from Iran. 90 percent of their oil they sell to China. They’re just gouging us. I blame Congress.” (Burchett is a member of Congress, where Republicans hold a majority in both branches.)

He continued: “Quit telling me, ‘Oil is a commodity, Burchett, you don’t understand it.’ We don’t prop up every other commodity with billions of dollars in offsets and rebates and all this garbage.”

Does Burchett understand global markets, though? While oil companies do lobby Congress aggressively (they mostly lobby Republicans, who overwhelmingly support fossil fuels), the price of oil is up right now because the Strait of Hormuz is closed, making it harder to export. Burchett seemed to understand this point until fairly recently. In 2022, he went on Newsmax and loudly blamed the war in Ukraine and the Biden administration for high gas prices.

Steve Scalise of Louisiana chimed in during a CNBC interview, though he didn’t have his numbers quite right. Asked about inflation by host Joe Kernen, Scalise said: “You go back two years ago, we were paying almost $6 a gallon for gas. Right now it’s in the 3’s.… It’s still 50 [percent down].”

“When were we paying $6?” host Joe Kernen asked. Gas peaked at a monthly average of $4.93 a gallon under Biden in June 2022.

“Two and a half years ago,” Scalise said.

“That wasn’t the average price,” Kernen said.

“Today we are 30 percent below where we were two years ago,” Scalise retorted, reducing his estimate down 20 points from the figure he’d just used. “We are lowering inflation.”

“You must have been on vacation in California,” Kernan said. “Two years ago, in April 2024, we were at about $3.65. We are actually above where we were then.” (Correct.) Scalise subsequently generalized his claim to say gas prices “were well into the fives under Biden.”

Another Texas Republican, Brian Babin, told MeidasTouch prices have “come down dramatically” since Trump took office. “The president keeps his promises,” Babin said. Asked to grade Trump’s economic policies, he said, “He’s got a B average right now. He had an A, it went to a B, and it’s gonna go back to an A.” Most Americans would disagree with Babin’s assessment, but cut him some slack; his net worth is over $2 million, so he’s a little out of touch.

As yet, it’s difficult to know how much truth there is behind any of these accusations. The details, as they were reported in The New York Times and elsewhere, were sparse. That didn’t stop FBI Director Kash Patel from boasting about his agency’s having foiled the alleged kidnapping in a post on X, one of his favored communications channels. “FBI and our partners acted quickly and saved a young child who was kidnapped and ended up in Cuba,” he wrote, “with the alleged kidnapper parent hoping to transition the child.” Patel then shared a story from the right-wing website The Daily Wire, titled “FBI Spoils Trans Father’s Plan to Transition Son In Cuba.”

The story spread rapidly across both right-wing and legacy media, told from a mix of angles. The New York Times, a publication that has published numerous articles casting doubt on the need for minors to have access to gender-affirming care, described the situation as a “transgender custody case.” Nearly every article advanced federal prosecutors’ claim that the trip to Cuba was an attempt to kidnap a child for the purposes of “gender reassignment surgery,” a statement attributed to federal court filings. The Daily Wire seemed to find validation for its yearslong project to present transgender people as predatory and gender-affirming care as dangerous. (The Daily Wire was behind the high-profile anti-trans propaganda film What Is a Woman?; in 2022, it staged a “Rally to End Child Mutilation,” with host Matt Walsh and Senator Marsha Blackburn, to demand a ban on gender-affirming care.) In the flood of headlines and in the narrative they helped push, one important detail—assumptions about which fueled the already raging anti-trans panic about children and offered a key reason for the FBI’s strange international rescue mission—was lost. “It’s not clear from court documents if the defendants … actually planned on getting the child surgery,” the Associated Press reported.

In the available court documents, the only source for the “surgery” claim came from an FBI agent, Jennifer M. Waterfield, who identified herself as part of “the Violent Crimes Against Children squad in the Salt Lake City field office.” Waterfield’s sworn statement was filed on April 16 in federal court by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Utah District, as part of the criminal complaint against the alleged kidnappers. That complaint was also published with the office’s press release about the case. These four pages of narrative in this one agent’s sworn statement appear to be the primary source for the reported claims that the child was kidnapped for “gender reassignment surgery.” In the statement, it is not clear whether Waterfield had heard the claims firsthand or was reporting something learned secondhand. Few news outlets seem to have paid attention to the distinction, and the oversight is telling. When included in a criminal complaint, what very well may amount to a game of telephone can appear as authoritative as anything else in the filing—after all, a reader (or a reporter) may conclude, these are sworn statements.

To judge from Waterfield’s brief recounting, the apparent rationale for the FBI’s dramatic retrieval of the child related to “concerns” raised by others in the child’s family about the reason for the kidnapping: “Interviews of [child’s] family members provided significant concerns for [the child’s] well-being, as [the child] was born a male, however, identifies as a female child, which is largely believed to be due to manipulation by [the child’s transgender mother].” As if to substantiate these “concerns,” Waterfield details some of what was found in the alleged kidnappers’ home, including a to-do list with such items as emptying a bank account and having $10,000 in cash on hand. On the list as well, according to Waterfield: “get haircuts,” and “write out and start what we can for tourist visa.” Waterfield then describes another note that she does not quote from: “Recovered notes included instruction from a mental health therapist located in Washington, D.C. including instruction to send the therapist the $10,000.00 and instructions on gender affirming medical care for children.” There is no mention of the therapist’s name, or any indication that they were ever sought out. There is no date given for when the notes were obtained. There is no family member named, no date on which the interview took place. Instead, the agent offered a strange and detached summary: “Concerns exist that [child] was transported to Cuba for gender reassignment surgery prior to puberty.”

Concerns exist. That’s the basis for these stories, “concerns” without attribution or detail, along with some handwritten notes, presumed to belong to the alleged kidnappers, describing purported instructions from an unknown therapist. It is not at all clear what was meant by the agent’s description of “gender reassignment surgery prior to puberty.” Is the FBI agent alleging that a family has “concerns” about a 10-year-old child undergoing a vaginoplasty or an orchiectomy? Breast augmentation? The Times spoke to the brother of one of the defendants—the child’s uncle—who may well be the same family member referred to in the FBI affidavit. The article says he told the newspaper that the parent “had been ‘rather adamantly pushing’ for the child to get transition surgery since the child was about 5 years old.” But surgery at 5 is even less plausible than surgery at 10.

Typically in the United States, the gender-affirming care offered to a child who has not reached puberty consists of puberty blockers; genital surgery is very rarely available to adolescents, let alone to prepubescent children. Some puberty blocker medication can be implanted by a clinician, but that procedure does not involve what most people would consider “surgery.” The child would be unable to obtain blockers in Utah, along with hormones and surgeries, due to a statewide ban on such care for minors. Some have speculated that this is why Cuba was the chosen destination. In Cuba, transgender adults are theoretically guaranteed legal access to free gender-affirming surgeries through a national health system, although trans Cubans have reported that such care is difficult to access. According to the Associated Press, “gender-affirming surgeries are banned for minors” in Cuba. The New Republic asked an agency in Cuba that coordinates gender-affirming care for adults, CENESEX, if that was the case, but received no reply by time of publication. (In 2023, when a Teen Vogue reporter attempted to visit CENESEX, they were told the office was closed and only seeing patients “on an as-needed basis.”)

Setting aside, then, whether “gender reassignment surgery” was even available at the alleged kidnappers’ destination, it is difficult to substantiate what that would mean in this case. Waterfield so thoroughly couched her statements regarding concerns about surgery in passive terms—interviews “provided concerns,” “concerns exist”—that it is impossible to know how credible the FBI agent finds the concerns to be. It could well be true that this agent heard that concerns “exist.” But that doesn’t mean they have any factual basis.

Before the FBI got involved, local law enforcement conducted its own investigation, which resulted in warrants for the arrest of the alleged kidnappers. A similar sworn statement based on that investigation was included in filings made to the Fifth Judicial District Court in Utah, and obtained by The New Republic. In the statement, a detective with the major crimes unit in Logan City, Utah, Mikkael Hardison, relates the story without mention of gender in any form. After the child didn’t return home when expected on April 3, the child’s mother called the local police “to report a custodial interference of their ex-spouse.” Two days later, she filed a missing person report. The next day, when the alleged kidnappers’ home was searched, the detective wrote, “various lists were discovered detailing their travel plans to Cuba.” Some items, as the detective related them, which included “pulling out large amounts of cash, emptying bank accounts, canceling cellphone service, and forwarding of medications,” were checked off as complete.

These state court filings don’t mention anything about anyone involved being trans. Nobody is described as having “concerns” about “gender reassignment surgery.” There is no mention of notes purportedly about a therapist or “instructions” for gender-affirming care. Is it possible that the local detective had not found or even heard of these purported elements of the situation before submitting this affidavit on April 7, the day after the search? Of course. But if he did know of concerns that a child was potentially being compelled to undergo surgery, they apparently did not merit inclusion. Indeed, when interviewed by the Associated Press after the kidnapping arrests, members of the Logan City Police Department confirmed that their investigators did not learn of any concerns about gender-affirming surgery at first, and that the concerns they did learn of came from a single family member, whom they did not name. “They just had the concern about it, no actual physical evidence,” the department spokesperson said.

