We are in a new era of American democracy, particularly for Black Americans. The Republican Party now views Democratic Party electoral wins and policy success as an existential crisis that it must prevent by any means necessary. Crushing Black political power is therefore essential to the GOP, since African Americans overwhelmingly support the Democratic Party. And the current Supreme Court, more than any in decades, has not only removed virtually all constraints on policies that might negatively affect African Americans but actively looks to outlaw any public policy that might benefit Blacks.

This era demands a new framework for Black politics—fresh strategies, tactics, leaders, and goals. We need a “Double Front” approach. And we should be clear-eyed: Even before Callais, the existing models of Black politics were growing stale.

It’s worth explaining when and how Black politics lost its effectiveness. There has never been a singular Black political movement or African American ideology. Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois famously quarreled. Du Bois’s own views shifted over the course of his life. The reality of the civil rights activism of the 1950s and ’60s was more complicated and messy than beautiful Martin Luther King speeches and smartly organized boycotts.

But after the civil rights victories of the 1960s, a clear Black politics emerged and predominated for five decades. Aspiring Black leaders, who had earlier led from the pulpit or protests, sought and won political office, most commonly becoming either mayor or member of Congress in heavily Black areas. A network of Black organizations, such as the National Urban League and the NAACP, focused less on the mass protests of the civil rights era and more on behind-the-scenes lobbying and collaborating with those Black officials in office.

Though they varied considerably, these organizations often became synonymous with a single famous leader, such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. And these leaders were often treated by the media and politicians as spokespeople for the entire Black population. These politicians, groups, and leaders aligned tightly with the Democratic Party, viewing it as the only vehicle to advance Black political goals.

The results of this approach have been uneven. On the one hand, African American politicians became increasingly powerful within the Democratic Party, gaining committee chairmanships, the mayor’s office in some of America’s largest cities, Cabinet and judicial appointments, and finally, in Barack Obama, the party’s presidential nomination. These elected officials delivered major policy victories to Black Americans and the country as a whole, from local economic empowerment of Black communities to the Affordable Care Act. On the other hand, African Americans became a “captured minority,” the term invoked by Princeton political scientist Paul Frymer. Democratic Party officials knew that Black voters would back them no matter what, so they had little incentive to push hard for policies and programs that would help African Americans in particular. Electoral pressures led the Democratic Party to set an agenda that would appeal to swing voters in swing states—a very non-Black constituency.

As the Democratic Party became increasingly concerned that advancing Black concerns turned off white voters, Black Democratic politicians and prominent activists faced a choice: advance in the party by downplaying and sidelining Black concerns, or advocate Black interests at the expense of their careers. Many chose the former. Contrary to conservative pundits who claim that he stoked racial conflict, Obama actually spoke far less about racial issues than his Democratic predecessors. Prominent activists shifted from pressuring Democratic politicians to being very defensive of them. Sharpton and others negotiated with mayors, presidents, and corporations, but grew unaccountable to Black America at large—operating more like celebrities than community activists. Over time it became difficult to distinguish the policies of Black and white mayors, as both were beholden to the police and corporations in their cities and thereby unwilling (and often lacking any real power) to advance policies to help rank-and-file Black Americans.

The Congressional Black Caucus for a time earned its self-given moniker, the “Conscience of the Congress,” pushing the U.S. in radical directions, whether on enforcing civil rights or in the fight against apartheid in South Africa. But gradually, members of the CBC became advocates for Democratic donors and big business as much as for Black activists and voters. Above all, they advocated for their own careers. Many CBC members are among the cohort of congressional Democrats in their upper seventies and eighties who insist on running for reelection despite growing concerns of a gerontocracy. To be clear, this calcification of leadership is more structural than personal. Politicians who want to rise inside an institution must serve that institution, and American party politics has nationalized in ways that disrupt the cultivation of new leaders at the local level.

But what about social movements, which have been so central to the past century of Black politics? The Movement for Black Lives that emerged in the 2010s was born out of frustration with the approach described above. These younger activists slammed Black politicians and the leaders and groups allied with them as ineffective and, at times, even complicit in systems and structures that kept African Americans down. The movement called for a different Black politics: bolder in its policy goals, less tied to the Democratic Party, led by people who hadn’t worked inside organizations like the Urban League for decades.

From 2014 to 2020, M4BL forced a national conversation about racial issues and some important substantial changes in government, business, and other parts of American society. It also mobilized votes for Democrats. At the same time, the millions of people who went to the streets in 2020 after George Floyd’s killing weren’t organized into new groups or political communities. And it was never clear who spoke for the movement or what its precise policy goals were.

The Biden presidency illustrated both the decline of the old Black politics and the struggles of the M4BL version. Biden overwhelmingly won the older Black vote during the Democratic primary, in part because the pastors and politicians of the Black Old Guard embraced him. He maintained close relationships with longtime Black officials like Representative James Clyburn. But his poll numbers with African Americans were among the weakest of any recent Democratic president, and eventually the 2024 Democratic ticket did worse among Black voters than recent ones. Being beloved by Sharpton, Clyburn, and that crew simply no longer translated to sky-high levels of Black support. They did not speak for the Black community—particularly its younger cohort.

At the same time, the M4BL struggled to gain footing. With little formal structure or organization, the activists never truly presented their agenda in a legislative form that Democrats in power could consider. And once Biden’s poll numbers dipped, he found it convenient to distance himself from the controversial but relatively powerless M4BL contingent within the party. (“Fund the police, fund them, fund them,” he declared in his 2022 State of the Union address.) Other Democrats followed his lead. By the 2024 election, not only had few of M4BL’s priorities advanced but the movement was being blamed for the party’s electoral troubles.

The Trump era has, of course, been catastrophic for both versions of Black politics. With Democrats out of power, M4BL doesn’t have anyone to pressure, and the Trump administration is cracking down on protest movements. At the same time, many of the small-bore initiatives pushed by the Black Old Guard, such as efforts to increase Black representation in corporate America, have been targeted by this administration’s executive orders. The Callais ruling now threatens to directly remove many of these Black representatives from office.

In the short term, there will almost certainly be fewer Black representatives in Congress, state legislatures, and local governments, particularly from majority-Black communities in the South. But does the ruling ensure a long-term decline in Black politics and political power? Not necessarily. We are hopeful that a new model can revitalize Black politics—and American democracy too. There are ways to constitute a Black politics that are more effective than Black mayors, politicians, and leaders trying to advance themselves in a Democratic Party often terrified of anything connected to Blackness. This is a moment of great political uncertainty that is ripe for experimentation.

What could a new model look like? First, history teaches us the importance of a focused inside-outside model. The “inside” structure during the Civil Rights Movement was Dr. King and formal organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Those organizations had serious policy agendas that they pushed hard.

Today, that’s harder to find. Sharpton’s National Action Network has policy goals listed on its website, but it functions more as an organization uplifting Sharpton’s role within the Democratic Party. When 10 likely 2028 Democratic presidential candidates came to NAN’s annual conference last month, they were not pressed to embrace a coherent set of policy goals that would benefit Black Americans. Instead, they were there to essentially kiss Sharpton’s ring, as if he were a gatekeeper to Black Democratic primary voters.

That is a very different form of “inside” politics, and a much less useful one. Whether it’s existing organizations like NAN, the NAACP, or the Urban League, or new ones are formed, it’s critical that Black-led groups act as representatives of Black people to the Democratic Party, not representatives of the Democratic Party to Black people. The goal must be policy change for African Americans, not a specific Black leader being in the room—whether it’s the Roosevelt Room in the White House or the greenroom of Morning Joe.

The model for outside politics could be the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In its 1960s heyday, it pushed an aggressive agenda with fiery tactics, helping create space for King and other insider figures. M4BL had the protests and energy of SNCC. But not the organization. The M4BL activists say that they are wary of the civil rights era, arguing it was too reliant on individual leaders, who were almost always male.

We agree that the movements of today should not be dominated by one person, and such leadership should certainly not be limited to men or pastors. But it’s essential that there are formal organizations that people interested in Black politics can join and that those organizations have some formal leaders and policy goals. (Remember that John Lewis rose to prominence as chairman of SNCC.) It’s time to concede that the “leaderful” model of the M4BL struggled to embrace clear, radical goals within what might look like a more traditional social movement structure. It’s worth noting that there are many radical Black organizations that practice mutual aid and social movement tactics at the local level in cities like Detroit, New York, and Oakland, but they do not represent the dominant form of national Black politics that we’re contending with.

That’s the Double Front—an inside strategy and an outside one. Both are essential. They reinforce one another.

Second, the role of politicians in Black politics must change. Instead of elevating Black politicians and trusting they will prioritize Black interests, it’s essential for African American groups and activists to develop clear policy goals and then rally around politicians who fight hardest for them. The ranks of such politicians would almost certainly include Representative Ayanna Pressley and Tennessee state Senator Justin Pearson, who are Black, but also Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, who are not. Hakeem Jeffries is speaking for the broader Democratic Party. That’s fine. But he is not necessarily a political leader of and for the African American community, and the community should not look to him for leadership on issues that particularly impact Black people.

There was once a time when having Black people in top government roles was, itself, the goal—and to a large extent meant real racial progress. But we’re well past that now. Clarence Thomas is the second-longest-serving Supreme Court justice in U.S. history. Three generations of Black mayors, one starting in the 1970s, a second in the 1990s, and a third in the 2010s, have led cities where today many Black people can’t afford rent or get fair treatment from police. It’s fairly obvious that Zohran Mamdani will be a better mayor for the average Black New Yorker than Eric Adams was. It’s more important than ever to focus on what leaders will do for Black Americans, rather than the leaders’ personas.

Third, African Americans must reconsider our relationship with the Democratic Party. We are indeed captured within the current two-party system. This does not mean that Black interests would be helped by voting Republican, as some have recently argued. Instead, it means taking seriously the fact that Democrats can expect Black votes with little effort because the Republican Party has an overtly anti-Black agenda. Many centrist Democrats in recent years have shifted policy away from Black priorities under the guise of anti-wokeness.

Black Americans have to look for ways out of this box. There is a large movement pushing for proportional representation and other changes that would disrupt the two-party system. A number of Black scholars and activists are heavily involved in this reform movement, but not enough, especially in terms of actual politicians. After the death of the Voting Rights Act, it is nearly impossible to imagine a worse political structure for African Americans than one based on single-member legislative districts.

In a multiparty system, the U.S. would almost certainly have a true left-wing party and a center-right one, in addition to today’s center-left Democratic Party and the MAGA-dominated, hard-right GOP. In our current system, African Americans are forced to vote for either center-left Democratic candidates or MAGA Republicans, and they usually choose the former. But in a multiparty system, while many African Americans would back the center-left, large blocs would also back the left and center-right ones.

What would this mean? Well, imagine a world where parties actually competed for Black voters. (In American history, there have only been rare moments and places, such as the 1970s in the Northeast.) The huge bloc of African Americans who care about education could force the center-left Democrat who currently gives lip service to improving schools but then does little about the issue to strongly support either school integration and increased funding (as the left candidate would) or vouchers and charters (as the center-right one would). Center-left Democratic politicians who won’t really push police reform would face the potential of losing to candidates who do.

Finally, we need a new definition of Black politics. The Trump era has shown that the U.S. is not postracial, whether in culture, politics, or economics. It’s much harder to get hired if your name is Keenesha instead of Kent, and median Black wealth remains well behind median white wealth. But we concede that racism in the U.S. looks much different than in 1962 and that the country is far more ethnically diverse than back then.

The Black politics of today should be more grounded in labor and less in law than before. It should be more focused on economic populism and class conflict, because these days there are Black billionaires like Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan and also plenty of white, Latino, and Asian Americans who are poised to join Black Americans in the struggle for decent wages. It should call for guarantees of jobs, health care, childcare, retirement security, and other necessities, because Black people today aren’t as much banned from the American dream as unable to afford it. It should embrace the young activists, many of whom are Black, who have led opposition to genocide in Gaza and the war with Iran.

The two of us would not be writing this op-ed without the work of Thurgood Marshall. But today, Maurice Mitchell, the onetime M4BL leader who is now the national director of the Working Families Party, which helped elect Mamdani, is closer to the vanguard of racial justice than most civil rights lawyers. This is not to say Black politics should simply be a colorblind class politics, but instead that Black Americans’ experiences have put them at the front of the fight for social democracy—with emphasis on both the social and the democracy—in the U.S. The point of the right to vote isn’t just to have leaders who look like you. It’s to have leaders who fight for you. We aren’t saying anything new. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was making these arguments at the end of his life six decades ago.

The VRA is gone. So is the infrastructure of Black politics that birthed a generation of Black politicians, including a president. And more fundamentally, the multiracial democracy of post-1960s America is in peril. It’s time for a Third Reconstruction. Like the prior two, that will require courageous, forceful, and creative leadership from African Americans. And that must start now. This battle will be won on two fronts—inside the halls of power and outside on the streets too.

In subsequent decades, Coontz has become perhaps the country’s most prominent voice debunking rose-tinted myths about the “traditional family” and the “golden age” of marriage. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy cited her in his majority opinion legalizing same-sex marriage (although he appears to have misunderstood her rather profoundly, attributing to her the idea that matrimony “promised nobility and dignity to all persons,” when she had actually written that marriage had conferred those qualities, for millennia, largely on the husband). In books such as The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families 1600–1900, The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms With America’s Changing Families, and Marriage, a History, she has documented the diverse ways that human societies organize pair and kin bonds, interrogated the very definition of family, and shown how our intimate arrangements reflect and respond to broader economic, social, and cultural changes.

In her new book, For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage, she once again turns to the past to make sense of our current marriage crisis—namely that, for many, the appeal of marriage is rapidly dimming. While the divorce rate has stabilized since its peak in 1980, married couples now make up less than half of American households, down from 66 percent half a century ago. Fewer young people even aspire to marriage than in the past: A 2023 poll showed that two-thirds of twelfth graders said they wanted to get married, down from 80 percent in 1993, a drop driven almost entirely by young women changing their minds. Another recent survey showed that Gen Z men ranked marriage as their seventh most important marker of personal success, while Gen Z women put it a dismal eleventh out of a possible 13. In the past few years, publishers have unleashed a spate of divorce memoirs, nearly all of them by women, nearly all of them jubilant about life after marriage.

At the same time, marriage advocates have been frantically attempting to revive the exact fictions about the midcentury nuclear family that Coontz has spent much of her career trying to dispel. The University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox’s histrionically titled Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization looks at demographic groups with notably high marriage rates (the religious, the highly educated, Asians) and argues readers should become more like them to increase their likelihood of getting married. The economist Melissa Kearney’s The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind purports to be a data-driven argument for marrying for the children’s sake. With pro-marriage, pronatalist allies in the White House, conservatives now feel the wind at their back. In January, the Heritage Foundation published a 168-page plan for reviving its version of the American family, calling for measures such as marriage “bootcamps,” paying couples to stay married, and evaluating every federal policy, grant, and contract for its effect on marriage and families.

Coontz recognizes the importance of marriage without making a case for or against it, at least in this book. The most she offers here is that most Americans (and Europeans) consider it “the highest commitment a couple can make,” one that garners extra societal respect and support. Even at a time when many people have become ambivalent about actually getting married, marriage tells us something about ourselves, and, in examining its changing role from Paleolithic times through the present, Coontz shows that marriage has always been the terrain on which “formerly dominant ideas about gender, sexuality, love, and marriage” were “challenged, reworked, or repudiated in favor of new arrangements and ideals.” If it is to endure, she suggests, we will need a deep rethinking of how the institution can accommodate recent and rapid social and economic changes.

What is marriage for? The fact that marriage customs are near universal throughout history is itself evidence that it serves some sort of purpose—social recognition, binding together families, embedding a couple more deeply within a community—that informal coupling up does not. As Coontz observes, “groups denied the right to marry have frequently invented their own marriage rules and rituals,” as did enslaved African Americans who performed a “jumping the broom” marriage ceremony in defiance of their enslavers.

But marriage’s evolution underscores the fallacy that there exists one enduring, and thus optimal, version of it. Changes in marriage have tracked changing expectations for women and men more broadly: how they should behave before, during, and after a union; their place as workers, friends, parents. And in the wake of all this change, cultural residues from each historical ideal have lingered in our psyches, instilling in modern marriage-seekers unhelpful thought patterns and behaviors that can undermine “the mutualistic relationships most of us now want,” she writes. Whether we are conscious of them or not, old-fashioned beliefs and habits such as the expectation that men provide and don’t show their emotions, or that women who engage in premarital sex are of loose character, still color our courtship behaviors. She calls these holdovers “earworms.”

The book begins by taking us back to the Stone Age, a period onto which commentators have projected some of the most persistent and tedious myths about gender roles. Coontz notes that for the first two million years of human existence, people lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers whose lives were governed by the search for food. But this era did not, contrary to manosphere caveman theories of gender relations, establish a time-honored template of women staying at home nursing babies while men went out to club woolly mammoths in order to feed their (and only their) young. These early hunter-gatherer societies probably resembled a commune more than Ballerina Farm: Women both foraged and participated in hunts, meat from successful hunts was distributed to everyone, and childcare was shared among the group. Marriage, usually to someone from a different band, was not intended to put a woman under the protection of a specific man, but to knit kin groups together in webs of reciprocity and obligation. This function was so essential to group survival that marriages were a collective decision, often overseen and arranged by group elders. Marriage, she writes, “was invented to turn strangers into relatives.”

As the establishment of agriculture generated surpluses, patriarchy took root. Whereas hunter-gatherers typically married outside their tribes, people in farming societies married with an eye toward consolidating their wealth. When wealth was passed down the male line, “fathers and husbands carefully monitored women’s sexual behavior in order to safeguard the patrilineal inheritance of property,” she writes. The existence of such wealth also sparked the concept of “illegitimacy,” a status that could exclude children from inheritance when elites did not approve of a relationship. Wealth accumulation also justified kin marriage, to ensure resources remained within the family.

Industrialization changed work, which in turn changed marriage. Before industrialization, couples tended to jointly run their households, each engaging in domestic labor (farming, say, or churning butter) and market work (selling butchered meat, or spinning wool) as necessity dictated. While family life was “far from egalitarian,” Coontz notes, these economic arrangements gave women and men “similar rhythms of labor and leisure.” As work increasingly moved outside the home, the notion that men and women belonged in “separate spheres” arose. Men occupied themselves with the rough, unpleasant, productive world, while women tended the domestic and spiritual realms.

In this same period, social movements calling for greater equality had the paradoxical effect of generating novel explanations for gender hierarchy. In an earlier era, when social hierarchies went largely unquestioned, “there was no need to construct elaborate justifications for the subordination of women,” writes Coontz. God intended for women to obey their husbands, just as he intended a working-class man to obey his social superiors. But following two revolutions in England and France, the adage that women should submit to their husbands “as the husband submits to the Crown” seemed a dicier prospect. Meanwhile, those demanding equal rights for men had to explain why women, enslaved people, and the unpropertied were undeserving of those same rights. The convenient answer was that women were simply very different in temperament and constitution. Democracy, then, had the unfortunate side effect of inventing a new female archetype: no longer the competent and industrious wife of yore, but instead a figure “delightful but delicate, virtuous but vulnerable.” This depiction had major implications for marriage.

Assigning different qualities to men and women placed them on Mars and Venus respectively. Yet they still sought a partner who was like them in spirit, and increasingly sought them on their own accord, rather than at the direction of parents or community elders. This is an era in which the “soulmate” trope takes on new primacy: “The new middle-class love script insisted that ‘manly’ men and ‘true’ women shared a class similarity of soul and character that differentiated them from their upper- and lower-class counterparts,” Coontz writes. Throughout the nineteenth century, the hunt for a top-shelf soul inspired women and men to bare said souls in florid correspondence. (“To love with all one’s soul,” one suitor wrote, is to blend “all things that are high, ardent and pure.”) But Coontz detects an important practical function underneath all the gushing: If a woman was no longer a co-provider alongside her husband, her financial security depended solely on his devotion, making her “especially anxious to make sure a suitor had sufficient funds in his emotional bank account.”

(Although the custom of professing one’s love in heightened language is hardly dead, Coontz does find that this romantic sensibility feels awkward to more recent generations. When she taught undergrads, she asked her students to read these letters aloud in class. Male students tended to adopt “a sarcastic tone,” and Coontz had to urge them to read the words as if they meant them. “Almost invariably, some woman would demand to know why today’s supposedly enlightened men were so freaked out by such emotionalism.”)

In the later nineteenth century and early twentieth century, women and men began to mix in new settings, living in close quarters in working-class urban neighborhoods, and sometimes working together. They also started “dating,” a term that dates to the 1880s, when the arrival of amusement parks and dance halls offered young people public places to mingle. This posed a now familiar problem for women: how to navigate dating strangers (rather than known quantities from one’s social circle) and getting to know men emotionally while remaining chaste enough for a “respectable” marriage.

The increasing public presence of women also put new pressures on men. Coontz sees a new model of manhood emerging around this time, linked to men’s need to “shore up their sense of identity and entitlement as women began to enter formerly all-male enclaves” such as clerical work and higher education. She also speculates that this budding machismo was a way of withstanding the harsh realities of a world ordered by “robber barons” and “imperialist rivalries.” Without naming it as such, Coontz pinpoints the emergence of toxic masculinity around the end of the nineteenth century, when “psychologists and physical education advocates … declared that mothers stunted the development of boys when they emphasized being ‘good’ and acting ‘nice.’” Boys started taunting each other with the term “sissy,” formerly slang for little sister. Masculinity was defined not as maturity, but in opposition to femininity.

“The resultant pressure on males to demonstrate their manhood instead of their adulthood has been good for neither sex,” Coontz concludes. She cites research by the social psychologist Alice Eagly finding that, over the past several decades, people increasingly rank women as more ethical, compassionate, and altruistic than men. These “feminine” qualities, from which men take such enormous pains to distinguish themselves, may explain what Coontz describes as “the antisocial features of today’s so-called ‘manosphere.’”

When today’s conservatives talk about restoring the importance of marriage, the type of marriage they have in mind closely resembles the saccharine domesticity and stark division of labor that defined marriage in the 1950s. As in earlier books, Coontz is unsparing in her assessment of that era, when marital rape was legal, child abuse “was not recognized as a social problem,” and incest was in some cases explained away as “female ‘sex delinquency’ rather than adult predation” in respected medical journals. So-called family experts of the day agreed that most domestic violence victims “had it coming.”

But Coontz, who before entering academia ran for Congress on the Socialist Workers Party ticket, also spends several pages ticking off the things we “should really miss about postwar America”: progressive taxation, high rates of unionization, job opportunities at all education levels, affordable housing, government infrastructure projects, income growth that benefited the majority of Americans. She calls this period of economic growth one of the “two pillars” supporting that era’s anomalously high marriage rates, and one that ordinary people, nostalgic for what seems in hindsight like a golden age of marriage, are not wrong to miss. The other pillar, though, was women’s exclusion from most of the exciting or lucrative professional and educational opportunities available to men. Women still couldn’t get loans or open businesses on their own. Marriage often resulted from an unplanned pregnancy. This pillar was coercive, herding or locking women into marriages they may not have wanted.

Free-market conservatives toppled one pillar, and feminism toppled the other, bringing us to our current era of record high inequality and singlehood. The conservatives trying to revive midcentury marriage patterns place the blame squarely on feminists, even though the regressive economic agenda enacted by conservatives themselves made it all but inevitable that marriage would become what Coontz and other social scientists call “a luxury good.”

Today, marriage is increasingly concentrated among those with a college degree or higher, who have the time, resources, and skills to negotiate disagreement and stressors, or to address potential sources of conflict, such as who does the laundry, by outsourcing it to paid help. Meanwhile, low-income people are less likely to be married, in part, perhaps, because their ideal marriage looks nothing like the one available to them. The less education someone has, the more likely they are to say it’s important that a good husband provide financially—and the less likely they are to find or be such a husband, given the scarcity of decent jobs for people with less than a college education. That mismatch between ideal and reality is unfortunate, because low-income people appear to benefit meaningfully from marriage: One analysis by sociologists Daniel L. Carlson and Ben Lennox Kail showed marriage is associated with greater well-being for low-income couples than for their wealthier peers, perhaps because in stressful, resource-scarce settings, marriage provides both emotional support and the financial security that comes with pooling resources.

Coontz is cognizant of the economic obstacles that put marriage out of reach. Like the card-carrying socialist she once was, she calls for affordable childcare, paid leave, and other programs that would relieve the enormous burdens that America places on families. But her conclusion reads a bit like a marriage counseling pamphlet, albeit one peppered with academic citations. She encourages couples to socialize with other people, share chores by doing them together rather than just divvying them up, and add mystery or tension to a long-term relationship by taking risks. Relationships today, she writes, “require more time and effort, better negotiating skills, more give-and-take, and more willingness to step outside traditional gendered comfort zones than in the past.” But the very quality that makes companionate marriages so desirable and often beneficial when they work, Coontz notes, also makes them fragile: If a marriage is no longer enjoyable, what reason is there to remain committed, especially when unmarried life can be pretty fun, too?

Coontz’s relationship advice may work for the already married who just need to iron out a few kinks in the chore chart; then again, it might not, because stepping outside one’s traditional gendered comfort zone is hard, especially for men. Research from economists Kyle Hancock, Jeanne Lafortune, and Corinne Low in their paper “Winning the Bread and Baking It Too” has shown that even when men earn far less than their wives, including when they’re unemployed and not earning at all, their contribution to housework is negligible. For many financially independent women, such an unequal union may bring more burdens than benefits.

If millennials had to deal with “earworms” subtly overlaying their romantic relationships with outdated gender roles, Gen Z is finding its way through the rituals of coupling up in an age of what I might call “blowhorns,” contending with messages blasted out by professional misogynists such as Andrew Tate, the increasingly influential right-wing troll Nick Fuentes, or even the current president of the United States, who famously bragged about never having once changed a diaper (he has five kids). Young women, who report a growing identification with feminism, encounter a torrent of misogyny on social media; in a recent essay in The Guardian, the author, a 15-year-old girl writing anonymously, describes how within minutes of opening up an app, she’s confronted with “comment sections on a girl’s post filled with remarks about her body, videos made by men or boys captioned with a degrading joke, and even topics such as domestic violence or rape, trivialised and laughed about.”

Poll after poll shows Gen Z women and men diverging not just on partisan affiliation but on important measures of values that might predict compatibility and a shared worldview. Among Gen Z, more men than women oppose abortion, report a religious affiliation, and believe that a wife should obey her husband. Men who nod along to manfluencers’ calls for women to lose their bodily autonomy and the right to vote are unlikely to shoulder their fair share of the laundry. Women have responded with understandable mistrust: Over half (55 percent) of women who are currently single believe that single women are by and large happier than their married peers, according to research by the Survey Center on American Life. Their online rhetoric dovetails with this belief, with women going #boysober, celebrating celibacy, and describing “protecting my peace” by avoiding men altogether. Even the marriage-minded express some reservations about their future spouses: One U.K. poll found that more than half of those under the age of 45 said that they want their future partner to sign a prenup. If these developments are any indication—and I hope they’re not—this generation is rife with suspicion toward the other sex. Small wonder they are losing enthusiasm for marriage.

Coontz is a marvelous writer of histories, engaging and wide-ranging, rigorous and nuanced. But by neglecting to more thoroughly reckon with technology at a time when over 50 percent of American teenagers spend four or more hours per day on their screens, and when algorithms direct users to extreme content based on presumed gender, or neglecting to address the worrying divergence between Gen Z women and men, this book will remain just that: a work of history. While she does not consider the possibility that marriage might one day not exist at all, I wonder whether the growing skepticism among the young, bolstered by economic changes, could lead to marriage’s eventual obsolescence. If that is the case, we will need to find new ways to extend respect and support to those who have not had the opportunity, or have no desire, to make the commitment that marriage entails.

President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” dramatically slashed spending on social safety net programs. It tightened work requirements and shifted greater costs onto states, and extended tax breaks for wealthier Americans and corporations. Those cuts included a reduction in spending of $187 billion on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, formerly known as food stamps.

The legislation made several changes to SNAP that will particularly affect young adults, including tighter work requirements for able-bodied adults without dependents—among them, eliminating a prior exemption for adults that have aged out of foster care—and shifting a greater amount of the costs of SNAP from the federal government to states.

Between July 2025, when it was passed, and February 2026, nationwide SNAP participation fell by more than 3.5 million people. This federal data was not broken down by age, but young adults are among the participants who were and will continue to be affected; one analysis estimated that nearly three million young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 are at risk of losing their SNAP benefits under the changes in the law.

“We do expect there to be a significant number of young adults who are impacted, just like the rest of the population who are impacted by SNAP,” said Crystal FitzSimons, the president of the Food Research and Action Center.

Even before its passage, SNAP had “always had a very rigorous application process” that was difficult for young adults to navigate, said Ed Bolen, director of SNAP state strategies at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Research suggests that young adults already have difficulty accessing social safety net benefits. Roughly 55 percent of the 5.8 million young adults who qualify for SNAP do not participate in the program.

Now, with the passage of the law, able-bodied adults without dependents between the ages of 18 and 64 must either work, participate in job training, or volunteer for at least 80 hours per month. If they do not record participating in these activities over three months, they will not be eligible for SNAP for another three years. States are also restricted in their ability to request waivers for these work requirements, such that only areas with an unemployment rate greater than 10 percent can be exempt from that time limit.

Lauren Bauer, a fellow at the Brookings Institute who researches social and safety net policies, noted that time spent job hunting does not count toward the requirement, making this mandate a significant challenge for someone just entering the workforce. Young people are less likely than older Americans to have a stable job, and are overrepresented in the gig workforce.

“If you are searching for work for 80 hours a month, you’re penalized. And young people don’t turn 18 and are given a job,” said Bauer. “This is a group that is more likely than others to be subject to sanction, because these are your first job-searching years.”

Those challenges may be particularly extreme for young adults aging out of foster care, who had previously had an exemption to the work requirement time limits for able-bodied young adults. However, the Republican tax and spending law ended this exemption, creating an extra challenge for a population that is more likely than its peers to undergo periods of housing instability, academic challenges, and unemployment.

“Kids aging out of foster care … do lose a lot of the support they’ve had, and in some circumstances don’t have a family to fall back on, or even to help navigate the system,” said Bolen.

A young adult experiencing homelessness would also be subject to the new requirements. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, 8 percent of young adults between the age of 18 and 24 experienced homelessness in 2024. Former foster youth are particularly vulnerable, with roughly a quarter becoming homeless during the transition into adulthood. (The House of Representatives recently approved bipartisan legislation to address housing instability among former foster youth, but the future of this measure is uncertain in the Senate.)

Unlike former foster youth, college students are not explicitly singled out by the legislation. However, the law could just further complicate their ability to obtain food assistance. College students are already subject to additional criteria when participating in SNAP, such as a “work-to-eat” rule requiring them to maintain 20 hours per work of paid work, as well as fulfilling their coursework.

A report by the Government Accountability Office found that in 2020—already a time marked by heightened food insecurity nationwide due to the coronavirus pandemic—59 percent of college students potentially eligible for SNAP did not report receiving benefits. The GAO has also found that the Department of Education has slow-walked sharing student income data with the Agriculture Department, making it more difficult to determine who is eligible for SNAP and simplify the application process. The expiration of pandemic-era SNAP flexibilities also affected students’ ability to access benefits.

Bolen said that it is a “myth” that college students are uniformly wealthy. In reality, they experience higher rates of food insecurity than other segments of the population. “The people going to college now look different than they did maybe 20 years ago … and the way they go to college is different. They might be going to community college for a year, or they might be juggling classes and work,” he said. “They’re trying to get an education, trying to better themselves to get a job. They are sacrificing and suffering.”

Young adults will also be affected by a move to shift the cost of SNAP administration and benefits onto states, placing greater pressure on states to either find the money to fund the program or slash benefits. Based on their “error rate”—that is, the number of over- or underpayments of SNAP benefits—states may have to pay up to 15 percent of benefit costs beginning as early as 2027.

States’ efforts to lower error rates are already resulting in significant consequences, with Arizona as the most drastic example: Since July of last year, nearly 500,000 Arizonans have lost SNAP benefits. Because the amount of benefits that a state contributes will be dependent on its error rates in 2025 and 2026, states may already have an incentive to drop someone from their benefits rather than work with them to ensure they are fulfilling requirements.

“A hypothesis that I have is, if you are complicated as a person, that they may be not picking up the phone for you,” said Bauer. “A student SNAP participant profile is a complicated one.”

Although SNAP benefits average to around $6 per day, SNAP is still a hugely consequential social safety net program, attributed with lifting millions of Americans out of poverty and generating economic growth. The impact on young adults will only be a part of the larger economic consequences, particularly given that the tightened work requirements also apply to new populations of older Americans and parents with teenage children.

“SNAP is our most successful anti-hunger program; it reduces food insecurity, it reduces health care costs, it lifts millions of people out of poverty,” said FitzSimons. “If people lose that, they lose that baseline.”

The latest evidence of this can be found in a kind of silly but actually instructive poll by YouGov that asked people who would win in a physical fight: themselves or Donald Trump. More Democratic women than Republican men thought they could win a fight with Donald Trump.

The president is 79 years old. He struggles to walk in a straight line, much less climb stairs. He has massive edema around his ankles, which is often a sign of congestive heart failure. There are mysterious bruises on the backs of his hands constantly now. He lives on Big Macs and Diet Coke and believes exercise is bad for you. He doesn’t listen to his doctors and takes too much aspirin. He brags constantly about passing the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which is generally only given to people suspected of having dementia and features “very tough” questions like identifying a picture of a lion, a camel, and a giraffe. There have long been rumors that he is incontinent, and he may even have been caught on video audibly soiling himself.

This is the party that prided itself on containing the manliest of manly men during the 2024 election. Of rural dudes who don’t believe in pronouns, lesbians, or unnatural hair colors. Yet somehow, after a decade of being fed slop images of Trump as a ripped Rambo, as a UFC fighter, and even as buff Jesus, Republican men have bought into the notion that Trump is a superman.

This polling gets even weirder when you compare it to another poll—also by YouGov—asking Americans if they thought they could win a fight with various animals. Men in this poll were overconfident in their ability to win a fight with a chimpanzee. Though the poll did not include political affiliation, it seems a good bet that Republican men would be more likely to say they’d win than Democratic ones.

The 22 percent of men who think they could win a fight with a chimpanzee are very mistaken: A chimpanzee will easily and preferentially tear off your face, hands, feet, and testicles. At the same time, 25 percent of Republican men cannot all be wheelchair-bound invalids in hospice, which is roughly what it would take to lose a fight with Trump.

This state of shared unreality is something that Donald Trump has ruthlessly encouraged since before his first term. He was a prominent “birther” about Obama secretly being born in Kenya. The first thing that he forced Sean Spicer to do as White House press secretary was to march out onstage and tell the world that Trump had set an attendance record at his inauguration. This was a bald-faced lie, of course, but was also a flex to break Spicer and emphasize that the price of admission to power was to always make reality conform with whatever Trump said it was, even if it constantly shifted from moment to moment.

At one time there were Republicans willing to call Trump out. At this point, however, they’ve either been purged from the party (Denver Riggleman) or were from a different generation and have passed on (Senator John McCain). Today, no Republican can survive long if they do not echo Trump’s insanities. Most of them choose to be amplifiers of this reality-distortion field, insisting that the 2020 election was “stolen” and that the people who raided the Capitol and wanted to hang Mike Pence were merely peaceful protesters.

When Trump goes too far, many of them feign ignorance. This is particularly true of Speaker Mike Johnson, who almost always pleads ignorance when confronted by the press about Trump’s misdeeds or the consequences of things Trump has done. Trump is literally the alpha and omega of Republican thought: The party platform in 2020 and 2024 boiled down to “whatever Trump thinks it should be at this instant.”

The media is culpable, as well. Once upon a time, far-right-wing media was limited to A.M. talk radio, Fox News, and Breitbart. Today, there is an entire ecosphere of insanity that’s only getting worse. Pseudo-intellectuals like Ben Shapiro are fading, and Nazi-brained nutjobs like Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens are ascendant. The MAGA population that started out uninformed is now living in a separate reality that has nothing to do with our own. This reality is crafted by Trump, confirmed by Republicans, and further amplified by the media.

Previously, traditional media outlets could be counted on to at least pretend to be centrist. They are now under assault, or already institutionally captured by Trump’s billionaire associates. Viktor Orbán advised Republicans to “get their own media,” and they have done so. Larry Ellison’s CBS News is being run into the ground by Bari Weiss. The Jeff Bezos–owned Washington Post has eaten itself alive and is now primarily an editorial vehicle singing the praises of the billionaire class. The New York Times has written a slew of concern-trolling hit pieces on transgender people, without disclosing the beliefs of hate groups it cites, and is sanewashing the administration.

Social media sites and AI-generated content take the news and further warp it for the American public. Meta, TikTok, and X all favor conservative rage-bait articles, and seeing nonsponsored content is becoming rare. The algorithms carefully curate a separate reality where rampaging transgender people in bathrooms and immigrants stealing elections and murdering their way through a terrified public are the most crucial issues facing the U.S. today. The odds of a conservative man seeing something on social media that contradicts his priors is roughly the same as of King Charles abdicating and becoming a roadie for a heavy metal band.

The result is a country where a third of the population live in their own reality, supporting the administration no matter what. Another third are either uninterested or don’t know what to believe, so they no longer try. And the final third who understand what is happening are mostly powerless to do anything to prevent the slide of the U.S. into Idiocracy-style oblivion.

When Mythbusters host Adam Savage quipped, “I reject your reality and substitute my own,” it was funny. It’s much less funny when a right-wing authoritarian party of know-nothings is gaslighting the United States into oblivion. Your average Democratic woman could kick Donald Trump’s butt, but getting MAGA to reconnect to Planet Earth is another thing entirely given the entire multibillion-dollar system built to warp reality around Trump’s delusions.

There are plenty of ways to describe this arrangement. Call it cartoon villainy. Call it criminal. For certain, call this an utterly impeachable offense. Also call this very worrisome: There is a non-zero chance that Trump will simply get away with it, now that corrupt elites dominate American life with absolute impunity. For those with any vested interest in restoring democracy and clearing out the Augean stables of Trumpism, how we respond to this is very important.

The Trump White House is a kleptocratic organ, pure and simple—one that increasingly resembles authoritarian regimes around the world. “This new slush fund is no different than what we see in other kleptocracies,” Casey Michel, frequent TNR contributor and author of the forthcoming book United States of Oligarchy, told me. “It’s a ruling figure creating a new pot of wealth that they can use for whatever they want—in this case, paying off a bunch of insurrectionists who Trump can now transform into his own personal paramilitary, without any oversight or checks whatsoever. It’s something we’ve never seen in U.S. history—but is perfectly familiar to those who study autocracy around the world.”

There is, however, a key distinction between Trump and the scores of foreign kleptocrats that Michel has spent years studying: “The only difference here is that most foreign kleptocrats at least try to hide their tracks—instead of broadcasting them to the world, like we’re seeing with Trump.” While most criminals endeavor to keep the newspapers from finding out about their intention to commit crimes, Trump does it in plain sight—either because he’s incredibly stupid or because the Supreme Court has told him he’s wholly immune from prosecution. (It’s probably both.)

But the newspapers’ early coverage of the so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund is troubling. If sanewashing was last year’s problem in the political press, sinwashing might be the au courant media malady. The initial coverage from The New York Times suggested that the scheme merely “could funnel money to Trump allies,” even though this was its expressed purpose. The news department also couldn’t bring itself to call it a slush fund, instead drafting “critics” to say what is plainly and objectively true (the paper’s editorial board at least named it appropriately). Elsewhere, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal found a useful euphemism, referring to the settlement’s arrangement as merely “unusual” instead of nakedly criminal. (TNR’s headline, if you’re keeping score, nailed it: “Trump Just Launched a Taxpayer-Funded $1.8 Billion MAGA Slush Fund.”) 

So I’m concerned that when Democrats return to power, the media will either be an impediment or an enemy to any effort to put things right. But at least that effort is kicking off right away. Representative Jamie Raskin told TNR’s Greg Sargent he is planning to “introduce a bill that would block the fund and other future efforts like it.” He’ll be doing so with the full support of party leadership, who will seek to bring the vote to the House floor over the Republican majority’s objections via a discharge petition. While such a maneuver will require some GOP support, Republicans in the House have in recent weeks broken ranks on the disclosure of the Epstein files—and a few have defected from the party line on funding Trump’s grifty ballroom, as well, likely killing the $1 billion that Republicans had planned to allocate to it in their ICE-funding reconciliation bill. 

Meanwhile, HuffPost’s Jen Bendery reports that Senator Chris Van Hollen will be launching a similar effort in the Senate, amending the reconciliation bill to prevent January 6ers—some of whom assaulted the Capitol Police officers who protect these politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike—from obtaining money through this slush fund. 

Taken as a whole, these efforts tick a lot of boxes for those, like me, who bemoan Democrats’ institutional timidity. If successful, this will force Republicans to take a hard vote and sign their name to this calumny. And regardless of success, it provides fodder for a massive media campaign to wreck the GOP in a midterm election year, creating a savage contrast between the president’s inattention to ordinary Americans’ financial struggles and his desire to enrich criminals with those Americans’ tax dollars.  

As Sargent noted, “Independents famously react badly to corruption.” According to a 2025 battleground survey conducted by End Citizens United, “Democrats’ journey to the majority begins with showing voters the consequences of Republican Corruption” because the topic was extremely animating for both independent voters and turnout voters. “Democrats should focus on telling the story of how honest Americans are losing their shot at the American Dream because of the corruption wealthy insiders have unleashed,” the study affirms, reaching the same conclusion that most of the political media had after the defeat of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.

What can I say? It turns out that accountability really matters. Trump and his inner circle have been like the raptors testing the bars at Jurassic Park: They’ve found weaknesses in the system, exploited them for criminal ends, and when they skate, they only redouble their efforts to find more flamboyant crimes to commit. That we’re now living with the prospect of a corrupt president cutting checks to his favorite thugs and miscreants is a humbling low for this nation.

Anyone out there treating this as normal or permissible business—or who believes that once this president is ousted from power we should overlook his sins in the name of “looking forward”—is just as guilty as anyone else interconnected with this web of sleaze.

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

“When it arrived in my inbox, I immediately clicked on it, used the search function, and searched for Gaza. Came up as zero,” Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, told Politico. “Israel came up as zero, Jews came up as zero. I was surprised. It looks like there’s a huge omission.”

Well, yes. The omission of Gaza, which played an important role in Harris’s disappointing showing with young voters, is appalling and suggests a party leadership still unwilling to reckon with the cost of the Biden administration’s support for Israel—or even to acknowledge just how far Democratic attitudes toward Israel have shifted in recent years. But the overriding focus on this one omission misses a more important point.

The problem with the DNC autopsy isn’t just that it doesn’t mention Gaza. It’s that it ignores policy and, for that matter, politics—how policies are messaged, and what role they play in coalition building—altogether. It is a profoundly weird document that’s almost entirely concerned with fundraising and spending while devoting almost no space to issues, including the two most consequential ones: inflation and President Biden’s age and fitness. Those issues, though less morally stark than Gaza, were clearly decisive. And the autopsy ignores them.

“The report’s so stupid, it’s hard to make sense why something’s in there and why it’s not,” one senior Democratic operative told Politico. It’s obvious why the DNC shelved the autopsy. It’s long yet incomplete, and utterly useless for its intended purpose: to show Democrats what they did wrong, so they don’t make the same mistakes in 2028. In a way, it’s actually worse than useless because the DNC’s clumsy attempt to suppress it became an unnecessary intraparty scandal in itself, making it seem to journalists and Democratic voters alike that some forbidden truth was being suppressed. In reality, the scandal is that this is the best the DNC could do to explain the party’s catastrophic loss in 2024, which set the country on a path of unimaginable corruption and authoritarian thuggery.

There is a disclaimer early in the autopsy noting that “this document reflects the views of the author, not the DNC.” The first question should be obvious: If this isn’t the DNC’s view of what went wrong in 2024, then just what are we doing here? The second question is just as straightforward: Just who is the author? It’s Paul Rivera, a longtime Democratic strategist and friend of DNC Chair Ken Martin. He is also, as many people have noted, a fixture of New York’s notoriously corrupt and incompetent Democratic Party and worked as an aide for state Senator John Sampson, who was convicted on charges of obstruction of justice and lying to federal agents in 2015. (Rivera resigned shortly before Sampson’s arrest.) It’s not clear why Rivera was tapped for this important job, aside from the fact that he was available and seemingly willing to work for free. He hadn’t worked on a presidential campaign since John Kerry’s in 2004.

Rivera clearly wasn’t up for the task, but the autopsy contains some critiques—mostly vague or incoherent—over voter targeting. It suggests that Trump’s anti-trans ad, “Kamala is for they/them, I am for you,” was especially effective, and observed that the Harris campaign didn’t do enough to try to capture rural voters. Mostly, though, it consists of platitudes, such as: “At times, it seems Democrats are trying to win arguments while Republicans are focused on winning elections. Democrats operate in an ecosystem defined by reason even in cycles when the electorate is defined by rage.”

The right, the report claims, is “always on,” but Democrats are not. What does that mean? Here’s the report’s explanation: “The difference is right-wing interests take a longer-term approach and amplify polarizing messaging and candidates within the Democratic family with the intention of ‘othering’ all Democrats. Without aggressive pushback and tactics, it works.” You can look at aspects of the right-wing machine—Fox News certainly, and parts of the Koch machine—and nod along. This analysis isn’t wrong, exactly, but it’s outdated—the kind of thing every Democrat was wailing about during the George W. Bush presidency and early Obama years. It doesn’t capture the most dominant force in right-wing politics over the last decade: Donald Trump.

To be clear, a report that reckoned with aspects of Democratic messaging and voter targeting, while also examining political and policy issues like Gaza, inflation, and Biden’s stubborn refusal to hold onto power, could be useful. One of the most peculiar aspects of this autopsy is that two of those issues—inflation and Biden—are now political advantages for Democrats, given that the current president is a decrepit Republican who’s directly responsible for a massive spike in inflation. This is the kind of observation that can give the DNC cover to delve into thornier questions, like what the party’s stance on Israel should be or how it can win back the young voters and people of color who voted for Trump in 2024.

But that would have been too obvious a path for Ken Martin, it seems. He had to muck things up by handing this task to a party insider who predictably mailed it in, then he mucked things up even more by trying to squash the autopsy once he realized how slapdash and misguided it was. The document itself may be useless, but it has yielded one important lesson nonetheless: The DNC needs new leadership.

But a bunch of recent events suggests that Trumpism as a broad ideological project has suddenly sustained a new kind of damage. The findings in this week’s poll from Fox News—a major institutional ally of Trumpism—combined with fresh levels of exasperation at Trump among GOP lawmakers leave little doubt: Some kind of new threshold has been crossed.

The Fox poll’s most brutal finding is that Trump is losing major ground among both his most loyal constituencies and those he made surprise inroads with in 2024. On the former, Trump’s approval is underwater with working-class whites (46–54), rural voters (43–57), and even white men (48–52). On the latter, he’s tanking among young voters (31–69), Latinos (33–67), and working-class voters of all races (40–60), suggesting he’s squandered his gains with nonwhite working people entirely.

His numbers on the economy are even worse. Only 29 percent of voters approve of his handling of it, while an extraordinary 71 percent disapprove. On inflation it’s an eye-popping 24–76. All his aforementioned core voter groups disapprove of Trump’s economic performance, as well—in very large majorities.

Just look at Fox’s write-up of its poll. It reports that Trump’s disapproval is at a “new high,” while even noting that he has slipped underwater on border security. It takes note of sudden new jumps in the percentages who disapprove of Trump on the economy and reports candidly on precipitous declines among base voter groups.

That’s as close as Fox will ever come to admitting that Trump is in collapse. As Media Matters’s Matt Gertz, who closely follows Fox, tells me, this is “certainly the most devastating Fox News poll of this presidency” and “portrays a presidency in free fall.”

Now look at what’s happening inside the GOP. At a private lunch Thursday, many Republican senators unloaded angrily on acting Attorney General Todd Blanche over Trump’s new $1.8 billion slush fund. They questioned the legality of the fund—which will hand out taxpayer money to Trump allies, including the January 6 rioters, pursuant to a corrupt “settlement” of his lawsuit against the IRS. Some Republicans objected to giving taxpayer money to January 6ers who attacked police officers.

This comes just after Republicans dropped their quest to give Trump $1 billion in taxpayer money for his ballroom. And House Republicans just shelved a vote on a measure to end his Iran war because they lacked the votes to defeat it. These too saw serious GOP defections from Trump.

What ties all this together? It’s this: Republicans probably wouldn’t be standing up to Trump so aggressively if his approval were in the mid-40s or higher, if his economic standing weren’t dropping so precipitously, and if his war weren’t destroying the global economy.

But there’s an even deeper connecting thread here. In recent days, Trump has crowed about his ousting of disloyal Republicans via his backing of primary challenges to them. He has succeeded at that. But suddenly, that’s not cowing the GOP into doing his bidding.

Trump’s primary-success boasts are meant to strike fear into GOP lawmakers: He can still turn the MAGA base against them on a whim with a twitch of his Truth Social thumbs. Yet terror of the base apparently weighs less heavily on Republicans when party actors come to genuinely fear the broader electorate outside the MAGA bubble—as evidenced by their apparent belief that Trump’s ballroom, his corrupt slush fund for January 6ers, and even his war are growing too toxic for them to bear.

It’s no accident that this comes as Trump is hemorrhaging support from both base groups and 2024 converts. To be a viable political project, Trumpism likely needs a combination of hypercharged core voters (the low-engagement Americans directly energized by Trump and only Trump) and non-MAGA voters sporadically attracted to him by economic dissatisfaction and his lingering cultural aura.

Yet it now looks plausible that these constituencies can’t hold together in a plurality coalition—let alone a majority one—under the conditions unleashed by Trumpist governing. Recent events drive this home with fresh clarity: It’s precisely the conditions wrought by the policies most associated with Trumpism and “America First” nationalism that are alienating voters the most.

The American carnage, as it were, is all around us, from the tariffs (which are meant to rebuild domestic manufacturing and disentangle us from globalization) to the war (which is designed to reestablish American imperial power while shrugging off liberal internationalist obligations). As a result, voters aren’t merely alienated by the damage wrought by “America First” nationalism. This week’s Times poll finds that 63 percent want to remain in NATO too, perhaps illustrating that voters are rediscovering why we should value our international alliances, not discard them.

Meanwhile, Trump’s mass deportations (which in the Trumpist program are consciously designed as an ethno-nationalist purging of the nation) have driven him deep underwater on his “best” issue of immigration. Stephen Miller, once drunk with hubris, was certain he could awaken the American majority’s latent racial nationalism. Now, having reminded many Americans why they like immigrants, his influence has withered.

Add to all this the sudden GOP willingness to buck Trump on his ballroom and his January 6 slush fund. Trump’s glorious monuments to himself, his self-enrichment, and his dispensing of the spoils of corruption to the MAGA paramilitary wing are supposed to be untouchable for Republicans—manifestations of his mystical bond with Trumpist America. But now, even among some GOP lawmakers, Trump’s aura as a tribune of the Real People—another core MAGA myth—is breaking down.

It’s far too optimistic to conclude that Trumpism is dying. But its principal tenets and mythologies appear to be getting badly discredited, putting the whole project in considerable jeopardy. By demanding absolute fealty to his Nero-like obsessions, his bottomless self-dealing, his floundering economic nationalism, and his world-historical delusions about U.S. military might, Trump is shrinking MAGA down to its molten core. Yet there’s a whole universe of American voters outside of it—and in a truly startling revelation, it turns out that they matter too.

Landry’s comments came after he traveled to Greenland uninvited last week, while the U.S. pressures Denmark to allow it to increase its military presence in the territory Trump has already essentially threatened to annex.

“Greenland needs the deal.… Greenland could be exporting two million barrels of oil a day right now,” Landry said on Fox News. “Think about what that could mean. Think about what kind of pressure that would relieve in the Strait of Hormuz. Think about what kind of leverage that would give the Western hemisphere and America.… We could have those barrels on production within 10 months or so.”

Landry also went on to mention rare earth minerals and the other various natural resources in Greenland.

Jeff Landry: "Greenland needs a deal. Greenland could be exporting 2 million barrels of oil a day right now. Think about what kind of pressure that would relieve in the Strait of Hormuz, what kind of leverage that would give America ... it's time for the Danes to come to the… pic.twitter.com/Lr67YZv6WY

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 22, 2026

“Ah yes. Oil. It’s always about oil and money,” Missouri congressional candidate Fred Wellman wrote on X. “Remember how it was for our ‘national security?’ No, it was for corporations to exploit the natural resources.”

Occupy Democrats also chimed in: “But Trump also said that because of Venezuela, we have more oil than we know what to do with.… So the Strait didn’t matter. NOW, we need Greenlands oil to offset the problems from Iran and Hormuz? What happened to more oil than anyone on earth?”

It isn’t hard to connect the dots here. Trump’s monthslong Greenland obsession has only been exacerbated by the war he started with Iran, which led oil prices to skyrocket after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps shut down the Strait of Hormuz. Now Trump is looking to Greenland—and its oil and natural resources—as a way out of his own mess.

Gabbard notified the president of her forthcoming departure during a Cabinet meeting at the Oval Office on Friday. Her last day is expected to be June 30.

She is reportedly departing Trump’s Cabinet to assist her husband, Abraham Williams, as he battles cancer, Fox News Digital reported.

“Unfortunately, I must submit my resignation, effective June 30, 2026,” Gabbard wrote in her resignation letter, obtained first by Fox. “My husband, Abraham, has recently been diagnosed with an extremely rare form of bone cancer.”

Gabbard said that her husband “faces major challenges in the coming weeks and months.”

“At this time, I must step away from public service to be by his side and fully support him through this battle,” she wrote.

Gabbard and her husband first met in Hawaii while he volunteered for her 2012 Democratic congressional campaign. They have been married for 11 years.

“His strength and love have sustained me through every challenge,” she continued. “I cannot in good conscience ask him to face this fight alone while I continue in this demanding and time-consuming position.”

It is not immediately clear who will replace Gabbard.

Her exit has curious timing. Despite being appointed to run America’s national intelligence operation, Gabbard has spent the last several months largely sidelined from the Trump administration’s national security operations. She was noticeably absent during decisions surrounding the White House’s attack on Venezuela, as well as the ongoing war with Iran.

Gabbard’s opinion on such matters frequently differed from Trump’s talking points: She has argued that the U.S. had different objectives in the war from Israel’s, and claimed that Tehran had not actually attempted to rebuild its nuclear program after the U.S. military attacked three of its key nuclear sites last June. Gabbard blatantly irritated Trump earlier this year when she opted to shield a former deputy who openly disagreed with the war.

Regardless of the broad purview of her office, Gabbard had recently been relegated to pursuing claims of 2020 election fraud. In January, Gabbard was caught on camera overseeing FBI agents as they packed up the Fulton County, Georgia, election office and walked out with ballots from the 2020 presidential election, despite the fact that she is prohibited from taking part in domestic law enforcement operations.

Gabbard told Democratic lawmakers in February that Donald Trump himself had asked her to be there—but he did not stick by her side. Instead, Trump blamed Gabbard’s participation on ex–Attorney General Pam Bondi. Now both women are gone from his administration.

Four people have exited Trump’s Cabinet since he returned to office last year—all of them women. They include Gabbard, Bondi, former DHS chief Kristi Noem, and former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer.

This story has been updated.

The New Jersey Republican has been missing in action since March 5, skipped 88 House votes so far, and hasn’t been seen in Washington for more than 75 days. Yet he has also taken Amtrak and used several rideshare apps around San Francisco, according to pre-primary reports that Kean filed with the Federal Election Commission.

All the trips occurred in mid-April—several weeks into Kean’s unexplained disappearance.

Kean’s staff have also been traversing the country with their boss’s express approval. His chief of staff, Dan Scharfenberger, has obtained Kean’s signature twice since early March for trips funded by special interest groups. They include a jaunt to Las Vegas, paid for by the Republican Main Street Partnership, and a trip to Middleburg, Virginia, for a “spring issues conference” sponsored by the bipartisan policy organization Center Forward, NOTUS reported Friday.

The 57-year-old has also continued trading stocks during his prolonged absence, buying and selling shares of Amcor, Chubb Limited, First Citizens BancShares, Johnson & Johnson, and PepsiCo, according to congressional financial records obtained by NOTUS. The combined value of the trades ranges from $50,008 to $190,000.

Kean initially offered a meager explanation late last month for his sudden disappearance, confessing to House Speaker Mike Johnson (after a small pressure campaign fronted by journalists and tristate lawmakers effectively forced him to pipe up) that he had been dealing with an unspecified “personal health matter.”

At the time, Kean promised that he would return to work shortly. It has been nearly four weeks since then.

On Thursday, Kean told the New Jersey Globe that his health prognosis was “good” and that he would be transparent about his illness soon. He also said that he planned to return to Washington—and the campaign trail—in the coming weeks.

“My doctors are confident that I’m on the road to a full recovery,” Kean said in a lengthy phone interview.  “I understand the need for public transparency, and I appreciate the support of my constituents.”

But the clock is ticking on Kean’s return: Johnson is in the midst of advancing a partisan budget reconciliation that faces total opposition from the Democratic Party. The speaker can spare just two Republican votes on the measure, if all Democrats are present and oppose it.

Kean was elected to represent New Jersey’s 7th congressional district in 2022, and is months away from being thrust into a contentious midterm reelection cycle. He is currently unchallenged in the Garden State’s Republican primary, scheduled for June 2, but is likely to face tremendous opposition from Democrats come November. Over the last several months, his district has shifted from a “lean Republican” advantage to a total toss-up, according to an analysis by the Cook Political Report.

The president was reportedly shocked by the move, raising questions around who exactly is calling the shots in the White House.

Trump also announced he was sending more troops to the longtime U.S. ally.

“Based on the successful Election of the now President of Poland, Karol Nawrocki, who I was proud to Endorse, and our relationship with him, I am pleased to announce that the United States will be sending an additional 5,000 troops to Poland,” Trump posted on Truth Social Thursday.

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Trump called Hegseth to ask why he had withdrawn the troops, and say that he should be kinder to one of America’s oldest allies. This implies that Hegseth was acting independently, or at least without the knowledge of the president—a shocking notion given the significance and unpopularity of the decision to pull troops from Poland. Is Hegseth acting alone? Is Trump too mentally unstable to be looped into these decisions?

“More evidence that DoD is running its own foreign policy, often directly contradicting what Trump wants,” Brookings Institute fellow Tom Wright wrote on X. “This is not the first time it has happened.”

Last year, Hegseth paused aid to Ukraine multiple times, all apparently without Trump’s approval.

Representative James Comer proclaimed that there’s a “need” for the slush fund.

“The things they tried to convict him of—it was a joke,” he said Friday. “So I think that there is a need for it. What the president needs to do to be able to get this through is to explain it and have a plan.”

Representative Ralph Norman appeared to have no problems with paying those convicted of assaulting police officers, saying Thursday that “January 6 is an issue that was made up in the first place” and a “staged thing from day one.”

Representative Jody Arrington called Trump “one of the biggest victims of weaponization” and argued that the slush fund is “an appropriate use of tax dollars.” Representative Dan Meuser went as far as to call the slush fund “reparations to those who were wronged by Biden.”

Even House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, the third-highest-ranking Republican in the House, defended the slush fund.

“Having your own personal lawyer, at this point, become [attorney general]—A.G. is the only person who could’ve gotten rid of these audits, right?” CNBC’s Joe Kernen asked Emmer, referring to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s related settlement agreement that the IRS cease all audits of President Trump and his family. “It just looks … smells bad.”

“Joe, I think it’s unfair to say it’s just the president who’s upset. Americans are upset. They don’t wanna see their government be used against anyone, Donald Trump or anybody else,” Emmer replied, not engaging with Kernen’s actual point. “It was so egregious what they did to Donald Trump and his family. It’s one of the reasons that he’s back in the office. America wants this cleaned up, and Donald Trump is gonna make sure it is.”

KERNEN: The AG is the only person that could've gotten rid of these audits, and it was Trump's personal lawyer. It just smells bad.

EMMER: It was so egregious what they did to Donald Trump and his family -- it's one of the reasons he's back in the office. America wants this… pic.twitter.com/JmiQW4RJOA

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 22, 2026

Emmer is really arguing that the majority of Americans want their taxes to go toward a slush fund for MAGA sycophants, January 6 rioters, and any other individual or group that felt “targeted” by the Biden administration. He continued pushing this narrative later in the interview.

“So we’re all clear, you support the settlement that the president made with—some people would say he made with himself, others would say it was with the A.G.—you’re supportive of that, you feel like that was totally on the up and up?” Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Emmer.

“Let’s see what it is when it comes over to the House. The Senate’s gotta get their work done, Andrew, and you’re asking me to pass judgment on something—”

“No, no, no,” Sorkin interrupted. “The settlement unto itself. I’m not talking about the justice fund. The settlement that was made between the president and the administration.… Do you look at that and say, ‘That’s totally fine,’ you support how that was done?”

Emmer claimed ignorance.

“Well, I wasn’t in the room, so I don’t know what the details are. But I can tell you this: No one knows weaponization of government against him and his family better than Donald Trump. He was absolutely raked by these people for years, and the American public knows it,” he concluded.

Trump was “targeted” because he incited an insurrection. Now he wants you to pay his damages, and the GOP is acting as if it’s a completely reasonable thing to do—all as this widely unpopular president approaches midterm elections.

The DOJ created a $1.8 billion slush fund for Trump’s allies earlier this week at the same time as the president opted to drop his waning $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. Despite the coincidental timing, Trump told reporters Wednesday that he “wasn’t involved in the settlement.”

In the few short days since its launch, the initiative has received significant blowback from the public, which is tasked with paying for the unprecedented cash stash. But mounting opposition from House and Senate Republicans forced Trump Friday to attempt to shore up legislative support.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump put his foot down on the matter, claiming that he had given up “a lot of money” to allow the creation of the fund—but in doing so, he also blatantly admitted that he was responsible for the whole thing.

“I gave up a lot of money in allowing the just announced Anti-Weaponization Fund to go forward. I could have settled my case, including the illegal release of my Tax Returns and the equally illegal BREAK IN of Mar-a-Lago, for an absolute fortune,” Trump wrote. “Instead, I am helping others, who were so badly abused by an evil, corrupt, and weaponized Biden Administration, receive, at long last, JUSTICE! President DJT.”

The honeypot payments are effectively reparations, paid for by U.S. taxpayers, to virtually any right-winger who felt targeted by the previous presidential administration.

The DOJ slush fund was the result of an unprecedented deal that Trump made with himself. And the arrangement came with a curious addendum from acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, immunizing Trump from further federal prosecution. The government of the United States, Blanche wrote Tuesday, is “forever barred and precluded” from pursuing “any and all claims” against Trump, his family, or his business.

Hundreds of Trump’s MAGA-aligned allies have already lined up for their slice of the pie. They include MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and Republican lawmakers. A slew of pardoned January 6 rioters are also in the queue, including former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, a sex offender who bear-sprayed cops, and a convicted child molester who told his victims he would give them money from a Trump payout in exchange for their silence.

Legal experts have questioned whether the scheme is legal at all. If the arrangement is allowed to stand, Trump will have effectively thwarted the powers of both the legislative and judicial branches, and soiled the constitutionally defined separation of power.

Why? I’ve written this a few times, but I’ll write it again: There is no comparison whatsoever to be made between the Democrats’ situation after the 1988 election and their situation now, post-2024. In 1989, the Democrats had been absolutely pasted in three elections in a row. In 1980, Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan by nearly 10 points and 440 electoral votes; in 1984, Walter Mondale lost to Reagan by 18 points and 512 electoral votes; in 1988, Michael Dukakis lost to George H.W. Bush by 8 points and 315 electoral votes.

Meanwhile, the last three presidential elections have been decided by razor-thin margins. Hillary Clinton lost narrowly, though she won the popular vote by a fairly substantial margin (2.8 million); Joe Biden won; and Kamala Harris lost by a combined 230,000 votes in three states. There is no parallel to 1989.

So why would someone write this? I can think of only two reasons. The first is a combination of historical ignorance and allowing emotion to push aside facts. Democrats were so crushed by 2024 that it kinda felt like 1988. But feeling that without looking at the actual numbers is either dumb or lazy.

The second reason someone might write that sentence is ideological. That is, they are firmly committed to the view that the Democratic Party needs to “move to the center” or even “to the right,” and so they invoke the anemic ghost of 1988 to help them make their case. And if they did happen to stop and look at the numbers from the 1980s and wrote the sentence anyway, well, that would make the writing of it a deeply cynical exercise as well, because the writer would know there’s no truth to the analogy.

That “someone,” by the way, was Democratic consultant Paul Rivera. The Democratic National Committee hired him on a pro bono, part-time basis to conduct the autopsy even though he hadn’t worked on a presidential campaign in more than two decades. Apparently, he never finished the job, as the document released on Thursday was shockingly incomplete. “For full transparency, I am releasing the report as we received it, in its entirety, unedited and unabridged,” DNC chair Ken Martin said. “It does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards, but I am doing this because people need to be able to trust the Democratic Party and trust our word.”

No wonder I couldn’t read it any further. Lazy and inapt historical analogies, and indeed carrying on a detailed argument about why Harris lost, is irrelevant to what’s needed most in this moment: a discussion of how the Democrats can win in 2028. But before doing that, let me quickly offer three broad reasons why Harris lost:

1. Joe Biden didn’t exit the race in time.

2. Harris didn’t do an adequate job of reminding voters of Trump’s incompetence on a range of fronts in his first term (this is a point the autopsy apparently does make, in fairness).

3. Harris didn’t make a compelling or aggressive enough economic case.

Always in presidential campaigns, there are dozens of factors, but I would hope about 97 percent of us can agree that if Biden had exited in the spring and the Harris campaign had done a better job of 2 and 3, she’d likely have won those 230,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and more. OK? And that’s all the autopsy that’s really needed. (There are separate questions of the ground game and spending and things like that, but those topics are for insiders only.)

The same day the autopsy was released, The New York Times published a poll looking at Democrats’ beliefs and attitudes right now. The poll does say that in some ways, Democrats and “potential Democratic supporters” want the party to move to the center; 52 percent said the party should nominate a centrist in 2028, and 25 percent said it should nominate a more progressive candidate. Respondents thought Democrats should moderate their positions on immigration (specifically the border) and crime. And I think it’s clear to most people, for example, that the 2028 Democratic standard bearer does have to take a pretty stern line on border security. It’s the one promise Donald Trump made that he’s actually delivered on, and the only issue on which he’s above water in polls (this does not include, mind you, wanton deportations by ICE thugs—just the actual border).

So there were things, surprise surprise, that Democrats disagree on. But there was one thing they seemed to agree on: “Still, the economic populism pushed by a growing number of Democratic midterm candidates has found a receptive audience. More than 80 percent of the party’s backers thought the political and economic system should be torn down entirely or needed major changes, and nearly 90 percent called the economic system unfair.”

That’s the secret sauce, right there. That’s the answer. There was one question in the poll that to me was more important than all the others. It was wordy, so bear with me: “Now I’m going to describe two hypothetical Democrats. Tell me which of the two you would be more likely to support in the next Democratic primary for president. A candidate who promises to lower prices by going after corporate monopolies and price gouging. [Or] a candidate who promises to lower prices by making it easier to build housing and expand energy production.”

I’m not quite sure why housing and energy were considered the opposite of monopoly power and price gouging, but hey, I didn’t write it. Anyway: Going after monopolies and price gougers won 67 to 30 percent. It won massive majorities from every category in the cross-tabs. Young people, 75 percent; old people, 68 percent. Men, 65 percent; women, 69 percent. Whites, 70 percent; nonwhites, 65 percent.

Oh. And among which subcategory was the result most lopsided? White noncollege, by 76 to 22 percent. In other words, those magic white working-class voters the Democrats have hemorrhaged, and the media can never stop talking and writing about. The result among nonwhite noncollege respondents was not as extreme as that, but was still a whopping 64 to 34 percent.

The lesson here is obvious. Democrats have to make it crystal clear, unmissably clear, that they are on the side of working people struggling to get by and getting nickel-and-dimed by shifty corporations every day of their lives. That means taking certain policy positions, but it means much more.

“Positions” are close to worthless in campaigns today. What’s needed today is to create emotionally gripping narratives and make them go viral. On this issue, that means calling out the bad actors by name. It means naming villains. It means educating the American public about why they’re paying higher prices for prescription drugs and other forms of medical care, and who’s responsible. Watch this five-minute clip of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just ever so deftly ripping the eyeballs out of David Joyner, the CEO of CVS Health, earlier this year. Much more of that, please, Democrats.

In the superficial lexicon the political media uses, I suppose this means “moving to the left” on economics. Fine. So be it. But I’d argue it isn’t even “to the left.” It’s moving to where the people are. The people are furious about getting ripped off by corporate actors whom a rigged system will never hold to account. If virtually every demographic in that poll prefers a nominee who goes after monopolists and price gougers by 30-plus points, well, polling doesn’t ever get any clearer than that.

There’s this endless and often boring debate about whether to energize the base or reach out to moderates. As the above poll numbers show, a populist economics that targets bad actors can energize both. It’s only elite moderates who are against this, because they accept money from those sources for their campaigns or their organizations. They don’t actually represent anybody, or they represent a share of the electorate that is shrinking at a lightning pace. They, too, need to get with the program. This is where the people are.

So autopsy, schmautopsy. Stop arguing about 2024, Democrats. Talk about the future. And talk about the bad guys who are making working people’s lives harder. That’s where today’s “vital center” is—they’re sick and tired of getting screwed—and that way lies victory.

But the longtime comedian did not go out quietly. Instead, Colbert capped his exit with an eyebrow-raising copyright joke by ramping up the tunes—licensed tunes, to be exact.

The Late Show host was in the midst of running through the headlines during his “Meanwhile” segment when he mentioned that the owner of the Peanuts catalog had recently sued several entities—including the U.S. Department of the Interior—over the unlicensed use of the show’s iconic music, written by American jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi.

Cue the music: “Linus and Lucy.”

“Is the band right now playing the same Peanuts music that I just said people are being sued for for using without permission? Is that what they’re doing?” asked Colbert.

“Yeah,” Louis Cato, the show’s band leader, responded with a shrug.

“Oh no, I hope this doesn’t cost CBS any money,” Colbert deadpanned.

LOL Stephen Colbert is making his band play licensed music during his final show so CBS – who fired him – will get sued and have to pay millions

"Anyone illegally using that music is gonna have to pay through the nose--"

[band starts playing]

"Oh no! I hope this doesn't cost… pic.twitter.com/mOeZMXEZpv

— Spencer Althouse (@SpencerAlthouse) May 22, 2026

Colbert’s show—the most popular in its time slot—was canceled in August, three days after the comedian criticized Paramount’s $16 million settlement with Donald Trump. He claimed that the company’s payout to quell the president’s groundless lawsuit targeting Kamala Harris’s 60 Minutes interview looked like a “big, fat bribe.”

The copyright gag will likely do no damage, however. Networks like CBS typically use broad blanket music licenses prearranged through entities such as ASCAP and BMI, which allow them to legally broadcast any copyrighted material within the catalog. The Peanuts tune that Colbert’s band played is within that fold.

Despite the bedlam consuming Trump—so much so that he has to miss his son’s wedding this weekend—he was quick to celebrate Colbert’s end, jeering on Truth Social that “Colbert is finally finished at CBS.”

“Amazing that he lasted so long! No talent, no ratings, no life. He was like a dead person,” wrote the president after Colbert’s final episode ended.

“You could take any person off of the street and they would be better than this total jerk,” Trump added. “Thank goodness he’s finally gone!”

Trump further insinuated that Colbert’s pink slip was anything but a coincidence. In another post Friday morning, Trump claimed that Colbert’s firing would be the “beginning of the end” for “untalented, nasty, highly overpaid, not funny, and very poorly rated Late Night Television Hosts.”

“Others, of even less talent, to soon follow. May they all Rest in Peace!” he wrote.

The plan, first reported by Reuters on Friday, was spearheaded by White House adviser Kurt Olsen, whose primary job is to find ways to prove President Trump’s false rigged election claims to be true. Olsen’s plan was to force states to switch to hand counting ballots, a method many experts say leaves more room for potential cheating.

The plan advanced far enough last year that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and other department officials began working to find a justification to implement it, but they ultimately failed to do so, as there is no good reason to swap out the voting method of millions of people—especially right before a midterm election. There is no proof that voting machines have ever been hacked, despite the president’s repeated allegations.

The Trump administration appears desperate to gain an upper hand ahead of the midterms. In December, the Justice Department sued and raided an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, and has filed lawsuits to gain voter rolls in more than 30 states. This is all aimed at creating chaos and doubt so that Trump can declare any election he loses fraudulent.

Both Secretary Lutnick and Olsen have yet to comment.

The cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s CBS program isn’t the end of entertainment shows with a political bent on network TV. In the latest edition of Right Now, Meredith Conroy, a political scientist at California State University, San Bernardino, discusses the post-Colbert television landscape. She emphasizes that ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel remains in his perch, as do the women who host The View, which also airs on ABC. Both programs are very critical of Trump. But Conroy acknowledges the landscape has changed dramatically since Bill Clinton played the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show during the 1992 campaign and forever made late-night TV a place for politicians to show their softer sides. She explains the powerful role that Colbert and Jon Stewart played in shaping liberal thought during George W. Bush’s presidency. Their influence seemed to wane during Barack Obama’s presidency. But during Trump’s first term, Colbert, fellow Daily Show alum Samantha Bee, Kimmel, Trevor Noah, and Seth Myers combined to deliver nightly humorous denunciations of the president. Stewart returned to late-night in 2024 with a sharp and prescient critique of President Biden’s decision to run for a second term. With Colbert off the air, Kimmel will be an even more important voice, says Conroy.

This is part of Right Now’s ongoing coverage of media in the Trump era, including a discussion on the temporary suspension of Jimmy Kimmel and an exploration of why the right has been much smarter than the left in developing media strategies.

Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. We’re talking today on the last day Stephen Colbert will be hosting his show on CBS, because CBS decided to cancel it. So we’re talking to Meredith Conroy. She’s a professor of political science at Cal State University San Bernardino, and she’s an expert on media and politics and the intersection of the two. So I want to talk to her about late-night TV and its role in politics. Meredith, welcome back.

Meredith Conroy: Thanks. Great to be here.

Bacon: So I want to go through a few what I’m going to call almost a history of seminal moments of late-night TV and politics. And rather than ask you questions, I want to go through the moment and describe it how I saw it, and then have you react to it. Because I think you and I are in the same age range—I’m not aging you—but we’re in the same range and we probably have some of the same cultural references, so we’ll do it that way.

Conroy: OK, that sounds great.

Bacon: All right. So I’m going to start with 1992. A lot of people in communications and politics say this is the big moment when late-night becomes a part of politics on some level. This is when Bill Clinton is running in 1992, and he goes on Arsenio Hall.

Arsenio Hall was a late-night talk show host—he’s African American, and I think that’s relevant to this conversation. So Bill Clinton goes on and plays the saxophone, and it’s a moment where he appears more natural, very charismatic, casual. It’s the first time, I think, a major candidate has been on one of those shows.

And I know it was a big moment because my mom mentioned it to me yesterday. We were talking about politicians she viewed as charismatic—and maybe handsome, even—and she mentioned Bill Clinton when he was running and playing the saxophone. So this really resonated, even years and years later. Did you watch this? Talk about Arsenio Hall and Bill Clinton—which I did not watch, because I was 12, but looking back, I know what it was.

Conroy: Yeah. I also don’t think I watched—I think I was 9. But as you mentioned, in political communication, people who study late-night—it’s always the first example in any academic article. They always start with Clinton on Arsenio.

And like you said, the effect of that was that he was likable, personal—his image was softened for a broader audience who may not necessarily be politically attentive, which academic research shows that the late-night audiences historically have been less attentive to politics, and late-night shows are a gateway for that attention.

We call that incidental exposure—by watching a late-night show where you might not expect to be encountering politics, you do. And I’m sure in the ’90s that was especially the case. Leno and Carson certainly had made political jokes, but I think with Clinton on Arsenio, that sort of solidified the necessity for political candidates to campaign by going on these late-night shows with audiences that were different than 60 Minutes.

But that’s interesting that your mom talked about how she really liked him because of that appearance. Those appearances, I think, have that effect. I remember—I’m already jumping ahead to The Daily Show—but I remember watching The Daily Show and seeing, I think it was Huckabee, play bass on the show.

Bacon: I think Huckabee is more of a musician type, if I remember correctly. I think you’re probably—this is when he ran in ’08, I think.

Conroy: I should have confirmed that, but I remember being like, “Wow, he is coming off incredibly likable.” They’re doing a talent that’s unrelated to politics, and it’s just a different environment. It really can change the way that people see these candidates. What else should we say about Clinton’s appearance on Arsenio?

Bacon: So I’m going to jump to another one. I’m going to jump to 2003—about 10 years later. I actually did watch this one. Arnold Schwarzenegger decided to run for governor, and he announced this on the Jay Leno show. That was very funny at the time, and kind of funny now, although he was actually a pretty decent governor.

But anyway, he goes on—and he and Jay Leno are friends, in part because they’re both in Hollywood. Arnold Schwarzenegger was an actor, for people who don’t know—and is an actor, I should say. And so he went on and announced his candidacy on Jay Leno, and then went on to win the governorship. That was another big moment—the first time, I think, somebody had really formally announced their candidacy on one of these shows.

Conroy: Yeah. It made sense—an actor, like you said, in the state of California. And the Tonight Show is in Burbank, as opposed to Letterman, which is in New York. I definitely watched Leno as a kid. There were the Leno-Letterman wars, where you liked one or the other. I grew up—I would stay up to watch Jay Leno.

And yeah, I remember that moment as well. I think it made sense for his campaign for those reasons we just said. But again, a moment that, like you said, was probably the first. I wouldn’t be surprised if a candidate since has announced that they’re running on a late-night talk show. And I know we’re going to talk about this—given how much more political these shows have become, and that Democratic politicians in particular actively want to be on these shows. So yeah, I’m sure that’s changed. But Schwarzenegger is a Republican running in the state of California.

Bacon: It should be noted because we’re conceding that now Democrats might announce on a comedy show. But back then, Schwarzenegger is a Republican—he was a sort of more moderate version. He and Leno—I think Leno actually got criticized later on for being too favorable to Schwarzenegger because they were friendly and so on. Also, Leno’s politics are probably kind of center-ish anyway.

Conroy: Yeah. One other—Trump went on with Jimmy Fallon, and Fallon famously ruffled his hair. But I think that appearance was probably one of the last times you saw a Republican that aligns themselves with Trump going on these shows.

Bacon: Yeah.

Conroy: But I jumped too far ahead. Are there other ones you want to talk about?

Bacon: So I guess the next thing I want to talk about is Jon Stewart and The Daily Show in the early 2000s. That show became really big from 2003 to 2008. I remember there was a moment in the 2007–2008 campaign—I was covering Biden, who was running for vice president by this time, and I was on the road with Biden. Biden was making all these gaffes, and my editor was like, The Daily Show featured Joe Biden’s gaffes—that means it’s really big now, we should do a story about it.

To the point where, particularly among liberals, Jon Stewart in that period from ‘03 to ‘08 was almost an assignment editor. That show was really seminal for liberals in that period. Does that seem right to you?

Conroy: Yeah. I think it was a can’t-miss for college-educated audiences. I don’t know how liberal the audiences were. There’s some academic research looking at who watched The Daily Show, and it did tend to be people who were already highly attentive. Because one of the debates in political science was whether or not The Daily Show in particular, and other mock news shows, created cynicism.

And there was even a special issue in a political science journal where they had mock debates and a mock trial, putting Jon Stewart on trial to argue about whether or not he was creating cynicism. And one of the debates was, he’s creating skepticism but not necessarily cynicism.

But yeah, it was a can’t-miss for myself when I was in undergrad and graduate school. You just didn’t miss it—you had to watch it in order to have conversations with your friends the next day.

Bacon: Did you learn from it, or did you already—was it more humorous, or did you actually learn stuff? Did you see things for the first time there?

Conroy: I learned a lot. And there have been studies that show that people did actually, from late-night and those satirical shows, become more interested in the news as a result of watching.

Because the people who watched The Daily Show probably already were highly informed in the first place, but it did lead to additional news-seeking from more traditional sources. So there were positive effects, learning effects.

I learned a lot, and then when I went on to be a professor, I am not ashamed to admit that I used—I had the DVDs. Remember the Indecision series?

Bacon: No.

Conroy: So every election they had Indecision 2004, Indecision 2008. I wore those DVDs out for my students, because I thought that satire is a vehicle for understanding a lot of what our politics is. And so I learned a lot, and I think my students did too. And then Jon Stewart even had a fake American government textbook—did you know this?

Perry Bacon: No.

Conroy: A physical copy of an American government textbook, organized just like any other American government textbook—yeah, mocking government, mostly.

But we should say The Daily Show—originally, I think their main foil was the media. Over time, they came to mock politicians, and I think The Colbert Report in particular targeted politicians more—especially, they brought them on the show and just mocked them to their faces in those “Better Know a District” series. But I think The Daily Show’s main target was you—the media. And that’s a useful vehicle or way to stay more neutral politically, when your target is the media, which is universally—

Bacon: I’m trying to remember now, because I remember Jon Stewart went on—there was a show called Crossfire, and Jon Stewart went on it to mock the idea that they made every issue Democrat versus Republican. But what was their—on The Daily Show itself—what was their critique of the media in the early phase? I don’t totally remember. On what grounds were they critiquing the media?

Conroy: They would definitely go after Fox News and the way that they used sound and images and eagles and flags and iconic American imagery to make people feel something. So I think Fox in particular was their primary source of ridicule. I do think they took on MSNBC as well—cable news, essentially. They would have lots of montages of either doublespeak or these mock debates where no one is really saying anything.

And so I wonder if his Crossfire episode—which probably people watching this or who do watch this know about—I used to show that in class as well. He takes down Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala for having a performative discussion and not a real discussion. And I’m sure that once he saw—that was one of those videos that went viral at a time when something went viral and became a topic of conversation for a month or longer.

And I think that maybe he was like, Wow, this really resonates. Let’s keep on this, let’s keep going after cable news. But I think Fox was the bigger focus of their criticisms—though I think MSNBC probably as well, and probably CNN.

Bacon: So we’ll come to Stephen Colbert now. He’s on The Daily Show for a while. I didn’t watch The Daily Show as much as other people did. But in 2006, I was at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and Colbert was the comedic guest. And it was a very aggressive attack on George W. Bush and his administration, but very subtly done through jokes and so on.

Everyone’s looking at the table, and we’re all like, Oh, this is much [more pointed than expected]. This is ‘06, before Bush has become very unpopular. People were like, Oh, he really gave a scathing speech about Bush, but in this sort of mock style, so it was harder to realize in the moment.

Conroy: Yeah, I think he’s so good at that. And on his show, The Colbert Report—where he was mocking Bill O’Reilly, I think, mostly—I think for a long time, people actually didn’t know if he was performing or not.

I genuinely think it was a debate amongst viewers. It probably was settled pretty quickly, but he’s so good at that. And I think he’s still good at it. I do think Colbert in particular has always been civic-minded. And when you hear him talk about his show and when he decided to leave The Colbert Report and go to late-night, it had a lot to do with feeling like that mocking was becoming too real and almost humanizing what he was trying to take down. And so that was what led to this next transition.

In that sense, I think his—and I know we’ll talk about this—he does seem to know where the winds are blowing and follow them. He was at the height of satirical news, and he was at the height of late-night in a political context.

I think the height of late-night was probably the Leno-Letterman wars, but in a political context, he was at the height of it. And now whatever he does next—podcast? That’s what I was thinking. Like Jon Stewart? I don’t know, but yeah.

Bacon: So I think that early period, from 2000 to 2008—Colbert and Stewart never said, “We are liberals,” but in some ways they were probably some of the more prominent and effective critics of George W. Bush.