On April 8, Utah law enforcement issued two warrants seeking the alleged kidnappers for a possible charge of “custodial interference,” a third-degree felony in Utah, with bail set at $5,000 each. Eight days later, according to the Utah U.S. Attorney’s Office, officials in Cuba found the alleged kidnappers and the child. The same day, the federal complaint, which included the FBI agent’s sworn statement, was filed. On April 21, just shy of three weeks since the child was reported missing, the Utah U.S. Attorney’s Office announced the arrests, in a press release headlined, “Utah 10-Year-old Reunited With Biological Mother After Transgender Parent and Partner Allegedly Kidnapped Child to Cuba; Defendants feared by family of taking child to Cuba for gender reassignment surgery.”

It’s obvious that some news outlets did not dig any deeper than the press release. This isn’t unusual. News stories routinely repeat law enforcement press releases with little to no additional investigation or context. The defendant, who may be in custody, rarely gets to comment on claims made after an arrest or in a criminal complaint, whereas the police have paid press relations staff to pick up the phone. The Logan City Police Department issued its own press release about the case on April 22. Notably, it was headlined only “Custodial Interference,” the initial charge, and, like its detective’s sworn statement, it did not mention anything about the gender identity of anyone involved. It was also posted to Facebook.

Police and prosecutors are used to getting to tell the story they want told. When the media doesn’t play along, they just post their version of events to social media instead. The typical law enforcement communications strategy, however, pales in comparison to the “flood-the-zone” tactics favored by the law enforcement officials now installed in the federal government, such as FBI Director Patel, who seem unable to stop themselves from posting on X or going on friendly podcasts. Patel was having a particularly rough public relations moment when the Justice Department apparently sent a plane to Cuba to pick up a 10-year-old child and return them to their mother in Utah. At the time, Patel was facing well-sourced claims that he is “erratic, suspicious of others, and prone to jumping to conclusions before he has necessary evidence,” as The Atlantic had alleged on April 17. The Atlantic article came not long after stories that Patel had delayed an FBI team’s response to a shooting at Brown University because he had tied up the FBI’s two available jets, sending one to a different team, and taking the other to south Florida. (And that followed reports that Patel had used the bureau’s private jet to take his girlfriend out on cross-country dates.) A story about the FBI’s bringing down an alleged kidnapper who was transgender, who intended to force their own child to transition with “surgery,” is certainly a story Patel would rather tell.

Some might say that Patel would rather divert scrutiny from himself and onto some perfectly cast scapegoats. I’m not convinced it’s so straightforward. If Patel, who is reportedly fighting to keep his job, wanted to deliver his boss a story perfectly aligned with the president’s agenda, this story of an alleged kidnapping hits most of the marks. Of course, Patel has already moved on: He’s been touting an incredibly thin criminal indictment of a group investigating white supremacists, the Southern Poverty Law Center. And now he has the case of an alleged assassination plot targeting the president and other members of his administration at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday.

Given this, it’s useless to refer to anything this administration does as a distraction from some worse action. There is always something worse coming down the pike, and the “distraction” in many cases is usually bad enough on its own. For the people who have had perhaps the most painful, frightening experiences of their lives transformed into FBI headline fodder, only for the story to be replaced by another a handful of days later, it must be profoundly disorienting and upsetting. That reality—chaos, fear, abandonment—is the one this administration would prefer that trans kids live in, if it even thinks of them at all.

Prices are up 3.5 percent compared to last year, the biggest year-to-year increase in three years, the Commerce Department said Thursday. Much of this is attributable to gas prices due to the war in Iran. But even with fuel and food subtracted, inflation is still up by 3.2 percent, above the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target.

The rising prices outweigh the modest 0.6 percent gain in U.S. workers’ incomes, the department’s report said. Any tax refunds that Americans receive are also being blunted by higher gas and food prices.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Wednesday that cuts to interest rates are unlikely to happen for months due to the war. In contrast, last year, the Fed cut rates three times. Usually, the central bank prefers to keep rates unchanged, or it raises them to combat inflation.

All of this doesn’t bode well for the party in power. Trump and the GOP campaigned in 2024 on lower prices and against high inflation, but thanks to a war of choice and the president’s whimsical tariffs, the economic gains created by President Biden have been wiped out. Many voters who thought otherwise are now starting to open their eyes, and Republicans’ only hope might be blatant attempts to choose their own voters.

Documents first obtained by advocacy nonprofit Democracy Forward via public records requests reveal correspondence between DOGE personnel and a key organization that fueled the 2020 election conspiracy, detailing how voter data would be transferred between the two entities.

The documents offer a clear trail of Trump administration officials working to share sensitive voter data with an external party in a covert arrangement.

While the messages were heavily redacted by the government prior to their release, at least one email illustrates the general tone between the unnamed organization and the government body as they shared password-protected information related to U.S. elections: “We live for this!” the conspiracy group wrote.

Most of the names and entities involved in the information exchanges were also redacted. Yet the emails showcase how government officials moved to exchange sensitive federal data with regard to election-related activity.

“The Trump-Vance administration continues to hide what it is doing with Americans’ personal data, who it has unlawfully shared it with, and why,” Democracy Forward President and CEO Skye Perryman told Democracy Docket.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration admitted to a similar scheme conducted by DOGE. In January, the Social Security Administration revealed via court filing that Elon Musk’s underlings had engaged in unauthorized communications and data planning with election-denial groups. The administration did not name the outside groups involved, but at least one stands out in the crowd.

Mere weeks into Donald Trump’s second term, election-denial group True the Vote appealed to federal employees at Musk’s slash-and-burn temporary advisory body.

Their original message was public, pasted to their website in early March 2025: “Given DOGE’s mandate to enhance governmental efficiency and your recent insights into federal data discrepancies, we urge you to extend your investigative rigor to the nation’s voter registration systems.”

“True the Vote stands ready to assist in this effort,” the group added.

True the Vote vehemently denied any involvement in the scandal at the time of the SSA admission.

The scheme could be a porthole into the Trump administration’s recent machinations, which involve an unprecedented effort to access state voter rolls nationwide and, with them, sensitive voter data on tens of millions of Americans.

The Justice Department has so far filed lawsuits against 30 states in an attempt to force the data’s release before midterms. More than a dozen Republican-led states, including Alaska, Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming, have already handed over the data voluntarily or have promised to do so.

Judges across the country, however, have tossed the DOJ’s various cases, blocking the extraction in Rhode Island, California, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Oregon. A Trump-appointed judge also tossed the case in Arizona, ruling that detailed voter registration rolls are “not a document subject to request by the Attorney General” under federal law.

The court voted 6–3 to throw out Louisiana’s congressional map and get rid of its only Democratic (and majority-Black) district. One day after the ruling, the state’s Republican governor, Jeff Landry, announced in a joint statement with Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill that the May 16 primary elections would be suspended to get a newly redrawn map in place.

“The State is currently enjoined from carrying out congressional elections under the current map,” Landry and Murrill said in their statement. “We are working together with the Legislature and the Secretary of State’s office to develop a path forward.”

Meanwhile, hours after the court decision, Florida passed a new congressional map redrawn by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis in the hopes of giving Republicans four more seats in Congress.

Mississippi Republican Governor Tate Reeves announced Wednesday that he would call the state legislature for a special session on congressional redistricting, which had been paused in anticipation of the court’s ruling. He celebrated the decision in a post on X, taking a shot at reproductive rights at the same time.

“First Dobbs. Now Callais,” Reeves posted. “Just Mississippi and Louisiana down here saving our country!”

Alabama’s Republican attorney general, Steve Marshall, said after the ruling that his state “will act as quickly as possible to apply this ruling to Alabama’s redistricting efforts,” taking aim at Alabama’s two Democratic (and majority-Black) districts.

Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, who is running for governor, posted a proposed congressional map of the state on X, colored entirely red and eliminating the state’s lone Democratic and majority-Black district.

“I urge our state legislature to reconvene to redistrict another Republican seat in Memphis,” Blackburn posted. “It’s essential to cement @realDonaldTrump’s agenda and the Golden Age of America.”

In South Carolina, Republican legislators are openly discussing the possibility of redrawing their districts, welcoming the court’s decision.

“I was happy to see it. Uh, you know, I, I have, um, I’ve long advocated that we need to treat people equally, not based on the color of their skin, melanin content, anything like that, and, and people don’t vote based on their skin color, so that’s. That’s been my position,” Republican state Representative Jordan Pace, who had previously submitted a redrawn map of the state’s 6th congressional district in anticipation of the Supreme Court ruling, told local TV station WLTX.

Hastily redrawn congressional maps will certainly face legal challenges, but the Supreme Court has now set a new precedent by striking down the 60-year-old Voting Rights Act. With the midterm elections just over six months away, courts will also be reluctant to rule on election law. If any of these new maps are in place by November, Donald Trump and the GOP may not lose the House of Representatives.

This story has been updated.

Trump has claimed that “86” is a “mob term” for ordering a hit on someone, meaning that when Comey posted a picture of seashells arranged on the beach in North Carolina to read, “86 47,” he was calling to “86,” or kill, the forty-seventh president.