Conroy: Yeah. Jon Stewart had that segment, “Mess-o-Potamia”—

Bacon: About the Iraq War, basically.

Conroy: About the Iraq War, absolutely. But that’s the one thing about media—one reason media seems politicized is because they are critical of power. And yeah, they were on air when Bush was in office for eight years. If there were a Democrat in office, do I think they would have gone after a Democrat as hard? Probably.

But because it was Bush, and because that was the height of those shows, I think they became more liberal-coded because they were critical of the people in power, and the people in power were the Republicans. And it does seem like Jon Stewart in particular has a personal, strong political opinion about Iraq and 9/11, and he’s done a lot, as most people know, for 9/11 first responders and made that kind of a personal political point of view.

Bacon: So I want to move to 2010, which I think was the height of their power on some level. Jon Stewart and Colbert had this Rally for Sanity, I think it was called, at the National Mall. And at this point, they didn’t make it—it was odd. They wouldn’t acknowledge this: it felt to me like a reaction to the Tea Party.

They were saying, The Tea Party is having these crazy rallies. Stewart and Colbert would not say, We are Obama supporters, but their ethos, their sense of humor was very in line with Obama. And I thought the 2010 event was in sort of frustration with what was happening in the country, driven by the Tea Party—that’s how I viewed that.

Conroy: Yeah. That’s right. The Tea Party rallies, for sure, and this was a reaction. Did you cover it, by chance?

Bacon: I didn’t actually end up going to that. I’m not totally sure why, because it was weird—we couldn’t quite figure out whether they were saying it was a political rally or not. They weren’t—they didn’t want to commit to it being political. They never wanted to commit to being political figures. That was part of what was going on, I think.

Conroy: And I didn’t go or know anyone that went, but I obviously knew about it and probably had wanted to go, because I was a super fan. And I think that what they were doing was good. A lot of it had to do with the fact that I personally became more interested in politics because of that kind of delivery.

But I don’t think the event—I think they’ve since commented on it. I don’t know if they necessarily regret it, but they didn’t necessarily see the function of it, and that trying to stay nonpartisan made it less effective.

Bacon: So by 2015, two things happen. And I think they correctly assessed that in the Obama years they were less relevant—their criticism was less sharp, I think that’s part of what’s going on. But by 2015, Jon Stewart decides to leave The Daily Show and stop hosting, and Stephen Colbert, as you alluded to, got a little bit bored with the Colbert character.

Then the late-night job with Letterman opens, and he’s chosen to replace Letterman. These things both happen in 2015. Jon Stewart kind of graduates out of The Daily Show—for a while, at least—and Colbert graduates to network TV.

Conroy: Yeah. I think that’s right, because much of what they needed was incompetence, and you can criticize the Obama administration for a lot of things, but incompetence isn’t probably one of them. So I imagine they lacked material, and there may have been less of a demand for that kind of political commentary.

When I was preparing for this, I was thinking about how irony and satire function. Dannagal Young—I think you’re aware of her research—she’s at the University of Delaware. She’s written about how liberals are drawn to satire and irony, and Republicans are drawn to outrage commentary. Her book is called Irony and Outrage, and it talks about the political functions of these emotions that can emerge from comedy. And those shows became so politicized that they almost ceased to do what they had set out to do, I think—and then, of course, late-night became politicized next.

Bacon: We’ll come back to that in a second.

Conroy: But I think you’re right about the evolution of it—the need for those shows was less obvious during the Obama administration. And I didn’t really watch much of Trevor Noah. Trevor Noah took over, I think, initially—

Bacon: Let me come back to Trevor Noah. Hold on one second. So 2015, also—I did watch this. Early in Colbert’s run—I don’t think I had a great sense of what Colbert himself thought and what his view of the world was. But in September 2015, he interviews Joe Biden. I think by this time, Joe Biden’s son Beau had died.

And there was a discourse about whether Biden was going to run for president or whether he was grieving and shouldn’t run. Colbert was very sympathetic to Biden, encouraged him to run. They talk about their shared Catholicism. And on some level, that was the first time I realized: Colbert is a Catholic Democrat like Joe Biden. That’s what I took away from that. Did you remember that moment?

Conroy: I do. And they also had their shared experiences with grief. Colbert famously lost a father and a brother in a plane accident and was raised by his mother. And Joe Biden, obviously, had lost his first wife and a child in a car accident, and then Beau. So I think they connected on that, and the Catholicism—they had lots of things to bond over.

Going back—Biden, I think, thrived in conversations with both of them.

Bacon: Both with Stewart and Colbert?

Conroy: Yeah. I think he thrives with that kind of back-and-forth. But Biden was on Stewart in 2006 and made a joke about how he lied about having coal miners in his family. Do you remember this?

Bacon: No, I don’t remember this.

Conroy: He says, I tried that crap. It doesn’t work. He’s like, I was from Scranton. I assumed there was a coal miner in my family, and it turns out there wasn’t. But Joe Biden’s no-malarkey, just being authentically who he was and honest—I think that did work well in those spaces.

And I do think Colbert is such a good interviewer. One of the things that he does on late-night is he has on engineers or scientists to talk about—not to say that those are boring fields—but he is able to get people excited about what they’re talking about. And yeah, I do think that interview was really good and probably may have informed Biden’s decision to eventually run.

But your question about Colbert’s politics being murky—I think that’s right. I kind of wonder if they formed in these roles. He’s talked about not really caring about politics before he started as a correspondent on The Daily Show, and I imagine that he became more engaged politically with that job. And the things that personally have happened to him in all of these roles probably shaped his views.

Bacon: I don’t actually think his politics at that point, 2015—I don’t think his politics are actually—yeah. I think he’s not Elizabeth Warren in terms of having a lot of views on things. And Joe Biden—I don’t think he’s that [ideological either.] He’s Catholic, he’s a nice person—that drives his politics more than that he’s read a bunch of books on policy. My sense is that for Colbert, maybe it’s a little bit like that too.

Conroy: Yeah. I think so—

Perry Bacon: What seems normal, what seems good, in a certain sense. I’m going to jump to 2017 now. This is when Trump is elected, and now we have a lot of TV hosts that I think are interesting. Colbert is very critical of Trump. Interestingly enough, Jimmy Kimmel—who I had never thought of as being interesting and never really watched—becomes the voice of—he’s defending Obamacare, criticizing Republicans. He talks about preexisting conditions and why we need to cover people with them.

I know that Bill Cassidy—Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy—just lost his primary. Back in 2017, Cassidy went on Kimmel’s show and assured him that the healthcare bill would not be that bad, and then the healthcare bill came out and it was pretty bad, and Kimmel ripped him and said, “You lied to me on my show.” That was a really—Kimmel I had thought of as always being dull, nothing to say, and he was very political.

You also had Seth Meyers, also very critical of Trump. Trevor Noah at this point has taken over from Jon Stewart and, with his background as being from South Africa, does a great job analogizing Trump to dictators abroad—that was an interesting role he played.

I had forgotten, until I was thinking about this, Samantha Bee, who’s also a graduate of The Daily Show—she also for this period has a show, and it was actually really very good, also very critical of Trump. So you have this unusual thing where comedy late-night becomes five different shows attacking Trump, who’s obviously terrible. But in a certain sense, that was a moment where late-night was very actively opposing the president.

Conroy: Oh, yeah. I had forgotten about Kimmel’s ACA segments. But I did used to show the one where they went on the street and asked people about the ACA and then asked people about Obamacare, and I think that would probably radicalize anyone to see how people’s opinions on the exact same thing shifted in real time when you labeled it Obamacare.

Bacon: Just so that people understand what you mean: when you ask people if they like Obamacare, they’re often very negative. But you ask people if they like the Affordable Care Act, they either don’t know what that is or they’re fine with it.

Conroy: Yeah. And I remember that was a segment that they did on Kimmel—they walked around talking to people. I actually don’t know where Kimmel is filmed—

Bacon: Studio in [Los Angeles].

Conroy: But yeah, walking around and talking to people. I had forgotten about that. But those moments were very salient for me, because I watched Samantha Bee for sure, and I watched all these late-night shows. I’ve just always loved late-night comedy, and I love political comedy.

And the moment with Trump is that he forced their hand with his attacks on media as being the enemy of the people. It’s funny, because that’s what their shtick was—they went after the media. And then now they got grouped in as media. It wasn’t just people at broadcast or online publications—they were now part of that group that was being demonized. And it makes sense that they would have to respond to those criticisms.

Bacon: One thing I hadn’t thought of until you were talking is that in the Leno-Letterman era, I think it was obvious Letterman probably voted for Democrats, but Leno and Letterman were trying to reach these big mass audiences. By 2017, there was no way—Colbert wasn’t reaching 20 million people. So being more ideological, being more partisan was fine because he already had a niche audience. There’s nothing—there’s no real broadcast by that point, right?

Conroy: Yeah. And I think that also explains the shift in what they talked about, because these audiences now—and even late—now this is the problem with late-night. The fragmentation of our media environment is such that appointment television is over, right?

People don’t sit down at 10:00 p.m. on a Thursday night to watch Jay Leno. They’re watching clips later on, and these networks are starting to get hip to that, to improve their ratings—and they’re still obviously struggling.

But the popularity was narrow. As you said, they had niche audiences. So we call it narrowcasting. Broadcasting is ABC, the network. Narrowcasting—you know your audience, and you give them the information that they want. It also creates more of those parasocial relationships, because they feel more personally attached to the hosts.

And you just have this cyclical effect: your audience becomes more and more like a community, more like your friends, and then you continue to tailor your content to what they want and what they’re demanding. For other audiences, they wouldn’t even think about watching those shows. But for the audiences who do, it’s part of their regular scroll.

Bacon: Trevor Noah’s very talented, but I think his show in the first Trump administration was certainly less relevant than Jon Stewart’s critiques of Bush. And that’s because—why? Why do you think that is? I don’t think people were watching Trevor Noah to understand what was wrong with Trump the way they were tuning in to Stewart to watch Bush 15 years prior. So what do we think explains that?

Conroy: I think his comedic approach is different. I think he’s more high-level, high-minded, less—not to say Jon Stewart is slapstick, and I don’t want to say fart jokes or whatever, because that’s not what Stewart’s doing. But I think Noah’s comedy is more high-level.

It’s more—you have to think about the context that all of this exists in. And yet he brought his experiences, as you already mentioned, as a South African and Black man. It took more time for people to kind of get what he was doing. But I think it eventually became more popular, and then he left and started doing something different.

Bacon: He’s doing a podcast, I think. And we’re going to talk about podcasts—that’s where the world is going, I think.

Conroy: But I just think it was different. It’s hard when a new host comes in—they’re not going to do it the same way. I think it’s cool that he didn’t do it the same way, because that wasn’t why people [were watching].

Bacon: So I’m going to move—so the Trump era, all these hosts criticizing him. Biden comes in, these hosts are less critical because they’re more left-leaning, I think it’s fair to say. But I remember in 2024, Jon Stewart comes back to The Daily Show, and one of his first episodes is where he’s very angry about why we have these two old people running for president—Donald Trump, but also Joe Biden. Why is he running still?

It seemed like at this point Biden was skipping interviews, and Jon Stewart was pointing out, Why is this guy not doing interviews? It seems like that’s a problem—it says he’s not up to it. And I remember that was the first time where I saw liberals—my friends, people I know—being like, Jon Stewart sucks. He’s doing this both-sides crap that the rest of the media is.

And that was an interesting moment, because I think seven months later, it looked like Jon Stewart was correct. But in some ways, that was the first time where Jon Stewart’s politics were different than the average Democrat’s were for the first time, I thought.

Conroy: Yeah. And I think it made sense—that’s when he came back, because I think he got uncomfortable with his only target being Republicans and Trump. And then when he saw an opportunity where I could be critical—be what I wants to be, which is critical of bad politics or bad political decisions—that was a door that he saw open and jumped through.

And he was definitely part of the folks that were critical of Biden. And yeah, I imagine that the audience didn’t want to hear that sort of thing, because—and it makes sense, right? There are lots of people targeting Democrats. So you come to those places for something that you feel good about watching— you come to those places for something that you feel good about watching and doesn’t make you question... No, I shouldn’t say that. that it was just a safer place to critique the other side.

And so some of those points were probably not received well by the audience. But as you said—and you were probably right—had people listened to people like Stewart sooner, 2024 could have gone differently.

Bacon: So 2025, Trump’s second term. It felt—I guess Samantha Bee doesn’t have a show by this time. Trevor Noah is not on, but Stewart is back, and The Daily Show is doing what it used to do. But I feel like by 2025, the hosts are a little less critical of Trump than they were in 2017. Is that right?

Conroy: The late-night hosts?

Bacon: Yeah, the late-night hosts. Yes.

Conroy: Yeah. I think people were tired of Trump criticism. And what else can you say?

Bacon: What else can you say? I think that’s correct as well. So when CBS decides—this is last July—we’re going to cancel Colbert on The Late Show, what did you—I guess my reactions were: Yes, this seems like CBS, or whoever’s buying CBS, might want to placate Trump.

But I’m also open to the idea that the late-night era—the era of one person, one white guy most of the time, interviewing whoever the celebrity of the day is—is over, because all the celebrities have their own podcasts. Everyone has a podcast. These people are all over the place. So I don’t like what happened, because I like Colbert, and I think CBS is probably doing some level of censorship. But in this—we probably have left the era of late-night as sort of—

Conroy: Yeah. I think—setting politics aside, which I think [you’re right about]—the fact that it’s CBS that’s the first to jettison a late-night talk show does suggest that it’s political, because of the new ownership there and other decisions that were made. That makes sense. But I think what we talked about earlier is also factoring in—the appointment television era is over.

I don’t think the era of interviewing politicians is over. There is some where interviewing is [what people watch]: Hot Ones, depending on your political orientation—Ziwe—what are some other interview shows? The SmartLess podcast, Armchair Expert. These people are—

Bacon: So all of them interview politicians a lot?

Conroy: Yeah, they bring politicians on. So I think there’s still a demand for that format, and for sketches too. I think Saturday Night Live is still really popular and has been better about figuring out how to use the clip economy to keep people interested. And like I said, I don’t think the networks have yet figured out how to measure the attention that they get from those audiences in all those spaces.

But yes—I think the formatting is affecting late-night. CBS is obviously the first to offload the actual show. Do I think the rest are going to? Possibly.

It does seem, though, that Seth Meyers and Jimmy Kimmel are still popular and figuring out this new format and these new audiences. Fallon I’m really interested in, because he’s the least political of them all. But his ratings are dropping as well.

Bacon: The ratings are going down because the ratings are going down, yes.

Conroy: Exactly. It’s kind of like that debate about Bluesky and Twitter—social media is dying.

Bacon: Yeah. Except Bluesky, social media is dying, at least for sure. Yes.

Conroy: Yeah. And so I think it’s just a formatting issue. And if CBS wants to try and figure out what works there instead, good luck. But I think some of these late-night shows will hang on. Some of these networks will try to hang on, to figure out if they can keep their audiences around—or where their audiences are going—and follow them. So I think it’s both: yes, the politicization, and Trump politicizing late-night, has contributed to it, but it’s certainly not the only reason.

Bacon: So going back to the beginning here. If you’re looking for the Arsenio Hall–Bill Clinton example—if you’re a politician today, where do you go to reach the sort of mass audience, to show that you’re a nice, normal person?

Conroy: I think you have to go everywhere. I think you have to tailor your message.

Bacon: I meant to mention—Trump hates The View, and they’re all on The View. The View is also a talk show in a different way, but is actually very political, right?

Conroy: It is interesting. In political science, we call The View and these shows we’ve been talking about “soft news.” I don’t know if I already mentioned that. But soft news is where you get incidentally exposed to politics when you’re not expecting it. I don’t know if that’s the case anymore for The View, because of how political it’s become—and they even have someone who’s more conservative and someone who’s more liberal to have balance. So it is a political show. But yeah, The View is relevant here. Obama and McCain both did The View.

Bacon: Yeah. I should have mentioned—The View is not in late-night. The time is not the same, and it’s not the same format. But in some ways, they interview people and they talk about politics a lot.

Whoopi talks about politics all the time and has the same views as Colbert and the other hosts in terms of being anti-Trump. And I know Trump also hates The View and has been trying to get ABC to censure them as well, the way he tried to handle Kimmel.

Conroy: But I think if you’re running for office now, you have to do a lot more shows. You don’t have the benefit of a single show that has a really big audience, like Leno or Letterman or Arsenio. But you have lots of shows with audiences that are attuned and care and take it as an endorsement.

Like, when you go on—I shouldn’t say that, because Crooked Media doesn’t necessarily endorse everyone that they have on. But the Crooked Media empire has a left-leaning audience, and politicians running as Democrats have to go on those shows. Ezra Klein has an audience that’s very different from Crooked Media but also slightly left-leaning, and if you’re running for office, you go on that show. He had on James Talarico, and he recently had on Alex Bores from the New York race. So that’s another stop you have to make.

It would be really interesting to see how these candidates are doing lots of shows—how they talk about themselves to these different audiences. I don’t think they’re going to do really niche shows. I mentioned Ziwe—do you know Ziwe?

Bacon: I don’t know who Ziwe is, no.

Conroy: OK. It’s incredibly dry—puts people on the spot, gets them to say something that they don’t mean. She’s a brilliant interviewer in a way that is very uncomfortable. Z-I-W-E. I don’t think they’ll probably stop there, but they probably will go on podcasts that have seemingly small audiences where those audiences never miss an episode. Call Her Daddy for younger women—

Bacon: This is one that I found challenging. When Kamala went on this show, I was like, “Who is this person?” And I can’t tell if that’s because I’m old, or male, or both, because I didn’t—I did not know who that was.

I feel like people knew who Arsenio Hall was in ’92, even people who didn’t watch it every night. But sometimes these—I know who Joe Rogan is. But Kamala did a bunch of podcasts in 2024, and some of them I was like, “I don’t—”

Conroy: That’s correct.

Bacon: Are you reaching people? Because I know niche and small are related concepts, and sometimes I wonder: Are they going almost so small they’re not hitting anybody?

Conroy: They are going small, and their audiences are nothing like what you used to get when you went on a late-night show. But I do think that if you are interested in a young female audience, you would go to Call Her Daddy. If you’re interested in a young male audience, you would probably do Joe Rogan. There are other options.

Bacon: I think Bill Simmons has been noted as somebody who might be more useful, yeah.

Conroy: Yeah. Probably. But it’s a whole new world, and I imagine working in communications for a politician these days—you have the weirdest spreadsheets in front of you. And also that data’s really hard to get. Edison has podcast listening data, but it is hard to know who watches these shows. They don’t have a Nielsen.

And I imagine all these candidates know who watches what. So it’s a whole new frontier—as someone who studies it, and for candidates and campaigns that are trying to navigate those waters. It is a whole new world. But I think going on every show seems to be what a lot of these candidates in contested races are doing.

Bacon: So we’ll finish by talking about these guys. Jon Stewart does an interview show—he’s both doing The Daily Show, I think once a week, but he’s also doing these long interviews. He interviewed AOC. And my sense is his interviews go viral in part because he is still a big deal—so in some ways, Jon Stewart has [that going for him]. Trevor Noah interviews people, occasionally politicians. And I’ll be curious what Colbert does.

Conroy: I am too.

Bacon: But I guess the question is: Do these individuals matter even if they’re not in the late-night format they used to be in 20 years ago, with a big audience? Do Colbert and Jon Stewart matter today?

Conroy: I think so. And remember when we did our 2028 draft—last time I was with Perry and Nathaniel Rakich—there were people in the comments talking about getting them to run for office. So I think that these names in particular have certainly solidified their influence on American politics.

I think I’m the one who said that they should both just take on a role as kingmakers—endorsing people, not running. And I don’t think either of them would even entertain running. Do you? I don’t think they would entertain it, either of them.

Bacon: When Colbert interviewed President Obama recently, he jokingly mentioned that people want him to run, and Obama said he would be the worst person, and then Colbert said, “Is that an endorsement?” and Obama said, “No, it’s not.” I don’t expect him to run for president, but I don’t think it’s zero percent. I think it’s more—

Conroy: With Colbert—

Bacon: With Colbert. He’s someone who seems fairly political and seems fairly open to it, and I think perceives himself to have been censored in a way that is political and partisan—and wants to run against today’s right. So I sense he has more motivation than Jon Stewart does.

Conroy: OK. I would agree with that if I had to rank them—Stewart below Colbert, for sure. But I do think their influence is solidified. Whatever Colbert does, an audience will follow him. I just don’t know what that will be.

A podcast seems the most obvious, but it seems like something not creative enough for Colbert. Maybe he’ll do some type of sketch show, or maybe he’ll do live events, go on tour. I think it’s probably something that him and his team are thinking about really hard, because they know that he has a lot of influence and that he does care about the outcome in the next races—2026 and 2028.

Bacon: So we think Kimmel and Seth Meyers will go on for a while longer, and we think politicians should go on those shows still?

Conroy: I do, yeah. I don’t think you’re getting the audience you used to get—politically inattentive people that aren’t politically active. I don’t think you’re getting that audience anymore. So the intention is different. But I still think you’re able to do what they’ve always done, which is be more personable, focus on your image, talk about your interests—your dog, your instruments, your kids—and they still serve that function.

And they can get away with it. One of the criticisms Stewart had initially of those shows was right—that they threw softballs. So does that mean that, now that late-night is political, they can’t have a softball conversation? They can. But even back in the Leno days, he would always end with a policy question.

Bacon: Yes. Yes.

Conroy: Because you can’t—OK, you had them on the show, you can’t totally shirk your duty to ask something political. But I think there are more political questions now. It’s still—you’re not going to have a debate necessarily with these late-night hosts, because the point is to make people have a good time while learning. So I think the intention is different, the audience is different, but it’s still an avenue where politicians should go.

Have we started seeing the 2028 Democratic candidates doing any of these shows?

Bacon: The reason I thought of The View is in part because I’m in Louisville, and our governor, Andy Beshear, who’s running for president, was on The View recently. Josh Shapiro has been trying to do the male shows—he’s done a couple of sporty podcasts.

In terms of late-night, I don’t watch Kimmel enough to know, to be totally honest. But I know that The View has become—I think The View is perceived as a place where you reach older liberal women. And they’re all trying to do that, yeah.

Conroy: OK. Yeah, I’ll have to start keeping an eye on that, because it does seem like it’s a rite of passage now. And you won’t see any Republicans going on those shows.

Bacon: Yeah. And with The View—I’m guessing that, though—it’s coded. Because I think even the conservatives on The View have become more critical of Trump in the last six months.

Conroy: Yeah. They have. And I don’t think you’re going to see JD Vance on Sunday night.

Bacon: Particularly JD Vance. The Republican running for president is not coded well for these kinds of shows. A Mitt Romney type might do better, but yeah.

Conroy: Or Nikki Haley—

Bacon: Nikki Haley would be a little better, or a less stiff version of that person, yes.

Conroy: But it’s a huge risk, politically, for Republicans to go on a show like that. You become associated with the Democrats and with liberals because of their own president.

It’s funny, because he has politicized them and then also given them a bigger audience because of the attention. And then his own party’s candidate can’t go on those shows because of how politicized it’s become.

Bacon: He made Kimmel more prominent by trying to get Kimmel canceled—

Conroy: Exactly.

Bacon: —and in a certain sense, yeah, we didn’t get into that, but—

Conroy: There’s no way people watched a monologue on a Tuesday had it not been—

Bacon: Yeah. That was the last time I watched Kimmel—was after he was suspended. He became the voice of America for some period, and the voice of free speech in a certain sense, which is good. But yeah.

Conroy: A former Man Show host is the voice of America. I had friends texting me, “Did you watch?”—friends that don’t talk to me very much—“Did you watch Kimmel’s monologue?” It was wild.

Bacon: All right. That’s a great place to end. Meredith, tell people where they can find your writing and your social media and your thoughts.

Conroy: Sure. First, thanks for the walk down memory lane. I did revisit some of my old Daily Show DVDs. I have a Substack called Gender Gap, where I write about gender gaps, and I might have to dig in to see if there’s some late-night show audience data about gender.

We talked about The View’s audience being obviously women—that’s the kind of thing I do on my Substack. And that’s where you can find me. Oh, and I’m on Bluesky at Meredith Conroy.

Bacon: Good to see you. Thanks for joining me.

Conroy: You too.

Bacon: Thanks everybody who watched. Bye-bye.

Conroy: Bye.

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

Donald Trump just got hit with an absolutely crushing poll from Fox News. Disapproval of Trump on the economy is at a new high, and his ratings on inflation are simply awful. This includes among Republicans. In that context, Trump’s rambling to reporters Thursday was revealing. He again urged Republicans to pass draconian voter suppression legislation, but he accidentally admitted that this is about preventing Democrats from winning elections. And on top of all that, Republicans are revolting against Trump in a fresh way. Things are really falling apart for him. Can we sustain this through election day?

We’re talking to MS NOW opinion editor James Downie, who has a good piece laying out how Trump is hitting all kinds of historic lows. James, nice to have you on.

James Downie: Great to be back.

Sargent: So let’s start with Trump’s ramblings to reporters. He brought up the SAVE Act, which is a vile piece of voter suppression legislation that would probably disenfranchise millions of people, and then said that Democrats are trying to block it. Listen.

Donald Trump (voiceover): The Democrats don’t want to pass. Now, I’ll tell you what, the Democrat voters do want to pass, 87 percent. But the Democrat politicians don’t want to pass. And the reason is they’d never be elected again. Because with their policy of open borders, transgender for everyone—I call it transgender mutilization of your children for everybody—men playing in women’s sports, all of the stuff that they do, high taxes. They want a tax hike …

Sargent: It’s complete nonsense that Democratic voters want to pass the SAVE Act. But note how Trump openly says there that passing it would mean Democrats never win another election. He actually says straight out that his voter suppression bill would lead to one-party rule in the GOP’s favor and that this would be good. Your reaction to that, James?

Downie: The clip practically speaks for itself. From the beginning of this presidency, but particularly in the last couple of months, we’ve seen, from the so-called weaponization fund to the arch to all sorts of efforts at self-enrichment, this is a man who more than ever wants to avoid accountability. And the only way to do that is to stay in power forever.

The fact that he is pushing this SAVE Act—versus, say, a bill to help the economy or to bring down gas prices by ending the war with Iran—shows that he isn’t really interested in winning voters over in any sort of regular, normal way. He’d rather cheat and he’d rather rig the election.

Sargent: Everything is about his monuments to himself and about preventing accountability for those things. That’s where we are.

Literally everything Trump talks about, pretty much all the time, is the arch, the ballroom. Now he’s got this new $1.8 billion slush fund that he’s going to use to reward allies. That’s got to be lumped in with voter suppression as yet another way to try and corruptly rig the system.

Downie: Absolutely. The slush fund can be seen as—and my colleague Zeeshan Aleem at MS NOW has written about this—not only rewarding past insurrection attempts, but a promise to people who are considering insurrection attempts in the future that this is a way you can get money, that there will be something there for you on the other side of it.

Sargent: Totally. This week’s Fox News poll is really something else. Trump’s approval among registered voters on the economy is 29 percent; 71 percent disapprove. These numbers have risen substantially in recent months. James, this is looking like something pretty close to total collapse on the economy, wouldn’t you say?

Downie: Absolutely. Not just on the economy, although that is the most outstanding number—but total collapse in general. You see a big movement, particularly on the economy, in the last two to three months as gas prices have spiked because of the Iran war. It’s brought down his opinion polls in general.

We’re seeing more and more movement toward the mid-thirties or even low thirties that is traditionally the floor for any president. It takes a lot of effort to reach those numbers—a lot of almost deliberate incompetence.

Sargent: I want to read a couple more numbers here. On foreign policy, he’s at 38 percent to 62 percent. On inflation, he’s at 24 percent to 76 percent. Seventy-six percent—that’s more than three-quarters of the country disapproving of his handling of the single most important issue to voters right now. He’s even crept underwater on border security as well, which was literally the one thing where he was staying above water.

He’s now underwater on that as well. And this is in a Fox News poll. I was struck by the write-up. They always generally try to come up with some way to soft-pedal the findings—they say, Well, there’s this good finding for Trump. This was a harsh write-up by Fox News. They were pretty blunt that he’s in real trouble.

Downie: Yeah. Even Fox News—there’s no way you can spin these numbers. And it’s not just Fox News. You have the New York Times/Siena poll that came out recently—minus 22, similar number for Trump.

The polling averages are looking similar. Nate Silver has him at an average of minus 21. The New York Times polling average, similar number. G. Elliott Morris’s number—who I believe you’ve had as a guest on your show in the past—minus 24, and 60 percent disapproval on average, which is just a remarkable number.

Just today we had the American Research Group poll, which was the first that I’ve seen that put Trump at 31 percent approval. Thirty-one percent. And yes, that’s just one poll, but even one poll at that number is a remarkably low reading for any president.

Sargent: We are getting close to George W. Bush post–Katrina [and] Iraq numbers here. I want to bring up still more numbers in the Fox poll because they go a little more directly to what’s happening to MAGA. Trump’s approval has dropped to new lows among Republicans who don’t identify as MAGA: 54 percent. Among white voters, it’s dropped to 43 percent. And among rural voters, it’s dropped to 43 percent.

Those are his approval numbers among those constituencies. And among independents, his approval is 24 percent—fewer than one in four in the country. To be barely above water among Republican voters who are non-MAGA and substantially underwater with whites and rural voters—that cuts deep into the coalition that elected Trump. That coalition is gone. It’s fallen apart.

James, the whole story we’ve been told about Trump for years has been that he has this rock-solid floor because his base will never leave him. But now big swaths of it are leaving him. What do you make of that?

Downie: The economy matters a lot. One story I like to tell is that historically, Herbert Hoover still got 35 percent of the vote in 1932 after four years of the Great Depression. But that was still a huge loss from his numbers in 1928. And the economy matters a lot to a lot of people, and the people sometimes who say that they’re now disapproving—maybe they’re not going to show up at the voting place and vote for the opposite party, but they might just not show up at all. So it can turn up in a number of different ways.

More generally, Trump set himself up for this. He promised prices would come down on day one. He promised no more forever wars. He promised to a lot of voters that their lives would be sunshine and rainbows the moment he was back in office.

Not only has it not happened, but he has been very publicly working against improving their lives and prioritizing things like the slush fund and his arch and his ballroom.

Sargent: Well, James, do you think there’s actually an opportunity here for Democrats to start making real inroads with some of these constituencies that have been hard for them to reach? Here, we’re seeing the guts of the Trump coalition leave him. We’re talking about white voters, noncollege whites, rural voters, even rural whites. Men are turning against him.

These obviously are constituencies that were terrible for Democrats in 2024—don’t have to get into why right now—but there’s actually an opportunity, with good candidates in the right places in some of these tough areas for Democrats like rural Pennsylvania, parts of Georgia, for them to actually start making the case to these constituencies that it’s time to give up on Trump and the Republican Party.

Downie: Absolutely. The longer this economic pain goes on, the longer that gas is as high as it is, the longer that people continue to feel like they are either barely making it by or falling behind, the longer that inflation continues to outpace wages—which it did again, we now know that it did for the past year, and that’s the first time that’s happened since the middle of the worst of the Biden presidency inflation—the more chance that gives Democrats to make inroads in the Republican coalition.

In 2024, as you said, not only did they do poorly with more traditional Republican constituencies that they would have hoped to make inroads in, but also they lost some things like younger voters, nonwhite voters, who they might have thought were part of their coalition. A lot of those voters either didn’t turn up or they voted Republican because of concerns about the economy. So the economy gives Democrats a real chance to now turn that around and to start making inroads in the Trump coalition.

Sargent: Well, two more Fox News numbers, just because they go to the point that you just made. Among Hispanics, Donald Trump’s approval is 33 percent to 67 percent. That’s staggering. It’s clear that any gains that Trump made among Hispanics are just gone. Among working-class voters—meaning voters without a college degree—he’s at 40 percent approval to 60 percent. Again, the inroads he made with nonwhite working class—gone.

This is a real opportunity, as you say, for Democrats to both start making inroads into some of these constituencies that have historically been tough for them and to repair the damage with these other constituencies that Donald Trump was able to take away from Democrats. Where do you see this going?

The big story has been that Republicans are on offense because they’ve been able to redistrict now. They’ve been able to rig the elections in their favor, and they’re going to win. But numbers like these will just absolutely swamp any redistricting that Republicans have done.

I don’t want to get too confident at all. Obviously, Democrats are going to have to win the popular vote probably by around three points at least right now. But it’s starting to look like that’s more than doable, because time is running out for them and Trump is tanking and he’s not turning it around. What do you think?

Downie: Usually a gain of seven, eight, nine, 10 seats—however much Republicans end up netting in these gerrymandering efforts—that would make a big difference in an election.… Especially in a House election there’s a shrinking number of competitive seats anyway.

But the numbers we’re seeing—the generic congressional ballot averages continue to widen. The Times had around plus 10. That would be well above what Democrats would need to flip the House. And the Senate is not something you can gerrymander. The Senate may be biased towards rural voters, but you can’t gerrymander it.

In terms of how it plays out, for Democrats to really make inroads into this coalition—you see it in this Fox poll, but you see it in a lot of polls—even as Democrats do well on the congressional ballot and Trump struggles, there are a lot of voters who are not happy with the Democratic Party and don’t feel like the party is fighting hard enough for regular voters’ interests.

Where that would tie in with what we’ve seen out of Washington this past week is that Republicans are realizing they can’t defend the corruption of the slush fund and the corruption behind the ballroom and things like that. I think that theme of corruption and of fighting against the big and powerful interests in Washington is going to be a winning message for Democrats.

Some candidates like Jon Ossoff in Georgia have been moving on that message. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Ossoff is now taking what many saw as might have been a toss-up race in the Georgia Senate contest—and now most people feel that Ossoff is pretty well on to keep it.

Sargent: Which is really striking, because Donald Trump won Georgia in 2024. Biden had won it in 2020, but it sure looked like that was a temporary blip. Now it’s looking like maybe Democrats can continue to seriously contest it.

To your point about the slush fund and Republicans turning against it, that is happening. The slush fund is actually being rejected by Republican senators, which is a rare thing. Punchbowl News reporter Andrew Desiderio reports that at a Senate GOP lunch on Thursday, two dozen senators objected to the fund. They now want to place restrictions on the fund in the reconciliation process. But it got even more interesting. According to this reporter, one GOP senator texted him, “Our majority is melting down before our eyes.”

This is pretty remarkable stuff. The slush fund is a bit of an inside-D.C. story. I think not as vivid as the ballroom, with its powerful imagery of Trump destroying the East Wing of the White House to build an enormous Nero-like monument to himself. But Republicans are just at the end of their tether with this guy. They don’t want to be associated with the corrupt schemes anymore.

Downie: Yeah, I think the slush fund—first of all, the name. The ease with which Democrats can just say, It’s an unregulated fund for Trump’s allies. It is very clearly a slush fund. It’s very easy to label. Also, we know January 6 was—thank goodness—not very popular, to say the least, with independent voters.

That means that in any TV package or social media video about this fund, you’re going to have footage of January 6. Any ad—it’s going to be people breaking windows and hitting cops with flagpoles. I don’t think that’s going to poll very well.

Sargent: There’s sort of a through line here, which is basically hubris. Donald Trump went out there earlier this week and stated straight out that his slush fund will go to insurrectionists. He said basically that that was the right thing to do because the insurrectionists were right.

So he admitted that he’s using this slush fund full of taxpayer money to reward people who tried to violently overthrow an election on his behalf. He just admits it straight out. Here in this clip that we just heard, he’s admitting straight out that he wants to openly rig the system in order to instill entrenched one-party rule forever.

There’s a level of hubris here that’s almost impossible to get your head around. But it’s looking like—I sure hope anyway—all the pieces are coming together for a truly epic repudiation. Don’t you think?

Downie: I think so. Just going back to the polls—we’re used to thinking of Donald Trump as unpopular, and he has been an unpopular president throughout his entire terms. But no president has ever been this unpopular at this point in his term.

Throughout the history of public opinion polling, no president has been this unpopular this early in a term. We’re entering uncharted territory. You’ve got more than two years to go and you’ve got a president whom fewer than two in five Americans support. And there’s no signs of it slowing down, especially while gas prices remain this high. So where do we go from here? It’s uncharted waters, to be frank.

Sargent: Well, as Donald Trump himself would say, nobody has ever seen anything like these poll numbers. And as you say, we don’t know where it’s going to end up, but it’s sure looking good right now. James Downie, awesome to talk to you. Thanks for coming on.

Downie: Thanks for having me.

In rare cases, the justices agree to hear a case, only to conclude later that it would be inappropriate or unnecessary for the high court to decide the case. When this happens, the court can decline to rule for either side and instead hold that the case is “dismissed as improvidently granted.” For brevity’s sake, most observers typically say these cases were “DIG’d.”

The court does not typically announce the vote breakdown when DIG-ing a case. Thanks to the concurring and dissenting opinions, it can be readily inferred this time. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch all dissented from the court’s move. Logically, that means Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett joined with the court’s liberals to nix the case.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor applauded the court’s decision to avoid a ruling. “Here, neither Alabama nor the United States seriously contends that the District Court’s finding was clearly erroneous,” she explained in a concurring opinion joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. “For good reason: It was not.”

Alito argued in dissent that the lower courts had misapplied precedents on executing people with intellectual disabilities and criticized his colleagues for not clarifying them. “By instead remaining silent, the Court exacerbates the confusion that plagues our jurisprudence in this area,” he claimed.

Thursday’s decision is good news for Joseph Smith, the death-row inmate in this particular case. Since the Supreme Court issued no actual ruling, the lower court decision where he prevailed is the final word. An Alabama jury convicted him of murdering Durk Van Dam in 1997 in a dispute over money. After receiving a death sentence from the trial court, Smith and his lawyers challenged the death sentence in court by claiming that he was intellectually disabled. They pointed to IQ tests where he scored in the mid-to-high 70s, as well as other evidence of his poor educational performances and low mental aptitudes.

It is a long-standing principle of the Anglo-American legal system that people with mental illnesses and intellectual disabilities are less culpable for their crimes. Lord Blackstone, the famed eighteenth-century judge and legal commentator, noted in the parlance of his era that “idiots and lunatics are not chargeable for their own acts, if committed when under these incapacities: no, not even for treason itself.” He invoked a Latin legal maxim that, translated into English, meant “Madness alone punishes the madman.”

In 2002, the Supreme Court held in Atkins v. Virginia that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment includes executing people with intellectual disabilities. Using an Eighth Amendment test that it had applied since the 1950s, the court looked at whether there was a national consensus against executing people with intellectual disabilities and concluded that one existed. (More on that test later.)

“Those mentally retarded persons who meet the law’s requirements for criminal responsibility should be tried and punished when they commit crimes,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the court, using the parlance of his time. “Because of their disabilities in areas of reasoning, judgment, and control of their impulses, however, they do not act with the level of moral culpability that characterizes the most serious adult criminal conduct. Moreover, their impairments can jeopardize the reliability and fairness of capital proceedings against mentally retarded defendants.”

The Atkins ruling did not specify the level of intellectual disability that could be permitted for an execution, nor did it spell out how to discern when someone met the constitutional threshold. Some death penalty states responded to Atkins by enacting a bright-line cutoff, typically at an IQ of 70. In 2014, the Supreme Court weighed in again by ruling that Florida could not execute a man whose IQ score had ranged between 71 and 80. This time, the court held that defendants must provide additional evidence of intellectual disability in “borderline” cases.

In this particular case, Smith took two tests from two experts, one hired by his own lawyers and one hired by the state. He scored a 74 on his lawyers’ test and a 78 on the one administered by Alabama. Both tests had a confidence interval of 95 percent, meaning that his score could fall between 70 and 83. The two experts, as well as a third one also hired by Smith’s lawyers, reached different conclusions. The state’s expert claimed that Smith’s scores were more indicative of a “learning disability” than an “intellectual disability,” while Smith’s experts pointed to other functional deficits to conclude that he was intellectually disabled.

A federal district court in Alabama weighed all of this evidence, along with other factual details, to conclude that Smith had shown that he had “significantly subaverage intellectual functioning and significant deficits in adaptive behavior” that manifested while he was a child. As a result, the court concluded that he met the constitutional threshold for intellectual disability, barring his execution. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the district court’s rulings on the facts of the case.

When the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case last year, it declined to review the specific questions presented by Alabama and instead focused on a different one provided by the Trump Justice Department in a friend-of-the-court brief: “whether and how courts may consider the cumulative effect of multiple IQ scores in assessing an Atkins claim.” After oral arguments and briefing, a majority of the justices apparently concluded that the reframing of the case was a mistake.

“The Court is not equipped in this case to provide any meaningful guidance on how courts should assess multiple IQ scores,” Sotomayor wrote in an opinion concurring with the court’s order. With the reframed question, she noted that both Alabama and Smith now agreed in a number of important ways, including that the Eighth Amendment “does not prescribe a single formula for weighing multiple IQ scores” and that Atkins left the “primary role” in developing those standards to the states.

Sotomayor also noted that the court had moved too far afield from what the lower courts had considered and decided, leaving the justices without a firm factual foundation upon which to rule. “Without the benefit of an evidentiary record or decisions below trained on the specific theories now advanced by the parties, this Court rightly concludes that it should not provide more detailed guidance beyond what this Court’s cases have previously said,” she wrote.

Alito, in what can be described as the main dissent, argued that the court should have reached a decision anyway to resolve what he described as “numerous unanswered questions” posed by Atkins. “This case presents one of those questions: How should a court apply a 70-IQ cutoff when a defendant has multiple test scores in the record?” he noted. “As the decisions below demonstrate, our failure to address this recurring question has led to confusion and unsound analysis in lower courts.”

Sotomayor disagreed with Alito’s framing of the stakes. “At the outset, there is no evidence that the lower courts are desperate for guidance; there is no split and neither state courts nor federal courts have expressed substantial confusion over how to assess multiple IQ scores,” she replied. Sotomayor also noted that there was “no reason for this Court to leapfrog the experts, state courts, and federal lower courts to provide conclusive guidance at this level of detail in the first instance.”

Alito’s opinion was joined by Roberts, Thomas, and Gorsuch. But even among the dissenters, there was disagreement. Roberts and Gorsuch declined to join part of Alito’s dissent that concluded the lower courts had “relied on psychologically, statistically, and legally unsound analyses to conclude that Smith’s IQ is 70 or below.” Alito took strong issue with the lower courts’ conclusion that since the lower bound of Smith’s IQ test was below 70, he falls below the standard. This is an unusually strong challenge to a lower court’s factual findings, especially in a highly technical discipline like psychology.

Thomas agreed with Alito in full but, as he often does, felt inclined to write his own dissent laying out his particular views. He argued that Atkins should be “overruled” because, in his view, “nothing in the text or history of the Constitution supports” it. He argued instead that the court should reconcile its precedents with the Eighth Amendment’s “original meaning” and the “common law.”

By abandoning the court’s 1958 ruling in Trop v. Dulles that relied upon “evolving standards of decency,” Thomas would implicitly wipe away the last 70 years of Supreme Court rulings on the Eighth Amendment’s protections. He correctly observed in a footnote that the court has not used Trop in its recent Eighth Amendment cases. But since the court has not directly challenged or overturned it, prior rulings that relied upon it remain intact, including bans on executing minors and on executing people for non-homicide offenses.

Despite his jurisprudential claims, it is hard to avoid the sense that Thomas’s personal views carry the day here. He describes Smith’s crimes in detail, as if it were relevant to the legal analysis. Unlike his colleagues, who all use the term “intellectual disability,” Thomas uses “mental retardation” when describing the conditions at issue here, echoing a broader public embrace of the slur by the American far right. He argues that the rule laid out by Blackstone and other English legal luminaries only applies to a “common-law idiot” and not, in Thomas’s view, to Smith.

Thomas’s colleagues would not go nearly that far—at least, not for now. Alito suggested that he might be inclined to do so if the court does not “clarify” its existing precedents. “If this Court continues to shy away from opportunities to provide workable doctrine, we should not be surprised if petitions asking us to overrule Atkins, Hall, and Moore arrive at our doorsteps soon,” he wrote, referring to the intellectual-disability cases.

That zeal for ensuring that executions go forward, unhindered by lower courts or defense attorneys, is characteristic of the Roberts court’s recent approach to the death penalty. In recent years, the Supreme Court has become generally hostile to death penalty litigation from prisoners and defendants, to the point that lawyers supporting its abolition or reduction now often shy away from bringing challenges that could be perceived as undermining American capital punishment. Thursday’s ruling suggests that there is still an outer boundary to the court’s eagerness for executions, no matter how hazy and indistinct it might be at this distance.

They were more than correct. The hospital ended care when it was under no legal obligation to do so, and the Trump administration still did not let up. Earlier this month, a federal court in the Northern District of Texas issued a subpoena to NYU Langone, ordering it “to provide information pertaining to patients under the age of 18 who received gender affirming care,” as well as the names of those who provided that care as far back as January 2020, according to an announcement the hospital posted to its website. Among the records the Department of Justice wants handed over are “documents sufficient to identify each patient who underwent Sex-Rejecting Procedures” (the administration’s term for gender-affirming care), as well as related billing records, insurance claims, and clinical evaluations, along with “complete personnel files” on hospital staff involved.  

In the administration’s ongoing attacks on trans kids, legal experts have said, the subpoena is a marked escalation, in which the federal government is using the secretive grand jury process to extract private health care information from an institution providing gender-affirming care to minors. The Justice Department purposefully pursued this order in a district with no relationship to the underlying issues, but where it would get a judge, Reed O’Connor, who was almost certain to give it what it wanted. As GLAD legal director Joshua Rovenger put it at a press briefing on Wednesday, “It’s not law enforcement—it’s harassment dressed up in a subpoena.”

In essence, a federal court in Texas—where you can count on getting a judge who’s repeatedly ruled in favor of the Trump administration’s mission—has now reached across the country and into the intimate lives of countless young New Yorkers and others who sought care in the state—where Texas arguably had no basis to intervene. If this sounds familiar—if a federal court in Texas with a history of taking cases involving other states’ business seems to ring a bell—you may be recalling a recent abortion story. In 2023, in the same district court, the Northern District of Texas, a group of anti-abortion doctors formed an organization and brought a legal challenge aimed at taking the drug mifepristone, commonly and safely used for medication abortion, off the market. The doctors didn’t provide care in the jurisdiction, nor had they cared for patients anywhere who had used the drug. They chose their location, Amarillo, because it guaranteed they would be assigned a judge who was most likely to bless their lawsuit—another MAGA favorite, Matthew Kacsmaryk. That legal challenge to mifepristone was one in a series of attempts to block medication abortion access in states where abortion is banned, but where patients can still receive pills by mail.  

After Dobbs, one might imagine that such efforts were unnecessary: Since that ruling, any state that wants to ban abortion can. But apparently this power is not enough. Some states with bans have begun trying to extend the reach of the laws outside their borders. They’re bringing legal challenges meant to prevent their residents from accessing abortion; they’re launching investigations into providers who may serve their residents; they’re getting arrest warrants for out-of-state providers; and they’re seeking federal intervention in order to block care they find objectionable.

A similar cross-state strategy is being applied now to intimidate health care providers into complying with bans on gender-affirming care for minors in other states. The strategy also targets patients, compelling states to turn over private medical information or engage in other forms of surveillance. It is becoming clear that simply living in a state with protective laws does not mean you can access care without fear of intimidation, if you can access care at all. 

By the time the criminal subpoena made it to NYU Langone, the hospital had already officially ceased providing gender-affirming care to minors. In fact, it had failed to restore care even after the New York attorney general demanded it do so. It is far from alone in this decision. Since Trump returned to office, more than 40 hospitals have stopped providing gender-affirming care, according to STAT News.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has repeatedly lost when its anti-trans demands were challenged in court. A few weeks before the NYU Langone subpoena, a district court judge permanently blocked a decree from Health and Human Services head Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in which the administration (again) threatened to withhold funding from hospitals that provided gender-affirming care to minors. This week, a federal court order allowed a Colorado hospital to restore gender-affirming care for minors, while a legal challenge to the ban proceeds. Another federal judge recently blocked an administrative subpoena that would have forced a Rhode Island hospital to turn over the medical records of youth who received gender-affirming care—following a wave of similar decisions thwarting the Justice Department’s efforts to seek such information after it issued at least 20 administrative subpoenas since last summer. These mounting losses may be why the Department of Justice has turned to grand jury subpoenas, such as the one NYU Langone has now received, and a friendlier court.

The current administration did not invent these intimidation tactics. Before Texas lawmakers outright banned gender-affirming care for minors in 2023, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was experimenting with a variety of legal threats against providers and parents meant to accomplish what a ban would, or worse. He unilaterally deemed gender-affirming care for minors to be “abuse” (three years ahead of Robert F. Kennedy’s similar decree, in December 2025, broadly defining such care as unsafe) and directed state agencies to investigate parents of trans kids, should they help their own children access care. He opened investigations into two Texas hospitals, claiming they were violating unspecified state laws, and demanding that they turn over the same kinds of records now being demanded of NYU Langone. By the time gender-affirming care was banned in Texas, it was already nearly impossible to access. Some Texas families I met in 2021 as they were lobbying against the ban and other anti-trans laws had already arranged care out of state, or had moved out of the state entirely.

But for officials seeking to end gender-affirming care in Texas, the state’s ban was not enough. Paxton began bringing lawsuits against individual providers who allegedly continued offering gender-affirming care to minors, referring in court filings to one provider as “a scofflaw who is putting the health and safety of minors at risk,” and another as “a Radical Gender Activist.” This week, Paxton, now a Trump-approved candidate for John Cornyn’s Senate seat, and the DOJ announced their latest victory in such efforts: They have forced the largest children’s hospital in Texas into creating a so-called “detransition” clinic that, as Paxton put it, “will help provide free care to those who have been victimized by twisted, morally bankrupt transgender ideology.” The hospital must also pay $10 million in fines and damages and revoke the medical privileges of five physicians.

In the case of NYU Langone, we are seeing a number of extreme, lawless trends collide: Providers and patients are being intimidated with the malicious collection of private health care information; and states are attempting to apply their bans on stigmatized health care to states that have no such bans—that have, in fact, protective laws meant to ensure patients’ rights and patients’ access.

Since November 2024, nearly one in 10 transgender people reported having moved to a different state, in a survey conducted by NORC and the Movement Advancement Project—an estimated 400,000 people. They are seeking refuge in what appear to be blue sanctuaries like New York, where shield laws protect providers of both gender-affirming care and abortion care. If, despite such laws, federal law enforcement and a grand jury in Texas are allowed to reach into New York state, what does that mean? Is anywhere safe? Is anyone? These are the questions these legal threats are forcing us to live with. The attacks, said Cynthia Weaver, litigation director at Human Rights Campaign, “create instability that can have detrimental, cascading impact on trans people’s health and well-being.” Whether or not the attacks succeed in court, the fear is already real. It cannot be rolled back with a court order.

But you absolutely should care—not because of the political or legal ramifications, but because she is not an anomaly. There are dozens, if not hundreds of Tina Peterses out there. And they aren’t in jail. They are your elected officials.

Peters’s scheme runs the gamut from shady to very illegal, with some Hollywood espionage sprinkled in. From 2019 to 2023, she was the Mesa County clerk and recorder, a position that oversees local elections, including voter registration, candidate paperwork, polling logistics, and ballot processing. After the 2020 election, she became convinced of the conspiracy theory that the election had been rigged for Joe Biden through Dominion voting machines. In May 2021, she took a colleague’s security badge and gave it to Conan Hayes, a former pro surfer who disguised himself as a computer “nerd” to gain access to a Dominion machine, then copied its hard drive both before and after updating its software. (Peters had turned off the security cameras.) That hard-drive data was then repackaged by Mike “MyPillow” Lindell to further push the aforementioned conspiracy theory.

Over the course of six months, leading up to and in the aftermath of the 2024 election, I worked for a nonprofit watchdog cataloging the election deniers and subverters who hold power at state and local levels. Tina Peters was a prominent player, but by no means the only one, or even the most shocking.

At the time of the “Threats to Democracy” tracker’s publication, nearly 300 public officials—from election canvassers and county clerks to state legislators and attorneys general—had in some way attempted to overturn the 2020 election results. And that doesn’t account for the hundreds more who denied the results but stopped short of trying to subvert them.

Some of these officials spread bad-faith lies about voting machines to their constituents, while others went further. Much further. On December 14, 2020—the day the Electoral College convened to certify the results of the presidential election—Republican officials in seven states that Trump lost signed fake electoral certificates claiming he had actually won.

In Michigan, 16 fake electors—including a mayor, a township clerk, and multiple candidates for state office—gathered in the basement of the Republican Party headquarters, signed counterfeit paperwork declaring themselves the official electors, and tried to march on the state Capitol where the real electors were certifying the results. In Georgia, the chair of the state GOP led a secret meeting to do the same thing in the Capitol. Among the 16 fake electors was state Senator Burt Jones, who was elected as the lieutenant governor in 2023. These weren’t fringe actors screaming into the void, but elected officials trying to defraud the American public, con the U.S. Congress, and use the machinery of democracy to break it.

Arizona state Senator Wendy Rogers, a Republican who was reelected in 2024, has called for violence against her political rivals at a white nationalist conference, called on Americans to “buy more ammo” while the state’s slate of electors formally cast their votes for Biden in 2020, and tried to decertify the election results years afterward. She currently chairs the Judiciary and Elections Committee in the Arizona Senate.

In 2021, in Wisconsin, Racine County Sheriff Chris Schamling recommended criminal charges against five members of the state’s Elections Commission, yet refused to investigate a resident who illegally requested multiple absentee ballots. Schamling is a member of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, a group that has worked to undermine election administration across the country, and his office routinely coordinates with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

As the clerk of Macomb County, Michigan, in 2021, Anthony Forlini pursued a forensic audit of the county’s election server based on debunked election fraud claims, and in 2022 he hired a known election denier and “Stop the Steal” agitator to serve as poll recruiter. He is currently running for Michigan secretary of state in the Republican primary.

With all the coverage of Trump, his administration, and the MAGA faithful using every disingenuous and borderline illegal tactic to tilt future elections, not nearly enough of a spotlight is being shined on those who already hold the power to do so at the local level—and who have demonstrated, on the record, that they will. With one of them finally breaking through to the national conversation, now is the moment to widen the frame.

We can spend however many column inches and podcast hours debating whether Polis did the right thing in commuting Peters’s sentence or whether the Colorado Democratic Party was justified in censuring the governor for it. It’s all just noise. What matters is that Rogers, Schamling, Forlini, and many like them around the country still hold office and have made it clear through their words and actions what they’ll do come November. If the 2026 midterms are stolen, it is probably not going to be due to meddling by the Trump administration or a ruling by the Supreme Court. It is going to be subtle, in places where these people hold sway and where a handful of votes makes all the difference.

Nevertheless, through a combination of stubbornness, incompetence, and senility, Trump is inadvertently boosting the fortunes of alternative energy to a degree not seen since Biden was president. If he keeps this up, the Natural Resources Defense Council may have to erect a statue in his honor.

As I write, the international benchmark price of Brent crude is trading around $108.50 per barrel, and gasoline is priced, nationally, at an average $4.56 per gallon. In Washington, D.C., where I live, and where members of Congress in vulnerable districts have been known to gas up, the price is an even higher $4.67 per gallon. By attacking Iran, Trump prompted that nation’s ruling regime (very predictably) to close the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump has made it unaffordable for Americans to fill their gas tanks. That’s bad. But the silver lining is that sky-high gas prices are a blessing to the environment. “Renewable Energy Is Booming Again,” says Barron’s. “Trump May Not Be a Fan of Clean Energy, but Iran War Is Accelerating Global Shift From Oil and Gas,” says The Guardian. “The Iran War Is Driving a Clean Energy Wake-Up Call,” says the climate-focused Canary Media. You can call it “The Only Good News From Iran” (David Wallace-Wells, New York Times), or you can call it “Donald Trump’s Green New Deal” (Tej Parikh, Financial Times). Parikh’s headline irritated me because that’s the one I pitched to my editor. It was already taken because the characterization is true.

Regrettably, this clean energy boom is happening mostly outside the United States, and especially in China, which was already cleaning our clock on renewable energy. Still, Planet Earth doesn’t care where carbon reductions originate, so long as they originate from someplace.

In Barron’s, Avi Salzman reported that China doubled its exports of solar energy equipment in March. Its solar exports dipped a little in April but still were 60 percent higher than a year earlier. Also in April, China’s exports of alternative-fuel vehicles more than doubled over the previous year, reaching a record high. Domestically, Nicholas Kusnetz and Georgina Gustin reported in Inside Climate News, China’s investment in green technologies is softening the blow of higher oil prices. For example, more than half of all new cars sold last year in China were electric.

Outside China, solar generation was up 15 percent over the previous year during the war’s first month. Wind power was up 8 percent, and hydropower was up 2 percent. Jigar Shah, who was an Energy Department official in the Biden administration, predicted to Matthew Zeitlin of Heatmap News that clean energy spending will double globally to $400 billion per month by the end of this year, all thanks to Trump’s Iran war. In Europe, electric car sales rose 51 percent over the previous year in March and 34 percent over the previous year in April. Alternative-fuel vehicle sales more than doubled in March in Japan, Korea, and New Zealand over the previous year, and rose more than 50 percent in India and Australia.

In spite of Trump’s efforts to kill it, some of this alternative energy boom is tiptoeing into the United States. The energy storage industry, which includes solar, hydropower, and batteries, reported record growth in January, February, and March. The proliferation of data centers was the primary driver, but “disruptions to global gas and gas turbine supplies” also helped, Reuters reported. This expansion occurred even as Trump canceled $7 billion in solar subsidies. During that same period, investment in electric vehicles increased by $1.1 billion (even as employment fell by nearly 6,000 jobs due to Trump’s policies discouraging E.V. production).

“The US renewables rollout has been more resilient to Trump’s anti-green policies than many first thought,” concluded Parikh in the Financial Times, noting that in March the United States, for the first time in history, generated more electricity from renewable energy than from gas. That would have happened anyway, but it happened sooner because of Trump’s Iran war. Parikh further noted that clean energy stocks continue through the Iraq war to outperform fossil fuel stocks, with the gap widening since the war began.

It isn’t just the war that’s greening U.S. energy production. As noted above, an irony of Trump’s refusal to regulate artificial intelligence is that all those data centers multiplying like rabbits, since they rely heavily on solar, expand business for green energy companies. When our AI overlords take over the planet, they will thank us for the head start we gave them on reducing climate change.

But much of their gratitude will have to go to Trump for boosting gas prices higher than few environmentalists dared wish through his Iran blunder. With Trump’s own Energy Department forecasting that oil prices won’t come down to their prewar level until “later this year” (read: December), a Democratic House is starting to look inevitable and a Democratic Senate is entering the realm of the possible. Democrats mostly support green energy, so in that sense too, Trump is an accidental Green New Dealer. For the moment, though, most of the economic benefit is going to China. Maybe Trump’s an accidental sinophile, as well.

Sarah Kellen appeared before the committee in a closed-door hearing Thursday. Committee Chairman James Comer described her participation as forthcoming, and shared that her testimony was “what we’ve been waiting for.”

“Sarah Kellen has been very helpful. Of all the people we have interviewed thus far, this was by far the most substantive and productive interview that we’ve had,” Comer told reporters after the hearing. “She was very brave coming forward. I can’t imagine how difficult it was for her to go into detail about the abuse that she endured at the hands of Epstein and [Ghislaine] Maxwell.

“One very positive thing today is she gave us three names of people that were involved in abuse. These were new names for us,” Comer continued.

The Kentucky Republican said that the committee would be releasing the transcript of Keller’s testimony as soon as possible, but that it would need to first redact the names of several mentioned victims.

“As far as the men that were the abusers—alleged abusers—the whole world will see that,” Comer said.

Kellen began working for Epstein in 2001 and stayed on his payroll for more than a decade, during which time she said she was “sexually and psychologically abused” by the pedophilic financier. It was only through years of therapy that she said she had come to realize that she too was a victim of Epstein’s grooming and manipulation.

“The abuse happened on average on a weekly basis, and was at times violent,” Kellen told the committee, according to her opening remarks.

“It included Jeffrey entering my room in the middle of the night and putting his fingers inside me, waking me up from my sleep,” she said. “It included an occasion in Palm Beach when he trapped me in the gym by lowering the metal hurricane shutter … choked me, and violently raped me.”

Kellen explained she stayed on as Epstein’s assistant for so long because she had “nowhere else to go.”

“I had no money, no family, no education, and no sense that I deserved any better.”

Kellen was named as a potential co-conspirator in Epstein’s 2008 sweetheart deal with federal prosecutors, which shielded him from federal sex-trafficking charges.

“I was not told this was happening,” Kellen said in her opening remarks of her co-conspirator status. “I was not asked about it. No one from law enforcement ever spoke with me, ever heard my side, ever asked me a single question.

“I want to start turning some of the pain and trauma into something good that can help others and bring awareness to this important topic,” Kellen told MS NOW ahead of her appearance on Capitol Hill.

Dani Bensky, another survivor of Epstein’s abuse, described Kellen’s situation to MS NOW as “complicated.”

“When you are victimized and then you are put in a position where you are manipulated to recruit, that is a very sticky, complex situation,” Bensky said. “People really need to understand what sex trafficking is and what it looks like.… It really is like a pyramid scheme.”

The six protesters were hit with felony conspiracy charges carrying a maximum sentence of six years in prison after they surrounded an ICE agent’s car in the Chicago suburb of Broadview in September, in an attempt to slow it down. It was alleged the protesters “pushed and scratched and otherwise damaged,” the vehicle, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. But like many charges brought by the feds against anti-ICE protesters, they failed to hold up in court.

The government first dropped charges against two of the protesters, Catherine Sharp and Joselyn Walsh. Then it threw out the conspiracy charges against the other four—Brian Straw, Michael Rabbitt, Andre Martin, and former congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh—and instead tried to convict them of one misdemeanor count each for impeding a federal agent.

In the end, the administration couldn’t even do that. Chicago’s top federal prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros, dropped the charges with prejudice in front of U.S. District Judge April Perry, meaning the case cannot be refiled in the future.

Boutros remained petty to the end. He called the protesters’ actions “unacceptable in a civilized society,” adding: “It is for the grace of God that that agent moved at two miles per hour.”

Perry was unimpressed. “You are significantly undercutting your mea culpa here by standing behind the charges and continuing to vilify these particular defendants,” she told Boutros.

Boutros had already annoyed the judge once before, when his assistants took transcripts of themselves explaining the conspiracy laws to the grand jury pool, then apparently redacted some of the transcripts when Perry asked for them. She discussed this with them in a private hearing. Boutros later insisted to Perry that “no one acted with the intent to mislead your honor.”

ICE came to Chicago in Operation Midway Blitz, a deportation campaign beginning in September 2025, a few months before Operation Metro Surge took over Minneapolis. The campaign resulted in protests, arrests, and the fatal shooting of one resident, Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez.

Enrollment in the Obamacare marketplaces for 2026 fell by 1.5 million people, to 23 million—the first decrease since 2020. But that only counted people who chose to drop their insurance during the open enrollment period. An analysis by the Wakely Consulting Group found that only 86 percent of enrollees had paid their January premiums by their due dates; those who hadn’t paid were at risk of losing their insurance. Monthly premiums are on average 58 percent higher this year, which means more families will continue to struggle to pay and even more people may lose their coverage as the year goes on. Wakely estimates that marketplace coverage overall could drop by almost six million people this year compared to last year.

But that’s only part of the problem. Facing the full cost of higher premiums, many people shifted to high-deductible “bronze” plans this year: KFF found that the average deductible across all plans—bronze, silver, and gold—rose 37 percent to a record high of nearly $3,800. “This is the steepest increase in deductibles ever seen in this market and largely reflects the shift from silver plans with reduced deductibles for lower-income enrollees to bronze plans with very high deductibles,” the report states.

Those who did so took a gamble. The average cost of bronze plans varies by state, but the premiums still cost an average of $456 a month nationwide. Those plans provide preventative care for free, like all ACA plans do, but if the people relying on them get sick, have an accident, or need treatment from a specialist for any other reason—like physical therapy, body scans, or surgery—they will have to meet their deductibles before their coverage kicks in. The KFF report shows that the average deductible for bronze plans is $7,476.

For people who are unlikely to get sick, or who have enough disposable income to use the tax-advantaged health savings accounts that are available this year, the bronze plans can save money. But it’s likely that many people who opted for bronze plans this year were just trying to find the lowest premiums possible because they couldn’t afford anything else. That means they have health insurance that they can’t really use because they can’t afford to.

Those who can’t afford their deductibles are more likely to wait longer to seek the health care they need, or go without it entirely, and often have worse outcomes. High-deductible plans are also likely to leave more Americans in debt if something does happen and they are swamped with bills they can’t pay. Many Americans who have chosen bronze plans are simply crossing their fingers that nothing bad happens, which isn’t providing the peace of mind that insurance is supposed to bring.

The bad news for all of us is that these are the kinds of plans Republicans want to force us all into, based on the false idea that the tight-budgeted “consumers” will be compelled to shop for the lowest-priced care and that this will drive down health care costs overall. But receiving worse care and facing unpaid medical debt will just move us closer to where we were before the ACA was enacted, when more Americans were uninsured or underinsured and facing mountains of medical debt. The U.S. is already teetering on the edge of a debt crisis, and piling more medical debt onto struggling Americans could be one of the things that pushes us over the cliff.

The DOJ created a $1.8 billion honey pot earlier this week, offering “anti-weaponization” payouts to virtually any right-winger who felt targeted by the previous presidential administration—at cost to U.S. taxpayers.

The money is apparently worth more to lawmakers than the negative impacts it will have on their constituents. Republican Representative Andrew Clyde came out in favor of the executive branch’s creation, suggesting to Politico Thursday that he wouldn’t rule out the possibility of taking money from the account himself.

The Georgia Republican argued that he had been previously targeted by the IRS and had to forfeit assets to the tune of $1 million. Clyde won most of the money back after he took the IRS to court, but he told Politico that he still has considerable legal fees from the endeavor.

There are others far beyond Capitol Hill who are interested in milking the fund, such as the financially ruined CEO of MyPillow, Mike Lindell, who lost most of his net worth for spreading unfounded conspiracies about the 2020 presidential election.

Hundreds of pardoned January 6ers are also in the queue, including former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, a sex offender who bear-sprayed cops, and a convicted child molester who told his victims he would give them money from a Trump payout in exchange for their silence.

Trump leveraged the promise of payouts to his success on the campaign trail. In January—months before the slush fund became a reality—Democrats attempted to stave off such payments, introducing the “No Rewards for January 6 Rioters Act.” But the bill never went anywhere, and has made no progress since.

The slush fund was the result of an unprecedented deal that Trump made with himself. Rather than settle his $10 billion lawsuit against his own administration, Trump opted to drop the case entirely earlier this week and, in turn, extracted a pledge from the DOJ to financially assist his allies.

The arrangement came with a curious addendum from acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, immunizing Trump from further federal prosecution. The government of the United States, Blanche wrote Tuesday, is “forever barred and precluded” from pursuing “any and all claims” against Trump, his family, or his business.

Legal experts are questioning whether the scheme is unconstitutional. If the arrangement is allowed to stand, Trump will have effectively thwarted the powers of both the legislative and judicial branches, and soiled the constitutionally defined separation of power.

The document says the fund is about “seeking accountability” for millions of Americans “who were victims of lawfare and weaponization.” It falsely claims the president cannot profit from it, lets senators know they can get a piece of the action themselves (wink, wink), and even attempts to paint the fund as a bipartisan win. “Democrats can submit claims, too,” the document states happily.

Unsurprisingly for the most corrupt presidential administration in history, the document greatly contradicts the legal agreement that actually established the fund. Journalist Adam Klasfeld found nine different instances where the document differs from the agreement.

For example, the document claims the fund can be audited by a third party, while omitting the fact that Blanche gets to choose the auditor and can veto the audit at will. The document also claims there is no “partisan restriction” to the fund, despite the legal settlement defining the “weaponization” in question as being committed exclusively by Democrats.

Even Republican senators realize this fund is incredibly corrupt. Just a few hours after receiving the White House document, the GOP canceled its plans to vote on a budget bill that would fund the Department of Homeland Security though the end of Trump’s second term, largely due to fears Democrats would force Republicans to go on the record about whether or not they support the fund.

The fund was announced on Monday as a result of a massive legal settlement between Trump and the IRS. It is expected to be doled out to Trump allies—including January 6 rioters and members of Trumpian super PACs—who claim they were unfairly targeted by past administrations. Of course, no one except Blanche will actually know who is awarded the bounties, and how much they’re getting.

The fund has come under intense public scrutiny since it was created. One legal watchdog called it “one of the single most corrupt acts in American history,” Democrats have bashed it as clear fraud, and a few Republican legislators have similarly gone on record to say it unfairly benefits the president.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune announced to his colleagues Thursday afternoon that the Senate will recess until June without a vote on their planned reconciliation bill to fund controversial parts of the government, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The House is expected to dismiss early, as well, as a scheduled meeting between Speaker Mike Johnson and Trump on Thursday was instead canceled.

The original plan was to vote this week on the legislation, which would have provided about $70 billion to fund immigration enforcement through 2029. But Democrats promised to introduce a series of amendments to the bill forcing Republicans to vote on the slush fund, as well. To avoid those votes, Republicans have chosen to skip town.

A meeting earlier Thursday between acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Senate Republicans on the fund went very poorly, with at least 25 Republican senators speaking out against it.

Republicans are also divided over funding for Trump’s ballroom, which is now unlikely to make it into the final version of the bill, whenever that comes. Trump had set a June 1 deadline to sign the bill into law, but that can’t happen if both the Senate and the House are out of session.

Most Americans can’t decide to skip working the next day and start their vacations early just because they have tough decisions at work. But for Republicans in Congress, it’s easier to just keep kicking the can down the road rather than try to fix their terrible policies.

The president told reporters at the White House Thursday that he will likely miss his son Don Jr.’s wedding this weekend, citing national security concerns related to the war with Iran. But his explanation suddenly veered into the absurd when he referred to his 48-year-old offspring as someone he’s “known for a long time.”

“He’d like me to go,” Trump said. “It’s gonna be just a small, little, private affair. I’m gonna try and make it, I’m in the midst—I said, ‘You know, this is not good timing for me. I have a thing called Iran and other things.’”

Trump then went on to blame the “fake news” for his impending decision, claiming that he would be raked over the coals by the press whether or not he attended. “That’s one I can’t win on,” Trump said.

But Trump has found plenty of time for other nonwork activities. Since returning to office, he has hit the links at least 106 times, spending more than a fifth of his term—about 21.95 percent—golfing, putting him on pace to exceed the 307 days he spent golfing over the course of his first term. That begs the question: Does his son’s wedding rank lower in his priorities than teeing up?

“He’s uh—he’s been a very, a person I’ve known for a long time,” Trump concluded on the topic of his first child. “Hopefully they’re gonna have a great marriage.”

Reporter: Are you attending your son’s wedding?

Trump: He’d like me to go. I’m going to try. I said, this is not good timing for me. I have a thing called Iran and other things. He’s a person I’ve known for a long time. pic.twitter.com/lGdjvU7oD0

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 21, 2026

Don Jr. and Bettina Anderson, a Palm Beach socialite, are expected to wed over Memorial Day weekend at a private ceremony in the Bahamas. The couple had, at one point earlier in the planning process, reportedly considered getting married at the White House—though those plans were scrapped due to the optics of a “lavish” wedding during wartime.

“They’re very aware that a lavish wedding at the White House while people are dying wouldn’t be well-received,” an insider told Page Six.

It will be Don Jr.’s second marriage, after his 13-year union to Vanessa Trump ended in 2018. The two share five children together and are said to be friendly toward one another (Vanessa’s health also clouds the happy couple’s weekend: She announced on Wednesday that she was diagnosed with breast cancer).

The eldest Trump child was previously engaged to former Trump adviser Kimberly Guilfoyle, though their four-year engagement was called off after Don Jr. was photographed getting cozy with Anderson. Guilfoyle is now the U.S. ambassador to Greece.

Punchbowl News reported that close to 25 Republican senators spoke in opposition to the fund in a reportedly hostile meeting with Blanche Thursday. That’s considered unusually high. Senators suggested imposing requirements on how the fund’s five commissioners would be chosen, and preventing anyone convicted of violence against police officers from being eligible for payment.

Before the meeting, the White House had sent a letter to Republican senators defending the fund, saying that there are no “partisan restrictions” on who can apply for the fund and that it’s open to senators “whose records were secretly subpoenaed,” a concept likely to win over Republicans investigated in Jack Smith’s January 6 probe. Senator John Curtis still left the meeting unsatisfied with Blanche’s defenses of the fund and stressed that commissioner requirements are “not enough” to win his support.

“Our majority is melting down before our eyes,” another GOP senator texted Punchbowl reporter Andrew Desiderio. Other Republican senators believe that Trump is responsible for this level of opposition to the fund, thanks to his desire to kick out anyone in Congress who he thinks is disloyal.

This week, Senator Bill Cassidy, who just lost a primary contest to a Trump-backed challenger, came out against the anti-weaponization fund, saying it wasn’t fair to Americans struggling to pay their bills. Based on the reports from Wednesday’s meeting, Cassidy is not alone, and other Republicans might join in to oppose what is essentially a slush fund for Trump’s goons.

The New Jersey Republican has been missing in action since March 5, has so far missed 88 House votes, and hasn’t been seen in Washington for more than 75 days. But residents in Kean’s affluent suburban hometown of Westfield claim that the lawmaker isn’t home, either.

Three neighbors who spoke to NOTUS’s Jose Pagliery said that the lawmaker’s two-story Tudor-style house has been dark for weeks. Further still, Kean’s wife is nowhere to be found: Local residents said they couldn’t recall the last time they saw Mrs. Kean walking the family dog, or the last time her car was parked in the driveway.

Pagliery reported that a lone black Ford F-150 sat outside of Kean’s home, coated in yellow pollen. No one answered the two Reolink digital doorbells when Pagliery rang.

The silence that consumed Kean’s home was only heightened in contrast to the rest of the bustling neighborhood, where people walked their children to school, rabbits and squirrels skittered across the road, and landscapers worked away at manicuring individual properties.

But Kean has not abandoned the property. The couple actually paid their sewer bill ahead of time on March 31, and paid their property tax bill five days late on May 6, according to municipal records obtained by NOTUS.

Kean offered a meager explanation late last month for his sudden disappearance, confessing to House Speaker Mike Johnson (after a small pressure campaign fronted by journalists and tristate lawmakers effectively forced him to pipe up) that he had been dealing with an unspecified “personal health matter.”

At the time, Kean promised that he would return to work shortly. It has been nearly four weeks since then.

On Wednesday, Johnson remarked to reporters that he’d spoken to Kean “a few weeks ago now” and reiterated that Kean assured him he would return to the lower chamber “soon.”

But the clock is ticking: Johnson is in the midst of advancing a partisan budget reconciliation that faces total opposition from the Democratic Party. The speaker can spare just two Republican votes on the measure, if all Democrats are present and oppose it.

Kean was elected to represent New Jersey’s 7th congressional district in 2022, and is months away from being thrust into a contentious midterm reelection cycle. He is currently unchallenged in the Garden State’s Republican primary, scheduled for June 2, but is likely to face tremendous opposition from Democrats come November. Over the last several months, his district has shifted from a “lean Republican” advantage to a total toss-up, according to an analysis by the Cook Political Report.

Kean’s absence in the race has apparently inspired his competition: The topic practically consumed his potential competition during a Democratic debate on May 12, according to the Bergen Record.

In an interview with Spectrum News Wednesday, Tillis was asked what he thought of Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund, which was established last week as a result of a settlement between Trump and the IRS.

“I think it’s stupid on stilts,” Tillis said. “It will invariably put us in a position where your taxpayer dollars and my taxpayer dollars could potentially compensate someone who assaulted a police officer, admitted their guilt, got convicted, got pardoned, and now we’re going to pay them for that? That’s absurd. The American people are going to reject this out of hand.… When you take money from me to give to a purpose that I vehemently disagree with, that’s tyranny.”

"Stupid on stilts."

Sen. Tillis rips into the new DOJ 'anti-weaponization' fund and calls it "tyranny."

Full Interview: https://t.co/DQo2kNNqjK #ncpol pic.twitter.com/ll3lOvwb58

— Reuben Jones (@ReubenJones1) May 21, 2026

It’s a solid explanation of what’s wrong with the fund, which is expected to be doled out to Trump allies who claim they were unfairly targeted by past administrations. These allies include January 6 rioters and members of Trump-backed super PACs.

Donald K. Sherman, the president of the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, called the fund “one of the single most corrupt acts in American history” in a New York Times interview. Various applicants—including the leader of the Proud Boys, the Trump-obsessed founder of MyPillow, and a former Trump campaign official—are already trying to stick their hands in the honey pot.

House and Senate Democrats are looking to introduce legislation that would block the fund, or at the very least force votes on it. Similar to the issue of taxpayer money going to Trump’s ballroom or the Iran war, MAGA Republicans seem to realize the fund is unpopular, and don’t want to go on the record about whether they support it.

Tillis is a rare Republican unafraid to take a stand against Trump once in a while.

In June 2025, he voted against the One Big Beautiful Bill Act after expressing concerns over proposed cuts to Medicaid in his home state. Trump, unsurprisingly, threw a fit and threatened to endorse Tillis’s future primary challengers.

Since Tillis then decided to retire, Trump sort of got his wish. Trump has endorsed Republican Michael Whatley in the upcoming North Carolina Senate race. But Democrat Roy Cooper is a worthy opponent who is leading in recent polling.

CNN published the report Thursday after months of the DNC refusing to release it, with Chair Ken Martin saying it would be a “distraction,” back in December. On Wednesday, Martin repeated that assessment, and added, “When I received the report late last year, it wasn’t ready for primetime—not even close—and because no source material was provided, it would have meant starting over. I could not in good faith put the DNC’s stamp of approval on the report that was produced.

“After last November’s massive Democratic wins, I didn’t want to create a distraction, but by not putting the report out, I ended up creating an even bigger distraction. For that, I sincerely apologize. For full transparency, I am releasing the report as we received it, in its entirety, unedited and unabridged. It does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards, but I am doing this because people need to be able to trust the Democratic Party and trust our word,” Martin said.

The report doesn’t examine many of the major criticisms of the Democratic Party’s 2024 campaign, from President Biden’s initial decision to run for reelection to the impact of Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, which the Biden administration failed to stop. Another glaring omission was the impact of Vice President Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic nominee for president late in 2024 without anything close to a primary or electoral process.

It also includes multiple errors—it cites Washington Governor Bob Ferguson as a candidate who supposedly did things right, only to point out later that he underperformed Harris at the polls. In other discrepancies, it has conflicting vote percentages written for North Carolina’s gubernatorial race and misspells the names of multiple Democratic politicians.

The solutions the report offers are minimal. One paragraph states, “Building to win requires new thinking, and building to last requires thinking about more than the next election. It requires finding the best way to connect with the right voters in the right places, and if 2024 has proven anything, there is enough money to do it all the right way.” But what that means doesn’t get much elaboration.

Martin seems to be right about the report’s flaws. But hiding it and not commissioning a new one—or at least not editing this one to a passable standard—is a scandal in itself. At a time when Republicans are polling at historic lows, Democrats need to capitalize and offer a better vision for the country. This isn’t it.

Read the full report here.

The DOJ launched its $1.8 billion slush fund earlier this week, offering compensation to virtually any right-winger who felt targeted by the previous presidential administration. To no one’s surprise, the free-for-all has already attracted quite a crowd, including MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and former Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio.

Lindell lost practically everything he had defending Donald Trump’s 2020 faux election claims. The former millionaire spent months using every platform at his disposal to promote the conspiracy, railing against Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic and claiming the electronic voting companies were complicit in a scheme to keep Trump from retaking the White House.  

Doing so ultimately cost him millions of dollars in legal fees and penalties, and nearly decimated his infomercial-based business—all of which Lindell now claims is the basis for him to recoup some $400 million from the Trump administration. 

Tarrio faced 22 years in prison for his role in orchestrating the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, before he was pardoned by the president last year. Tarrio told the Miami New Times that he would “definitely” be applying for compensation. Reuters reported that Tarrio estimates his claim to be somewhere between $2 million and $5 million.

“I’m not greedy,” Tarrio told Reuters. “But my life was all fucked up because of this.”

Hundreds of other pardoned January 6ers are also in the queue, including a sex offender who bear-sprayed cops and a convicted child molester who told his victims he would give them money from the slush fund in exchange for their silence.

At least one pardoned riot participant is seeking $30 million in restitution for the alleged governmental weaponization.

Democrats attempted to stave off such payments in January, when California Senator Alex Padilla introduced the “No Rewards for January 6 Rioters Act,” but the bill has made no progress since.

The DOJ chief, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, doesn’t see anything wrong with forcing the American people to foot the bill for Trump’s aggrieved allies.

“What American would say, ‘Oh my gosh, that is terrible’? I very much disagree with the idea that the American taxpayer is indignant that a victim of weaponization—a victim who suffered, whether it was legal fees, loss of job, they had their life turned upside down that was not appropriate,” Blanche told CNN Wednesday. “I do think the American people have an issue with that. To the contrary, I think they do want their taxpayer dollars spent on things like that.”

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon will be overseeing the case against Trump’s slush fund too. Leon has previously drawn Trump’s ire not only by delaying the construction of the White House ballroom, but also by striking down the president’s executive order to target law firm WilmerHale.

On March 31, Leon issued a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking construction on the ballroom, saying in his ruling, “Unless and until Congress blesses this project through statutory authorization, construction has to stop!”

Just over two weeks later, Leon ruled that Trump could work on the underground, national security–related parts of the project but not on the aboveground ballroom.

“National security is not a blank check to proceed with otherwise unlawful activity,” Leon said in his ruling, criticizing Trump for trying to go around his earlier injunction by claiming the ballroom’s bulletproof glass, bomb shelters, and other security measures were for national security reasons.

This infuriated Trump, who called Leon a “Trump Hating” judge who was “highly political” and accused him of having “gone out of his way to undermine National Security, and to make sure that this Great Gift to America gets delayed, or doesn’t get built.”

Now Leon will be in charge of examining whether a slush fund to pay Trump’s political supporters who run afoul of law enforcement is constitutional. Considering how much criticism is already being raised against the fund, even from Republicans, Trump may soon be writing another angry screed on Truth Social.

Eight days after Reynolds American, an American tobacco company with a history of government lobbying, threw $5 million at a Trump-backed super PAC, the Food and Drug Administration moved to ease restrictions on flavored vapes, allowing companies like Reynolds to roll out flavors previously banned because they were too marketable to minors.

The donation was made April 30 and revealed in a campaign finance filing posted Wednesday. It was first reported on by The New York Times.

Shortly after the $5 million donation, a Reynolds executive and two Reynolds lobbyists had lunch with Trump at his Florida golf club, and reportedly pressed the president on current FDA regulations. Trump pulled out his phone and called his appointed commissioner of the FDA, Marty Makary, to complain. Makary did not pick up.

The next week, The Wall Street Journal found that the president had become frustrated with Makary because of his refusal to approve blueberry, mango, and menthol vapes from one manufacturer due to health concerns. Under pressure from Trump, the FDA announced a few days later that it was removing some restrictions, and Makary resigned.

In his first term, Trump took some steps to control youth vaping, which was exploding in popularity. But on the campaign trail in 2024, he pulled an about-face, promising to “save vaping” in a poorly disguised effort to capture the youth vote.

Vapes from Chinese companies sold in American convenience stores and gas stations remain popular with young people, and have created a $6 billion market share. Instead of properly regulating those devices and reducing vaping rates, Trump would prefer that U.S. companies profit from the crisis, as well—and donate to his super PACs, of course.

On Wednesday, Cassidy held nothing back in criticizing the White House ballroom Trump is building, complaining in particular about the president’s lack of transparency.