Speaking on CNN’s The Source Wednesday, Elie Honig, a former federal prosecutor, challenged Trump’s claim, arguing that mobsters just don’t talk like that.

“There was a point in my life where I spent the better part of my waking hours either talking face-to-face with real-world mobsters, or listening to them talk to each other over wiretaps, body wires, or bugs,” Honig said. “I dealt with all five families: Gambino, Genovese, Bonanno, Lucchese, and Colombo. I dealt with bosses, underbosses, consigliere, capos, soldiers, associates, all the way down the line.”

“Never, ever. Not once did I hear any real-world gangster use the term ‘86’ to refer to a murder or anything, and God knows these guys had colorful lingo, but never that phrase,” Honig said. “I don’t know where the president’s getting this from. He said from some movie. They don’t use that term in The Godfather, The Sopranos, or Goodfellas. Maybe some old-timey movie, but that’s not reality.”

Honig also pointed out that when CNN’s Kaitlan Collins had pressed Trump earlier Wednesday on whether he really felt his life was in danger, the president had replied: “Probably, I don’t know.”

“Right there, that’s an acquittal,” Honig said. “Because prosecutors have to believe beyond a reasonable doubt that the victim believed that his life was in jeopardy.”

The brief indictment against Comey, listing charges that include making a threat against the president and transmitting it in interstate commerce, does not include this mobster argument. Rather, it claims that “86” was a symbol that a “reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to President Trump.”

But clearly there is nothing reasonable about Trump’s Mafia fiction—least of all any actual danger.

Mills was the establishment Democratic favorite to replace Senator Susan Collins, a Republican who has held the seat since 1997. But she severely lagged in the polls behind progressive candidate Graham Platner.

In a statement released Thursday, Mills explained that her exit from the race boiled down to basic resources, specifying that she lacked the campaign funds to continue campaigning.

“While I have the drive and passion, commitment and experience, and above all else—the fight—to continue on, I very simply do not have the one thing that political campaigns unfortunately require today: the financial resources,” Mills said. “That is why today I have made the incredibly difficult decision to suspend my campaign for the United States Senate.”

Mills’s late entrance into the race last year hampered her fundraising abilities, and raised questions about her hunger to represent Maine in Washington. Within the first three months of 2026, Mills had raised just $2.7 million, a paltry sum for an establishment favorite expected to have the party’s wealth behind her. Mills’s fundraising efforts were eclipsed by Platner’s campaign, which raised $4.6 million in the same period.

Her withdrawal is a stunning loss for the national Democratic Party, not only as a sign of her waning popularity within the state, but also for the waning popularity of the national establishment that endorsed her.

For nearly two decades, New York Senator Chuck Schumer has selected the party’s Senate candidates with little opposition. That is no longer the case. Schumer’s political apparatus also faces contention in the midwest, where his preferred Senate candidates are facing tough primary competition in Iowa, Michigan, and Minnesota.

The race to contest Maine’s Senate seat has also sparked a debate on age, challenging ideas about which generation of candidates should be representing the breadth of America. Platner, a Marine and Army veteran-turned-oyster farmer, is 41 years old. Mills, who has represented the Pine Tree State since the 1980s, is 78.

This story has been updated.

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

Donald Trump’s corrupt use of state power to persecute his enemies is dramatically ramping up. The Justice Department just indicted former FBI Director James Comey on laughably thin charges. And the Federal Communications Commission chief is escalating his war against ABC due to Trump’s rage at Jimmy Kimmel. These are heinous abuses of power, but we also think they’re likely to backfire on Trump in a major way. If and when they fizzle, the result will be that they don’t even energize the MAGA base for the midterms, and if anything, will likely drive votes against the GOP.

We’re digging through all this today with former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade, author of a new book, The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government, which is certainly an apt title given these latest developments. Barb, good to have you on.

Barbara McQuade: Thanks, Greg. Great to be here. You know, when I first came up with that title, like a year and a half ago, it felt very novel and now it feels very obvious.

Sargent: It’s perfect. You were prescient there. Well done. So let’s start with James Comey. Trump’s effort to prosecute him the first time failed. Now they’re starting again. James Comey has been indicted for an image he put on Instagram last spring showing seashells arranged to depict the numbers 86-47. Barb, can you walk us through what prosecutors are trying to do here and why it’s such a joke?

McQuade: Yeah, it’s hard to get into the head of what’s happening at DOJ right now because it’s so far afield from what I saw in my 20 years as a federal prosecutor. We saw the effort to convict James Comey of a crime in the fall fizzle. And so now here we are with this charge based on events that occurred almost a year ago. If this were really such a serious charge, you know, what on earth could explain an almost year-long delay?

I know Todd Blanche and Kash Patel said that they’ve been investigating the case, but my gosh, they had the post in May and they interviewed Comey the next day. I don’t know what more is necessary. Go out to sea and find the actual seashells? I don’t think so.

And so, this statute is something I’ve charged. Threatening to kill a president is a serious crime and people do get charged with it from time to time. The essence of the charge is it has to be what’s called a true threat. It’s not enough to say, I don’t like the president or even to say the president should die. You have to express a true threat.

And what the court has said, as recently as 2023 in a case called Countermann v. Colorado, is that a true threat is—I’m reading here from the case—”a serious expression that the speaker means to convey an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence.” That’s a high standard. And the reason it’s such a high standard is to separate what is a true threat from mere political speech.

Of course, in this country, we give a lot of protection under our First Amendment to free speech. And so to make sure that it isn’t just, you said something mean about the president, you said something about your wishes about the president—those are not enough. It has to be a threat to commit an unlawful act of violence against a target. And I just don’t think we have that here.

Sargent: So we’ve got the number 86 here, which seems to be at issue. It seems to be getting construed as a threat itself. Let’s listen to Trump talk about that for a sec. Here, a reporter asks Trump if he really thinks Comey’s shell image threatened his life. Listen.

Reporter (voiceover): Do you really think that he was endangering your life or threatening your life with that?

Donald Trump (voiceover): Well, if anybody knows anything about crime, they know 86, you know, and 86 is a mob term for kill him. You know, you ever see the movies—86 him? The mobster says to one of his wonderful associates, 86 him. That means kill him. It’s—I think of it as a mob term. I don’t know. People think of it as something having to do with disappearing. But the mob uses that term to say when they want to kill somebody, they say 86 the son of a gun.

Sargent: Barb, he can’t even bring himself to pretend to believe that’s real, right? I mean, look—so the term 86, you wrote in a piece for MS NOW about this—can you talk about the term 86 in this context and why this construal is so friggin’ ridiculous?

McQuade: Yes. So as far as I know, the term comes from the restaurant business, where to 86 means to cancel an order. I know Merriam-Webster says it can mean to remove. I suppose Donald Trump thinks it’s used by the mafia—I guess he would know, I don’t—to mean to kill somebody. But I think it’s a vague term. It’s capable of numerous interpretations.

It could mean impeach the president. It could mean remove him from office. It could mean don’t vote for him. It could mean don’t support his—it could mean no kings, right? It could mean a lot of things.

Sargent: Is there any planet on which it clears the threshold you laid out just before, which is that it has to be a very clear expression of a deliberate and imminent threat with real intent behind it?

McQuade: Yeah, I don’t think it does. And, you know, in addition to the statement itself, I think that if this case were to go to trial, Jim Comey himself would testify and he would get on the stand and say what he told the Secret Service agents the day after the post, which was, I had no idea people viewed this phrase this way, I certainly didn’t intend to express any sort of threat. And he took it down immediately.

I think in light of that, combined with the vague nature of the statement itself, there’s just no way a jury unanimously finds 12 people—beyond a reasonable doubt—that this was an effort to convey a serious threat of unlawful violence.

Sargent: Right. And we should point out here that Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, is now auditioning for the permanent AG slot, and Trump fired his predecessor, Pam Bondi, because she failed to prosecute and jail enough of Trump’s enemies. And she failed at that—guess why? Because the facts and the law didn’t permit it. The whole reason Trump wants Blanche in there instead is because he will not be constrained by facts and law, correct?

McQuade: Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, it’s obviously a little bit of speculation on our part, but it really seems that, you know, there’s a vacancy. Blanche as the acting attorney general no doubt wants the permanent role. If the reason Pam Bondi lost her job is that Trump thought she was not aggressive enough, then guess what Todd Blanche decides he needs to do.

Donald Trump has long yearned for his Roy Cohn. Roy Cohn, of course, was the lawyer who represented him in housing discrimination cases against the Department of Justice in the 1970s. He was a lawyer to the mafia, represented many members of crime families in the 1980s. He was also one of Joseph McCarthy’s lead counsel during the Red Scare. He was someone known to play hardball politics, a tenacious, take-no-prisoners style of litigation. And Donald Trump wants that in an attorney general.

But let me say that is not the way the Justice Department has traditionally conducted itself. That’s the way maybe lawyers in private practice conduct themselves. They will very zealously advocate for their client because that is who they represent. And that’s fine when it comes to private practice. But when you are a lawyer for the government, you have a higher calling.

Your job is to see that justice is done. And a prosecutor should not bring a case under the DOJ’s principles of federal prosecution unless it is probable that they can obtain and sustain a conviction based on admissible evidence. And here, I think it’s completely far-fetched to think that that standard could be met.