“There’s no architectural plans. There is no environmentals. There’s no engineering. There’s no sense of when we ask, how did it happen to cost exactly a billion,” Cassidy told CNN. “It could cost a lot less, it could cost a lot more, I just don’t get it.”

Cassidy on ballroom: There's no architectural plans. There is no environmentals. There's no engineering. There's no sense of when we ask, how did it happen to cost exactly a billion. I just don't get it. pic.twitter.com/1J3Kt7S0mW

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 20, 2026

Cassidy also attacked the Department of Justice’s new $1.776 billion “weaponization” fund, designed to compensate people who say they were politically targeted by the government (read: Trump supporters).

“People are concerned about paying their mortgage or rent, affording groceries and paying for gas, not about putting together a $1.8 billion fund for the president and his allies to pay whomever they wish with no legal precedent or accountability. This is adding to our national debt. If there needs to be a settlement, the administration should bring it to Congress to decide,” Cassidy said in a post on X about the fund, created from a settlement agreement between Trump and the IRS.

It’s telling that Cassidy only feels emboldened to speak out once his political career is essentially over. He had plenty of earlier opportunities to publicly oppose Trump’s policies, especially considering he is a medical doctor and has seen some of the White House’s destructive public health decisions.

Instead, Cassidy voted to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a well-known anti-vaccine activist, as secretary of health and human services, and has refused to address Kennedy’s weakening of vaccine policies since then. In the end, it didn’t help him politically, as Trump still criticized him and backed Representative Julia Letlow in the Louisiana Senate Republican primary. Now he’s pretending to have some courage.

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

Republicans are quietly starting to break with Donald Trump over his $1.8 billion slush fund. This shows how toxic Trump’s corruption has become, and it comes as a new poll shows him at another record low on the economy, which will make GOP anxiety even worse. Trump knows this is a problem. He snarled with rage over a House Republican who’s been bucking him lately, which is a key tell. While Trump is successfully ex-communicating disloyal Republicans in primaries, that’s not stopping the party from breaking with his corrupt schemes on numerous fronts because he’s politically weak and doesn’t know what to do about it.

Today we’re sorting through all of this with Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, who has a good piece arguing that the only thing anyone will remember about Donald Trump in the end is his corruption. Amanda, always good to have you on.

Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: So let’s start with GOP Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick, a vulnerable Republican from Pennsylvania. A reporter asks him about Trump’s slush fund—this is the slush fund that the Justice Department created as part of a quote-unquote settlement of his bogus lawsuit against the IRS. The fund will pay off supposed victims of government weaponization, including the insurrectionists. Listen to this.

Reporter (voiceover): What do you make of this $1.7 billion fund?

Brian Fitzpatrick (voiceover): Bad news. We’re going to try to kill it.

Reporter: You’re going to try to kill it? OK. And how?

Fitzpatrick: Well, we’re considering legislative options. We’re going to write a letter to the A.G. to start, but we’re considering a legislative option. We’re trying to unpack exactly what the legal machinations are, but you can’t do that.

Reporter: Have you ever heard of any other Americans—other than Trump and his associates—who are unauditable by the IRS?

Fitzpatrick: I’ve never heard that before.

Reporter: So would that be part of the legislative—

Fitzpatrick: Of course. Of course. Yeah, you can’t do that.

Sargent: Note that Brian Fitzpatrick is supporting a legislative move to block Trump’s slush fund—importantly including undoing the part of the settlement with the IRS that would nix all tax examinations of Trump’s businesses and his family, which is just an extraordinary act of corruption. What do you make of Fitzpatrick here?

Marcotte: I mean, I think he’s trying to save Trump—and especially the Republican Party—from Trump. You know, Trump should be writing him thank-you letters. Because here’s the thing: I’m sure that Trump sees he’s a lame duck. He doesn’t have to run for office again. So there is a strong possibility that he just doesn’t care about voters or political popularity or approval ratings or whatever.

I’m skeptical of that because while the man is very dumb, I think he does understand that if Democrats take the House in January, this is not going to get easier for him—that we’re going to be looking at a lot of hearings, we’re going to look at investigations. I think that the Epstein files are going to come roaring back to life.

Sargent: Trump actually raged over Representative Brian Fitzpatrick in a truly weird, rambling, slurred tirade. He was asked a question by a Fox reporter who happens to be married to Fitzpatrick. Trump then started abusing the reporter by saying her husband votes against me. Listen.

Donald Trump (voiceover): When her husband votes against me all the time—can you imagine? I don’t know what’s with him. You better ask him what’s with him. Her husband—she’s married to a certain congressman. He votes against—he likes voting against Trump. You know what happens with that. It doesn’t work out well.

Sargent: Boy, Trump sounds like he’s in rough shape there. He doesn’t drink, so it can’t be that. Now, I don’t think Trump was raging at Fitzpatrick over his bill targeting the slush fund. I think it’s some other thing Fitzpatrick has opposed, like the ballroom.

But clearly, Trump is drunk with power, having ousted many Republicans in primaries in recent days. Yet at the same time, he’s still furious that he can’t control all of them.

Marcotte: He just wants to have it all. He wants to control it all. One reason that a lot of these stories about how much money he’s basically stealing and defrauding as president isn’t landing with a lot of people is because in their minds they think, Why would he want all this money? He already has more money than anyone could spend.

And it’s like, well, it isn’t about the ability to spend it, right? It’s just about this megalomaniacal desire to have everything. So he needs utter loyalty from Republicans. He needs all of the money.

It’s all about filling the hole in his soul that he’s been trying to fill his entire life. And I think that’s what we’re seeing right here. And it is unfortunate because it would be one thing if it was only Republicans that were being tortured by this man’s deep, deep personality disorders. But it’s all of us. Unfortunately, we’re all in this together.

Sargent: Yeah, apparently. It sure feels that way. And it is torture—that’s a very good word for it. I really do think that this shows something interesting about the political situation Donald Trump is in.

Brian Fitzpatrick is a Republican from Bucks County, which is a swing county just north of Philadelphia. This is going to be one of the most contested House races this fall. And here Donald Trump isn’t even willing to give Brian Fitzpatrick one tiny little bit of room to distinguish himself from Trump, to move away from Trump, to move away from the Republican Party.

This is tough political territory for Republicans—the district that Brian Fitzpatrick represents—and Trump won’t give him any room. Can you talk about the district a little? This is not the kind of place where you can win elections as a Republican if you’re supporting Trump stealing $1.8 billion from the taxpayers and handing it out to insurrectionists who attacked cops.

Marcotte: Yeah, so I did some reporting there a few years ago about the efforts to kick Moms for Liberty off the school boards in the area. And so I met a lot of the voters there and talked with some people who were Republicans before the craziness started, right? And I get a very strong sense that a lot of the swing voting that goes on there—it’s a part of the country that even though it’s a little bit rural, it’s a suburban area, it’s very educated. It is a lot of professionals. It is a little bit like suburban Virginia in that way. So you’re looking at a lot of Republican voters who just want sane conservatives. They’re the Mitt Romney types.

And I think they will be, first of all, higher-information voters than you would often get with Republican voters, or willing-to-be Republican voters. And so they’re probably more likely to be aware of this slush fund. They’re probably more likely to care about it. And I think they’re also the kind of people that that might actually affect—the ugliness and the corruption.

And I think it’s important to understand that while right now it seems to a lot of us like people are letting these corruption stories just kind of wash over them and they don’t care, as the economy gets worse and prices get worse for people, I think we’re going to start to see a lot more ability to connect the dots for people—that the reason that you don’t have any money is because Trump took it all.

Sargent: Right, exactly. Well, a really good window on how hard this is for Republicans is what House Speaker Mike Johnson said when he was asked about Trump’s slush fund. The reporter, CNN’s Manu Raju, points out that the fund could allow the January 6 insurrectionists, including the violent ones, access to a whole lot of taxpayer money. Listen to this.

Manu Raju (voiceover): Would you be OK if January 6 rioters—the ones who were convicted, even some of the ones who attacked the police—had access to taxpayer dollars, $1.8 billion in settlement that the DOJ has created, the settlement fund? Would you be OK if they had access to that?

Mike Johnson (voiceover): We don’t know any of the details of that settlement fund. The acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, testified yesterday and he gave a lot of detail, and I’ll just defer to what he said because he obviously knows a lot more about it than I do. He said—let me tell you what he said. He said they are setting up a fund to compensate all Americans who have been the subject, the target, of lawfare or weaponization of the federal government. Again, that’s not a partisan proposition, either. Everybody should support that.

Sargent: So, Amanda, that’s basically homina homina homina, as Ralph Kramden used to say on The Honeymooners. But note how desperate he is to make it appear as if this fund doesn’t go to Trump’s allies. He kind of dissembles and says it’s available to all victims of supposed government weaponization.

The funny thing is Trump himself has said some of it will go to the January 6ers. But Mike Johnson knows that that’s absolutely toxic. Trump, once again, can’t help himself. He goes out and he tells everyone he’s giving it to the insurrectionists because he can. And this is just a deep problem for Republicans, I think.

Marcotte: I found it genuinely interesting that Mike Johnson, of all people, seems to not enjoy this moment, because he was at the forefront of the efforts to steal the 2020 election. He was really deep in that. He was one of the drivers of efforts to have the House vote to overturn the election in 2020 and try to basically end our democracy.

So it’s interesting to me that he does not seem excited about this, because I have this kind of dark fear that this might be Trump’s Hail Mary for winning 2026—the slush fund. Hear me out.

Sargent: OK, let’s hear it.

Marcotte: So basically, the point of putting this money up is to say to the kinds of thugs and militiamen and fascist goons that tried to steal the election and rioted at the Capitol in 2020: Hey man, if you take violent action on Trump’s behalf, you will get paid for it.

Part of me wonders if in his little addled mind Trump thinks that he can basically put this money out there, wink at them, and they will somehow make the losses in 2026 go away by force. But Mike Johnson is not stupid. And I think he recognizes that that’s a much bigger lift even than the idiotic plan that led to the Capitol riot on January 6.

Sargent: Well, I think there’s also an element of coalition management to this, as well. This is Donald Trump’s way of telling the MAGA masses that when Trump engages in extraordinary corruption and self-dealing, it’s actually in their interest in some sense. He’s saying, don’t worry, you guys will get a cut of the spoils, so just stick with me. My corruption’s good for you. I think that’s part of the message as well, don’t you?

Marcotte: Probably. I mean, one of the things that is true about fascist movements in the past, and hasn’t really quite been as true about MAGA, is that there was an effort to reward everyday party loyalists in the past. Often Nazis would just literally steal stuff from Jewish victims and give the stuff to people that backed the party.

And so there is a self-dealing element a lot of the time with even just the ordinary supporters of a fascist movement. And I think Trump has kind of promised these sorts of things. And in fact, there were some efforts in the past couple of years to imply that mass deportations would somehow financially benefit white people in America. But it hasn’t actually materialized in any way.

And so, yeah, in that sense, it’s kind of a classic Trump grift. He’s going to dangle this big pot of money in front of them, imply that they’re going to get a piece of it. But honestly, that makes me think they won’t.

Sargent: Right. I mean, this is sort of how MAGA fascism really works on some level. Trump loots our country to enrich himself. He, meanwhile, persuades the paramilitary street-thug wing that this self-dealing is in their interests—they’ll get a cut of the spoils—but they actually won’t. Maybe at the end of the day, right?

Marcotte: Well, it’s like, it’ll go to pay lawyers, right? So OK, at the most, if you’re lucky and you apply for money, it will go to your lawyers. But you’re not actually going to get it in your pocket.

Sargent: Look, the January 6ers were willing to follow him to the Capitol. So I don’t know—maybe they’ll believe this too. We’re seeing more Republicans moving away from Trump on the slush fund. Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters that he’s not a big fan of the fund and doesn’t see a purpose for that.

Thune also added that there will be a lot of questions that the administration is going to have to answer. Well, I sure hope so, Republicans. We also had a senior GOP Senate operative tell Politico, in reference to all these big primaries where Trump has ousted all these people, this operative said, “Those so-called victories over the last couple of weeks are just a mirage. They are self-owns.”

I just find that extraordinary because if you go to Trump’s feed on Truth Social—which I spend too much time on—you see that every time a Republican wins who he’s endorsed, he posts it up there and says “endorsed by President Trump.” This is his way of saying to the Republican Party: I own you.

But through his dictatorial control over the party, he’s forcing the party to walk over a cliff. He’s demanding that they support things like the slush fund. And that’s going to just kill them in the midterms. It couldn’t be happening to a bunch of nicer assholes, really.

Marcotte: Yeah. I am a little bit curious how the next few months are going to play out, because my sense has been that the corruption stories that have come out have not really taken off with the public like that. But maybe part of that is because, for instance, a lot of it was with cryptocurrency, and so people don’t understand what’s happening. And the reporting on it is very oblique because there’s not a lot of facts that reporters can gather.

We know that he’s making a lot of money off cryptocurrency. We don’t know how. And we have some suspicions, but you can’t put those in print. But this is him just backing the truck up to the Treasury and filling it with our money. I think that’s a little bit easier to explain to people. And I think terms like “slush fund” are really helpful—they sum it up.

And then I do think this White House ballroom is going to matter. I think the fact that he talks about it constantly and he loves to show off pictures of how ugly it’s going to be, how gaudy and over—like, it’s both somehow very cheap-looking but it will cost a fortune. And it’s obviously for him. It is not for anybody else.

And I think sometimes just having a visual representation of this amount of corruption is very, very helpful. And I mean, it will be political malfeasance if Democrats don’t just run a million ads like: $1.8 billion for J-sixers; a White House ballroom for Trump; for you, $7 gas.

Sargent: Yes, that’s good. And by the way, one billion dollars of taxpayer money for the ballroom. We just had a Quinnipiac poll come out today, in fact—it finds 66 percent of voters oppose using $1 billion of taxpayer money to enhance security infrastructure at the ballroom. And 60 percent oppose the ballroom itself.

I really think that the imagery of Trump just wrecking the people’s house, just wrecking the White House to build a monument to himself, has really broken through in a way that stories seldom do. The imagery of that is so powerful and captures so much about this presidency. And I also think that the slush fund has the capacity to do that, as well.

More on the Quinnipiac poll, by the way—it’s pretty extraordinary. One-third of voters, 33 percent, approve of how Donald Trump is handling the economy. Sixty-four percent disapprove. That’s the lowest approval on the economy Trump has gotten in either of his two terms.

And get this: Among independents, 70 percent disapprove of the way Trump is handling the economy while 27 percent approve. Those are absolutely abysmal numbers. Independents hate corruption. These stories will resonate with them. Don’t you think?

Marcotte: Yeah, I think so. I mean, there’s the piece of it that both the media and Democratic politicians should try their level best not to get distracted by the next shiny object. Because repetition is super important to get this through to people. It’s going to be a long summer, and it’s going to be a summer where news consumers are going to see lots and lots of big numbers—money coming out of our pockets because of Trump’s craziness.

Not just the ballroom, not just the slush fund—we’re going to get back to the Iran war and how much that’s costing us. And people do have a very strong sense that money spent on this other stuff is money that’s not being spent on us. And that’s correct. I mean, how many people have lost their health care because of the cuts to Obamacare?

So I think it is going to be really helpful to have these stories coming out. I think the main thing is making sure that it is always brought back to understanding that Trump is getting rich and you are getting poorer, and those are not coincidences.

Sargent: Trump is getting rich, and you are getting screwed. That’s the message in a nutshell. Amanda Marcotte, always awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Marcotte: Thanks for having me.

   windblown in an alley, a light rain beginning to fall,

   once a black Cadillac rusted in a field of milkweed,

   October snow come down over Lake Huron,

   once a young man disappeared and was found

   days later a hundred and fifty miles away alone

   weeping near the railroad tracks in Carey, Ohio,

   those thoughts, those days, consciousness expended

   determining the value of wage labor, the long-eared owl

   in the red maple watches a father in his living room chair

   weeping, furies and Molochs, hot-eyed comedies,

   the shy and kind one’s mercies redeem me,

   old-souled premonitions, eternities repeated

   in a red and black flow.

It’s fall!

The trees outside her window turn

The sheets and blankets on the hospital bed come and go like hills in a painting

No one would buy

Gentle and white and very still

Like a snow scene or a dish of ice-cream

The settlement is illegal mainly because it violates the Constitution’s domestic emoluments clause, which states:

The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be encreased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.

Trump has, with great impunity, been violating the Constitution’s two emoluments clauses, domestic and foreign, since he first entered office in 2019. The nonprofit watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sued Trump during his first term over foreign emoluments violations concerning payments to Trump’s hotels and apartment buildings and royalties from foreign government–owned broadcasters related to The Apprentice. But CREW said Trump’s businesses also likely violated the domestic emoluments clause because some of the transactions involved payments from the federal government or state governments.

CREW’s lawsuit was dismissed in district court, but CREW prevailed on appeal and the case was remanded back to the district court. Trump then appealed to the Supreme Court. By now it was September 2020. The high court waited four months and then dismissed the case as moot because Trump had lost reelection. A similar lawsuit brought by the District of Columbia followed a similar trajectory, but didn’t get as far as CREW’s lawsuit before the Supreme Court decided that time had run out. That’s hardly a ringing endorsement.

If an emoluments case could get this far based on Trump’s business transactions, a case in which Trump pockets federal funds directly should be, in any properly functioning republic, a slam dunk. This is not only a legal settlement between a president and his own administration, which is outrageous enough. It’s also a legal settlement of a lawsuit that would lack legal merit even if Trump weren’t president, because the statute of limitations had passed by the time Trump filed it. (More on that here.)

On top of all that, everybody knew Trump was in an unseemly race to settle before the presiding judge, Kathleen M. Williams, tossed the case out. IRS civil servants, bless them, were eager to fight Trump in court! To settle, for a large sum, a lawsuit that’s doomed to fail quickly is grand larceny. Did I mention that the settlement prompted the Treasury Department’s general counsel to resign?

Ninety-three Democrats filed an amicus brief Monday urging Judge Williams to “make clear that any purported settlement between the parties, and any related voluntary dismissal, intended to avoid the Court’s scrutiny would contravene the DOJ’s settlement authority and the Constitution.” But by then Trump had already withdrawn his lawsuit, denying Williams any opportunity to reject the settlement. Still, the Democrats’ brief is a good roadmap for future action. “A settlement payment,” they wrote, “especially for an unmeritorious claim … is a straightforward violation of the Domestic Emoluments Clause.”

It’s just a question of figuring out who has standing to sue. In CREW’s earlier emoluments lawsuit, the nonprofit teamed up with various people in the hospitality industry who could claim harm from Trump’s market advantage in peddling his influence as president. This time, two police officers who defended the Capitol on January 6, 2021—Harry Dunn, formerly of the Capitol Police, and Daniel Hodges of D.C.’s Metropolitan Police—are suing to block Trump’s slush fund on the grounds that it will “finance the insurrectionists and paramilitary groups that commit violence in his name.” The plaintiffs say that they “already face credible threats of death and violence on regular basis; the Fund substantially increases the danger.” Also, it “will directly finance the violent operations of rioters, paramilitaries, and their supporters who threatened Plaintiffs’ lives that day, and continue to do so.”

Hodges in particular had a rough January 6. From the legal complaint:

Making his way to the [Capitol], he was separated from his platoon, hit from above with a heavy object, kicked in the chest, and driven to the ground. Shortly thereafter a rioter grabbed Hodges by the face and tried to gouge out his eyes.… In the rushing crowd of the mob, Hodges was nearly crushed between metal doors by the enraged attackers. He later said that he thought, “this could be the end.”

How do Dunn and Hodges know that January 6 rioters will be compensated? Because Trump spoke last year of creating a compensation fund for them. Asked by a sycophantic Newsmax interviewer whether the rioters would be compensated financially (“because they lost opportunity, they lost income”), Trump answered: “There’s talk about that. There are a lot of people—a lot of the people that are in government now talk about it. Because a lot of the people in government really like that group of people. They were patriots as far as I was concerned.” Trump’s comments caused a minor furor at the time.

The plaintiffs also got a boost Tuesday when NBC News reported that Ed Martin, who used to lead the Department of Justice’s Weaponization Working Group (he now handles the even dirtier business of giving out pardons) was heard earlier this year predicting that the Justice Department would give out millions to the January 6 rioters. Martin was wrong only about the amount, which he lowballed at $40 million.

Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, told my TNR colleague Greg Sargent earlier this week that House Democrats would introduce a bill blocking the slush fund and similar efforts in the future, and that they would file a discharge petition to get around Republican House leaders who would otherwise block a vote. “We need to put Republicans on the spot as to whether or not they are going to endorse this rank corruption,” Raskin told Sargent, “or whether they are going to stand up for basic constitutional values.”

We now have a text of that Democratic bill, courtesy of Axios’s Andrew Solender. It bars the use of any federal funds for the settlement slush fund, and says that in future no “compromise settlement or award” may be given to a president, vice president, their families, a president-owned entity, a Cabinet member, a political appointee, etc. In addition, no future settlement can be paid alleging harm from the January 6 riot, the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, or any other civil action that was “dismissed with prejudice.”

There remains the matter of Trump’s canceled audits. But are they really canceled? The indemnification language forbids prosecutions and various types of claims, but it doesn’t include the word “audits,” suggesting the prohibition affects penalties but not investigations. I note further that the IRS is not a signatory to the agreement, and that Attorney General Todd Blanche probably lacks the legal authority to cut any such deal without the IRS. “He is not a party to the case,” observe Anna Bower and Eric Columbus on Lawfare, “and he is not exercising any authority delegated to him by the settlement agreement.” Starting in two and a half years, any Justice Department “freed from Trumpian political constraints would likely treat Blanche II as presumptively invalid.”

But why wait that long? Assuming the Democrats retake the House, which remains probable even with Republican redistricting, any brave civil servant at the IRS who blows the whistle on a superior’s attempt to block a Trump audit will be guaranteed a friendly hearing at the House Ways and Means Committee. Indeed, any civil servant who obeys any such direction could make himself vulnerable to prosecution; the maximum penalty for failing to resist executive branch interference with an IRS audit is a $5,000 fine or a five-year jail sentence. That’s yet another way the law doesn’t allow the deal that Trump just cut. We just need to enforce it. If we don’t, we are no longer a country governed by the rule of law.

It feels appropriate that the house Dave built would eventually fall due to the sniveling cowardice of the “suits,” as he liked to call them. (CBS declined to renew Colbert’s contract last year and decided to shutter the show in what they say was a business decision, but which many observers interpret to be an apparent move by Paramount to appease the Trump administration.) In 1991, David Letterman was the host of Late Night With David Letterman, a zany, aggro variety show that occupied the post–Tonight Show time slot on NBC. That year, Johnny Carson, the longtime host of Tonight, shocked both the viewing public and his network by announcing his retirement. As detailed in Bill Carter’s extensive history of the drama, The Late Shift: Letterman, Leno, and the Network Battle for the Night, Letterman had long dreamed of replacing his idol Johnny Carson, and Carson himself saw Letterman as his heir apparent. But, unbeknownst to either of them, NBC had made an agreement with frequent Tonight Show guest-host Jay Leno that the show would be his upon Carson’s retirement.

So Letterman lit out for the territory, taking his talents to CBS, where his Late Show began airing in 1993 as a direct time-slot competitor to Leno’s Tonight Show. Letterman’s show, then, came into the world as a giant middle finger to the network executives at NBC who did him wrong. Of course, it’s not as if Letterman independently financed a late-night talk show on public access TV. He just swapped one set of suits for another, but CBS granted him the independence to continue directing his venom toward his betrayers, long after the late-night war was settled. In an incredible segment from 1998, Letterman interviewed Norm MacDonald, who’d just been fired from NBC’s Saturday Night Live, allegedly for making too many jokes about O.J. Simpson, a close friend of NBC executive Don Ohlmeyer. There’s a gleam in Letterman’s eye as he lays into the network for their shortsightedness. “I know Don Ohlmeyer,” he says, “and, between you and me, he’s an idiot.” Then, in 2010, when NBC got caught in another Tonight Show succession drama—giving the show to Conan O’Brien before taking it away and giving it back to Jay Leno—Letterman’s CBS monologue became must-see TV every night, a raucous running commentary on the pettiness and venality of corporate media decision-makers.

So it’s fitting that a television program born as a result of the intransigence of one major network would die as a result of the intransigency of a different network. As I listened to Letterman impart hard-won koans to his successor—“You can take a man’s show, you can’t take a man’s voice,” he said—I couldn’t help but find the moment hollow. It’s nice to think that Colbert will still have his voice, presumably to podcast with when the time comes, but sometimes the show matters too. This particular one meant a lot to me; it meant a lot more to Stephen Colbert and David Letterman. One day, the political figures who influenced these events will be out of power, and the corporate officers of these major media corporations will seek survival above all else. There may be a day again, in other words, when a show like Colbert’s can exist without interference. But, whatever comes next, The Late Show will be gone—no amount of podcasting will bring it back.

Stephen Colbert’s Late Show was always a different animal from Letterman’s. Coming out of the wild experimentation of Letterman’s NBC Late Night, The Late Show toed a narrow line between the courtliness of a Carsonian talk show and the chaotic anti-comedy that was always Letterman’s personal sensibility. There were regular bits like “Stupid Pet Tricks,” “Will It Float?” and my favorite, “Hairpiece (Not a Hairpiece)?” And there were regular disruptions of TV form, like when Letterman would cut away from his patter to stock footage of a car accident. And the interviews could be strange trips, as well. But he was also, more often than not, in control of the proceedings. For all his manic hijinks, Letterman had an almost classical intuition for hosting. Whatever happened once they got out there, Letterman extended a kind of old-school hospitality to his guests.

When Letterman retired, I’ll admit that I hoped his replacement would be Amy Sedaris, a beloved recurring guest who would have been a fit standard-bearer to bring The Late Show’s comic pandemonium into the future. Instead, the show went to Colbert, a longtime comedy partner of Sedaris, and transformed in different ways. Never experimental or radical, Colbert replaced Letterman’s rascally manners with the warm wiliness of your favorite high school teacher. Colbert interviewed guests with an earnestness that could read as smarm in a media environment so unused to that kind of sincerity.

This was quite a departure from the comedian’s previous life playing a Bill O’Reilly–esque satire of Fox News journalism on The Colbert Report. On that show, distanced from his own authentic personality, Colbert could be cutting and astringent. Losing that made sense when he made the transition to The Late Show, but it also meant losing other aspects of his appeal. The new Colbert felt more aligned with the naïve optimist who launched the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” in 2010, a stunt that was meant to pillory political hypocrisy across the political spectrum but that served as a cringey precursor to the kind of bothsidesism that now seems endemic in political commentary. Colbert tried to begin his Late Show from an apolitical angle, to trade his old precision satire tools for a softer approach, but, within a year, it became clear that he needed to get political to survive. Still, as the critic Will Leitch wrote recently, “The Late Show was a perfectly fine show, but it was never transcendent in the way The Colbert Report was. It was just another show in which an older White guy told safe jokes from behind a desk.”

In that way, it feels odd to mourn so hard for a show like this. By the time Letterman retired in 2015, we were already well into late-night’s viral era, a period inaugurated by the rise of Jimmy Fallon. As much as the circulation of clips online helped breathe some life into the form, it would prove to never really be enough. In 2024, for instance, Fallon’s Tonight Show was reduced to four episodes per week, and Seth Meyers, who hosts Letterman’s original Late Night, had to fire his studio band. It would not be a surprise if either of those shows bit the dust in the coming years, for reasons political or otherwise.

One of Colbert’s most visible innovations in the format was the conspicuous introduction of his devout Catholicism into the proceedings. Never preachy, Colbert could sometimes affect the manner of a cool catechism teacher, bringing to mind the jokes that might punch up a stultifying homily, a kind of welcoming rebelliousness cushioned by belief in a system bigger than us all. Viral clips of the show would often feature Colbert and his guest engaging in questions about the existence of God. (Notably, the most overt instance of recent censorship came when CBS pushed The Late Show not to air Colbert’s interview with James Talarico, much of which focused on the possibilities of a new Christian left. The interview went straight to the show’s YouTube channel.) Of all the snide and smug voices of the men of late-night, Colbert’s was the godliest. Despite his partisan bite, the most righteous. They don’t make hosts like that anymore—they hardly ever did.

A hallmark of the MAGA movement—at least in its second wave—is the seeming contradiction between its weaponized nostalgia and its compulsion to tear things down. Trump motored through both elections on the energy of a sentimental politics of return to a lost America, an America perhaps represented by the wide reach and influence of a program like The Ed Sullivan Show. The past, we are told, has been altered beyond recognition by derangements of public consensus like #MeToo and DEI, and so the mission of this politics is to rid the country of those unasked-for revolutions. But the means have all been destructive. Rather than reform or rat out existing institutions, this administration has sought eradication. This is the logic of Elon Musk’s DOGE quest. You can’t reform the Department of Education; you have to get rid of it. You don’t get a late-night comedian fired or bring him in line; you get his show canceled.

But what does a show matter? The late-night shows—whether it’s The Late Show or The Tonight Show or Jimmy Kimmel Live!—are locations of the sloppy, sometimes generative convergence between TV’s past and its future. They can be spaces that reinforce norms, but they can also be spaces of figuring out. Letterman helped the format to take on that charge, and Colbert, in his spiritual pilgrimage for a media environment free from fear and insanity, was striving along those lines. The continued existence of these shows gave that kind of exploratory improvisation a place at the center of the cultural ecosystem, and a budget to go with it.

What the closing down of The Late Show represents is the wanton destruction of cultural property. It was imperfect, outdated even, but the possibility of change goes out the window now that it’s gone. I’d love to say that I hope, one day, something better replaces it. I love the Dick Cavett-on-drugs audacity of The Adam Friedland Show, and Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney was full of surprises. The talk show, if anything, is a genre on the rise online. But The Late Show is dead, and the late-night show is dying as an institution. To imagine its glorious return would be to avow a misguided kind of faith in the institutions and stewards of contemporary corporate media. It’s too late for that now.

The Justice Department’s announcement that it will set a $1.8 billion slush fund to settle a $10 billion lawsuit from Trump himself against the IRS drew widespread outrage from Democrats on Capitol Hill, who are exploring ways to block the payments. It also drew criticism from Capitol Police officers who were injured on January 6, who have filed a lawsuit to challenge the legality of this compensation scheme. Brian Morrissey, the Treasury Department’s top lawyer, reportedly resigned after the fund was announced.

Until now, Trump’s efforts to reward the insurrectionists who sought to illegally keep him in power in 2020 have been more unethical than illegal. Nobody seriously questioned the lawfulness of Trump’s decision to pardon more than 1,500 defendants in January 6–related cases, nor his decision to fire prosecutors who investigated those cases. Not everything that is morally wrong is necessarily illegal.

Trump’s efforts to extract billions in federal tax dollars for personal gain—either for self-enrichment or for rewarding his militant supporters for their coup attempt—may have finally crossed the line. What’s more, he and his associates may have broken the laws in ways that even so-called “presidential immunity” bestowed upon him by the Supreme Court cannot protect him.

When did Congress authorize the creation of this slush fund, you might ask? Well, it didn’t. Congress created a “permanent, indefinite appropriation” known as the Judgment Fund, to “pay many judicially and administratively ordered monetary awards against the United States.” This allows the federal government to comply with court rulings without constantly seeking individual appropriations from Congress each time a court awards compensation to a plaintiff deemed worthy of a legal remedy. Creating slush funds for a president’s insurrectionist co-conspirators is neither what Congress intended nor what it authorized.

The Justice Department claimed that it was creating the Anti-Weaponization Fund as part of a settlement agreement from a lawsuit brought by President Donald Trump himself in his personal capacity against the IRS, which he also runs in his official capacity as president. Overseeing the “negotiations” is acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who was one of Trump’s own personal lawyers before his appointment as deputy attorney general.

No law degree is necessary to find fault with this arrangement. As conservative legal scholars are fond of reminding us, the Constitution vests the executive power of the United States in the president of the United States. The president cannot shake hands with himself. Any agreement or contract that a president makes with himself binds only himself, and no one else.

To that end, this “settlement” has no legal force beyond that which the Trump administration gives it. Trump’s lawsuit had been assigned to Judge Kathleen Williams in Miami. Last month, she called for additional briefing on whether the lawsuit was constitutionally valid. Article 3 requires courts to only hear “cases and controversies.” In this instance, this means that the parties must be adversarial to one another.

Federal judges typically approve litigation settlements. After the two sides moved to dismiss the case, Williams pointedly noted in her order closing it that she had not agreed to any settlement, nor had one been filed with her.

Because the Notice does not reference any settlement or include a stipulation of settlement, there is no settlement of record. Additionally, Defendants—federal agencies represented by the Department of Justice, which has an independent obligation to uphold the “public’s strong interest in knowing about the conduct of its Government and expenditure of its resources” and the “fair administration of justice,” 28 C.F.R. §§ 50.9, 50.23—neither submitted any settlement documents nor filed any documents ensuring that settlement was appropriate where there was an outstanding question as to whether an actual case or controversy existed.

The absence of judicial review is even more notable when it comes to an addendum to the “settlement” that was revealed on Tuesday after the case was formally closed. In the memo, Blanche purported to immunize Trump from any future prosecutions, claims, costs, and so on related to his past IRS tax returns, as well as his family members and his personal businesses. The Justice Department did not announce this decision; it was uncovered by Politico’s Josh Gerstein instead.

There is no precedent for such brazen corruption in the annals of American history. Nothing else comes close. Watergate seems almost quaint now. Teapot Dome is practically a minor accounting error. The president cannot simultaneously extract billions from the Treasury for corrupt gain while immunizing himself and his family from tax audits. To describe the scheme is to describe its criminality.

So what can be done? Trump and his allies appear to be operating under the assumption that they cannot be prosecuted for these acts in the future. One can hardly blame them for it: The Supreme Court’s disastrous invention of “presidential immunity” in the 2024 case Trump v. United States has paved the way for all sorts of crimes by the Trump administration since he returned to power last January.

It is important to note, as always, that “presidential immunity” is not real. The Constitution does not explicitly grant any form of immunity to presidents, nor can it be implicitly derived from the constitutional text. If anything, the text requires presidents to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” which a president cannot do if he is breaking them. Presidential immunity is utterly alien to our traditions and our national culture. Trump v. United States was wrong the day that it was decided. It is not constitutional law, and it barely pretends to be.

So emboldened is Trump, however, that he may have breached even the Roberts court’s expansive vision of his own impunity. Roberts’s opinion in Trump v. United States lays out a three-part scheme for presidential immunity. For acts within a president’s “conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority,” Roberts claimed, there is absolute immunity from criminal prosecution. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out in her dissent, this would immunize presidents from taking bribes in exchange for pardons—a message that Trump apparently took to heart—and insulate them from ordering the military to kill their political opponents.

But beyond that sphere, presidential immunity gets weaker. Most presidential powers as we understand them come from powers delegated or authorized by Congress, not from Article 2 of the Constitution. For all other official acts, Roberts claims that the president only gets “at least presumptive immunity.” And for unofficial acts, there is no criminal immunity.

The full bounds of the categories have not been tested in court since the ruling. Since there are so few presidents, it is also not exactly easy to build up case law on the matter. Even within the funhouse mirror of the court’s new jurisprudence, however, basic logic can still reign supreme.

If Trump were to claim even a single dollar from the Anti-Weaponization Fund, he would be violating the domestic emoluments clause in Article 2. The clause specifies that the president receives a fixed salary, but simultaneously bars him from accepting “any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.” What counts as an “official act” by a president is a nebulous concept at best under the Supreme Court’s reasoning. If there is anything that falls outside that scope, however, it would be something that is explicitly forbidden by Article 2.

Federal law also makes it a felony offense for federal officials to steal or embezzle federal funds. In addition to the president himself, Trump’s subordinates may have also placed themselves in future legal peril by executing the scheme on his behalf. Philip Allen Lacovara, a former deputy solicitor general, argued in Bloomberg Law on Wednesday that the agreement amounted to a “collusive settlement” that could open the participants up to criminal charges.

“Collusive settlements are a species of fraud,” Lacovara explained. “Most typically, they involve self-interested deals in which a person with insurance agrees to settle a bogus claim or commits to an unreasonable payment in the hope of foisting the costs on an insurance company. Courts find settlements to be fraudulently collusive when, for example, there is no real effort to defend against liability or to contest the exaggerated claim for damages.”

Lacovara noted that the statute of limitations for these offenses, if dated from this week, would extend into 2031—well into the next president’s term. Presidential immunity, insofar as it exists, extends only to the president and not to his subordinates. Trump may try to shield Blanche and other associates from future prosecutions through preemptive pardons, but he could not save them from bar associations, which can review their professional misconduct and impose sanctions.

Any funds disbursed by the Anti-Weaponization Fund may also be recoverable by lawsuits from ordinary Americans, Lacovara noted. Under federal law, recipients of stolen federal property “are deemed to hold it in trust for the real owner—the American taxpayers—even if they are ignorant of the illegality of the scheme,” he explained. “In addition,” he continued, “the federal False Claims Act allows private citizens to sue anyone who collects money based on a false claim—such as having been the ‘victim’ of ‘weaponization’—and to recover penalty damages from the recipient of ill-gotten federal money.”

Trump went to great lengths since last year to rewrite his criminal history and the January 6 prosecutions by framing himself as the victim of “lawfare” and the “weaponization of the federal government” under former President Joe Biden. By trying to steal almost $2 billion from the federal government, he has only confirmed that the scandal was never that he was prosecuted by the Justice Department—it was that he escaped scot-free. That is, at least for now.

So they’re pretty well-qualified to assess the question: Has Trump deteriorated over the years?

“The past year, I will say it’s accelerated more than anything,” Carusone said. “It’s really noticeable.” For starters, he said, Trump simply sounds different: “There’s a lack of crispness in his articulation.” And at rallies, which Trump is doing very infrequently these days, “He just reads the room less effectively. He’s less nimble … less responsive to where the crowd is.”

Rupar sees things a bit differently. “He’s always been extremely incoherent, very untruthful, impulsive,” Rupar said. “So I don’t really think any of those core things are new. I just think that it breaks through now more than it did in the past.” Even so, Rupar counted himself surprised, he said, on the morning of Easter Sunday, when someone DM’d him Trump’s latest Truth Social post. “And my very first thought when I saw it was, ‘That’s the craziest thing he’s ever posted,’” Rupar said.

The post he’s referring to is the first of two that, even by Trump’s standards, will live in presidential infamy. For the record: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.” It was followed two days later by the post Trump opened with the sentence: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

These posts were a turning point: They lit a match that started a bonfire of new speculation about Trump’s mental state. It consumed social media and cable news; by the next week, it made A1 of The New York Times. What was happening here? The man was once desperate and insecure enough to label himself a “very stable genius”; that was pathetic enough, but that was eight long years ago. Where is he now? The day between those two posts brought the traditional White House Easter Egg Roll, which saw Trump surrounded by children and regaling them with the story of … the Easter Bunny? The Last Supper? Christ’s Resurrection? Try again. Joe Biden’s autopen. To a bunch of six-year-olds.

Oh, and speaking of Christ … that moment on April 12, when Trump reposted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus, on the same day he was picking a fight with the pope, was a little much even for his admirers. He took it down and, laughably, tried to say it was an image of him as a doctor. That very night and into the next morning, Democratic commentator Harry Sisson monitored Trump’s social media activity:

9:49pm AI Jesus photo
9:50pm Trump tower on moon
10:10pm dumb meme
10:32pm news clip
10:53pm news clip
12:43am announcing Hormuz blockade
2:35am article about Biden
2:36am article on naval blockade
2:37am article on [now former] Representative Eric Swalwell
2:37am posted the same article about Biden again
2:38am article on his ballroom
4:10am article on Iran

Yes, he’s always been like this. But many people think it’s worse now. Is it age? He turns 80 in June; there are millions of compos mentis octogenarians out there, but it’s fair to ask whether age is slowing Trump down, especially given the way that he and his backers carried on relentlessly about Biden. Does he have dementia? Or are we seeing more glaring manifestations of his legendary arrogance, which is rooted in his profound insecurity? Or is it merely the stupidity of a man who not only never reads a book but reportedly can’t even read one-page briefing papers?

Whatever the explanation, the bottom line is sobering: The person with the power to sic the Justice Department on perceived political foes; to send masked, heavily armed, and poorly trained troops out among the populace; and to order a nuclear attack is slipping. Maybe fast. And the chance that his Cabinet or his party will do anything about it is zero, which means we’re going to have to survive two and a half more years of this.

1. Age

“We Barely Talk About It”

In 2025, as he began his second term, Trump was the oldest person ever to be sworn into the presidency. But Trump’s oldness does not exist in a vacuum. He is the successor to Joe Biden, a president who was forced to give up his reelection bid because of a disastrous debate performance that led to his supporters deciding he was, at 81, too old to run for president again.

Trump is less than four years younger than Biden. During Biden’s presidency, Trump and MAGA writ large were laser-focused on Biden’s age. Even the mainstream media reported endlessly about Biden’s use of the back stairs in Air Force One, his bicycle tumble, his fall onstage at the Air Force Academy graduation in 2023, his name mix-ups (he once called Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El Sisi the “president of Mexico”). The mainstream media was so obsessed with Biden’s age that, according to Media Matters for America, The Wall Street Journal published 41 articles in the first six months of 2024 on the topic. There was even a book written by CNN’s Jake Tapper that alleged that there was a cover-up about Biden’s age-related decline (which, essentially, there was). Even Trump’s nonsensical musings about the autopen are in fact callbacks to Biden’s term, when he was accused of being so addled that he couldn’t do the work of the presidency, even including simply affixing his signature to documents. In mid-April, Trump signed his name to a document and remarked, “Oh, that’s a good one. Look at that, Joe. Do you think Biden can do that?”

Donald Trump is not a normal president; he is the most powerful president in modern American history, or maybe all of our history, because of how he has used unitary executive theory and surrounded himself with a Cabinet filled with billionaire sycophants who largely got their jobs because of their willingness to sign off on anything he wanted. Imagine a Cabinet of Mike Johnsons but somehow richer and dumber. While Trump 1.0 featured the president being held back by guardrails, Trump 2.0 feels like it’s lacking a working frontal lobe: Ideas pop into Trump’s head, and he just executes them. He went from bragging about being a peacemaker to stampeding Venezuela and starting an impulsive, dumb, and possibly disastrous war with Iran. Take away that FIFA peace prize.

We would be remiss not to mention Trump’s mystery hand bruise, which seems to appear monthly and is coated in orange makeup that, like all the makeup Trump wears, does not even come close to matching his skin tone. The White House’s explanation is that he bruises easily because he pops aspirin like they’re Tic Tacs, and because he shakes so many hands. And then there are the pictures of Trump’s drooping lip, which sparked a flurry of speculation after a speech he gave in Miami last November.

Maybe it’s all nothing. But this is a guy who ran on being healthier and spryer than the guy before him. He told us that Joe Biden was too old and too sick to be president, but that he would be able to do the job because he had accomplished certain feats: “The White House Doctors have just reported that I am in ‘PERFECT HEALTH,’ and that I ‘ACED (Meaning, was correct on 100% of the questions asked!), for the third straight time, my Cognitive Examination, something which no other President, or previous Vice President, was willing to take,” he wrote in January on Truth Social.

Trump shows his age the most in the apparently diminished functioning of his frontal cortex—the thin layer of gray matter that helps the brain make decisions and regulate itself, the part of the brain that prevents you from saying the unkind or insane thing. Trump appears unable to hold himself back. He called a reporter “piggy.” He called another a “fresh person.” He confuses Greenland (which he wanted to invade) with Iceland.

Graydon Carter, a co-founder of the digital magazine Air Mail, has been tracking Trump closely (and mocking him mercilessly) since his halcyon days at Spy magazine in the 1980s. Carter said the Donald Trump of now is not the same man who went down that escalator 11 years ago. “He has gone from being the chatty, handsy salesman at the office happy hour to the crazed, opinionated antiquity shuffling the mail cart from cubicle to cubicle,” Carter said. His old Spy colleague Kurt Andersen agreed: “When he became a recurring character in Spy, Trump was an angry, needy ignoramus, liar, bully, and braggart more desperate for attention than anyone I’d ever encountered. And a vulgarian with short fingers. He’s the same—except in his forties he had impulse control in public, didn’t ramble and forget and repeat himself or show other signs of mental illness.”

Trump will turn 80 this June. He will be 82 when he leaves office, assuming he does, so we will see what the future holds. He compares favorably to Biden in one respect. Biden aged visibly before our eyes in ways that most of us associate with watching our parents pass through that portal from their seventies, when they can mostly still drive and golf and play tennis, into their eighties, when those things start to be out of reach. Biden’s voice quieted. He held his mouth agape in that old-man way. He hunched over just a little. Trump has none of those issues, for now.

Vin Gupta, the public health physician and MS NOW medical analyst, said he thought Biden was a pretty healthy 80-year-old. “The guy bikes 30 miles in Rehoboth Beach every weekend,” Gupta said. “From a cardiovascular standpoint, [Biden] was way more robust than Trump,” who famously never exercises, unless you count getting in and out of a golf cart. Yet Biden got run out of the race, “and with Trump, we barely talk about it,” Gupta said.

That’s largely because of the right-wing media. Do they even discuss his age on Fox News? Sometimes—like when one Fox host cheerily picked up Trump’s claim that he’s “aging in reverse.” Trump will literally have to be drooling and forgetting his own name before Fox and others will acknowledge his age as an issue. And the same goes, of course, for Republicans in Congress. That wall of denial will prevent Trump’s age from being an issue until some point when it’s utterly impossible to deny.

2. Dementia

Disinhibition and Digression

In early April, Mary Trump—who, in addition to considering her uncle to be a danger to the country and the world is, remember, a clinical psychologist—took note in two interviews of what she called “concerning changes” in her uncle’s behavior. “Sometimes it does not seem like he’s oriented to time and place,” she told New York magazine. “And on occasion, I do see that deer-in-the-headlights look.” Donald’s father, Fred, she said, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, but not till well into his eighties.

No one can say, of course, whether Trump has dementia, an umbrella term for a range of mental conditions, among which Alzheimer’s is the most notable. The common visible symptoms, according to the website of the Alzheimer’s Association, include difficulty performing a number of tasks Trump hasn’t had to perform in years or perhaps ever: paying bills, preparing meals, remembering appointments. The symptoms listed on the Mayo Clinic website are, for present purposes, more on point: problems communicating or finding words; issues with reasoning or problem-solving; confusion and disorientation.

So: Is the president demented? Harry Segal is a clinical psychologist at Cornell University and a former co-host of the podcast Shrinking Trump. (His co-host was psychologist John Gartner, who in 2017 started an organization of mental health professionals, Duty to Warn, that sought to caution Americans about Trump’s unfitness for office.) Shrinking Trump ran for 70 episodes, from May 2024 until October 2025, when it was stopped out of fear of being sued by the president. In an interview, Segal was quick to note that he is not offering a clinical diagnosis of Trump. That, he said, would be unethical. But it’s not unethical to comment on “behaviors so striking that you would recommend an assessment for someone in your family who demonstrated” them.

What has he seen? Three concerning things. One: “He began to have odd quirks of speech where he would begin a word or a phrase and seemingly lose his place, slur, and end up with some kind of compromise word,” Segal said. This is called phonemic paraphasia. It’s a possible sign of dementia (though it could have other sources), and Trump has been doing it for a long time: He coined the “word” “infantroopen,” for example, back in 2019. The same year, he referred twice to the need to look into the “oranges” of the Robert Mueller investigation. He finally carefully enunciated “origins” on the third go.

Second, Segal “began to notice the tangential digressions.” After the mainstream media picked up on how aggressively random and disjointed his stump speeches had become, Trump gave it a name, “The Weave,” and said it was all intentional. But the claim was nonsense. The pattern has continued into his second term—recently, for example, in a late-March Cabinet meeting about the war, when he got lost in a five-minute digression on how much money he’d saved by using Sharpies to sign legislation and executive orders.

The third thing that caught Segal’s ear was that, on certain occasions, Trump said or posted something really shocking even for him: “The outlandish things he’s been saying when people died, right? Like Robert Mueller, I am glad he’s dead, or Rob Reiner.” Maybe that’s just an older man losing patience with decorum, Segal said; but “this feels a little bit more like dysregulation. Like, ‘I have a wildly aggressive thought, I am just going to say it.’”

After Trump’s crazed post on Easter Sunday, Vin Gupta made national headlines by posting on X: “Erratic. Can’t finish sentences. Often confused. Illogical train of thought. Word finding difficulties. Developing and worsening gradually over time. The President is exhibiting all the signs of dementia.”

In an interview, Gupta kept returning to the word “impulsivity.” Speaking the week after Easter, he said: “I think his impulsivity and his erratic behavior, as we’ve all seen just in the last two weeks, seems like it’s getting worse. Like he just has less of a filter. Even at baseline, he had no filter. But it seems like the disinhibition is worse. And when you think about the family history, I think reasonable people can ask reasonable questions.”

Those reasonable questions include, for example: Why does Trump so frequently boast about acing cognitive tests? In January, Trump bragged that he’d nailed his third cognitive test, adding that the tests were “something which no other President, or previous Vice President, was willing to take.” That’s one way of putting it. Another way of thinking about it, Gupta said, is that people are administered these tests on a repeat basis only when concern about possible mental impairment exists. Said Gupta: “He’s using it as a sort of a talking point to say, ‘Look how fit I am,’ and in reality, that should tip off anybody.”

Finally, these questions extend to Trump’s physical health, and the White House’s opacity about it. Last fall, Trump went to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for an examination. The White House said it was for an MRI. Trump later revealed it was a CT scan. Maybe not a big deal, but why the confusion? Over Easter weekend, rumors flew across social media that Trump had been admitted to Walter Reed. There’s been no confirmation of that, but the cartoonish White House denials when such rumors swirl aren’t credible either. That weekend, spokesman Steven Cheung posted about the president who doesn’t read briefing papers, is known to pass his days watching hours of cable news, and has been caught napping in meetings and at events: “There has never been a president who has worked harder for the American people than President Trump. On this Easter weekend, he has been working nonstop in the White House and Oval Office.”

3. Arrogance

Too Much and Never Enough

One thing we know for sure Trump suffers from is his endless, embarrassing, proud, and loud arrogance. It was an unforgettable and, at the time, shocking moment in March 2016 when he was asked on Morning Joe whom he was speaking to on foreign policy: “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain, and I’ve said a lot of things.”

That turned out to be a little amuse-bouche that gave us all a small, early taste of what life with Trump would be like. The constant and utterly unquenchable need to be the center of attention. The ceaseless preening and boasting about very average accomplishments. (How many times has he used the phrase “Nobody’s ever seen anything like it”?) The confidence that long, long ago boiled over into auto-infallibility.

It would be one thing if this were just some tic of his that was dismissible. But it has policy implications, which is to say, it affects all of us. Michael Patrick Lynch is a humanities professor at the University of Connecticut whose 2019 book, The Know-It-All Society: Truth and Arrogance in Political Culture, was more a critique of our social media outrage culture than of Trump per se; nevertheless, Lynch said, Trump very much suits the age of toxic argument, arrogance, and certainty. If you’re certain you’re right, Lynch said, you have nothing to learn from anyone else, and you don’t need to pay attention to evidence. “If you ignore evidence, if you ignore other people’s experience, if you don’t think you have anything to learn, then you are going to end up ignoring reality,” Lynch said. “And we know that’s a central feature of Trump’s universe.”

The thing about arrogance, or at least Trump’s version of it, is that it needs constant feeding, a steady stream of new targets to dominate and conquer. At first, he ran for president just as a vanity project, not expecting or even really wanting to win. Then he won. Then, once he actually became president, he needed to be the greatest ever, in his mind. “This is Donald Trump, hopefully your favorite president of all time, better than Lincoln, better than Washington,” he said in a December 2022 video introducing his “digital trading cards.” In his first term, he needed to dominate his enemies, but as many have observed, there were still some guardrails around him. In the second, with the guardrails gone, he’s extended his reach from the hated deep state to universities and law firms.

He started to run out of domestic enemies, so it was only a matter of time before he turned his gaze outward to the world. This is the precise reason why a person had to be gullible in the extreme to believe him when he said he wouldn’t be starting any wars. He had to start wars. His insatiable arrogance, his grandiosity, made it inevitable. At some point, conquering the United States would not be enough.

“What I really believe is that Trump is struggling with a mix of grandiosity, desperation, and old age,” said Tony Schwartz, who co-wrote Trump: The Art of the Deal (1987) and has been doing penance ever since. “Nothing he’s ever accomplished has been sufficient to overcome his lifelong experience of emptiness and fraudulence. Now, in his final turn, he’s trying to take over the world. It’s only about making himself feel more worthy. He couldn’t care less about the suffering and destruction it causes.”

The problem, though, is this. Once you’re the emperor of the world, at least in your mind; once you’ve “toppled” the Iranian regime and “brought peace” to the Middle East and brokered at least eight other peace deals—what’s next?

This is the really dark and twisted side of Trump’s arrogance. He needs to be right about everything because deep down, he knows that he knows nothing—about history or economic policy or health care. He needs to dominate because deep down, he’s massively insecure. He is contemptuous of everyone—his enemies, of course, and “Sleepy Joe,” and radical left lunatics; but also of a lot of his groveling supporters. (Do you think he has an ounce of respect for, say, Pam Bondi or Ted Cruz?)

But in the end, Schwartz believes, “There is nobody he’s more contemptuous of than himself.” The arrogance and grandiosity are a mask. That’s what makes the title of Mary Trump’s 2020 book about her uncle so brilliant: Too Much and Never Enough. He always needs too much, and yet, it’s never enough for him. And while this personality trait has always been there, and it stands separate in many ways from his age or his possible mental deterioration, it’s implicated in those things, too. The more vulnerable he feels, the more arrogant he’ll become—the more likely he’ll be to post about, oh, destroying an entire civilization. He backed down from doing that. But remember—he has two and a half years left.

4. Stupidity

Every Accusation Is a Confession

In November 2025, Trump berated a reporter for asking him why he blamed Biden over an Afghan national who had shot two National Guard members near the White House. “Because they let him in. Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person? Because they came in on a plane, along with thousands of other people that shouldn’t be here, and you’re just asking questions because you’re a stupid person.”

This was far from the only time Trump has called a reporter stupid, and it won’t be the last. Trump is very much a known name-caller, and “stupid” is one of his favorite insults, though he also enjoys the use of the phrase “low IQ.” The put-down is pretty rich because Trump has to be one of the least intellectually curious people ever to occupy the Oval Office. But despite this, the state of being stupid seems to be an obsession of Trump’s. It’s the thing Trump calls people when he’s done with them. In April, Trump posted that people who had been crucial to him (Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones) were “stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too! Look at their past, look at their record.”

Here’s why this is telling. For Trump, every accusation is a confession, and no accusation of Trump’s seems more of a projection than this one. In 2019, his former lawyer Michael D. Cohen testified before a House committee: “I’m talking about a man who declares himself brilliant but directed me to threaten his high school, his colleges, and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores.” Certainly, grades aren’t the sole measure of intelligence, but Trump’s obsession with hiding them speaks to a deep insecurity about his own intelligence. A lot of famous people are more than comfortable being honest about their own poor grades.

One of Trump’s best tricks is his ability to obfuscate his gaffes. With the sheer volume of things he’s said, he’s created a wall of sound, an endless stream of noise that comes at us like a firehorse, one mistake drowned out by the mistake that follows like a Möbius strip of misstatements and lies. But there have been moments when Trump’s stupidity has broken through. One classic came during his first term, in April 2020, when he gave a mind-blowing press conference that broke through the noise. At the time, he was giving nightly press conferences with Covid-related updates. And he said: “So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous—whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light.” He turned to Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, and said, “I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside of the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting.”

Even Trump’s staunchest defenders seemed flummoxed. After that presser, Trump took to X to say it was “not worth the time & effort” to do the Covid pressers. It was one of those moments when Trump’s own stupidity eclipsed the sun.

One of the ways Trump tries to buttress his own intelligence is by bragging about an uncle, John Trump, who taught at MIT. Trump claims that John was the “longest-serving professor” at MIT. This is of course not true, but it’s closer to the truth than a lot of the things Trump cooks up. Trump’s own insecurity betrays his anxiety about his own intellect, which is certainly merited.

Aside from age, possible mental deterioration, and unfathomable and unstable arrogance, we must deal for another two and a half years with the fact that the president of the United States just isn’t a smart man. The specific question that concerns us here is: Which of his many bad decisions are explained mostly by his stupidity?

The answer? It’s not reassuring. It’s not, for example, his decision to start a war with Iran. That’s explained mostly by his arrogance/insecurity: His need to erase from the historical record anything positive Barack Obama did, in this case the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which Iran was evidently abiding by until Trump unilaterally pulled out of the deal in 2018. That deal stands as the most striking example of something Trump had to destroy simply because Obama did it. So that was about his arrogance and insecurity.

No—the answer to the stupidity question, quite unfortunately for the American people, concerns the one issue that most directly impacts most Americans: the economy. Most notably, his commitment to tariffs.

Just stop and ponder this: Trump sincerely appears to believe that tariffs can eliminate the income tax. He has said this arguably more than he’s said anything else in his second term, with respect to actual policy. It’s a deranged fantasy. Before Trump, tariffs brought in about $80 billion in revenue. He has raised that to $264 billion—so, yes, it’s tripled! However, since the Supreme Court ruled against Trump on tariffs, the U.S. government has to return at least $160 billion of that money. And income taxes bring in—ready?—about $2.7 trillion. It’s possible he knows this and chooses to ignore it. But from the way he talks, it just seems like he doesn’t know it and doesn’t care to know it. That’s not age or dementia or arrogance. It’s just stupidity. And it isn’t going to change.

Conclusion

Two and a Half More Years of This?

There’s been a lot of talk over the spring about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment option—removal of a sitting president, due to incapacity, by the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet. But let’s be real. This Cabinet of fatuous fawners is unlikely to do that. Trump would have to do something we can’t imagine today—take his clothes off at a press conference, bomb a U.S. city—for that to happen. Nobody is going to take advantage of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.

The Democrats are still favored to take back the House of Representatives, and they will presumably impeach him over something. (It’s not like there aren’t a lot of choices; as of late April, impeachtrumpagain.org suggests 27 different reasons.) The Senate, however, won’t convict. Even if the Democrats take narrow control of that body, 15 or so Republicans would have to join them to convict Trump of the House charges. Not happening. Said the Lincoln Project’s Stuart Stevens: “No one will stop him. The only people who can stop Trump are Republicans. They’re not going to stop him. They’re going to let him keep crashing and killing and destroying.”

So in all likelihood, we’re stuck with him. What’s he got up his sleeve that he hasn’t unleashed on the nation and the world yet? God only knows. ICE is still hiring like crazy. He’s still building immigrant detention camps. His acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, reindicted James Comey days into the new role; Letitia James can’t be far behind. FBI Director Kash Patel says arrests are coming relating to the 2020 election. He wants to take over Cuba. He still wants Greenland. He hasn’t played the Insurrection Act card. He’s looking at ways to crack down on “domestic terrorists,” a catchall phrase if ever there was one. Said Miles Taylor, the first-term Trump administration official who quit and joined the opposition and now runs defiance.org: “The machine is going to spit out a bunch of fucking prosecutions against these people. That is going to happen, hands down, no doubt about it. There will be nonprofit groups and individuals that are just protesters that are deemed domestic terrorists.”

And there will be outbursts, and Truth Social posts, and accusations, and God knows what else. Two years ago, a nervous nation watched a president who was no longer up to performing the job. That president just couldn’t adequately fill the office. Today, that nation is watching a president who may well destroy it.

It’s not hard to find quotes like this. During his two terms as president over eight years, Ahmadinejad said Israel has “no place in the region” and that “a devastating storm is on the way that will uproot the basis of Zionism.” The United States—whose president, George W. Bush, had listed Iran as part of an “Axis of Evil” alongside Iraq and North Korea in 2002—was another frequent target. “The accomplishment of a world without America and Israel is both possible and feasible. And God willing, with the force of God behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionism,” Ahmadinejad said, days after calling for Israel to be “wiped off the map.” Even if some of Ahmadinejad’s fury could be chalked up to anti-imperialist anger, he was also an unrepentant Holocaust denier who repeatedly referred to the deaths of six million Jews at the hands of the Nazis as a “myth,” a “lie,” and the “opinion of just a few.”

Ahmadinejad was the face of an Iranian regime that Israeli hard-liners and neoconservatives in the Bush administration were determined to wipe out. In other words, Ahmadinejad, who left office in 2013, was not someone whom the U.S. and Israel ever wanted to see return to power—or so you’d assume. And yet, that is precisely what the two allies attempted to engineer earlier this year, according to a bonkers new report from The New York Times. The story, which has to be read to be believed, reveals the utter incompetence and incoherent strategy of the Americans and Israelis who are responsible for the Iran war.

In the early days of the war, Ahmadinejad’s home—where he had been held in house arrest over critiques of regime leaders—was hit by an airstrike, and he was initially assumed to have been killed. But now the Times, citing U.S. officials, reports that the strike was intended to kill Ahmadinejad’s guards, allowing him to then be installed as the U.S.- and Israeli-approved leader of a post–Islamic Republic government. Ahmadinejad had even met with Israeli representatives on visits to Guatemala and Hungary between 2023 and 2025. But after the strike, in which he was injured, “he became disillusioned with the regime change plan,” the report states. (You don’t say?) His whereabouts now are unknown.

The Times reporting makes it clear that this plan was concocted and primarily driven by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency that is analogous to the CIA, and U.S. leaders only signed off on it shortly before it was executed. To a large extent it suggests that Mossad, once one of the premier intelligence agencies in the world, has not just lost its touch but fallen completely off the deep end: Installing a Holocaust-denying blowhard as president is absurd even by contemporary Israeli standards.

But even if this was a Mossad-driven operation, it is still damning about America’s handling of the war itself. President Trump and the Pentagon made “regime change” a stated goal of the operation, albeit in a typically ambiguous and confusing way. Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth stated last month that “regime change has occurred” in Iran, an apparent reference to the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei in the first day of airstrikes. But that statement is hard to square with the fact that the country is apparently being run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in consultation with Khamenei’s son, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, who was injured to an unknown degree in an airstrike. If this is regime change at all, well, it’s a more hard-line regime than existed before the war.

Now we have another data point about what the U.S. considers to be regime change, and it’s even more ridiculous: installing the U.S.- and Israel-hating Ahmadinejad as Iran’s new leader. An “associate” of Ahmadinejad told the Times that “Ahmadinejad saw the strike as an attempt to free him. The associate said the Americans viewed Mr. Ahmadinejad as someone who could lead Iran, and had the capability to manage ‘Iran’s political, social and military situation.’” That the U.S. deemed him an acceptable leader is difficult to fathom, but perhaps not inconsistent with how this administration operates: The associate suggested to the Times that the Trump administration saw Ahmadinejad as analogous to Delcy Rodríguez, the Venezuelan vice president who took over the country after U.S. special forces kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro in January.

It’s possible, as Spencer Ackerman notes in a typically shrewd and acerbic post, that this could mean that Ahmadinejad was a long-standing U.S. and Israeli intelligence agent, a mind-melting possibility, or that “this whole piece is a set-up job to discredit Ahmadinejad”—in other words, having failed to kill Ahmadinejad in the airstrike, U.S. officials planted this fanciful scenario in The New York Times in an attempt to discredit him and thus prevent him from taking power.

Under any previous administration, this Times story would be too batshit to believe. But nothing is beyond belief under the Trump administration—and indeed the more unbelievable the story, the truer it often turns out to be. (This week provided another case in point.) If it is true that U.S. and Israeli leaders really were trying to elevate Ahmadinejad, it’s hard to think of anything more damning for the war effort. The idea that he would have any credibility in Iran if installed in such a fashion is preposterous, not to mention that any attempt by the U.S. and Israel to justify installing him would have been instantly discredited by his litany of past statements about the two countries. Yet this administration has proven time again that it doesn’t actually think through its plans; it acts, then reacts.

But the main reason the Ahmadinejad gambit seems plausible is that it epitomizes something that has long been apparent about the Iran war: The American and Israeli officials conducting it have no real idea what they want to accomplish. They certainly have no idea what kind of government in Tehran they would deem acceptable. And that is how, perhaps, you end up trying to install a Holocaust denier who wants to wipe you off the map.

The president aggressively dodged questions about the future impact of artificial intelligence Wednesday, claiming that nothing but good has come from the technology’s rapid implementation across industry.

“What’s your message to American families who are scared by the rise of AI?” asked a reporter on the tarmac of Joint Base Andrews. “They’re worried that their kids are not going to be able to have jobs someday because AI is going to take over—”

“No, I’ll tell you, AI has been amazing because right now we have more jobs, more people working right now, in the United States by far than we ever had before,” Trump interjected.

But that’s just not true. The lowest unemployment rate in recorded U.S. history was in 1953, when a postwar boom brought rates down to 2.5 percent, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The lowest rate in the last 50 years happened in 2023, when unemployment dropped to 3.4 percent. Today, unemployment sits at 4.3 percent—and is gradually rising.

Beyond that, the initial rollout of artificial intelligence has decimated thousands of early-career opportunities and massively disrupted myriad industries, including the higher education system, which is currently pumping out thousands of degree-bearing professionals with nowhere to go.

Hours before Trump’s remarks, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta—which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—laid off 8,000 employees in favor of the emergent technology. All in all, analysts predict that AI and automation will claim 6 percent of U.S. jobs by 2030.

Trump, however, was not willing to speak to that. Instead, he decided to harp on his handling of the Iran war, suggesting that the economy was actually thriving due to the wildly unpopular Middle East conflict.

“The stock market is higher now than it was before I started the Iran situation, and on Iran—I had no choice because they were going to have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said. “Oil is going to come tumbling down.”

Reporter: What's your message to American families who are scared by the rise of AI? They're worried that their kids are not going to be able to have jobs someday?

Trump: AI is amazing. Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. pic.twitter.com/Ks0VCsYMhC

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 20, 2026

But analysts do not predict that oil and gas costs will come crashing down—at least not anytime soon.

The average cost of gas nationwide is $4.55 per gallon, with large swaths of the U.S. pushing $5 a gallon, according to the AAA’s price tracker. That’s about 50 percent higher than prices were before the war started.

The situation has become so dire that Trump’s Cabinet members have stopped speculating as to when prices will actually go back down. Analysts, meanwhile, have projected that gas and oil costs will likely continue to climb—potentially even after midterms.

On Wednesday, Republican Senator John Kennedy told Samantha Handler of Punchbowl News that the GOP doesn’t have enough votes to provide $1 billion in taxpayer money to the ballroom project, and the amendment is expected to be removed from the budget bill going to the Senate floor this week.

Four Republican senators have publicly voiced opposition to public money going to the vanity project. They are Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina.

Cassidy lost his primary last week, thanks in large part to a Trump endorsement of one of his opponents, and has also vocally spoken out against Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund, which was announced Monday. Collins and Murkowski are each expected to face tough Democratic challengers in the November midterms, while Tillis is retiring.

Just these four “no” votes would probably kill the $1 billion going to the ballroom given the widespread Democratic opposition to the project. A larger group inside the GOP is privately against the ballroom, according to five anonymous insiders who spoke with Politico.

The White House originally said the ballroom would be funded with approximately $200 million from Trump and “other patriot donors.” That number soon doubled to $400 million.

Senate Republicans, at the president’s behest, then attempted to sneak in a $1 billion sum for White House security—including $220 million for ballroom security—into the larger budget bill. The allotment was deemed spurious by the nonpartisan Senate parliamentarian. Trump then, of course, tried to get her fired.

The DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion in April claiming that the act was unconstitutional because it unfairly restricted “the constitutional independence and autonomy of the Executive.” In response, two organizations, the nonprofit watchdog group American Oversight and the American Historical Association sued in federal court, and on Wednesday U.S. District John Bates ruled that the act is in fact constitutional.

“The original public meaning of the text of the Constitution, canons of interpretation, Supreme Court precedent, general principles of property law, and almost 50 years of practice confirm that Congress has the enumerated power to regulate presidential records under the [Constitution’s] Property Clause,” Bates wrote in his ruling.

Bates noted that Trump had no problem following the law during his first term as president. Bates’s order takes effect on May 26. It’s not clear if the White House is following the law at the moment, and it will likely appeal the ruling to a higher court, as Trump has shown little respect for recorded documents during his presidency.

Trump was charged with hoarding classified documents in his Florida estate in a case that was eventually dismissed thanks to a judge he appointed. In his first term as president, Trump also reportedly used to tear documents into small pieces and throw them on the floor. Trump doesn’t plan to keep any documents at his proposed presidential library, instead planning to make the Miami skyscraper more like a hotel as he doesn’t “believe in building libraries or museums.”

The Tuesday order, titled “Restoring Integrity to America’s Financial System,” directs bank regulators and the government agencies to look into the legal status of people applying for credit cards or loans or opening bank accounts.

“My Administration will not tolerate national security and public safety risks caused by illicit cross-border financial activity, nor will it permit risks to our financial system posed by the extension of credit or financial services to the inadmissible and removable alien population,” the order states.

The White House wrote that America’s financial institutions should “be attentive” to the potential credit risks posed by extending loans to undocumented immigrants, specifying that that situation creates a “structural ‘ability to repay’ deficiency that undermines the safety and soundness of the national banking system” in the event that those individuals are deported.

Exactly how much risk these individuals pose is unknown, since banks have never collected information about their customers’ citizenship or immigration status, reported the Associated Press.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is expected to issue a formal advisory on the new regulations within the next 60 days that will specifically describe certain “red flags and typologies” employers are to be suspicious of, such as potential payroll tax evasion, the use of “foreign-identity documents,” the use of an individual taxpayer identification number (a code typically used by undocumented immigrants in place of a Social Security number), or the use of third-party payment processors that the order claimed could be indicative of “off-the-books” wage payments.

Somehow, the order was less severe than bank executives expected. Early reports on the executive order suggested that the White House was weighing whether to make it mandatory for financial institutions to collect their customers’ citizenship data.

After Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS resulted in the creation of a $1.8 billion pool of taxpayer money for him to essentially dole out to his allies at a whim, Democrats want to force Republicans to go on the record about whether they support such blatant fraud.

In the House, Representative John Larson has announced what Democrats are literally calling the SLUSH FUND Act, which would tax the fund at 100 percent, returning every dollar back to the government.

“The President should be focused on public service, not personal gain and profit,” Larson wrote in a press release. “Never in our nation’s history has a sitting president sought a settlement against their own government. Hardworking American taxpayers should not have to write blank checks to Trump, his cronies, and violent January 6th insurrectionists who attacked our Capitol.”

Jamie Raskin, a ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, told The New Republic that he plans to submit another bill to block the slush fund and any future efforts to create similar pools of money.

“We need to put Republicans on the spot as to whether or not they are going to endorse this rank corruption, or whether they are going to stand up for basic constitutional values,” Raskin said, adding that he wants “straightforward legislation to block this outrageous misappropriation.”

Earlier Wednesday, Raskin moved to subpoena acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and other members of Trump’s Cabinet involved in the creation of the fund.

Raskin said his proposed bill will be backed by the entire Democratic caucus and that Democrats will seek a discharge petition to force a vote on it. Discharge petitions require majority approval from the House, so this plan may not work unless a few Republicans also vote to bring the bill to the floor. The New Republic can think of at least one GOP House member Dems can count on …

Not to be outdone, Senate Democrats are also planning to force votes on the slush fund as a budget bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security hits the floor in the coming days. Republicans are using the reconciliation process to try to approve the budget, which means Democrats can propose slush fund–related amendments that will automatically go to a vote.

For example, Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen has said he will introduce a provision that prevents money in the fund from going to child sex offenders or those found guilty of assaulting police officers. “It’s time to see where Republicans stand,” he said.

This episode is part of Right Now’s ongoing coverage of the midterm elections. Other recent episodes have covered the gubernatorial race in California, the U.S. Senate race in Texas, and the U.S. Senate contest in Maine.

Perry Bacon: We’re going to focus Right Now on Georgia, and I have a great guest. Tia Mitchell is the Washington bureau chief for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Tia, welcome.

Tia Mitchell: Thank you for having me back, Perry.

Bacon: Yes. So let’s talk about—I’ll start with the governor’s race there, and what I thought was a surprising result, but I’ll be curious what you think. There was a multi-candidate field for the Democratic primary. The most prominent candidate, I would say, is the former mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Lance Bottoms.

I expected there to be no one to reach 50 percent, but it looks like she’s apparently got over 50—won the primary, no runoff there. So I want to ask: One, are you surprised by that, that she got over 50 percent? And then two, how important was the endorsement from Joe Biden—who we’ve been talking about as being unpopular for a long time but is actually fairly popular among Democratic voters, particularly older Black folks? So talk about her win.

Mitchell: So I am surprised at how commandingly she won. She always was leading in the polls. We always knew she was very likely to get the most votes on primary night—if there was going to be a runoff, she was going to be in it. And we always knew there was a chance she could win outright. But I thought it was going to be more of a nail-biter if she won outright, whereas she won handily. It wasn’t even close. It wasn’t even a question, really, for most of the night—would she win without the need of a runoff.

And I do believe that what really helped her was her name recognition away from metro Atlanta. However, she did very well in metro Atlanta, which was a question in the weeks leading up to the election during early voting. There was a lot of online discourse about her record as mayor, her decision not to run for a second term, and a lot of people on social media were talking about why they were not supporting Mayor Bottoms.

And then even beyond that kind of anecdotal evidence, my colleague Riley Bunch did an article about how many of the people who served alongside Mayor Bottoms when she was mayor or on the Atlanta City Council—so these are the people who know her governing style best—were not supporting her race for governor. And that also speaks volumes.

But her name recognition—and I do think the Biden endorsement—really was a signal to older Black voters. The fact that she’s a Black woman who has this brand as being a strong, accomplished Black woman—that means a lot to Black voters. And so she was able to overcome some of those weaknesses.

The question now is: Does she work to mend those gaps? Not because these people aren’t going to support her—because it’s not like they’re going to vote Republican—but does she say, I want people to be enthusiastic about me. I have some work to do.

Bacon: I don’t want to liken them, but the person who was last the Democratic nominee for governor in Georgia, Stacey Abrams—another Black woman. We’ve never had a Black woman governor in the history of the United States, horribly enough.

So talk about how Bottoms might be better or worse politically compared to Abrams, and if her chances of winning are better, worse, the same. Talk about where she stands compared to Abrams.

Mitchell: Yeah. So I covered both of Stacey Abrams’s campaigns. She ran in 2018 and 2022. She was, in 2018, a rock star. Keisha Lance Bottoms is not Stacey Abrams 2018. Keisha Lance Bottoms—her personality is a little bit more subdued. She’s more soft-spoken. She does well when she needs to, but she doesn’t have that natural way of connecting with people just in general. She’s just a shyer person.

Stacey Abrams literally went to all 159 Georgia counties. She was packing out rural counties and getting out the vote, and it paid off—she got so close in 2018. Even four years later, in 2022, Stacey Abrams wasn’t the same candidate—wasn’t as enthusiastic, didn’t come across as connecting as well—and struggled as a result against then-incumbent Brian Kemp.

So I would say, I’ve talked about the personality differences, but I think it’s going to be interesting to see how Keisha Lance Bottoms campaigns statewide. She and Stacey Abrams are not known to be particularly close, but does she get in touch with Abrams’s team? Is there conversation about what did and didn’t work, particularly in 2018 when Stacey Abrams got so close?

There’s also no evidence that she’s particularly close to Raphael Warnock, who is the only Black Democrat to win statewide in Georgia in recent elections. Does she reach out to his team? I know for a fact some of Team Warnock were among the people who were very critical of Keisha Lance Bottoms’s campaign.

Her people—little tea for your viewers—some, I’m not saying all, but some of her people aren’t necessarily Georgia campaign advisers. So it’s going to be interesting how Mayor Bottoms figures out, again, how to move forward. But if nothing else, there is a path that Stacey Abrams and Raphael Warnock have laid out for her.

Bacon: Let me ask a couple more Bottoms questions. I guess the first is: My perception is that she might be perceived as more conservative than Abrams, who had worked on voting rights and so on, and that might be a feature—she’s more business, more pro-police—

Mitchell: Pro-family—

Bacon: And two, 2026 looks to be a pretty Democratic year overall, nationally. So is it possible that while she’s not maybe the most charismatic person, she might do better than Abrams 2022, for sure?

Mitchell: Yeah, I think so. Again, even her critics have said, “If she becomes the nominee, I will support her.” Now they were hoping for a runoff—they were hoping that either Michael Thurmond or Jason Esteves would have a head-to-head matchup and Democratic voters would be forced to make a more conscious choice about Keisha Lance Bottoms. But they didn’t get that—she won outright. So now they have a choice and some soul-searching to do, as well.

But I do think that the climate bodes well for Democrats in Georgia. Now it’s about organizing. I will say, to your point, Perry—Senator Ossoff, who did not have a primary—he ran unopposed, so we always knew he was going to be at the top of the ticket in November. He quickly put out a statement saying he welcomed Keisha Lance Bottoms and supported her campaign. He did that overnight. So it’s clear that Ossoff is ready to be on the ticket with her, and his team is already thinking about what that looks like.

Bacon: So talk about the Republican primary for governor, which is now going into a runoff, because I thought the—I’m going to call him the billionaire for now—I thought he was going to finish ahead, but he did not. So talk about that race a little bit.

Mitchell: The billionaire—I think people forget—most people had never heard of him until roughly February 7. Not even four months ago. So he went from zero—not even a candidate, no known political aspirations—to, in less than four months, being one of the two people who could be the Republican nominee for governor.

Bacon: His name is Rick Jackson. I forgot him briefly.

Mitchell: Oh yeah, yes. You were saying “the billionaire.” That’s what we call him, even when we do know his name in Georgia. So that didn’t stick out to me. Yeah. But yes, Rick Jackson.

Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones was the heir apparent—he was lieutenant governor wanting to move up to governor. He’s a very Trumpy, MAGA Republican. He has a rich father who was going to bankroll his campaign. Didn’t really have any competition in the MAGA lane. His biggest competition was Attorney General Chris Carr, who is a kind of traditional, old-school-style Republican, and Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state, who—

Bacon: Famously not a Trump Republican, yeah.

Mitchell: Yes. Famously not a Trump Republican. Conservative, both of them—but not MAGA Trump Republicans. And so Burt Jones was the him. And then here comes, in February, a guy who clearly has it out for Burt Jones. It’s a little personal.

They started by—and again, Rick Jackson says he has nothing to do with it, but there is evidence indicating that at least people aligned with him do—there were attack ads for a couple of months before Rick Jackson launched his campaign, a dark money group attacking Burt Jones. And then here comes Rick Jackson, saying, Burt Jones is not the guy you think he is. I can do this better. I can be MAGA, but I have my own bootstrap story. I don’t need daddy’s money. And he gets to the runoff.

Bacon: Let’s talk about the Senate race now. Ossoff, as you noted, uncontested—and doing real—we talked about it last time you were on. He’s got good fundraising, and he’s in good shape. Talk about the primary for the Republican side, which has also gone to a runoff.

Mitchell: Yes. So I was at U.S. Representative Mike Collins’s watch party last night. He did get the most votes, made it to the runoff pretty easily. And the question was: Who would be the other guy in the runoff? It turned out to be former football coach Derek Dooley, who was endorsed by Governor Brian Kemp.

You might remember that Leader Thune and President Trump wanted Kemp to run. He was seen as the best Republican who could beat Ossoff, because Republicans know Ossoff is going to be a strong candidate. Kemp said, I will not run, but I’ll find you someone that I think can beat Ossoff. He selected Derek Dooley—a political unknown, but with a famous last name because his dad is Vince Dooley, the famous Georgia coach.

Derek Dooley was not as successful as a football coach, but because of Brian Kemp’s endorsement, he was able to get to that second-place spot, particularly because it resonated with Republicans in metro Atlanta, where Brian Kemp is very visible. The odd man out was another congressman, Buddy Carter, who was in third place last night.

Bacon: So has Trump endorsed in either one of these primaries?

Mitchell: Trump endorsed Burt Jones in the governor’s primary, and even in the days leading up to Election Day, reiterated that support—did a tele-rally with Burt Jones ahead of early voting. Trump is in for Burt Jones. But he has not attacked Rick Jackson the way he often attacks the opponents of people he’s endorsed.

In the Senate primary, he did not endorse. Now Mike Collins is pretty MAGA. He’s also close with the White House—he was the lead sponsor of the Laken Riley Act, which is the first bill that Trump signed into law in his second term. He’s got this social media feed that really speaks to MAGA bros online. So he’s seen as the most Trumpy of the candidates.

But Brian Kemp, I think, was successful—he has this truce with President Trump, and it’s been a mutually beneficial truce for both men. I think part of that truce was Trump staying out of endorsing. I don’t think he would endorse Dooley—someone who, again, he’s not just a political unknown. He didn’t even vote.

He admits he didn’t even vote for 20 years, didn’t vote for Trump, didn’t really get politically active until the Biden administration. I think he voted for Trump in 2024 but didn’t in 2016 or 2020. So anyway—didn’t endorse. I don’t know if he will in the runoff, but I doubt he will.

Bacon: OK, so I know people who are reporters tend not to want to make predictions, but what’s your expectation, I want to ask you. It feels to me like Ossoff is probably, all things being equal, the favorite to win the Senate race. And if I had to bet, I’d bet on the Republican nominee beating Bottoms. Do you agree with me? What do you think about those two things?

Mitchell: So I think that Ossoff is still going to be hard to beat. He’s got a lot of money. And Derek Dooley being such a novice—if he were to win the runoff, it’s going to be hard for him to match up with Ossoff in a debate and just on—if Ossoff can say, I’ve done this, and this guy’s been losing football games, I just think Ossoff is going to win the court of public opinion.

Mike Collins does really well connecting with people, but he is very MAGA. He has some controversies on social media. He is the target of an ethics probe, and those attack ads write themselves, as well. So I do think there is concern that neither one is well matched against Ossoff.

But that being said, Republicans tend to win statewide in Georgia, and Democrats need to prove they can win statewide. So that’s that.

On the governor’s race—it’s going to be a good year for Democrats, and if Republicans continue to suffer because Donald Trump is not giving them great things to run on, then that does, I think, bode well for Keisha Lance Bottoms’s campaign. But I think she’s got to run a smart campaign.

Could it help her that she’s perceived as being tough on crime during the pandemic and during the summer of Black Lives Matter protests? She can say, I told people to go home. I told people to get out of the streets. I’m not a progressive. I said build Cop City—even though progressives were trying to block them from doing it. Could that resonate against a super-MAGA Republican?

And they’re getting ready to spend another month spending millions of dollars attacking each other. So I think it’s possible—but again, in a state like Georgia, you cannot count out the Republicans.

Bacon: Two other subjects. You had some state Supreme Court races last night, and I know President Obama endorsed the two Democrats—I know this is nonpartisan, but they both lost. I was expecting the Democrats to win those races, or the Democratic-endorsed judges to win those races. So how did it happen there, you think?

Mitchell: So I think—and I’ve actually been talking to my co-workers about that—we’re going to need to really dig into the numbers and talk to voters. But I do think there was a lot of confusion, because it was a primary night with one race on the ballot that not only was it not a primary, there would be no runoff.

Georgians are used to jungle primaries sometimes where everyone’s on the ballot together regardless of party, and then the top two go to a runoff. And don’t get me wrong, there were only two candidates in these races. But I don’t know if it really fully translated, particularly to low-information voters, that this was not a primary—this was not something where you will see these candidates again. This is one ballot, and this will decide the winner.

And especially if you’re a Democrat and you pull a Democratic primary ballot and see two names under the state Supreme Court—one’s an incumbent, and one’s not—are you thinking perhaps both of these are Democrats?

Bacon: I see.

Mitchell: I don’t know. But we know it was by design, right? There was a choice to put this non-primary race on a primary ballot, and that choice was definitely not made by Democrats.