You can certainly make a person’s life miserable by indicting them. They’ve got to undertake the expense of hiring a lawyer. There’s stress on them and their family. It’s disruptive of their lives. It can harm their reputation. All of those kinds of things will happen to Jim Comey, even if he ultimately is exonerated at trial, which is what I fully expect to happen.

Sargent: Well, let’s switch to Jimmy Kimmel for a sec. Trump is in a fury at Kimmel because he did a routine where he played the role of MC at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. He didn’t actually show up at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. This was a couple days before—he was acting out the role of MC at it.

And then, as if Melania Trump were sitting in the audience, he joked, “Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.” Now, of course, the alleged assassination attempt happened a couple days later. Trump is now demanding his firing. Barb, this is just standard-issue standup ribbing. How is this real?

McQuade: Yeah, and we also have now Brendan Carr deciding to review the license of ABC—their broadcast license. He is, of course, the chair of the FCC, and it’s not the first time he has suggested that he could mess around with licenses as an effort to rein in Jimmy Kimmel, right?

I mean, Jimmy Kimmel made a joke—not a particularly funny one—but about the reaction of the administration to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, talking about how members of the White House and politicians were trying to exploit that death. At the time there were statements made by Brendan Carr.

Remember he said something like, we could do this the easy way or the hard way. Talk about mafia talk. And so, you know, this is a really powerful power that Brendan Carr has as the keeper of licenses for the broadcast media, whether it’s television or radio. And if he is to take those things away, that could be meaningful. And so could he use that power to influence the content of what is aired over ABC? And it seems like that’s exactly what he’s doing. I don’t like what you say about my boss or his wife—I have the power to take away your voice.

Sargent: Well, basically that’s exactly it. Trump exploded at Jimmy Kimmel on Truth Social. This is after the assassination attempt. He recounted Kimmel’s routine and said this: “A day later, a lunatic tried entering the ballroom of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner loaded up with a shotgun, handgun, and many knives. He was there for a very obvious and sinister reason. I appreciate that so many people are incensed by Kimmel’s despicable call to violence and normally would not be responsive to anything that he said, but this is something far beyond the pale. Kimmel should be immediately fired by Disney and ABC.”

It’s so shameless, you almost can’t get your head around it. He’s seizing on the shooting to retrofit the claim about Kimmel to accuse him of incitement. That’s beyond absurd, but Barb, seriously—could you rule out, would you be prepared to rule out DOJ trying to prosecute Kimmel for incitement as a result of this?

McQuade: Well, there’s what they should do and what they might do. Under no normal administration would you expect there to be any sort of charge of incitement. But in light of the fact that we’ve seen Todd Blanche now bring charges against Jim Comey, the Southern Poverty Law Center—there was the effort to indict the members of Congress for making that video about providing lawful advice to members of the military that they have a right to refuse an unlawful order. They’re investigating Jerome Powell.

All of these things suggest that they will take the slightest kernel of a potential crime and turn it into a full-fledged indictment. Because back to this whole name-and-shame theory—they don’t much care if they can obtain a conviction, contrary to those DOJ norms and the ethics of most state bars, for the standards for criminal prosecutors.

Sargent: So Barb, here’s what’s mysterious to me, and I think still somewhat unanswered for a lot of ordinary people paying attention to this. Is it legal for Todd Blanche to say, I know that this prosecution is not supported by facts or law, but I’m going to bring it anyway because Trump wants me to, or because Trump will fire me if I don’t, or because I’m auditioning for the job of permanent attorney general. What are the constraints on that? Can he do that?

McQuade: Well, can he—I suppose, yes. May he do it permissibly—no. DOJ lawyers are constrained by two things. One is the principles of federal prosecution, which say partisan politics may never factor into a charging decision and a prosecutor should bring a case only if they believe that the evidence makes it probable that they will obtain and sustain a conviction.

That means a trial jury will convict them, and on appeal your legal theory is sound and it will be affirmed. Of course, no case is a slam dunk, but you have to believe it’s probable that that will happen. The scenario you described falls short of that standard.

Sargent: Is there a good-faith constraint? Like does Todd Blanche have to operate in good faith?

McQuade: Yes, absolutely. That’s what that norm is designed to create—that a prosecutor before they bring a case has to believe that this is a winner, that, you know, I may be wrong in the end. It may be that the jury sees things differently than I do. It may be that my witnesses don’t testify exactly the way I expected them to, but based on what I’ve looked at, I fully believe that it is probable that I will obtain a conviction at trial and that it will be upheld on appeal. That’s DOJ policy.

In addition, there’s a very similar ethics rule in most states about this good-faith requirement—that the prosecutor believes that this case will result in a conviction. And the reason for that, Greg, makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? We don’t want prosecutors running around bringing charges against people that they think are going to fail, for the reasons we already discussed—it’s a very big burden on a person’s liberty to be charged, even in an indictment, even if they’re not convicted.

And so that balance between public safety and individual liberty requires prosecutors to bring cases only when they believe they have evidence sufficient to prove the case. It may even be, I believe you’re guilty, but I don’t think I have the evidence. Even that’s not good enough. I have to not only believe you’re guilty, but believe I can prove it with admissible evidence. And so if Todd Blanche doesn’t believe in this case—and it’s really hard to believe he does—then that is not acting in compliance with DOJ’s own principles or with the ethics rules of most state bars.

Sargent: Well, is there any kind of prospect for accountability later for either Todd Blanche or some of the lower prosecutors doing his bidding or anybody else involved? Is there a way Democrats could be getting out there and saying, you know what, guys, maybe you shouldn’t be doing this because you’re going to be held accountable for any breaches and any abuses later. Is there a way to say that?

McQuade: Yes, I think so. You know, in terms of any sort of criminal accountability, they all know that Donald Trump has the ability to pardon them on his last day of office. And it seems likely, as long as they stay in his good graces, that that will happen. But that’s not the only remedy, of course. There is the potential for civil lawsuits for money damages.

Ordinarily, there is a great deal of immunity that protects prosecutors who operate in good faith in the scope of their duties. But if you operate in bad faith, there could be an exception for that. And I think the thing that’s most likely to provide accountability for people like Todd Blanche is their bar license. Todd Blanche is still a young enough man that I’m sure he envisions practicing law after he has completed his term as attorney general, or at least acting attorney general. And to be disbarred would prevent that. John Eastman was just disbarred from the State Bar of California for his role in the January 6th, 2021 effort to steal an election. And so I think that is something that could be held over the head of Todd Blanche.

At the moment he doesn’t seem to much care. It seems that so many of these Trump operatives act as if this is the last administration that’s ever going to be there and they’re going to keep winning elections. Maybe they know something I don’t know, but I think what goes around comes around and that they should be very fearful of losing their licenses to practice law.

Sargent: I would agree. So I understand that these types of actions against James Comey will cost them in legal fees and they’ll suffer harassment, as you mentioned, and I’m not minimizing these abuses—they’re horrific. However, there is a high likelihood of backfires, right? Because we all know that in midterms, the GOP absolutely has to get out some of these low-propensity Trump/MAGA voters, low-engagement voters. This stuff with Comey and Kimmel is supposed to accomplish that. But I just don’t see it.

If and when these things fail, they could have the opposite effect, dampening enthusiasm, right? It’s the great Trump failing. Well, conversely, it all further energizes the Democrat-aligned, high-engagement voters who do turn out in midterms. And also underscoring that Trump is not at all focused on real people’s regular daily concerns. Is there a high likelihood of this backfiring?

McQuade: I don’t know about the political ramifications, but I do think there’s a high probability of it backfiring legally. And that could bring some of the political fallout you describe. But I don’t see how they get a conviction of James Comey. And I think this case will—if it goes to trial—result in an acquittal for James Comey. And, you bet, he’ll be out there all over social media bragging about how he took on Trump and defeated him.

I think the other likelihood that we will see is a successful motion to dismiss the case on both First Amendment grounds, as we discussed earlier, and also on the grounds of selective prosecution. Now, this is a defense that rarely prevails because what you have to show is not only that I was impermissibly targeted, but that other people who are similarly situated were not charged with the same crime. And it’s often impossible to prove that second prong, right? How do you prove that somebody else committed the same crime and was not prosecuted? It’s like the dog that didn’t bark. How do you prove that thing? But it’s really easy in this case—just go on Amazon today and you will find all kinds of people selling T-shirts and hats and bumper stickers that say 86-47.

You know what else they’ve been out there selling for years? 86-46. Do you think anybody in this administration thought to charge anybody for threatening to kill Joe Biden? Nope, they sure didn’t. And so I think that it will be very easy for James Comey’s lawyers to point to those non-prosecutions to say this is selective prosecution. So one way or the other, Jim Comey is going to win this case. And he still has some respect across the political aisle. He’s, after all, a Republican. He was appointed by George W. Bush to be a U.S. attorney and the deputy attorney general. And so I think he’s got a lot of respect in law enforcement circles. And so I think this one—you know, when you overreach, there is always that risk that it backfires on you. And I think this could be one of those.