So yes, could the Democratic Party maybe have done better with informing voters—not just about Miracle Rankin and Jen Jordan, but telling them they’re on the ballot, You’ve got to vote on Tuesday, it’s not a runoff, it’s not a primary, pay attention, at the bottom of your already lengthy ballot there’s this Supreme Court race?

I do think you’re hearing people saying, Georgia, don’t feel too bad. Wisconsin had to figure this out. They’re about 10 years ahead of you in figuring this out. So Georgia, this is step one, but you’re going to have to learn how Wisconsin did it. I’ve seen a lot of that chatter on social media, as well.

Bacon: Just to clarify: Wisconsin Democrats have gotten good at telling people, Judicial races are partisan—vote for this person, and then they’ve won these races.

Mitchell: Yes.

Bacon: Let’s finish with the potential—something that didn’t happen on Tuesday, but all these other states in the South are redistricting right now. South Carolina’s doing it. Louisiana just did it. Tennessee just did it. What’s happening in Georgia? Because Kemp has said a couple of different things now. Your seats are—there are 14 Georgia seats, nine Republican, five Democratic. It could make a big difference if changes happen there. So what’s going on in terms of redistricting?

Mitchell: So we talked about Georgia having a runoff—it’s June 16. The redistricting special session is June 17.

Bacon: OK. So it’s happening.

Mitchell: They are considering—it’s happening. But the difference is Kemp has said all along, We are not redistricting for 2026. What they are doing is redistricting for 2028—but they’re doing it now, just in case Keisha Lance Bottoms becomes governor—

Bacon: I see.

Mitchell: —and has power to not call a redistricting special session. They would lock in the map for two years.

Bacon: So they’re not canceling elections, which is bad—and I’m glad they’re not doing that—or changing the rules, but they are locking in the maps for the future.

Mitchell: That is their plan. Now, we expect massive protests. The concern with any of these states is, in their eagerness to redistrict, do they try to get one or two seats in Georgia’s congressional map? And how does that affect all the other seats?

Because at the end of the day, Georgia is a purple state. There are a lot of Democratic voters you’ve got to put elsewhere—not just in metro Atlanta. However you carve up Augusta and Macon and Albany and Columbus and Savannah will affect the congressional races in those areas, which are not small cities with lots of Democratic voters.

Southwest Georgia—Sanford Bishop’s seat is the main target. He is a long-term Democrat, the dean of Georgia’s congressional delegation, seeking—I believe it’s either a seventeenth or nineteenth term. His seat is already a toss-up seat, it’s just that he’s just such an entrenched incumbent that Republicans have realized it’s not worth trying to take him out—he’s too strong. But should he retire, that seat’s already a toss-up. Do they make it even more Republican?

But it’s a very Black area—it is the Black Belt, basically the descendants of plantation slaves and sharecroppers. And they’ve remained in rural Southwest Georgia for generations. So again, it’s going to be hard to make that district more Republican without affecting the GOP districts that are its neighbors.

Bacon: Do we have a version of a map they’ve written? Have they written a map already?

Mitchell: Not that we’ve seen. We have heard that 10 or 11 are both under discussion.

Bacon: So, final question. This is not about Georgia, but you follow national politics—what do you make of Thomas Massie losing last night? We saw Cassidy lose a few days ago. We saw those Indiana members. The theme I’m getting at is: Is Trump still very strong among his party’s elites?

Mitchell: Absolutely. And Perry, we’re both from Louisville. I was in Louisville for a couple of weeks earlier this month, so I know about the back-to-back ads that were either attacking or defending Thomas Massie. I do think that it shows how much Trump has control over the party.

Now, we can talk about whether that will help Republicans, again, in competitive seats, in swing states. But in the party, Trump has—I would say—strengthened his power over the party, because now there’s going to be an effect on other Republicans who say, “I want to keep my seat, so I might keep my mouth shut, even though I really don’t agree with what’s going on.”

Maybe—the Epstein files were what took Thomas Massie out. Now he may be targeting other Republicans who voted with Democrats to force the release of the Epstein files. For a long time, I thought Thomas Massie and people like Marjorie Taylor Greene had a strong enough brand in their districts that they could coexist even with Trump criticism. Quite frankly, Massie had done that for a few cycles. But the fact he wasn’t able to do it this cycle shows that Trump has strengthened his grip.

Even Marjorie Taylor Greene—had she chosen to stay and run for reelection and not resign—she probably would have lost last night. So I do think it may have a chilling effect on the Republican Party. I think we’re going to see it with this thin margin in the House. It might help Mike Johnson, because now I think a lot of members are going to say, Once Trump says we do a thing, we do it, and we don’t push back.

Bacon: I see. Thanks, Tia. Tell everybody where they can find your work, both social media–wise and in text.

Mitchell: Thank you. I’m at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution—please check us out at ajc.com. You can just Google Tia Mitchell. I’m on all the things, including here on Substack—I’ll post a comment to this video so that you guys can find my profile. I’m on X @AJConWashington. I’m on Bluesky at tiamitchell.com. So yeah, find me—I love to interact. And thanks again for having me, Perry.

Bacon: Good to see you, Tia. Thank you. Bye.

Former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms overwhelmingly won the gubernatorial Democratic primary in Georgia on Tuesday, avoiding a runoff. If she wins in November, Bottoms will be the first Black woman ever elected governor of a state. In the latest episode of Right Now, Atlanta Journal-Constitution Washington bureau chief Tia Mitchell says that Bottoms’s Democratic support was stronger than anticipated, perhaps because of an endorsement from Joe Biden right before the primary. Senator Jon Ossoff, another Democrat, was unopposed in his primary and is well positioned for the general. Both the Republican primaries for governor and U.S. senator are headed to runoffs on June 16. But it’s not all good news for Democrats. Mitchell emphasized that Bottoms is untested statewide and Republicans often do well in general elections in Georgia. Mitchell also discussed Georgia Republicans’ plans to further gerrymander the state, but for the 2028 elections, not this year. And she explained why Democratic-backed candidates struggled in state Supreme Court races in Georgia.

This episode is part of Right Now’s ongoing coverage of the midterm elections. Other recent episodes have covered the gubernatorial race in California, the U.S. Senate race in Texas, and the U.S. Senate contest in Maine.

Castro, 94, and five others were charged in Miami with conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals, four counts of murder, and two counts of destruction of aircraft related to when the Cuban military shot down planes over the Florida Straits on a humanitarian mission to find refugees trying to escape Cuba, killing four people. Castro is accused of giving the order to fire.

The planes belonged to Brothers to the Rescue, a group founded by Cuban exiles that searched for Cubans fleeing the island in rafts. Three of the people killed were U.S. citizens, while one was a U.S. permanent resident.

“For nearly 30 years, the families of four murdered Americans have waited for justice,” acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a press conference in Miami Wednesday. “My message today is clear: The United States and President Trump does not and will not forget its citizens.”

The indictment appears to be part of the Trump administration’s growing pressure campaign to force regime change in the country.

“This isn’t a show indictment,” Blanche stressed when announcing the news. “There is a warrant for his arrest. We expect that he will show up here by his own will or by another way”.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has invoked the U.S.’s January capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro when discussing Cuba, raising the possibility of Castro meeting the same fate. At the time, Rubio said, “If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I would be concerned, at least a little bit.”

For months, the U.S. has blocked oil shipments from arriving into Cuba, resulting in electricity blackouts across the country and protests in the capital, Havana. Earlier on Wednesday, Rubio posted a video message in Spanish addressed to the Cuban people.

“The reason you are forced to survive without electricity is not due to an oil blockade by America,” Rubio said, instead blaming the Cuban government for plundering “billions of dollars” and preventing electricity, food, and fuel from reaching the Cuban people.

Cuba’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs replied in his own post on X, saying, “The reason why the U.S. Secretary of State lies so repeatedly and unscrupulously when referring to Cuba and trying to justify the aggression to which he subjects the Cuban people is not ignorance or incompetence. He knows full well that there is no excuse for such a cruel and ruthless aggression.”

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump publicly lashed out against Elizabeth MacDonough Wednesday, writing on Truth Social that the upper chamber’s nonpartisan adviser should be thrown out because she was appointed by a Democrat years ago, and because of her staunch opposition to including bits and pieces of the SAVE Act in budget reconciliation bills—a position she is required to take by virtue of her job.

“Over the years, she has been brutal to Republicans, but not so to the Dumocrats—So why has she not been replaced?” Trump wrote. “There are many fair people who would be qualified for that vital job.

“The Republicans play a very soft game compared to the Dumocrats. It is their single biggest disadvantage in politics. The Dumocrats cheat, lie, and steal, especially when it comes to Votes in Elections, but stick together, whereas the Republicans allow the Elizabeth MacDonoughs of the World to stay in power, and brutalize us,” Trump continued.

MacDonough became the first woman to serve as Senate parliamentarian in 2012, after she was appointed by then–Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada. In his post, Trump incorrectly claimed that MacDonough was appointed by former President Barack Obama, although she was hired during his second term.

The Senate parliamentarian’s role is to advise lawmakers on both chambers’ rules and procedures, and to review spending packages for line items that the Senate cannot make good on. She is also required to oppose policy-oriented provisions in reconciliation bills, a regulation known as the “Byrd rule.”

Yet MacDonough earned the ire of the president over the weekend for doing exactly that, when she nixed the last line item in the Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill: a $1 billion allowance for security funding for Trump’s White House ballroom.

She ruled that the funding provision could not be included as it violated budget reconciliation rules in its current form, an outcome that surprised no one on either side of the aisle, reported Fox News.

Trump was so irate about MacDonough’s decision, however, that he reportedly phoned Senate Majority Leader John Thune to fire her. Thune was not responsive to the request.

“We’re going through a process that we go through every time we have a reconciliation bill and the people on both sides are mad at the parliamentarian,” Thune told NOTUS Tuesday, clarifying that he would not consider firing MacDonough. “That’s been true.”

Thune’s spokesperson Ryan Wrasse said in a social media post over the weekend that the party would continue to revise the language of the legislation until it earned MacDonough’s approval. “None of this is abnormal during a Byrd process,” Wrasse wrote Saturday.

Apparently unsatisfied with Thune’s response, Trump has brought his attacks against MacDonough into broad daylight, offering up her continued employment to the court of public opinion.

In the same lengthy Truth Social post, Trump urged Republicans to “kill the filibuster” (something that the party will likely never do) and pass the SAVE Act, the voter restriction bill that was shelved earlier this month.

“If we don’t pass at least one of these two provisions quickly, you will never see another Republican President again,” Trump wrote, going on to suggest that Democrats will henceforth be able to create two additional states out of Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. He also claimed that Democrats would pack the Supreme Court with as many as 21 justices and eliminate the filibuster anyway.

“Get smart and tough Republicans, or you’ll all be looking for a job much sooner than you thought possible!” Trump concluded.

For all his bellyaching, the cost of Trump’s White House ballroom project has vastly exceeded his initial projections. Last summer, Trump told the American public that the renovation would cost $200 million and be paid for entirely by private donations. In the months since, Trump has tacked on extra construction to the site and doubled its construction expenses to $400 million.

The price tag grew to $1 billion when Republicans offered to ramp up security at the site, offering taxpayer dollars to foot the bill in the wake of another assassination attempt on the president’s life last month.

The lawsuit, filed by former Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn and current Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Officer Daniel Hodges in U.S. District Court, alleges that the fund is illegal and violates the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, which states the government can’t pay debts “incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.” They note that the fund could be used to pay the rioters, and also fund violent organizations.

“If allowed to begin making payments, the fund will directly finance the violent operations of rioters, paramilitaries, and their supporters who threatened plaintiffs’ lives that day, and continue to do so,” the officers’ lawyers wrote in the legal filing. “Militias like the Proud Boys will use money from the fund to arm and equip themselves. The fund will grant their [past] acts of violence legal imprimatur.”

The plaintiffs are asking for a federal judge to declare the fund unlawful, to block officials from setting it up, and to reverse any payments that have already been made. The lawsuit alleges that creating the fund also broke federal law, as the government can only settle lawsuits after the attorney general declares that such a payment “is in the interest of the United States.”

“The payment of $1.776 billion into the Anti-Weaponization Fund to settle Trump v. IRS was patently not ‘in the interest of the United States,’” the lawsuit states. “Rather, it was a misappropriation of taxpayer funds orchestrated by the President to reward his allies and the rioters who committed violence in his name.”

It will be interesting to see where this lawsuit goes, and whether it reaches the Supreme Court, which may or may not rule in favor of the president. One hopes that it would see the legal problems with a fund that the president can spend on people who break the law in his name.

On Wednesday morning, Representative Jamie Raskin, the top-ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, moved to subpoena acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and other officials involved in the creation of a $1.8 billion slush fund, which is expected to be used to pay out Trump allies who feel they were wronged by previous administrations.

The committee vote on the subpoena will be Wednesday afternoon. Republicans have the numbers to block it, though Scott MacFarlane of MeidasTouch noted that “it’s not a favorable vote politically.”

Trump’s slush fund was announced on Monday by the Department of Justice (remember when that used to be an independent body?) as part of a settlement in Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. The lawsuit was filed over the president’s tax returns, which were leaked to the press by an IRS contractor in 2018 after Trump repeatedly refused to release them.

Critics and policy experts have labeled the slush fund one of the most blatantly corrupt moves the Trump administration has ever made, and Democrats seem to agree.

In addition to the subpoena, Democrats on the Judiciary Committee and the Ways and Means Committee submitted a congressional inquiry to the White House on Wednesday containing 10 questions about what the hell is going on. They are similarly questioning the president’s newfound immunity from any IRS investigations into his and his family’s tax returns.

“The American people and the world just witnessed one of the most brazen acts of public corruption and self-dealing in American history,” the inquiry reads.

One day after promising to end his Middle East conflict in “two or three days,” Donald Trump told reporters that he is in “no hurry” to make a deal with Iran.

“Everyone is saying, ‘Oh, the midterms,’” Trump said to reporters at Joint Base Andrews Wednesday. “I’m in no hurry.”

It’s a dramatically different timeline from the one Trump offered Tuesday, in which the president stated in no uncertain terms that Tehran had until Sunday to come to the negotiating table.

“I’m saying two or three days. Maybe Friday, Saturday, Sunday, something,” Trump said outside the White House as construction workers hammered away at his $1 billion ballroom project. “A limited period of time. Because we can’t let them have a nuclear weapon. If they had a nuclear weapon, they would start with Israel, they would blow it up and they would blow it up fast. But they would blow it up.”

“It would be nuclear holocaust,” Trump said, imagining the future if Iran were to develop a nuclear weapon.

But now it seems the president is happy to take his time, a move that could hurt Republican candidates come November. The vast majority of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the war. A New York Times/Siena poll released Monday revealed that some 64 percent of the country feels that going to war with Iran was the wrong decision, while more than half of respondents said that the war will not be worth its cost.

The war itself—which has so far lasted roughly 12 weeks—is costing the U.S. about $1 billion per day, according to early estimates by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. But Trump’s warmongering has made life more expensive for people everywhere, due to the ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz and attacks on several major oil and gas facilities.

The average cost of gas nationwide is $4.55 per gallon, with large swaths of the U.S. pushing $5 a gallon, according to the AAA’s price tracker. That’s about 50 percent higher than prices were before the war started.

Costs have also gone up for the rest of the world, a reality that has only aggravated U.S. alliances.

The situation has become so dire that Trump’s Cabinet members have stopped speculating as to when prices will actually go back down. Analysts, meanwhile, have projected that gas and oil costs will likely continue to climb—potentially even after midterms.

Republicans are already frustrated with Trump for backing primary candidates who openly support him, rather than candidates who are likely to perform well in a general election. If the war is still dragging on when voters head to the polls in the fall, who knows what will happen to the GOP.

In an interview with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin Wednesday morning, the billionaire Amazon founder was asked about what he thought of President Trump’s second term amid tariffs and the war in Iran, and the tech CEO went out of his way to praise the president.

“I think he is a more mature, more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term,” Bezos said. “Trump has lots of good ideas and been right about a lot of things. You have to give him credit where credit is due.”

Bezos on Trump: "I think he's a more mature, more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term. Trump has lots of good ideas. He's been right about a lot of things. You have to give him credit where credit is due." pic.twitter.com/VPyFUGRJZs

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 20, 2026

“I’m on the side of America, and that’s where business leaders should be,” Bezos continued.

Earlier in the interview, Bezos was asked point-blank whether he is trying to placate Trump, citing the Melania documentary that Amazon Prime made about the first lady.

“The Melania thing is a falsehood that will not die,” Bezos said, denying that he personally had anything to do with producing the movie or that a deal was reached at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. But he still defended the documentary as a “good business decision.”

“It did very well in theaters, it’s done very well on streaming, people are very curious about Melania, so even though I had nothing to do with it, you know, it appears that the Amazon team made a very wise business decision,” Bezos said.

Bezos on the Melania movie: "By the way, it appears it was a good business decision. It did very well in theaters. It's done very well on streaming. People are very curious about Melania. So even though I had nothing to do with it, it appears the Amazon team made a very wise… pic.twitter.com/MeZ8nDc5y6

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 20, 2026

Amazon spent $40 million to acquire Melania and spent $35 million to market the film, and only ended up making about $16.7 million from its worldwide theatrical release. Based on those figures, it can hardly be considered a good business decision, unless the goal was to curry favor with the White House.

Bezos is ignoring Trump’s negative effect on the economy, from his arbitrary tariffs to the impact of the Iran war, because he wants to benefit from being on Trump’s good side. Americans are struggling as a result, and they’ve lost confidence in the president. But not Bezos, who has gone for broke in licking Trump’s boots. He’s shifted the newspaper that he owns, The Washington Post, further toward the right, losing thousands of subscribers, and has decimated the publication’s staff with layoffs. But none of that matters if it keeps the president from messing with your cash flow.

Several of Donald Trump’s endorsees won their primaries over the last week, beating out prominent conservative Trump critics including Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy and Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie. But the president’s wins are creating a new headache for his legislative allies.

Republicans on Capitol Hill are concerned that Trump’s exclusive focus on pushing his political acolytes will come at a cost to their legislative majority in the upper and lower chambers, Politico reported Tuesday.

“Those so-called victories over the last couple weeks are just a mirage. They are self-owns,” one senior Senate Republican operative told the outlet. “We’re not actually beating Democrats, and we’re not actually advancing legislation. Instead, gas is up 45 percent due to our actions and the President’s decision to go to war with Iran. He’s focused on the ballroom. He’s announced a $1.8 billion restitution fund with zero details or congressional authority to do so. It just is crazy.”

Cassidy, in the few days since his recent loss, has morphed into something of a free agent apparently unbeholden to the Republican Party or the president: On Tuesday, the Louisiana lawmaker voted in favor of the war powers resolution for the first time, advancing the Democratic-led effort to end the Iran war.

“There are still many, many months to go before the election, and this president is going to have to continue to deal and work with, and partner with, or battle with this group of lawmakers,” Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska told reporters after the vote. “Even though Bill Cassidy lost his primary, he is still a voting member of the Senate until January.… So the president may have just opened some opportunities for people.”

Lawmakers are also reportedly grumbling about Trump’s choice to endorse Ken Paxton, Texas’s scandal-laden attorney general, for the Lone Star State’s GOP senatorial primary instead of Senator John Cornyn. Trump directly contradicted Senate Majority Leader John Thune by picking his own man in the race, and created new problems for the GOP’s fundraising arm, which had already spent some $90 million supporting Cornyn’s candidacy.

Trump’s preference boils down to loyalty, according to Punchbowl News: Paxton has been “extremely loyal” to the president, while Cornyn was apparently “very late in backing” Trump’s 2024 presidential bid.

It was a gamble and a loss for the nation’s conservative party, which had twisted and wrought itself in order to earn the president’s favor. Cornyn has done much to support other Republican candidates over the course of his career, becoming one of the party’s biggest earners by bringing in more than $400 million for auxiliary races.

Paxton and Cornyn are slated for a runoff race on May 26. But Trump’s choice could cost Republicans more than the Senate seat as the party is forced to decide whether to divert more financial resources to Texas in support of Cornyn or to reserve the funds for battleground states such as Georgia, Michigan, Maine, and Ohio.

Further still, the president appears to be throwing caution to the wind as he fails to adequately address—or solve—the nation’s teetering oil and gas crisis. The average cost of gas nationwide is $4.53 per gallon, with large swaths of the U.S. pushing $5 a gallon, according to the AAA’s price tracker. That’s about 50 percent higher than prices were before Trump sparked a war with Iran. In some areas of California, such as Mono County, fuel costs are above $7 per gallon.

Meanwhile, Trump is planning to spend billions of dollars to reshape Washington in his image by way of his White House ballroom project, the “Triumphal Arch” near Arlington National Cemetery, repainting the Reflecting Pool at the National Mall, installing a golf course next to the Potomac, and plastering his face and name on federal buildings.

Michael Caputo served in the Trump administration during his first term as a campaign strategist and spokesperson at the Department of Health and Human Services, where he interfered with CDC findings on Covid. He is now seeking $2.7 million in damages from the government, claiming his life was upended after being investigated as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe in 2016.

“I was the target of the illegal Crossfire Hurricane investigation and our family suffered greatly during that dark era of political weaponization,” Caputo wrote in a letter to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche obtained by CNN. He claimed he was still under FBI investigation as recently as December 2025.

“They found nothing; we lost everything,” he wrote.

Caputo resided in Russia in the 1990s while an employee of the U.S. government. The Mueller report determined he had helped arrange a meeting between Roger Stone—Trump’s campaign manager and close associate—and a Russian agent, for the purpose of sharing information about Hillary Clinton.

But who cares what FBI investigations say when your buddy is president? Now Caputo can get a huge chunk of taxpayer money because he thinks he was wronged by people Trump doesn’t like.

Caputo is the first to publicly seek damages after the slush fund was created, but he won’t be the last.

The Department of Justice has not said exactly who can profit off the fund, but hundreds of Trump allies—including January 6 rioters and members of Trump’s own super PAC—could theoretically get a piece of the pie.

The Kentucky congressman came out to chants of “Massie, Massie!” from his supporters, and referenced AIPAC’s backing of his Trump-endorsed opponent, Ed Gallrein. 

“I would’ve come out sooner, but I had to call my opponent and concede, and it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv,” Massie quipped. “I did get the call through though, I have called and conceded the race. We’ve been honorable the whole time, and we’re gonna stay that way.” 

Massie: I would have come out sooner but I had to call my opponent to concede and it took a while to find him in Tel Aviv pic.twitter.com/DmTkDfS17a

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 20, 2026

Massie drew the ire of the president after breaking with him on key issues, including aid to Israel, the war in Iran, and perhaps most notable of all, the Epstein files. Trump attacked Massie relentlessly and practically campaigned in his backyard, but the congressman didn’t let up on his stances. Despite his loss,  Massie vowed to press on in his final seven months on the job. 

“By the way, today is the six-month anniversary of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. We’ve taken out two dozen CEOs, an ambassador, a prince, a prime minister, a minister of culture, and that was just six months. I’ve got seven months left in Congress,” Massie said as the crowd began chanting his name. 

Massie: Today is the six-month anniversary of the Epstein Transparency Act. We’ve taken out two dozen CEOs, an ambassador, a prince, a prime minister, a minister of culture—that was just six months. I’ve got seven months left in Congress. pic.twitter.com/sm1nAOBVO6

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 20, 2026

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

Donald Trump just endorsed MAGA nutjob Ken Paxton in the Texas GOP primary for Senate. This all but ensures a weaker GOP nominee, which improves Democratic odds in Texas and makes a Democratic Senate takeover a little bit more likely. In fact, Republican senators were furious about what they regarded as a betrayal.

But Trump made things clear in his endorsement: Paxton got it because he was loyal to Trump—the only thing that matters. Too bad, Republicans, this is the guy you hitched yourselves to. So does this mean Texas actually is gettable for Democrats, or is heartbreak looming once again?

Sawyer Hackett, a Democratic operative who has worked on numerous Texas races and knows the state well, is going to walk us through all of it. Sawyer, thanks for coming on.

Sawyer Hackett: Good to be with you, Greg.

Sargent: So in a long Truth Social rant, Trump endorsed Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas. Trump called Paxton someone who has “always been extremely loyal to me and our amazing MAGA movement.”

Trump also cited Paxton’s support for ending the Senate filibuster to pass the SAVE Act, which is a disgusting voter suppression bill. And Trump ripped Senator John Cornyn, the current GOP incumbent, as “not supportive of me when times were tough.” Sawyer, your reaction to that?

Hackett: Yeah. I mean, you said it up top. This is all about loyalty, right? He mentioned Paxton’s loyalty to Trump in the first sentence of that multiparagraph statement, goes on to talk about the filibuster. And this is kind of coming up in the context of him wanting to build this ballroom and overturn the parliamentarian’s ruling on the ballroom funding.

So clearly this was all about Trump’s own personal wishes for this race. He wanted a sycophant in this race that he could control, that he could manipulate, and that’s what he’s going to get with Paxton.

Sargent: It’s interesting that you talk about the larger context legislatively, because Senator John Cornyn, we should tell people, has opposed doing away with the filibuster. And so anybody who won’t wreck the system entirely for Trump has to go, basically, is the situation.

Hackett: Yeah, Cornyn is someone who has voted with Trump 99 percent of the time. I mean, this is somebody who goes out of his way to post these kind of obsequious, subservient pictures of Trump and holding Trump’s book, constantly trying to flatter Trump and voting with Trump 99.2 percent of the time in the Senate. And he was not loyal enough to Trump. This is somebody who did not go far enough in his loyalty, his obsequiousness to Trump.

On the other hand, you have someone like Paxton, who—I mean, this is a guy who travels down to Mar-a-Lago as often as he possibly can. He’s probably scheduling tee times around Trump’s tee time just so he can have a chance of running into him on the links. I mean, it’s pathetic how these Republican primaries have essentially just become contests in who can bootlick Trump the most.

And in Texas, in a state known for kind of independent, these Western cowboys who stand up for their values and fight for the things that they believe in, you have two men essentially competing for who can lick Trump’s boots the best. And clearly Paxton has come away winning that contest.

Sargent: And he very consciously set out to do that. Punchbowl News reporter Andrew Desiderio posted on Twitter that this is the, quote, “nightmare scenario for Senate Republicans.”

Sawyer, can you give us the case for why Paxton is weaker as a candidate than Cornyn is, due to the corruption, the extremism, and everything else?

Hackett: Yeah, I mean, with Paxton, you have an extremely vulnerable candidate who is not only disliked by a lot of independents and Democrats in the state, but also by a fair number of Republicans.

He’s somebody who’s been underwater on his approval rating for many, many years. He’s somebody who’s been impeached by a Republican-controlled legislature. He’s somebody who has been federally criminally indicted on multiple felony counts—securities fraud and bribery and many other things.

And he’s somebody who has intentionally gone out of his way to make an enemy of people of color in the state, of women in the state, at a time when I think Democrats are starting to turn those coalitions back around in our favor. It’s only going to play into Democrats’ hands in November.

I think that polling—head-to-head polling between Paxton and Cornyn as who would be the better nominee—I don’t necessarily think reflects the depths of a campaign, a vigorous campaign between two nominees where you’re going to have negative ads running constantly. Democrats are going to be able to weaponize Paxton’s record and Paxton’s personality in the state way better than they would have done with Cornyn as the nominee.

Sargent: It sure looks that way. Let’s talk about the Democratic candidate, James Talarico. He’s running on an open profession of his Christian faith combined with a promise to get beyond the acrimony of the Trump years with kindness and, I guess, goodwill toward the opposition—really understanding toward the opposition, empathy.

The polls are showing a dead heat between Talarico and Paxton. Sawyer, can you bring us up to date on how Talarico’s campaign has been doing? Where is he succeeding? Where is he failing? What does he have to do now?

Hackett: I think Talarico has done a pretty fantastic job of keeping focused on the issues that Texans care about, focusing on Trump’s record at a time when Democrats desperately need Trump’s negatives to be as high as possible heading into a midterm cycle. He’s not necessarily put his thumb on the scale for either one of these Republican nominees. He said that whoever the nominee is, we’re going to run the same campaign, we’re going to run the same message.

But at the same time, I think Talarico is jumping for joy today with Trump’s endorsement of Paxton, because this is a man who is going to fire up a lot of the constituencies that Talarico needs to win while also turning away a lot of voters that I think Republicans desperately need to win.

And Christian voters are one of those constituencies. Many will still hold their nose and vote for Paxton, but I think Talarico is going to be able to peel a significant number of them off. You also have Paxton as this kind of reviled character within independent and Democratic circles in the state.

He’s going to be somebody who’s going to help Democrats raise a ton of money. He’s going to be much easier to contrast with in a November election and the get-out-the-vote phase. He’s the embodiment of Trumpism, Trump politics, which is extremely unpopular across the country. He’s going to turbocharge turnout among Latino voters and Black voters in the state. And he’s going to alienate suburban voters, especially suburban women, who Texas Democrats need if they’re going to assemble a winning coalition.

Sargent: Someone like Paxton is representative of all these traits in Trumpism that everybody hates now—the corruption, the rage, the hatred, the worship of Trump at all costs.

It seems like Talarico is almost perfectly positioned to use Paxton as a foil, precisely because Talarico is running this campaign that is really almost designed to counter-program Trumpism on a very profound level. Is that right, do you think?

Hackett: I think that’s right. And I think the same qualities that would make Trump want to endorse Paxton are the qualities that are going to turn voters away from Paxton in November. It’s that corruption, that cronyism. It’s that relentless focus on Trump himself—how can I serve Trump rather than serving the people of Texas?

That has been the message I think Talarico has led with. It’s been an overwhelmingly populist message focusing on corruption, focusing on bringing it back to a message on working people and what working people need to succeed today. That message was already crystal clear in the Trump era.

I think with Paxton as the nominee, you’re able to just drive that wedge even further into independent voters and even some moderate Republican voters that Talarico, just in his personality, the way he carries himself, and his background, is able to appeal to much easier than some traditional Democrats would.

Sargent: It’s a fascinating matchup. We had Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski publicly admit that Trump’s endorsement will make it harder for Republicans to hold Texas. She told reporters: “I think this puts that seat in jeopardy.”

Punchbowl reporter Andrew Desiderio, again, characterized Murkowski as saying Texas is all but lost. Sawyer, that’s a bombshell, isn’t it? Republicans saying outright that Texas might or is even likely to fall.

Hackett: Yeah, I mean, I think you’re probably hearing the same thing coming out of the DNC and Democratic circles today. Democrats have been looking ahead at this kind of Senate map and whether we have the ability to keep a hold on the Senate past 2026, past 2028. The map has not been looking good for us.

I think with somebody like Paxton as the nominee, we have kind of the perfect storm in a place like Texas. You have a very unpopular, very corrupt, very easy-to-contrast nominee on the Republican side. You have a Democratic nominee who does have appeal to independents, to even some conservative or Christian Republican voters in the state. You have an extremely unpopular president whose favorability is only dwindling even more every single day.

And you have the coalition that Trump needed to win in 2024—which was an increasing number of Latino voters and Black voters, particularly Black and Latino young men. You had young voters turning towards Trump. You had suburban voters turning towards Trump. All of those coalitions have completely reversed themselves. So of course, Texas is in play this cycle.

I think, of course, it’s an expensive state. That’s the one thing that I don’t think a lot of voters necessarily understand about Texas. It takes a lot of money to run a successful campaign in Texas. That being said, with Paxton as the nominee and Talarico able to contrast with him, he’s going to be able to raise the amount of money needed to compete in the state.

And Paxton and Cornyn flushed millions of dollars down the drain in this primary that Trump waited to endorse for weeks and weeks and weeks, and left Republicans in dire straits financially heading into a get-out-the-vote phase of this election.

Sargent: Right. Trump really screwed the Republican Party royally by doing this, because these outside groups that are allied with Senate Majority Leader John Thune have reportedly spent tens of millions of dollars propping up Cornyn against the Paxton challenge. And now that money’s up in flames.

Still though, I have to say, I keep hearing from Democrats that they’re generally pretty worried about the spending disparity. There’s been a lot in the press about that as well. We’re going to see an immense amount of right-wing money in Texas now to try to save this seat against Talarico and Democrats, right? Will Democrats have the resources to compete? Will they be outspent? Does that matter?

Hackett: I think Texas Democrats, and particularly the Talarico campaign, will be able to raise enough money to run a very, very competitive race. I think you’ll probably see Talarico raise close to the amount that Beto O’Rourke was able to raise in 2018. That was a very expensive race. I think he raised more money than any Senate candidate that cycle and maybe even the next cycle after that.

I think Talarico can raise that kind of money, especially with Paxton as the nominee, especially with Democrats looking at the Senate map and needing a battleground state like Texas to flip blue if we’re going to take back the Senate. Trump just handed Democrats their messaging on a silver platter to invest in a state like Texas.

It is going to take major elections like this with lots of spending, lots of organizing across every corner of this state to win. And I think Talarico was already doing pretty well in the fundraising game. The DNC is not doing very well in the fundraising game. If that trend continues, I still think Talarico could be extremely competitive.

But I do think he’s going to need some backing from some of the national organizations. And maybe that’s not the national party—maybe it’s some of the organizing organizations. But I think they will have his back as we look ahead to November.

Sargent: I mean, look, Democratic donors out there—I know you feel a little burned by 2024 still. You put a lot of money into Kamala Harris and lost what appeared to be a winnable race. But the Senate’s really gettable now.

I mean, you’ve got these Republican senators who are furious. The New York Times reports that they’re l”ivid.” For instance, Senator John Hoeven of North Dakota said, quote-unquote, “Oh boy,” after hearing about Trump’s endorsement. And then Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi is being described by numerous reporters as stone-faced. They know that this is potential calamity, basically, isn’t it?

Hackett: Yeah, I mean, Trump is on a power trip right now. He took out those Indiana Republicans who wouldn’t redistrict for him. Then he went and took out Bill Cassidy in Louisiana. Now today he’s trying to take out Thomas Massie in Kentucky. And now he’s endorsing Ken Paxton over John Cornyn, who was once the Republican Senate whip and barely lost to John Thune for Senate majority leader.

This is a senator who is very well respected within the Republican conference. And Trump is already having a difficult time managing control over this very tightly divided Congress. Trump just helped oust Cassidy, who is the head of the HELP Committee in the Senate. And now he’s turning and ousting one of the most senior Republicans in the entire conference in John Cornyn.

That is only going to piss off a lot of these Republican senators who he desperately needs to do things like ignore the parliamentarian’s ruling or nuke the filibuster to get certain things that he wants to get done. He’s clearly on a power trip, but he’s leaning in these very unpopular directions that I think Republicans are starting to see the writing on the wall when it comes to the midterms. And they know that they’re headed for a wipeout in November if Trump continues in this trend.

Sargent: So Sawyer, it seems like the big story here is what you’re getting at when you say that Trump is on this power trip. On some fundamental level, what we’re seeing here is that Trump simply cannot imagine that he and/or Trumpism and MAGA have become toxic. He is surrounded by sycophants at all times. He only looks at polls that show him winning. He has his own pollsters telling him he’s winning, winning, winning. He constantly tweets out polls that are just, I think, basically made up, or so buffoonishly cherry-picked that they’re meaningless.

Point being that Donald Trump is in this information bubble right now where he can’t perceive what’s happening out in the country with his unpopularity, his toxicity. For instance, The New York Times poll this week has Trump disapproved of by 70 percent of independents, 54 percent strongly. I have not seen numbers like that before. And independents are favoring Democrats in the generic House ballot matchup by 18 points—also staggering. Those are the types of numbers that you need to put something like Texas in play, right?

Hackett: I think so. I mean, coupled with the kind of coalition turning on Trump that he had in 2024—Latinos, Black voters, young voters—I think coupled with that independent shift away from Trump towards Democrats is exactly what I’m talking about when I say a perfect storm is happening in Texas.

And really that’s all being driven by the economy. And in Texas, the numbers on the economy are interesting. I think the Texas economy has been a little bit insulated from some of the impacts of the Iran war, for example. The impacts on oil, for example, take a little bit longer to get to Texas than they do to other places. And so you’re only going to see those numbers get worse as this Iran war and global supply crisis continues. And that’s what we’re expecting.

And so I think in a state like Texas, where you have some of the highest share of independent voters in the country who are turning against Trump and are having an aversion to candidates like Paxton, a candidate like Talarico is poised to pick them up in droves—and especially in places like the suburbs outside of those major cities. Especially suburban women who have seen abortion access taken away and now mifepristone access threatened by somebody like Paxton. Paxton led that effort.

The ads write themselves in Texas. And I think independent voters are going to see tens of millions of dollars of ads flooding their TVs between now and November. Of course, there’s going to be a lot of misinformation and disinformation coming from the Paxton side of that equation. But I think Talarico really has a chance to run up the numbers, both with his own coalition but also with independent voters.

Sargent: In a way, the choice of Paxton by Trump kind of perfectly typifies the degree to which he’s in a bubble about his own toxicity. It’s a total calamity he’s threatening Republicans with by picking Paxton, but he’s unable to imagine that Paxton, who’s as MAGA as they get, would be toxic.

Just to close this out though, let’s not be under any illusions. Texas is Texas, which is Texas. As you know as well as anyone, it’s extremely hard for Democrats again and again and again. We think it’s within reach and it’s not. It falls apart at the last minute. Why is it so hard for Talarico to get there? What is the nightmare scenario for Talarico?

Hackett: The difficulty in assembling a winning coalition in Texas is just the sheer size of the state. You have to compete in those traditional Democratic strongholds of the cities and those Latino communities along the Rio Grande Valley. You have to be able to pick up voters in the suburbs and you have to be able to compete in rural areas.

In a state like Texas, it is a fairly conservative state. It’s a state where Republican voters are still very animated to support the Republican president, and a Republican president in Trump is somebody who does electrify the MAGA base—and the MAGA base is pretty huge in Texas.

That being said, the sheer number of independent voters and the different layers of the coalition that Democrats have to assemble to win is very difficult. And so you do need a ton of money, not only to reach into every corner of the state, but also to be doing that deep outreach into constituencies like Latino voters who are harder to reach and harder to persuade and harder to turn out in a general election.

It’s an uphill challenge for Talarico. I think if he has the money and if he has the kind of national environment with a very deeply unpopular Trump, it’s something that he can win. And I think by Trump picking Paxton, he is elevating corruption at a time when corruption is at the center of our conversation nationally.

We’re always talking about the ballroom, talking about these payments from the IRS, talking about all this stock trading that he’s doing. Trump is elevating someone like Paxton who is just known for being a corrupt politician at a time when that’s going to be not only at the center of the national conversation, but at the center of Talarico’s message as a candidate.

And so he has the opportunity to reframe this race, to nationalize the race, but keep it focused on Texas issues, on Texas politicians, Texas leadership. If he can do that and he gets the money to do the deep organizing across the state, he can win. But it is an uphill challenge regardless.

Sargent: And I will add, independents absolutely hate corruption. So if there were a way to get those independent voters in the numbers you need, this is the matchup that could do it. It is possible that Trump really screwed himself very royally here. Sawyer Hackett, awesome to talk to you. Thank you so much. That was super illuminating.

Hackett: Yeah. Great to be with you, Greg.

Marty, a Democrat and staunch critic of the gambling business, was dismayed: NCPG traditionally remains neutral on gambling expansion, but that hadn’t stopped Whyte from speaking forcefully over the years about dangers associated with the online betting boom. After a 2018 Supreme Court decision, Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, opened the floodgates by declaring a 1992 federal ban on sports gambling unconstitutional, Whyte warned Congress, “This Frankenstein’s monster of advertising, access, and action is unprecedented.” Returning to Capitol Hill six years later—by which point Americans were legally wagering about $150 billion every year—Whyte declared: “The evidence is overwhelming that expanded sports betting has led to increased harm on a national scale.”

Yet a few months after delivering that impassioned testimony, Whyte was pushing to legalize sports betting in Minnesota, one of about a dozen holdout states, arguing that people there were wagering with black-market bookies, and a “legal, regulated marketplace is far safer than unregulated platforms that lack basic safeguards.” The Gopher State had previously rejected several sports-wagering proposals, but Whyte’s endorsement—which argued that this bill included the strongest consumer protections in the country—was viewed by some state senators as a game changer.

Marty hadn’t noticed the bio at the bottom of Whyte’s op-ed describing his NCPG tenure in the past tense. The NCPG staffer he emailed provided further clarity. “[Whyte] is a paid lobbyist of the Sports Betting Alliance now, so they are paying him for this opinion,” the person wrote. “To say it is frustrating to us is an understatement. Not only because he has changed course from his 26 years at NCPG, but because it leads to mix-ups like this.” (Marty shared their exchange on the condition that The New Republic not identify the staffer.)

The Sports Betting Alliance lobbies on behalf of five top sports gambling operators: FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM, Fanatics Sportsbook, and bet365. After Marty told his colleagues about Whyte’s new affiliation, he said support for the bill collapsed. Minnesota still hasn’t authorized bookmaking, though this past April, Whyte wrote another op-ed, in The Minnesota Star Tribune, urging the state to reconsider.

Marty called Whyte’s turn to lobbying, and his efforts to disguise those shifting loyalties, “disturbing,” though he added, “maybe the guy just changed his mind on all this.”

Whyte insists that’s not the case, telling me, “I’ve got 30 years of being pretty consistent on these issues, and that’s, I think, what people value.”

He describes himself as a “strategic adviser” to SBA, and the organization said he does not provide lobbying services. Yet there’s no doubt Whyte has been dispatched to influence lawmakers nationwide on behalf of the gambling industry: In Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., he’s written op-eds and testified in favor of expanding legal sports betting and online casino gambling, while opposing efforts to curtail those industries or raise their taxes.

The tobacco industry was notorious for co-opting trusted health experts to vouch for the safety of smoking. Today’s gambling giants are deploying a similar strategy, and Whyte is perhaps the most egregious example, considering he’s leveraging his reputation as NCPG’s longtime leader to advance the interests of sports betting corporations. Some former colleagues feel betrayed. Americans have legally wagered more than $650 billion since that Supreme Court decision, and nearly half of bettors say they’ve felt ashamed after losing a bet. Evidence is piling up of legalization causing more bankruptcies, lower credit scores, and surges in gambling addiction, putting the industry on the defensive more than ever. Recruiting former critics like Whyte is a powerful tool for sustaining the betting business’s meteoric growth.