Sargent: Right. I think it draws a ton of attention to yet another failure on Trump’s part, which will, if anything, turn off MAGA. And simultaneously, it reminds normie voters of the reason they want to check on this lunatic. Barb, just to close out—your book, aptly titled, The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government. What do we need to do to save ourselves from this?

McQuade: Yeah, so thanks very much. I’ve got this book coming out June 2nd, The Fix, and, you know, it compares the Trump administration to the mob. I talk about some of the cases that I prosecuted in my career as a prosecutor, some of the lessons learned there about how you deal with corrupt politicians, how you deal with extortionists and other things. But also offering some real solutions about how we can build guardrails around some of what are currently just norms, to help protect us from the next Donald Trump that might come down the road.

Sargent: Well, it sounds like it’s going to be a great read. I’m looking forward to it. Barb, thanks so much for coming on with us, folks. Check out the book—The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government. Barb McQuade, thanks so much for coming on.

McQuade: Thank you, Greg.

Two early Democratic front-runners have adopted at least some of the language of the abundance agenda: Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro is touting his record of cutting regulation and building quickly—his mantra is “Get Stuff Done”—and California Governor Gavin Newsom has an aggressive plan to build more housing in the state. How unions fit into that agenda has been a central question. Newsom’s housing push has stalled over some concerns from unions, while Shapiro has argued that there’s no reason unions can’t be part of an effort to speed up building.

A new report on Thursday from the Roosevelt Institute argues that unions form a key ally in the abundance movement, and makes the case for what its authors, Columbia University labor experts Kate Andrias and Alex Hertel-Fernandez, call “democratic abundance.” Unions are important in bringing workers’ rights to the table in any discussion, they say. The report comes as the mammoth No Kings movement around the country is joining forces with workers for May Day on Friday, and as workers are showing a renewed interest in forming and joining unions.

“We thought it was really important to take a step back and ask where are workers in this story, and in particular, to think about why organized labor needs to be part of the conversation when it comes to abundance … to get the kind of things that abundance seekers want,” Hertel-Fernandez said.

Their report pushes back on some of the criticisms of unions from the abundance movement, mainly that they slow down and raise the costs of building, especially when it comes to housing. The authors point out that construction costs in the U.S. are higher than in countries with higher union density, and have gone up in states that don’t have a strong union presence, indicating that other forces are at play. They also argue that unions are unusually democratic—their electoral and governance structures are actually required by law—and so they aren’t subject to some of the criticisms abundance proponents lob at other “interest groups,” which is that they don’t truly represent the ideals and desires of the people they say they represent.

But the report is much more forceful about the benefits its authors say unions can bring to a strong abundance movement. Unions are a source of skilled labor and have some of the best training programs for the trades that building the country’s physical infrastructure requires. And, as democratic organizations, unions can also work to get more buy-in from the communities they’re in to make sure projects reflect community needs and that lawsuits and other objections don’t slow projects down. The quickest way to launch an abundance agenda that builds more infrastructure and housing, then, would be to get unions on your side early for any project or program.

More than that, though, any abundance agenda that doesn’t include workers’ representatives won’t benefit everyone. “What we saw in some of the more specific policy conversations … is that policymakers and academics who are in the mix in these conversations really aren’t centering the needs of workers or the participation ability of workers,” Andrias said. “It’s also important to have organizations participating in the public policymaking process that are focused on the rights of workers, making sure that working conditions are safe, that wages are fair, as well as increasing jobs and providing and building in an efficient way.” Otherwise, who is abundance for?

This comes at a time of renewed interest in rebuilding union power in the U.S. Earlier this month, New York State Assemblymember Claire Valdez, a candidate for Congress in New York’s 7th district who has been endorsed by Senator Bernie Sanders and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, launched an agenda that would make it easier for workers to join unions and give them more power. “I think unions are essential, not just for winning on the affordability agenda and winning the material things that workers deserve, but for really building our democracy and fighting back against the people who want to strip us of our rights,” she said.

The note on building democracy was also important to Andrias and Hertel-Fernandez, who write that workers who feel disempowered and displaced are more likely to be swayed by the right-wing populism of President Donald Trump. Unions can be a countervailing, democratizing force. That may explain why the organizers of the No Kings protest movement against Trump are also joining forces with labor unions to expand their actions on May Day. “Worker solidarity and progress are going to be incredibly important, because we are at this potential breaking point for a democracy and for our economy if we don’t realign ourselves in favor of the people this country was made to represent,” said Hunter Dunn, one of the organizers of 50501 in Los Angeles, which is helping to organize May Day actions.

For the Roosevelt report’s authors, unions are part of the fight over not just how well a Democratic government might perform and respond to the infrastructure needs in the U.S. but also a more existential question about how to rebuild our political system—and perhaps even democracy itself. “On multiple levels, having a strong labor movement and bringing workers into the governing process is a way of strengthening some of the Democratic muscles that are so weakened in our society,” Andrias said.

“Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was designed to enforce the Constitution—not collide with it,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court. “Unfortunately, lower courts have sometimes applied this Court’s Section 2 precedents in a way that forces states to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids.”

Alito’s majority opinion fundamentally rewrote the court’s Section 2 precedents and the law itself to achieve the conservative bloc’s goals. It raised numerous new hurdles to racial gerrymandering claims, including some that will likely be insurmountable. It even blessed the use of partisan gerrymandering as an explicit legal defense by states against racial gerrymandering.

The effects for American democracy will be corrosive. Southern Republicans will now likely set out to wipe out as many majority-minority congressional districts in the South, some of which were created by past VRA lawsuits, as they feasibly can without diluting other solidly Republican districts. Black representation in Congress will likely plummet, further tilting the House map in favor of the GOP.

Something noble and dignified has also been lost. The Voting Rights Act “was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent. “It ushered in awe-inspiring change, bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality. And it has been repeatedly, and overwhelmingly, reauthorized by the people’s representatives in Congress. Only they have the right to say it is no longer needed—not the members of this Court.”

After the 2020 census, every state redrew its congressional map to account for population changes over the previous 10 years. Louisiana’s map was an obvious gerrymander that locked in Republican control of five districts. The sixth one, centered in and around New Orleans, packed most of Louisiana’s Black residents into an ultra-Democratic district.

A coalition of Black voters and voting rights groups filed a Section 2 challenge to the new map, arguing that Louisiana lawmakers had diluted their electoral power by packing them into a single district. A federal district court agreed and ordered the state to draw a second majority-minority district. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is generally considered to be the country’s most conservative court, upheld that ruling.

Normally, that would be the end of that matter. After Louisiana adopted a revised map to comply with the court order in 2023, however, a separate group of plaintiffs who described themselves as “non–African American voters” filed a separate lawsuit to challenge the new map’s constitutionality. They argued that state lawmakers had impermissibly used race as a factor when drawing the new districts, even though the new map was drawn to remedy racial gerrymandering in the first instance.

This upside-down approach already had supporters at the Supreme Court. That same year, the high court upheld a court order for Alabama to draw a second majority-minority district, with the court’s liberals joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh. In a concurring opinion, however, Kavanaugh suggested that he would be open to considering in a future case whether such remedies were themselves a form of racial gerrymandering.

Wednesday’s result was hardly a surprise. The high court originally heard Callais during its last term to decide a much narrower question, only to schedule it for reargument this term to allow for a much broader challenge to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Lest there be any doubt about the conservatives’ goals, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote an unusual side opinion where he complained about the court’s delay.

That frustration only made sense, as I noted at the time, if Thomas knew that there was already at least a five-justice majority for attacking Section 2 and they could simply do it now. But some of the justices apparently wanted to do things by the book, leading to the yearlong delay and to Wednesday’s decision. Indeed, Alito wrote on Wednesday that the court had delayed the case to avoid upending elections.

I am journalistically obligated to note that conservatives’ attack did not fully succeed. Thomas wanted the court to hold that Section 2 does not apply to redistricting at all, which would leave voters with no mechanism whatsoever to challenge racially gerrymandered maps in court. Alito instead left Section 2 nominally intact and framed Callais as a mere tune-up to the court’s preexisting framework for weighing racial gerrymandering claims.

“We need only update the framework so it aligns with the statutory text and reflects important developments since we decided Gingles 40 years ago,” Alito wrote, referring to Gingles v. Thornburg, the 1986 case where the court first interpreted a strengthened version of Section 2 passed in the 1980s.

The reality is that, thanks to the court’s butchery, it will be nearly impossible for any future racial gerrymandering claim to succeed. Thomas’s concurring opinion, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, lamented that his approach was not followed but celebrated that his preferred outcome was attained. “Today’s decision should largely put an end to this disastrous misadventure in voting-rights jurisprudence,” he crowed.

Kagan found this explanation unpersuasive. “Let’s first drop the majority’s misleading label,” she wrote in her dissent. “What the majority gives us today is not an ‘updated Gingles framework.’ It is its own thing, deserving of its own name. Maybe the Callais contrivance? Or if that seems too immediately pejorative, just say that what the majority does today is to impose the Callais requirements.”

At the core of the new Callais requirements is backbreaking deference to partisan gerrymandering, the sordid practice where state lawmakers draw maps to dilute a party’s electoral power as much as possible. In the 2019 case Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority held that federal courts could not hear partisan-gerrymandering claims, finding no justiciable standards for them under the Fourteenth Amendment. The justices have traditionally described the practice in negative terms, with Alito noting on Wednesday that “disapproval” of it “dates back to the founding.”

Now Rucho has swallowed the court’s racial gerrymandering cases whole. Alito warned that litigants could try to circumvent Rucho by using racial gerrymandering claims to break extreme partisan gerrymanders. “In a state where both parties have substantial support and where race is often correlated with party preference,” he claimed, “a litigant can easily exploit Section 2 for partisan purposes by repackaging a partisan-gerrymandering claim as a racial-gerrymandering claim.”

This is wretched reasoning, driven by a clear desire to avoid handing victories to certain plaintiffs instead of a faithful adherence to law and precedent. The obvious outcome is that states can now, with the court’s blessing, invoke partisan gerrymandering as a legitimate rationale to foil racial gerrymandering claims, especially in states where race and partisanship are closely correlated. “Assuming the State has left behind no smoking-gun evidence of a race-based motive (an almost fanciful prospect), Section 2 will play no role,” Kagan warned in her dissent.

Gingles’s first precondition, for example, was that a “community of minority voters” is “sufficiently numerous and compact to constitute a majority in a reasonably configured district.” Section 2 plaintiffs typically accomplished this by drawing an “illustrative map” to show, as Alito put it, “their desired number of majority-minority districts.”

Alito revised this prong to require Section 2 plaintiffs to also meet “all of the state’s legitimate districting objectives, including traditional districting criteria and the state’s specified political goals.” The first part basically repeats the existing Gingles precondition: Districts must generally be contiguous and compact. But the second part requires plaintiffs to draw maps that comply with a state’s partisan-gerrymandering aims.

“If the State’s aims in drawing a map include a target partisan distribution of voters, a specific margin of victory for certain incumbents, or any other goal not prohibited by the Constitution, the plaintiffs’ illustrative maps must achieve these goals just as well,” he wrote. “If not, the plaintiffs would fail to demonstrate that the State’s chosen map was driven by racial considerations rather than permissible aims.”

That also sounds suspiciously like a requirement that Section 2 plaintiffs must prove discriminatory intent by lawmakers. The Supreme Court has been down that road before: In the 1980 case Mobile v. Borden, the justices read an intent requirement into Section 2, only to be overridden by Congress when it passed an updated version of the VRA to explicitly nullify that ruling. Gingles and its preconditions emerged from the aftermath where the court—until now, at least—accepted Congress’s discriminatory-effects test.

“The problem, as even the majority recognizes, was ‘that a focus on discriminatory intent, rather than discriminatory effects, would defeat worthy claims because of the difficulty of proving intentional discrimination,’” Kagan wrote, quoting from precedent. “It is the rare legislature, as the history of voting discrimination shows, that cannot camouflage racial targeting with race-neutral justifications.”

Alito claimed that he wasn’t simply reintroducing a discriminatory-intent test in his opinion, but it was not convincing. “The dissent states over and over again that our decision requires a Section 2 plaintiff to prove discriminatory intent,” he wrote, referring to Kagan’s dissent. When a discriminatory effect is shown, he continued, plaintiffs must then show that “the circumstances must give rise to a strong inference of racial discrimination.”

Kagan, in a footnote, sounded almost surprised to read this portion of Alito’s opinion, “which, if true, would be welcome news. And welcomer still if lower courts took those last words seriously and allowed Section 2 claims to succeed even absent proof of race-based purpose. But I suspect they will not. Because they, like I, will have read the many pages leading up to the majority’s coda.”

It was “something of a mystery,” Kagan wrote, to try to figure out what Alito meant to do by disclaiming an intent test. “To try to disguise what it is really doing?” she asked, rhetorically. “To somehow absolve itself of responsibility? Or could it just be that, in responding to this dissent, the majority can do nothing but agree?”

Few conservative justices have been honest enough to describe what they have been doing to the VRA. The plot against the VRA was best articulated 13 years ago by Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the principal co-conspirators. He delivered a lengthy monologue on why the Supreme Court had to act, during oral arguments in Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 case where the justices considered the constitutionality of the VRA’s preclearance mechanism.

“This Court doesn’t like to get involved in racial questions such as this one,” Scalia claimed. “It’s something that can be left to Congress. The problem here, however, is suggested by the comment I made earlier, that the initial enactment of this legislation in a time when the need for it was so much more abundantly clear was—in the Senate, there—it was double-digits against it. And that was only a 5-year term.”

The justice was describing the law’s original passage and the stiff resistance of Southern senators to it. “Then, it is reenacted 5 years later, again for a 5-year term,” Scalia continued. “Double-digits against it in the Senate. Then it was reenacted for 7 years. Single digits against it. Then enacted for 25 years, 8 Senate votes against it. And this last enactment, not a single vote in the Senate against it. And the House is pretty much the same.”

What Scalia is describing is factually true. The Voting Rights Act became much more popular over time, and was eventually seen as a celebrated milestone of the nation’s progress in dismantling racial segregation and creating a more equal country. “Today, we renew a bill that helped bring a community on the margins into the life of American democracy,” President George W. Bush told an audience on the White House lawn when signing the 2006 reauthorization.

But not everybody was so celebratory. “Now, I don’t think that’s attributable to the fact that it is so much clearer now that we need this,” Scalia continued. “I think it is attributable, very likely attributable, to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement. It’s been written about. Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.”

Describing the VRA as a “racial entitlement” for ensuring that Black people in the South can fully participate in American political life needs no further comment. But his ultimate point was that since the Republican Party could not openly oppose the Voting Rights Act without immense political backlash, it must fall to the conservative legal movement and the Roberts court to demolish it.

“I don’t think there is anything to be gained by any Senator to vote against continuation of this act,” Scalia explained. “And I am fairly confident it will be reenacted in perpetuity unless a court can say it does not comport with the Constitution. You have to show, when you are treating different States differently, that there’s a good reason for it.”

To that end, the court’s conservative majority held in Shelby County that the VRA’s preclearance formula was no longer valid because Congress had not taken changing circumstances into account. “Nearly 50 years later, things have changed dramatically,” Roberts wrote for the court, in what now sounds less like a celebration of America’s progress toward racial equality and more like a lament—or a threat to reverse it.

Then, in the 2021 case Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the Supreme Court struck again, this time by throwing new encumbrances on plaintiffs who wish to invoke Section 2 to challenge election laws with racially discriminatory effects. Alito, writing for the court that time, even managed to invoke concerns about voter fraud—a phantasmal specter in American elections—to hamstring the VRA’s ability to protect Black and Hispanic voters.

In her Callais dissent, Kagan noted that Alito’s work in 2021 was so thorough that since Brnovich was handed down, “not a single Section 2 suit has successfully challenged such a restriction on voting, however discriminatory in operation.” The same fate will now likely befall racial gerrymandering claims under Section 2, as well. Thanks to Callais, the Voting Rights Act is dead.

So, what is to be done? First, if they are ever able to retake Congress again, Democrats must now abolish single-member districts and adopt proportional representation instead. (I have written about this at some length before.) Only then will the American electorate be free from the antidemocratic poison of gerrymandering—of any kind, in all places, at all times, and for any reason.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, there must be consequences for the Supreme Court for its war on the Reconstruction amendments and on multiracial democracy. Twenty years ago, President George W. Bush signed the VRA’s reauthorization into law with civil rights leaders around him, only for two of his Supreme Court appointees to destroy the law and its protections. No civil rights advance, no voting rights protection, no democratic recourse can survive a conservative Supreme Court majority that is determined to stop it.

Since the Supreme Court as currently constructed cannot be trusted to protect the egalitarian republic that, as Kagan noted, Union soldiers and civil rights activists fought and died to build, sufficient justices must be appointed to it to remedy the problem. Fortunately, since the conservative justices lacked the courage of their convictions to strike down the VRA altogether, all the liberal justices must do is wipe away the false shackles that bind it: Shelby County, Rucho, Brnovich, and now Callais. The Voting Rights Act may be dead today, but through court reform, it can one day be given new life again.

The model emphasizes that health care providers need to do more than examine patients in a clinic to treat them effectively. Studies of MLPs have found they lower hospitalization rates, reduce asthma flare-ups, and generally improve well-being. Today, over 450 health organizations, across 49 states and D.C., have an MLP. Lawyers in MLPs not only tackle individual cases but often train physicians in advocacy so they can influence legislation and policy to make structural changes in their communities.

Yet such practices are still relatively rare. And in the decades since Zuckerman began Boston Medical Center’s MLP, Americans’ well-being has by many metrics deteriorated. The prevalence of chronic disease is on the rise. For those without a college education, average life expectancy is falling. And more and more people are diagnosed (or self-diagnosed) with poor mental health, to the point that some experts warn of a mental illness “epidemic.”

Why is our society getting sicker? In Empire of Madness: Reimagining Western Mental Health Care for Everyone, Khameer Kidia argues that an unjust world is an unhealthy world—that sickness, and in particular mental illness, can result from the gross misallocation of resources stemming from colonialism, capitalism, and the ongoing predations of rich countries and corporations. Kidia, an internist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, reassures readers that his focus on structural and historical contributions to ill health are not intended to discredit modern medicine. “Fear not: I’m a physician, not a scientologist,” he writes in the introduction.

In questioning the standard paradigm of mental illness, Kidia joins a line of physicians such as Bessel van der Kolk, Gabor Maté, and Rupa Marya, as well as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whose inquiries into the sources of mental distress push beyond standard biomedical approaches to emphasize how factors such as trauma, cultural environment, and social media affect well-being. But Kidia writes from a unique position: He splits his time between practicing medicine in Boston and overseeing a mental health nonprofit in Zimbabwe, where he was born and raised. As he moves between countries, both insider and outsider at any given moment, he grows more and more attuned to the culturally specific nature of healing, and critical of interventions that don’t account for the simple facts of poverty and injustice in people’s lives.

Kidia calls at the outset of his book for “the end of psychiatry,” at least as a practice that limits itself to “a tiny toolbox”—a neurochemical model of mental distress overly reliant on diagnoses and drugs. Many instances of mental distress are not so much disorders as a “rational reaction to colonialism and capitalism,” he writes. “My patients are not suffering from depression; they’re suffering from oppression.” To treat such symptoms requires reckoning with the root causes: the legacies of colonialism, capitalism’s intense pressure to produce and consume, and systems that leave so many people’s basic needs unmet even as billionaires proliferate. “For the oppressed,” he adds, “psychiatry does not heal so much as mollify.”

Kidia begins with his mother’s nervous breakdowns, periods of what her doctors describe as “paralytic mental distress” lasting weeks or months, which she had experienced since she was a teenager and one of just a few girls of color at an elite boarding school in what was then Rhodesia. His mother has never received an official diagnosis for these episodes, and, Kidia later discovers, “nervous breakdown” is not itself an official diagnosis, even though it is her preferred term and his—with its connotation of a break, or hiatus, from the ordinary demands of society.

Kidia writes that “when she is in debt or her bank balance is low, she develops severe, often crippling anxiety.” Her mood fluctuations affected Kidia profoundly. No matter how she was feeling, he writes, “her mood would diffuse throughout our home and press up against me until I either let it in and shared it or fought against it, stirring up conflict.” He calls this early experience of intersubjectivity—“that our emotional lives don’t exist in a vacuum”—possibly the most important lesson he would ever learn about mental health.

In his work, Kidia sees many cases in which personal and financial misfortune results in health problems. In his early days of clinical training as a med student, he meets Sheila, who had come to the hospital for a scheduled colonoscopy and been seized by chest pain. Asked by a colleague to interpret her electrocardiogram, or EKG, reading, the first one he’s ever read outside a classroom, he’s relieved to see that her printout doesn’t show any sign of a heart attack, although his colleague orders a second EKG to be safe. Before he can continue to treat her, however, Sheila goes missing. Later she explains why she absconded: “The last EKG I got ruined my life,” she tells them. A previous ER visit landed her with a hefty bill, and now she is $50,000 in debt.

Kidia observes on her medical chart that she is on an antidepressant and a benzodiazepine. People with outstanding loans are “far more likely to suffer from depression and suicidal ideation,” he notes. One study from England of more than 7,000 people found that those with debts were three times more likely to have a common mental disorder and an American study of more than 27,000 people found those with depression and anxiety were two to three times more likely to have medical debt. This debt, in turn, decreased the likelihood that they would pursue mental health treatment. (As he is treating Sheila, Kidia is himself desperately and unsuccessfully trying to secure $100,000 in student loans to continue his medical education. “Sheila was suffering because she had too much debt, and I was suffering because I couldn’t access debt,” he writes.)

As Kidia shifts his attention and his work between countries, he registers how cultural context shapes ideas of what is healthy and normal. When he was 18, he moved from Harare to Princeton, New Jersey, where the median household income is $192,079. He finds himself absorbing the status hierarchies around him—clocking the wealthy kids, and then the truly wealthy kids, princesses and heirs and children of Fortune 500 CEOs. Such status hierarchies, he notes, are themselves bad for one’s health, which is one reason highly and visibly unequal societies like America’s tend to have higher rates of mental illness than do social democratic countries such as Germany.

On arrival in the United States, Kidia also finds himself falling behind academically. In Zimbabwe, he was “considered one of the best high school seniors in the country,” yet at Princeton University, he is judged “ineffective and underproductive.” He develops canker sores, acne, and muscle spasms. Then, a friend advises him to try to get diagnosed with ADHD so that he can access productivity-boosting drugs. He grows addicted to Adderall and other stimulants—or, perhaps more precisely, he is addicted to the exhilarating feeling of productivity, which comes to a grinding halt when he crashes during a chemistry exam, taking a few pills before gently laying his head down on his exam booklet and sleeping through the test.

Recounting his experience, Kidia probes the distinctions between drug tolerance (needing more drugs to get the same effect), dependence (needing them to function), and addiction (dependence, but without the functioning). He was addicted to his little blue pills; he had lost control over his life because of a drug he felt compelled to take. But the common metaphor of addiction as a brain disease, he writes, doesn’t map onto its complexity, which goes well beyond the limited neuroimaging research on what is popularly understood (and oversimplified) as the brain’s “circuitry.” He cites the neuroscientist Carl Hart, the former chair of psychology at Columbia University, who argues that it is inaccurate to call addiction a brain disease. “There is no brain scan or blood test doctors can do that lights up and allows us to say, ‘Aha, you’re an addict,’” he writes.

He locates the source of his own addiction in the mismatch between what was expected of him, and what he felt capable of; it sprang from his desperate attempt “to fit into a mold that made me take those stimulants in the first place.” Addiction is “a phenomenon that society causes, not a ‘brain disease’ that people have.” This view means less judgment of those who take drugs—including some of his patients, “who are dependent on and take astronomical doses of stimulants and opioid painkillers multiple times a day,” all while caring for their children, working, and paying taxes. It would mean more scrutiny of companies like Purdue Pharma and the doctors who too readily would “discharge patients with monthlong prescriptions for Percocet or Vicodin or oxycodone after simple procedures that heal after a couple of days.”

Kidia also questions who qualifies as afflicted. As he carefully edges into the apartment of Daniel, a homebound patient with low blood pressure and what, since 2013, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has classified as “hoarding disorder,” Kidia inhales the smell of boiled cabbage and cat urine, before tripping over a milk carton and scattering a pile of papers onto the floor. Daniel’s behavior is a problem: Among the many things he hoards are medications that have expired or that he is no longer supposed to be taking, all of which he sheepishly presents to Kidia in “a plastic bag bulging with pill bottles.”

But Kidia wants to know why hoarding, which his medical textbooks define as pathological “when it is harmful to either the patient or others,” is only problematic when observed in patients like Daniel. What about, say, Jeff Bezos, “who hoards more than $200 billion made on the backs of underpaid, contingent warehouse workers who are twice as likely to be injured as other warehouse workers”? Daniel, “with his harmless piles of People magazines,” has been labeled diseased, yet Bezos and the other nine men at the top of Forbes rich list, whose collective $1.5 trillion in assets could end world hunger many times over, are the ones harming countless others with their hoarding. Rich countries hoarded the Covid vaccine, he points out, while his mother “and other Zimbabweans waited, uncertain if vaccines would ever come their way at all.”

The home visit also helps Kidia understand Daniel’s hoarding. Kidia writes that as he watched the sun pour in through the window of the apartment, “I could feel Daniel’s nest, constructed scrap by scrap, giving me a hug.” Now that Kidia has for several years seen up close America’s privations and excess, he can grasp how such a deluge of belongings might serve as a balm of sorts, “how the safety of all this stuff could comfort someone who feels insecure.”

The Mount Sinai Visiting Doctors program that took Kidia into Daniel’s home is unusual. Most medical care today is delivered in hospitals or clinics, where doctors can see more patients, more quickly. He describes in painful detail a system that limits physicians to 10- or 15-minute visits, incentivizes them to order costly tests and scans, and relies on drugs and devices to tranquilize and restrain instead of investing in the human personnel that can provide genuine care.

In one especially heartrending passage, he’s asked to prescribe the powerful ­antipsychotic Haldol to an elderly woman, Geraldine, who keeps getting out of her hospital bed, which sets off the bed alarm and wakes up her roommate. Anti-psychotics can increase the risk of death in the elderly population, but Geraldine’s nurse is worried about her taking a fall, which can be harmful to a frail patient and costly for the hospital. He asks for a sitter, someone “whose sole job is to sit and watch a patient.” They are used when someone is on suicide watch, or to keep patients like Geraldine from falling out of their beds. But the hospital is out of sitters, and the nurse must attend to other patients. Kidia, too, is paged to attend to a lifesaving intervention for a patient with a dangerously elevated heart rate. Eventually, against his better judgment, he is compelled to prescribe the medicine for Geraldine, because “it is cheaper for hospital corporations to make us quiet patients with antipsychotics, or even to physically restrain them, than it is to hire more doctors, nurses, and sitters.” Small wonder, then, that doctors and nurses have been leaving their profession in droves, pushed out not merely by Covid-related burnout but by the moral injury of being unable to practice medicine humanely when corporate managers or private-equity owners are breathing down their necks.

What do patients actually need from medicine? And what is the doctor’s role in delivering it to them? Kidia insists on the hybrid role of physician-advocate, duty bound to use their institutional authority to push for structural change in the wider world. He criticizes the gatekeeping function of diagnosis, the need for a label to unlock access to care. And while he is careful to note that emotions are simultaneously biological and psychological, a purely medical model is often not the right tool for addressing the source of distress.

Kidia makes an eloquent case for the practice of “social prescribing,” in which health care workers “prescribe (sometimes via literal written prescriptions) social and structural resources—from food to housing to social events to exercise—that patients need to live healthier lives.” Of course, gaining insight into what might spark genuine healing—would this patient benefit more from a Zumba class or a walk in the forest?—would require more knowledge of a person’s life than a 15-minute doctor’s visit will typically yield. Young people, who report over and over they feel detrimental impacts from social media yet feel compelled to participate, may warrant a prescription for more in-person connection.

Health care providers, he concludes, should first and foremost offer their patients humanity: presence, attention, nonjudgmental listening. Mental health care can also be provided by, simply, people who care. The Friendship Bench is an innovative Zimbabwean mental health intervention in which local grandmothers are given basic training to counsel people in their community. Grandmother and patient meet weekly on a designated bench in urban Harare, the capital, an outdoor setting that also serves to destigmatize therapy. The program, developed by Dixon Chibanda, one of the country’s 12 psychiatrists, was shown to improve patients’ mental illness symptoms more effectively than typical medical care, and has been fêted in venues from Davos to the World Bank.

The Friendship Bench is not a panacea. When Kidia studied it in a rural setting, he found that few people were able to prioritize traveling from their villages to visit the bench. An exception was the small subset of study participants who received a $5 travel stipend. He suspects that the weekly $5 disbursement may have been more responsible for the participants’ improved mental health, rather than the bench. When poverty is causing depression, he concludes, the most effective prescription is money.

This insight implies that mental well-being requires not just care and social connection, but some measure of redistribution. In the United States, at least, both financial resources and human relationships are distributed unequally. College-educated Americans are more likely to marry and have far more close friendships than their peers without higher education, and economic inequality has grown to almost farcical levels. On an international scale, colonialism enriched some countries while impoverishing others, a historical injustice with far-reaching effects.

Scribbling on his prescription pad, Kidia comes up with a remedy that is, at its heart, a shift in thinking. The Bantu concept of ubuntu, meaning “the force that inextricably ties our mental states with those around us,” is a way of acknowledging that our own well-being depends on that of others, that we will never be healthy and well if others, near and far, are sick and deprived. The healing he envisions takes the form of a global redistribution of wealth through taxes on millionaires, reparations on a worldwide scale, and multilateral debt forgiveness through institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Healing also looks like Friendship Benches, or policies that allow people to work less and care more, or a blessing from his mother, in the depths of a depressive spell, to leave Harare and go finish his book.

In essence, Kidia has written us a prescription for more humanity, both at the structural and interpersonal levels. In an era of tax cuts for the rich, the slashing of foreign aid, and supercharged xenophobia, this call for a deeper and more encompassing humanity can feel as distant a possibility as a global wealth tax. But as he shows over and over, there is no shortage of evidence that more humanity—whether in the form of time with friends and family, a connection to our community, or a welfare state that underpins a dignified life—is the cure for what ails us.

The war has further strained U.S. relationships with global allies like the EU and Japan, and the discord has spilled over into Gulf States like the United Arab Emirates that had once considered themselves relatively insulated from regional conflicts and are now reevaluating their security, economic approach, and global ties. Beyond fuel, the conflict has led to a global shortage of fertilizer, leading to fears of food insecurity.

There is, however, one dimension to the conflicts in Iran and Lebanon that has been overshadowed by the overlapping energy, military, and diplomatic crises: human displacement. Per the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, some 3.2 million people are already internally displaced within Iran. While a trickle has already headed to the relative safety of neighboring Turkey, this remains an issue mostly contained within Iran itself, but that could easily change under a set of very plausible scenarios.

There are, broadly speaking, at least two relatively likely outcomes that could lead to significant refugee outflows from Iran: In one, the regime remains broadly in charge and viable, likely with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps occupying an even more influential role in the country’s governance, and with a freer hand to to crack down far harder on pro-democracy protesters and others who may be emboldened to more publicly stake out opposition in the wake of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s death and Trump’s encouragement.

Prior to the start of this conflict, Iranian security forces had killed what a network of medical providers in the country estimated could be up to 30,000 people as they tamped down on public discontent and demonstrations. In a now wartime situation in which the IRGC moved to fully consolidate power as opposition groups—perhaps supported by external players like the U.S.—tried to topple the regime, millions of people could get caught in the middle and decide their best bet lay in greener pastures elsewhere. There are already parallels: Of the Iranians who have fled to Turkey, many have signaled that their decision was sparked by the regime crackdown more than by the war.

In the other, more acute scenario, Trump and his allies could succeed in a campaign of making life untenable in Iran altogether. Should he follow through on promises to strike civilian infrastructure, including energy production and desalination facilities, the resulting damage could quickly make life in large parts of the country of 92 million unsustainable. After another Trump social media post promising to “knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge” in Iran, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Mike Waltz said the threat was “perfectly acceptable” and “all options are on the table.”

Naturally, this approach would fit the definition of a war crime, but that’s something the administration has been building toward for months in Iran and other theaters; the plainly illegal military strikes against alleged drug-ferrying boats in Latin American waters are continuing even now in spite of their obvious illegality. A collapse in the viability of civilian life across large swaths of Iran and the greater Middle East would trigger a much more widespread and rapid exodus, first to neighboring countries such as Iraq and Pakistan but inevitably spilling over to a broader area, including the Gulf States, Europe, and, yes, eventually the United States.

In either case, while they are not direct parallels and have their own contexts, it’s instructive to look at the Syrian refugee crisis that started building up with the start of the civil war in 2011, part of the broader Arab Spring. By 2014, some 3.7 million Syrians had fled the country, mostly ending up in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon as Western governments pledged to take limited numbers of refugees while committing significant funding to effectively pay other countries to help accommodate them (though they still received asylum-seekers who arrived outside of standard refugee channels).

At the time, Lebanon absorbed over a million Syrian refugees, many of whom remain there. Now, not only is Lebanon likely incapable of accommodating additional outflows, it is itself on the verge of destabilization as Israel’s attacks and demands for the functionally impossible Lebanese disarmament of Hezbollah spark fears of civil war. In that scenario, some portion of the Syrian refugees already there would be likely to pick up and move on again, along with some number of Lebanese themselves.

Where would they go? While Turkey took in the largest number of Syrian refugees during the peak of the crisis and has already received some Iranians, Ankara has been cracking down on “irregular” migration flows. Last month, Interior Minister Mustafa ‌Ciftci said that the country was drawing up plans to contend with Iranian outflows, including potential border buffer zones. He added that Turkey was prepared to accommodate “up ‌to ⁠90,000 people” in the event of a sudden influx, which is, in the context of the total collapse of a country four times the size of Syria, a paltry number. The Gulf States, having been targets of Iranian military strikes and with a generally hostile posture toward refugees, are unlikely to step up; they infamously declined any formal Syrian refugee resettlement, instead absorbing some through myriad temporary programs.

Aside from the pure practicalities of a potential refugee crisis, migration in the mid-2010s, from Syria and elsewhere, more or less reshaped politics globally. Fears of mass migration and its (real or imagined) cultural and economic consequences were arguably the preeminent driver of the resurgence of a new far right in Europe and at least a part explanation for specific policy outcomes like Brexit, despite what were comparatively tiny numbers of resettlements. In the United States, immigration hysteria was the main foothold for the first Trump campaign, and the post-Covid so-called migrant crisis of asylum-seekers arriving at the southern border became a dominant narrative in the lead-up to the 2024 election despite border arrivals falling to four-year lows in the run-up to voting.

Even the relatively middling post-withdrawal resettlement of Afghans who had literally assisted in the U.S. war effort and civil society building in Afghanistan sparked backlash among the MAGA crowd, which spread to the remaining moderate GOP, particularly after a mass shooting by an Afghan asylee last year. Now the Trump administration is reportedly planning to send some Afghan refugees who have been stranded on a U.S. base in Doha, Qatar, to Congo. If that’s the plan for wartime allies, I don’t imagine there’ll be much effort to assist Iranians the administration has spent weeks demonizing. If Trump’s catastrophic decisions in Iran and inability to rein in Israel’s attacks on Lebanon spark a refugee crisis, he’s likely to try to use that to his advantage to regain public opinion ground lost, including on immigration, by fearmongering about refugees.

Already, Trump has set something of a trap for pro-immigrant advocates and political opposition, similar to the one created by his Title 42 restrictions during his first term: Humanitarian migration has been effectively shut off entirely, which makes even a return to the status quo of accepting asylum applications at all seem like a bleeding-heart capitulation by comparison. That’ll be especially severe in a situation where Trump engineers significant additional global need for refugee resettlement. Ideally, that won’t happen, but now’s the time for civil society and liberal leaders here and in EU capitals to think through a humane response—and to understand that a right-wing backlash is primed.