Asked why he’d endorsed Minnesota’s sports betting bill while failing to disclose his ties to SBA, Whyte demurred, “I don’t think I was involved in any of that.” I then sent him the Minnesota op-ed to jog his memory, and he conceded he should have disclosed working for SBA. Later, I asked why he’d supported that bill, proposed by state Senator Nick Frentz, as opposed to one from Marty, which included significantly more aggressive consumer protections, such as banning wagering at stadiums, prohibiting misleading “risk-free” promotions, and requiring sportsbooks to intervene if customers exhibit potential signs of addiction—all issues Whyte has expressed concern about in the past.

Whyte said he considered Frentz’s bill more “pragmatic.” But, he added, “Part of the issue was, of course, the industry was behind Frentz’s bill, and that’s the group that I’m working with—the online sportsbook operators.”

The nonprofit that became NCPG was co-founded in 1972 by Dr. Robert Custer, a psychiatrist whose pioneering research led to the official recognition of gambling as potentially addictive. The Washington, D.C.–based organization was run by volunteers until 1998, when it received a grant to hire its first full-time staffer, an executive director. Whyte, then in his late twenties and serving as director of research for the gambling industry’s new trade group, the American Gaming Association, got the job. “It was not uncontroversial to hire someone who had industry connections,” Whyte told me in 2024 for my book Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling. “But the folks on the board realized that working with the industry was something that the National Council was going to need to do.”

Whyte helped expand NCPG from an annual budget of about $100,000 to more than $5 million by 2024, supporting a staff of 13. About 20 percent of that funding comes from gambling companies, and roughly $2 million comes from the NFL, which, of course, is now heavily invested in gambling. Whyte allowed any company to become an NCPG member as long as it paid dues, regardless of whether it took steps to mitigate gambling harm.

Some people noticed a gradual shift at NCPG, including Dave Yeager, who developed a gambling addiction while serving in the military and is now in recovery, helping people across the country with gambling problems. He recently served on NCPG’s board. Though he admires Whyte personally, Yeager told me, “It felt like we started catering to the industry far more than we were catering to serving people who struggle with gambling addiction.”

Still, when called upon to discuss the risks of gambling during his tenure at NCPG, Whyte was inexhaustible, giving, by his estimation, about 2,000 media interviews over his time. The executive directorship was hardly glamorous; his office could have passed for that of an assistant professor.

His approach, at NCPG and in his consulting, highlights a profound divide among gambling health advocates. Whyte believes sportsbooks can reduce gambling harm by encouraging customers to bet responsibly. Critics of that model say preaching “responsibility” lets gambling operators off the hook for making their products increasingly addictive, while promoting the cruel stigma that gamblers with a mental health disorder really have a character defect.

One of those critics is Harry Levant, a recovering gambling addict who serves as director of gambling policy for the Public Health Advocacy Institute at Northeastern University.

“I believe at both the state and federal level in the rank and file there are some wonderful, caring people who desperately want to effectuate change and protect people,” he said. “I believe they are trapped in a system called ‘the responsible gaming model’ that is scientifically flawed, ethically dangerous, and ethically compromised. And I think the single biggest proponent of this model for years was Keith Whyte.”

Whyte’s peers in the advocacy world are split about whether he’s sold out. Some said he deserves the benefit of the doubt—that he’s partnering with the industry to advance the same safeguards he supported at NCPG. Others said it’s exactly because he’s so trusted that his lobbying is uniquely damaging, lending legitimacy to discredited industry talking points. His critics said the Sports Betting Alliance’s deal with Whyte reflects a broader industry strategy to neutralize health experts and counter mounting fears of a gambling-fueled public health crisis.

Many still wonder why Whyte left NCPG in the first place. The organization released a curt statement in January 2025, thanking him for his service, and he posted cryptically on LinkedIn that “it is time for a new challenge.” NCPG and Whyte declined to address his departure for this story, but multiple people told me the organization’s board of directors voted unanimously to dismiss him, frustrated that NCPG wasn’t growing to meet the moment and concerned that Whyte had become too dominant a presence, unwilling to relinquish more control and visibility to NCPG’s state affiliates.

In his final year on the job, public tax filings show, Whyte made $158,224. After he was fired, the SBA offered him a significant raise: $20,000 a month, according to a former colleague who said Whyte shared that figure with them. (Whyte declined to comment.)

Whyte told me he’s proud to have consistently occupied the “center lane.” The slogan of his consultancy is “Promoting responsible gambling to help prevent gambling addiction.” One of his first clients was the Sports Betting Alliance. Whether he believed in their approach or not, he might have had a hard time declining such a significant payday; public records show he and his wife filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy in 2011, having accumulated about $145,000 in unsecured debt, much of it on credit cards. Their repayment plan was completed in December 2016. “Financial decisions from more than a decade ago have no bearing on my current work,” Whyte told me.

Last September, he announced he was also consulting for FanDuel. Asked to describe what changes he’s encouraged, Whyte said customers should have to opt out of setting personal deposit limits, as opposed to having to opt in to that tool, and that for “VIPs”—gamblers who receive extravagant perks in exchange for losing staggering amounts of money—deposit limits should be mandatory. He said FanDuel tells him it’s “moving to” making those changes; but asked for comment, the company declined to make that commitment, saying, “Keith brings a valuable perspective and a strong track record in advancing player protection, and we’re fortunate to work with him on a range of responsible gaming initiatives.”

He also makes $275 an hour consulting for the Massachusetts Gaming Commission, offering advice on how best to regulate sportsbook advertising, VIP programs, and wagering limits imposed on winning bettors. His contract, obtained through a public records request, includes an elaborate rundown of his credentials but makes no mention of his consulting for the betting industry.

A commission spokesperson said Whyte disclosed his work for SBA and FanDuel, and that the commission’s lawyers determined it “did not need to be included in his contract,” adding, “the Commission does not consider his working with sports wagering operators as a conflict.” A Massachusetts law barring the regulator from employing people who have worked recently for a licensee, the spokesperson clarified, “applies to casino gaming and not sports wagering.”

Whyte is hardly the first person from a gambling nonprofit to accept industry money. “Maybe people feel that they can contribute to change within as opposed to outside,” said Jeff Wasserman, a Delaware-based lawyer who is in recovery for gambling addiction and previously served on NCPG’s board. “I understand it. Does that make me happy about it? No. It’s disappointing.”

He said he takes issue with Whyte trumpeting his NCPG credentials while doing SBA’s bidding. “When you use your past experience to promote something that is contrary to a lot of the principles that you once hopefully had, and certainly advocated for, yeah, that’s pretty scummy.”

As betting firms rake in money, they’re upping the pressure on states to legalize new forms of gambling—and deploying people like Whyte to sweeten the pitch. Last year, Virginia’s General Assembly was considering whether to legalize online casino gambling, giving people the chance to risk money on games such as roulette, slots, and blackjack played on their phones. Only about half a dozen states have legalized online casinos, which generate roughly four times as much revenue as sportsbooks and are widely believed to be considerably more addictive. (As a former FanDuel employee once told me, “Online casino is probably, ethically, the worst product they have.”)

Brianne Doura-Schawohl, who was once among Whyte’s top lieutenants at NCPG and now lobbies to curtail online gambling on behalf of a variety of groups, testified, as did David Rebuck, New Jersey’s former top gambling regulator; Whyte; and Michelle McGann MacGregor, SBA’s senior policy adviser.

At one point, state Senator Bryce Reeves, a Republican, said the legislature had been misled in the past by experts who “didn’t want to disclose certain things about who was paying their bills.” Addressing MacGregor, he asked about Whyte and Rebuck. “I hope you’ll be honest with me … are they compensated by the Sports Alliance or anybody you’re associated with?”

“No, absolutely not,” she replied.

Asked to explain that response, SBA said Whyte wasn’t testifying that day on its behalf. Whyte echoed that defense, saying, “I wasn’t being paid to represent them at that hearing.”

When I shared this with Reeves, he said MacGregor’s denial amounted to “false testimony.”

That August day, Whyte had offered a mixed assessment of whether Virginia should legalize online casinos. But this March, he published a full-throated endorsement in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, writing that Virginia’s proposal, if enacted, “would become the gold standard of consumer protections for the United States.” (That bill stalled in the legislature.)

Even more audacious was an op-ed he published in April in The Daily Sentinel, a newspaper in Grand Junction, Colorado, one of several states considering bills that would dramatically rein in online betting—in Colorado’s case, by curtailing advertising, promotions, push notifications, certain types of bets, and capping customers to five deposits per day.

“Restricting legal, licensed operators isn’t the right strategy,” Whyte wrote, arguing that “the primary responsibility rests with the individual to make informed choices about their gambling.” He criticized the “common misconception” of using increasing calls to problem-gambling help lines as evidence of rising gambling problems.

All of this contradicts statements Whyte made in recent years. In 2021, he warned of “a race to the bottom leaving families burdened with gambling-related addiction,” and as evidence of that harm cited “a rise in calls to gambling help lines.”

In 2024, he told me that “advertising is such a big thing” contributing to gambling problems. But when asked for this story about the risks of excessive advertising, he said, “I don’t give it as much weight, and I never have.”

Over the years, he’s been adamant that sportsbooks can’t be trusted to self-police, and that states must impose tighter guardrails. But one of SBA’s “core objectives,” as its president, Joe Maloney, articulated in March, is to “defend against market restrictions in legalized jurisdictions.”

I asked Whyte how advancing that mission is compatible with his values.

“In my work with SBA, they have supported good RG [responsible gaming] regulations,” he said.

That will be tested this year, as Congress considers a proposal to allocate one-third of revenue collected by the long-standing federal excise tax on sports betting—25 cents for every $100 wagered—toward gambling addiction research, prevention, and treatment.

At NCPG, Whyte was a staunch supporter of an earlier version of that bill, which the gambling industry fought to defeat. At the time, Whyte told me it was a damning reflection on sportsbooks that they’re so opposed to government funding of gambling research.

“They want to count the revenue,” he had said. “They do not want to count the bodies.” By NCPG supporting federal funding for research, Whyte added, “We’re on the right side of history.”

When we spoke recently, he pledged to support this latest bill. In a statement, Maloney said, “The federal excise tax should be repealed, not repurposed.”

I asked Whyte if SBA’s opposition to federally funded research might make him reconsider working for the group.

Almost whispering, he replied, “It would.”

The rules, which come after the meatpacking industry has repeatedly lobbied for the ability to run lines as fast as possible, will almost certainly lead to more worker injuries. Workers will be left with chronic pain or amputated digits and limbs, but they will make these companies more money. “More meat, more profits,” noted Kathleen Fagan, an adjunct professor in the Case Western University school of medicine and a former medical officer at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA. The effects of this new rule will not only be felt by workers; it also threatens to let more foodborne pathogens infect Americans’ meat.

The industry, which is already made up of highly profitable conglomerates, has unsuccessfully tried for this before. Under President Barack Obama, it pressed for higher speeds overall; instead, the administration allowed 20 poultry plants to run faster as a pilot program. Under the first Trump administration, the industry petitioned to get rid of “arbitrary line speed limitations,” but rather than accede to that demand, more plants were allowed to apply for waivers to join the pilot and increase their speeds.

Now that these companies have cozied up to the second Trump administration, they are on the verge of getting what they’ve long sought. Pilgrim’s Pride, a subsidiary of Brazilian behemoth JBS, donated $5 million to Trump’s inauguration, while Tyson donated $1 million. The proposed rules are “just doing the industry’s bidding,” said Debbie Berkowitz, a fellow at Georgetown University who worked at OSHA for six years.

The administration is also misusing the findings of federal research into worker safety in poultry and swine plants, according to the two scientists who led the research, to argue that faster line speeds won’t hurt workers. In their public comments, the scientists state that “the results of our study do not support the Proposed Rule” in both poultry and swine. They argue that, until the high risk of injury and pain in these plants is mitigated, the agency “should not allow or facilitate increased line speeds.”

“They’re looking at part of the research, and they’re ignoring other parts,” said Carisa Harris-Adamson, associate adjunct professor of environmental health sciences at UC Berkeley and one of the lead scientists. “That’s unfortunate, because it means that no matter what the results would have been, they were likely to use them in the way that they wanted: to eliminate line speed regulations.”

In these studies, researchers went into poultry and swine plants, some operating at elevated line speeds, to evaluate the impact on workers. In poultry, they found, 81 percent of workers were at high risk of developing musculoskeletal disorders, such as carpal tunnel syndrome, and they were at higher risk if they had a higher piece rate, or had to handle more bird parts per minute. Forty percent of workers reported moderate to severe upper extremity pain from the work over the previous year. The researchers also found that 46 percent of swine plant workers were at high risk of musculoskeletal disorders, which was associated with higher piece rates, while 42 percent of swine workers reported pain. These findings were “measured objectively, quantitatively,” Harris-Adamson noted.

The injuries and chronic conditions were “related to the work they were doing, and it really had to do with how fast they had to work and the repetitive jobs,” said Fagan, who was “unceremoniously” kicked off the study at the behest of the industry before it was completed. Workers whom she and the other researchers interviewed would tell them they had no health issues before they began the work and that symptoms would improve at home and then worsen on the job. “It’s just too fast,” she said.

The studies found that, in poultry, there were similar hazards to worker safety in plants running at 140 birds per minute, or bpm, as at 175 bpm, which the administration is claiming in its proposed rulemaking means that the higher speeds are just as safe. But what the research found, Harris-Adamson asserted, was high levels of risk in both settings. “That was misconstrued to say there’s no difference between the two and therefore we’re going to allow them to run faster,” Harris-Adamson said. “They’re ignoring the fact that there’s high hazard at both speeds.”

In the study of swine plants, meanwhile, all of the plants were operating at high speeds. One was found to have high rates of injury, while another had lower. The administration “essentially averaged those two,” Harris-Adamson said, to say there’s no difference. “That’s really faulty logic.” Lower levels at one plant don’t excuse the higher levels at the other, she said. “There was a clear increase in hazard for some workers.”

“We thought the findings spoke for themselves that at the lower line speeds there was a lot of hazard,” she added. She had hoped the outcome would be efforts to require the industry to increase safety before any other waivers to run at higher speeds were granted.

Of the proposed rules, Harris-Adamson said, “Do I think workers will suffer? Yeah, I do.”

Higher line speeds don’t necessarily lead to more worker injuries. In the two USDA studies, higher risk of injury was directly correlated with how fast the piece rate was, but higher evisceration line speeds don’t lead to higher piece rates if the work takes longer or more employees are added to handle it. The companies can’t afford to let carcasses pile up after evisceration, however, and adding more workers is “a financial decision,” Harris-Adamson pointed out. “The more staff you have to hire, the more you’re paying.” A plant that received a waiver to run at 175 in 2018, for example, simply reduced the number of days it operated from six to five, cramming more work into less time.

Companies are under no obligation to spend the extra profits they’ll generate from faster lines to hire more workers; the proposed rules don’t mandate any mitigation steps. “You’re taking a group of workers who already have high exposure [to risk of harm] at even lower line speed levels and it’s going to be up to their individual employer as to whether they protect their workers or not,” Harris-Adamson said. “If we could trust employers to understand the issues and respond accordingly, we wouldn’t be seeing such high hazards.”

Even if companies wanted to hire more workers, it might not be possible. There isn’t necessarily room in the highly crowded plants to add more people on the lines. Poultry and swine processing workforces are majority immigrants, sometimes undocumented and sometimes with Temporary Protected Status, so the Trump administration’s huge increase in immigration enforcement and attempts to end TPS will make those workers scarcer. Without limits or requirements, meanwhile, there will almost certainly be a race to the bottom. “There’s a hugely unfair disadvantage for companies that are trying to do the right thing,” Harris-Adamson said.

These problems could at least be mitigated if OSHA were empowered to act. But while the agency put out a standard in 2000 to protect workers from musculoskeletal injuries, Congress rescinded it and blocked the agency from issuing the same rule in the future. “That would have prevented hundreds of thousands of work-related injuries and saved many, many workers from years of pain and suffering,” Fagan said. Congress could still act by passing legislation that instructs OSHA to create a standard to protect meat processing workers.

“I am convinced that there will be an increase in work-related injuries, musculoskeletal disorders, and also acute injuries if things go faster—people are going to slip and fall, there will be more amputations and cuts,” Fagan said.

The proposed rules also eliminate a requirement in both swine and poultry plants to report back to the USDA on their programs to monitor and document workers’ injuries. “USDA is saying, ‘We don’t have to care about worker safety,’” Berkowitz said. USDA and OSHA currently have a memorandum of understanding that requires them to work together on meat processing worker safety, but Fagan sees this waiving of the reporting requirement as a weakening of that agreement. “It’s a first salvo to cutting ties completely with OSHA,” she said. Indeed, USDA appears to be distancing itself from responsibility for worker safety; in response to a request for comment on whether the rules will increase injuries, a USDA spokesperson said, “The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is the Federal agency with statutory authority to promote workplace safety and health.”

“The data and science are very clear,” Berkowitz said. “This is going to harm workers.”

Then there’s what higher line speeds could do to food safety. The Trump administration argues that there won’t be an impact on food safety and isn’t requiring any heightened monitoring for foodborne pathogens. But Jill Mauer, who was a USDA inspector for 31 years in swine processing plants, and Hallie Varvel, who was a USDA supervisory public health veterinarian, say they couldn’t adequately do their jobs under current speeds. “At current speeds with current staffing levels, they’re not able to observe the animals for food safety and animal welfare purposes,” said Delcianna Winders, director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at Vermont Law and Graduate School, who supported Mauer and Varvel in writing their comments.

The administration argues that USDA line inspectors in charge can stop the lines if food inspection problems arise. An agency spokesperson tells The New Republic: “[The Food Safety and Inspection Service] protects the public’s health by ensuring that meat, poultry and egg products are safe, wholesome and properly labeled. In its recent proposals to update poultry and swine processing regulations, FSIS is seeking to clarify and streamline regulatory requirements to align with FSIS’ statutory responsibilities while preserving all necessary food safety verification and inspection activities. Further, under these proposals federal inspectors retain the authority to slow or stop lines if food safety or process control is not maintained.”

Still, according to Mauer and Varvel, that’s not the reality. “The inspector in charge is under a tremendous amount of pressure to not stop the lines,” Winders said, because it costs the companies money every time workers get paid while meat isn’t being processed. In her comments, Mauer noted that she personally experienced retaliation and extra scrutiny after stopping the line. There often isn’t even an inspector in charge present at the plants, leaving no one with the authority to stop the line. The proposed rule also doesn’t require them to stop the line at any particular time, it only says that they can. “That is no assurance whatsoever that food safety and animal welfare will be protected. There is no backstop,” Winders said.

“Based on my direct experience, I believe these high-speed models lead to lower-quality meat products and increase the likelihood that unsafe food reaches the public,” Mauer wrote in her public comments. “At higher speeds, there is less time to observe, less time to react, and less margin for error.” But it might be hard to know exactly how much more illness these rules, if they go into effect, will cause. The Trump administration has significantly weakened the country’s surveillance system for identifying and limiting the spread of foodborne illnesses.

“We are going to have more food outbreaks, and some number of Americans are going to die because of this,” Winders said.

* This article has been updated.

Although not the first major sexology research directed and written by a woman (that honor belongs to paleobiologist Marie Stopes’s 1918 marriage manual), The Hite Report was the first popular sex manual to put women at the center of their erotic lives. Hite and her team of female research assistants drew from a survey completed by more than 3,500 female respondents. They were not credentialed academics or physicians, a fact that was used to attack both their methods and findings. Hite had some training in the social sciences, but she centered her approach around radical feminist methodologies she observed in consciousness-raising groups.

In these settings, thousands of lay experts on women’s sexuality debunked long-held definitions of “good” or “mature” sex theorized by—and privileging—men. Hite’s findings were a collective portrait of the many non-penetrative routes, particularly masturbation and fantasy, that women took to orgasm. The premise of the book was simple: Women had plenty of orgasms—just not with men. Not surprisingly, many male readers found The Hite Report salacious and enraging (Playboy famously dubbed it “The Hate Report”). But women, and undoubtedly some men, loved it. In the first year of its publication, MacMillan sold two and a half million copies.

The Hite Report’s instant and enduring popularity offers the intriguing possibility that there was never a unitary “sexual revolution,” but rather a complex transformation that unrolled over a decade or so, gradually pulling in different, overlapping demographics: men, queer people, and finally, with The Hite Report, women. More than 50 million copies have ended up in readers’ hands, making it among the 30 bestselling books of all time; it is still in print today. Yet, as we learn from historian Rosa Campbell’s engaging and deeply reported new volume, The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and Then Disappeared: Shere Hite and the Hite Report, a book that brought women’s orgasms out of the consciousness-raising group and onto the page was nearly relegated to the rubbish bin of history. Hite’s publisher gave her an advance contract in the early 1970s, when feminism was hot, but, by the fall of 1976, it had lost confidence in the project and cut the press run to 4,500. “Female sexuality had been over-discussed,” Hite recalled bitterly, “and nobody needed any new books about it. Sorry kid.”

Hite was used to hearing “Sorry, kid.”

Born Shirley Diana Gregory in St. Joseph, Missouri, on November 2, 1942, she was the illegitimate daughter of a teenager, also named Shirley, and an Army draftee who shipped out—permanently. Shirley deposited her firstborn with her Christian fundamentalist parents. They divorced in 1948, and in 1951, big Shirley, now married to Raymond Hite and toting a second infant, returned. A year later, “unable to cope,” she brought the child—now renamed Shere Hite, after her stepfather—to St. Joseph. (Shere is usually pronounced “share.”) Big Shirley returned for exactly one visit, largely remarkable for the fact that Hite nearly drowned in a public pool while her mother flirted with the men there. Then Shirley vanished from her daughter’s life; she was incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital and cycled in and out of institutions thereafter. Hite appears to have seen her only once more, decades later.

Campbell and documentarian Nicole Newnham, who directed The Disappearance of Shere Hite, a 2023 documentary biography about the sexologist’s life and work, agree on more than the arguable assertion that Hite and her work have vanished. Both infer that her courage, independence, and sexual nonconformity were a consequence of childhood resilience in the face of persistent social shame and family chaos. At about 13, Hite became aware that she was beautiful. When she began to have sex, her grandmother could not tolerate it, warning her that boys only “marry the nice ones.” Eventually, Hite was exiled to Daytona Beach, Florida, to live with an aunt and uncle who, in a happy turnaround, provided a kinder and more normal middle-class childhood. Their expectations were that Hite “would date and be popular,” and she obliged, becoming a cheerleader and getting nominated for homecoming queen.

Besides kindness, Hite’s aunt and uncle gave her an even greater gift: the security and comfort to read, to understand that she was smart, and to dream of a cultured, sophisticated life. Graduating from the state flagship with an M.A. in history, Hite was accepted into a doctoral program at Columbia University to study intellectual and cultural history with Jacques Barzun. During her first meeting with the professor, Barzun cut her down to size, telling her that her M.A. thesis must be plagiarized, since he was “absolutely sure that they don’t have most of those books at the University of Florida.”

Sorry, kid! As Campbell notes, Barzun’s lack of respect for Hite was only the tip of the iceberg; after all, “what counted as history was hugely limited by sexism.” Although there were two women on the tenure track during her time at Columbia, Hite knew a bad deal when she saw one. She dropped out of the program, and, for the remainder of the decade, became a fashion photography and illustrator’s model. (Both women on the 1971 poster for Diamonds Are Forever are drawings of Hite.) Then there were the occasional, and far better paid, stints in pornography.

The porn, readers will not be surprised to learn, came back to haunt her when she became a celebrity author. Sorry, kid.

As Hite was exiting graduate school, she was also finding her way to feminism. The tipping point seems to have been an Olivetti print ad with the legend “The typewriter is so smart that she doesn’t have to be,” which triggered a protest from the National Organization for Women. Hite, the model for the ad, went to a NOW meeting, and began attending consciousness-raising sessions. There she noticed that women talked about every aspect of gender equality but “their own experiences and feelings about sex,” as Campbell put it, in part because they were embarrassed.

This wasn’t true of all consciousness-raising groups. As early as 1968, Anne Koedt had written “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” and numerous essays in Toni Cade Bambara’s The Black Woman: An Anthology explored the erotic as a site for gender inequality. Although neither Cambell nor Newnham comment on whether Hite herself enjoyed sex, she was rarely without a lover, and one, Martin Sage, encouraged and supported her as she wrote The Hite Report. What we do know is that her private sexual life clashed with her experiences on pornography sets. Fashion modeling had given her “more spare time than a regular job,” she recalled, although it “took a lot out of me too.” In porn, however, she found the work “so violent, so depersonalized, and degrading.” The men who consumed these films either did not know, or did not care, about how they were made. Not surprisingly, shortly after her book became a bestseller, Hite became a founding member of Women Against Pornography, a fact that, oddly, Campbell does not mention.

Hite’s observation—that men often had no idea when women were or were not turned on, and that women did not know how to tell them—was the germ of what eventually became The Hite Report. Hite created an anonymous questionnaire, decorated “with love hearts, cupid bows and arrows, and starbursts,” and began handing it out. Although her sisters at NOW viewed the project as unserious, they let her distribute the questionnaires from their office. Feminist health activist Barbara Seaman got on board, introducing Hite to Knopf editor Regina Ryan. Ryan took the project with her to MacMillan, named it The Hite Report (after the 1947 Kinsey Report), and secured a $20,000 advance (or about $160,000 in 2026 dollars).

It was a shocking sum for a first-time author with no credentials.

Hite mailed out 100,000 questionnaires and got 3 percent of them back, a figure that, she explained in her methods chapter, was a “standard rate of return.” The process took five years; when the money ran out, Hite borrowed from friends to finish the book. Both Campbell and Newnham emphasize Hite’s Zola-like existence in a crummy basement apartment that she fixed up in neo-Victorian style. The place was so small that researchers sometimes worked in the hall, turning answers to questions like “Please describe how an orgasm feels to you,” “What do you think is the importance of masturbation?” and “Do you like rectal penetration? What kind?” into data.

Success was not guaranteed. Popular sexology had always been produced by scientists and was often pilloried as obscene. Psychiatrist Sigmund Freud and Magnus Hirschfeld, a pre–World War II pioneer in the study of gay and transgender people whose Institute for Sexual Research, in Berlin, was destroyed by the Nazis, were both physicians. In the United States, Alfred Kinsey, a zoologist before he began his groundbreaking research about human sexuality, lost his foundation funding after he began to publish, and saw his work banned in several countries. If Virginia Johnson was not a credentialed scientist, her collaborator, William Masters, was an academic gynecologist who risked losing his medical license for the work that led to their 1966 book, Human Sexual Response.

Hite defended her research, method, and analysis as scientifically sound in the face of harsh criticism: Indeed, in 2023, one team of researchers praised her surveys as “a treasure trove of information about practices at the time.” I wish Campbell had dug more deeply here. Is it an accident that Hite’s method, which was to send questionnaires to people who asked for them, and encourage those people to send questionnaires to their networks, is a version of the snowball sampling method developed at Columbia’s Bureau of Applied Social Research in the 1940s to study hard-to-reach populations? Or that, at around the same time, Columbia was the first university to establish an oral history project—and that snowball sampling was an early methodology in the field?

When MacMillan tried to throw The Hite Report under the bus, its author became a one-woman book-promotion machine. It was a matter of survival. Hite went to the publishing house at night, printing and mailing her own press releases. She sent copies to every important woman she could think of. She organized a press conference, a publicity tactic common in a women’s movement stacked with journalists and activists like Betty Friedan, Florynce Kennedy, Gloria Steinem, and Susan Brownmiller. She organized nine months of personal appearances and interviews on afternoon talk shows. Most importantly, Hite’s editor, Regina Ryan, arranged for novelist Erica Jong (she of the “zipless fuck”) to write a review for The New York Times. “What Shere Hite has done seems very simple, but next to the inscrutable prose of Masters and Johnson, her simplicity is more than welcome,” Jong wrote. “The women speak in their own words and what they have to say is utterly fascinating and often surprising.”

Hite’s growing audience agreed. The book climbed onto the bestseller list and stayed there for over 20 weeks.

The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and Then Disappeared is an odd title for a study that features women who used words like “vulva,” “clitoris,” and “cunt,” and knew exactly how to orgasm when they took care of it themselves. Using the word “masturbate” 271 times, Hite revealed that of the 82 percent of her sample who masturbated, 95 percent reached orgasm “easily and regularly.” Seventy percent did not reach orgasm from penetration minus clitoral stimulation. The clitoris, derided for over a century as a vestigial penis and an immature site for properly vaginal orgasms, turned out to be the star of the show.

But The Hite Report was about more than orgasm. It was about how women struggled to be sexually desirable beings, a problem that the contemporary industry in vaginal sculpting, rejuvenation, waxing, and deodorizing still promotes. Hite’s respondents struggled with anxiety that their vulvas were ugly and smelly, “like a gaping wound with dirty brown edges.” This sense of shame intruded even on sexual activities designed to give maximum pleasure, such as masturbation (“I always feel cheap and dirty”) or cunnilingus (“I am always self-conscious that I might smell or look disgusting”).

When these feelings were put aside, women also described being multiorgasmic, the many different parts of their bodies and minds that engaged as they masturbated, and how they made love to themselves. “Sometimes I dress in erotic costumes and view myself in the mirror,” one respondent wrote. “Usually I smoke a cigarette, and sometimes put on makeup. If there is time, I lubricate my breasts and genitals with oil or cream.”

These insights were not exactly new. French existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir prefigured Hite’s work in The Second Sex (1953), arguing that for women, orgasm “radiates throughout the whole body” in vaginal contractions, “a system of waves that rhythmically arise, disappear and re-form, attain from time to time a paroxysmal condition, then sink down without ever quite dying out.” In 1971, before Hite began her work, feminist journalist Lucy Komisar attributed women’s difficulty in finding pleasure not to women’s ignorance about their bodies, but to the double standards of a patriarchal society in which men were taught that they were entitled to have fun with sex, while women found it difficult to escape the idea that sex was “something dirty and evil.”

What The Hite Report did was make what women knew discussable, particularly with men. Some female readers wrote to Hite to say she made them feel “normal.” One woman described watching Hite on a talk show, and experiencing her husband say: “Is that all true?” When she said yes, they leaped into bed, and she was orgasmic with him for the first time. “My husband and I are ecstatic,” she concluded, claiming that Hite had saved their marriage. A list of New York Times holiday book suggestions billed The Hite Report as titillating entertainment for commuting husbands, with a cover “sufficiently plain” that it could be “read on an airplane without undue embarrassment.”

This was the mildest insult Hite would be subject to. As the book’s sales skyrocketed, Campbell writes, “critics in the media accused Shere and the women she surveyed of being abnormal,” and sought out experts who derided The Hite Report’s research and methods. The most personal attack came from Larry Flynt’s Hustler, for whom feminism was the misogynistic gift that kept on giving. (Andrea Dworkin eventually sued him for lampooning her.) In 1977, the magazine printed a review of The Hite Report that characterized the book as “feminist bullshit,” attacked Hite’s grooming and hygiene, and suggested she was sexually frustrated. They also reproduced six nude photographs taken in 1968, an act Campbell rightly characterizes as analogous to revenge porn.

The clock was ticking on Hite and on feminism’s capacity to hold the stage. By 1980, when Ronald Reagan made patriarchy great again, Hite’s critics took center stage, and, despite the book’s being reissued in 1994, 2004, and 2011, its cultural influence receded. The erosion of Hite’s authority was linked to the medium she rode to success in 1976: the television talk show. In Hite’s 1981 sequel, The Hite Report on Male Sexuality, she, a feminist, claimed to speak with authority about men, so naturally talk show producers mustered audiences of angry men to tell her she was wrong about everything. In a particularly harrowing scene, Oprah Winfrey herself seems overwhelmed by a panel of men (several of whom openly admitted they had not read the book), subjecting her guest to savage criticism, and Hite wilting under the pressure. Eventually, after simply walking out of an interview, Hite became media kryptonite. By the 1990s, unable to get a contract in the United States, she moved to Germany. She spent the rest of her life in Europe, where she died in 2020. Sorry, kid.

In a way, Hite did disappear: One of the neighbors Newnham interviews says that he came home one day and she was gone. But was she, or the book, forgotten? Perhaps only in the sense that her insights are now so commonplace that we no longer attach them to a particular author. Hite’s legacy is everywhere: in Christian sex manuals, in vibrators evaluated in Wirecutter, in Taylor Swift’s lyrics, in self-help Instagram accounts, and in the most recent season of Bridgerton, which features an entire episode of discussions about reaching “the pinnacle.” In the 1999 movie South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, about a group of foulmouthed boys fighting for freedom of speech, Stan is in despair that he will ever succeed with a girl he likes. Taking pity on him, Chef, the male school cafeteria cook, advises him that he must “find the clitoris.” As the town of South Park descends into war and chaos, Stan wakes up in the woods outside town to see a large, glowing pink dome. “Be not afraid,” it says. “Behold my glory. I am the clitoris.”

If Shere Hite became just one voice among many in popular sexology, her project—breaking the silence around women’s sexual pleasure—succeeded.

On Tuesday night, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky lost his reelection bid in a GOP primary to Ed Gallrein, a political newcomer whose entire campaign strategy was to emphasize that he was endorsed by Trump. Massie had become one of the president’s least favorite House Republicans by voting against Trump’s economic policy bill, joining Democrats in pushing for the release of Justice Department files related to Jeffrey Epstein, and supporting a resolution to stop the war in Iran. He is also the rare Republican who was critical of Israel’s military actions in Gaza and the U.S. support for them, thereby drawing strong opposition from pro-Israel groups. By the end of the race, more than $33 million had been spent, largely against Massie, making this one of the most expensive House primaries in recent history.

Massie’s defeat came four days after incumbent Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana finished third and therefore did not qualify for the runoff in his reelection bid. Cassidy voted to convict Trump during his second impeachment trial, in the days after the January 6, 2021 insurrection. The president in turn endorsed Representative Julia Letlow, who finished first on Saturday. Two weeks ago, five Indiana Republican state senators lost in primaries after Trump and his aides recruited and supported challengers to them. Those five had voted against Indiana further gerrymandering its congressional districts, which the president had demanded.

An eighth Republican, longtime Senator John Cornyn of Texas, also likely had his career ended by the president this week. Trump announced on Tuesday that he is endorsing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in the May 26 runoff there. Cornyn hasn’t crossed Trump on any key votes. But Paxton is Trump’s kind of Republican, with numerous ethical scandals, while Cornyn is close to the former Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who has long feuded with the president.

Massie is very conservative. So is Cassidy, who also took a number of steps to ingratiate himself to the president and his base, most notably putting aside his concerns as a doctor and backing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services. No matter. Trump endorsed their opponents, and Republican voters fell in line.

These election results are terrible for the country. Trump is an authoritarian using the presidency to enrich himself and punish his political enemies. The odds of Republican politicians taking any steps to rein him in were already close to zero, and these primary results will make GOP officials even more wary of crossing the president. Any Republican on the ballot in the next three years (and perhaps even after Trump leaves office) knows that he can end their careers. And think about the antidemocratic precedent set here. Trump led an insurrection; Cassidy voted to sanction it. Louisiana Republican voters chose loyalty to their leader over a senator who stood up for democracy.

On the other hand, there are now two senators (Cassidy and retiring Thom Tillis of North Carolina) with very frosty relationships with Trump and likely a third (Cornyn, if he loses). Susan Collins of Maine is up for reelection in a Democratic-leaning state. Kentucky’s Rand Paul and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski also go their own way occasionally. So it’s possible that in a Senate where Republicans control 53 seats, they are down to 47 sure “yes” votes. Cassidy, only days after his defeat, supported a resolution to end the war in Iran and is signaling that he will oppose funding Trump’s White House ballroom. Legislation and judicial confirmations (perhaps even for the Supreme Court if a justice retires) are likely to get harder for Trump.

And the fealty to Trump from the Republican base is not at all shared by average voters. Polls show that around 60 percent of Americans disapprove of the president, compared to fewer than 40 percent who approve. Even 47 percent of moderate Republicans disapprove of Trump, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll. So do 60 percent of men, 74 percent of Hispanics, and 75 percent of Americans age 18–29, three groups who were more pro-Trump than expected during the 2024 election.

This is a president whose word matters only to Republican primary voters. His support is the kiss of death for other politicians, from California to Hungary. Universities, news organizations, and other institutions that this time last year acted like Trump’s second electoral victory signaled a political realignment now treat him as an unpopular lame duck.

Donald Trump is creating a Republican Party that even archconservatives like Thomas Massie, Bill Cassidy, and John Cornyn are too normal for. But no one outside of Trump’s base likes that kind of party, so the GOP is poised to be resoundingly rejected this November.

“Matt from Las Vegas” tore into Donald Trump during a call-in segment on Real America’s Voice Tuesday, furious with the White House about how it has handled the Iran war—and the narrative the administration has packaged and sold to its voter base in the interim.

“If we so decimated Iran’s Navy and Air Force, how come we can’t get a ship through the Strait of Hormuz?” asked the caller. “Whose intelligence are they insulting?

“If they don’t have a Navy, how can they stop ships? What are they using to stop ships and redirect ships?” the caller continued. “I’m being lied to by my own government and, I hate to say, Mr. Trump. And I love Donald Trump. But you know, all this—they’re annihalating—they’re full of shit.”

“Iran won this round, as far as I’m concerned,” he added.

The cost of oil and gas has gone through the roof since the war began, a fact that has only been aggravated by Tehran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for the region’s trade.

The average cost of gas nationwide is $4.53 per gallon, with large swaths of the U.S. pushing $5 a gallon, according to the AAA’s price tracker. That’s about 50 percent higher than prices were before the war started. In some areas of California, such as Mono County, fuel costs are above $7 per gallon.

The situation has become so dire that Trump’s Cabinet members have stopped speculating as to when prices will actually go back down. Analysts, meanwhile, have projected that gas and oil costs will likely continue to climb—potentially even after the midterms.

The strait has largely remained closed, despite several attempts to reopen the trade point amid rocky peace negotiations.

The war itself—which has so far lasted roughly 12 weeks—is costing the U.S. about $1 billion per day, according to early estimates by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Matt from Las Vegas further claimed that Iran had Trump “by the short hairs” over the economic disruption, and had put the White House in a position in which it had to beg China for help.

“And I kind of think that we’re a paper tiger, just like Russia,” the caller concluded.

The show host, Eric Bolling, pushed back, claiming that Iran’s “mosquito boats” and underwater mining operation were sufficient to keep the area on lockdown.

“We didn’t lose, they got crushed, they’re clearly the losers on this,” Bolling said desperately.

When Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry—who is, for some reason, President Donald Trump’s new special envoy to Greenland—touched down in the capital city of Nuuk on Sunday, he got a frosty reception, including a middle finger from one resident, The New York Times reports.

Landry’s weird ideas of diplomacy probably didn’t help much. The governor went around offering local children MAGA hats—a few politely declined—and telling them that if they visited his Louisiana mansion, he’d give them “all the chocolate chip cookies you can eat.”

In response, Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen told Landry to relax.

“We have our red lines,” he told the Denmark public broadcasting service. “No matter how many chocolate cookies we get, we are not going to change them.”

Landry was asked about the response by reporters. “There’s only one line and it’s red, white, and blue,” he shot back.

This isn’t the first time a Trump official has tried and spectacularly failed to charm the island. Vice President JD Vance toured a Greenland military base with his wife, Usha, for just three hours in 2025. He had reportedly planned a longer visit before being cold-shouldered by locals.

The people of Greenland clearly haven’t taken a liking to the Trump administration, which has repeatedly mocked their status as an autonomous territory with comments about making it the fifty-first state. Trump has an ongoing obsession with acquiring Greenland for supposed military and trade purposes, publicly musing about buying or just straight-up annexing the island.

The Danish military reportedly began preparing for a ground invasion of Greenland in January, shipping blood supplies to the island and cooking up plans to blow up its own runways if attacked.

Trump’s threat of invading the chilly territory has abated as the weather has warmed, but it’s good to see the people of Greenland continue to give his administration the reception they deserve.

Gothamist reports that the Department of Homeland Security is arguing that Adriana Zapata, 55, can’t come back to the U.S. even though she was deported to the country a month ago.

On Monday, DHS cited a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention order preventing anyone from traveling to the U.S. from areas affected by the outbreak. Zapata’s lawyers say that she was deported to Congo well before the outbreak was announced, and she’s staying in the capital, Kinshasa, which hasn’t had any cases. On Tuesday, her lawyers pointed out in a court filing that Zapata already had medical conditions before being deported to a country that said it couldn’t care for her, and now she is particularly vulnerable in the midst of an Ebola outbreak.

At the time of Zapata’s deportation, Congolese officials said that they couldn’t care for her medical issues, which include “diabetes accompanied by black spots on her foot and back, peeling skin, blackened nails, and other manifestations consistent with severe vascular and metabolic disease.” In the U.S., she would get medical care with help from relatives in New Jersey. A federal judge ruled in 2024 that Zapata could not be returned to the country of her birth, Colombia, because she faced the likelihood of torture from her former intimate partner.

Last Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, appointed by President George W. Bush, ruled that the U.S. government had to bring Zapata back to the U.S. Zapata had sued the federal government, and described how her ex-partner, who has connections to the Colombian National Police, had physically and sexually abused her, including stabbing her in her genitalia, repeatedly raping her, breaking her teeth, and cutting cross-shaped scars into her chest.

On Friday, lawyers from the Department of Homeland Security responded to Leon’s ruling and claimed that they didn’t know where Zapata was and were working “diligently” to find her in Congo, claiming that Zapata’s attorneys hadn’t told them her location.

The next day, Zapata’s lawyers responded in their own filing, saying that DHS had not even reached out to them, pointing out that Zapata’s address in Congo was mentioned in earlier court filings and was shared with DHS in court the day before. On Monday, DHS lawyers tried another tactic, filing a status report asking for Leon to pause his order because the country’s Ebola outbreak, announced last week by Congolese officials, made it unsafe to bring her back to the U.S.

“The premise of plaintiff’s request for conditions upon her return is for her to receive medical monitoring in the United States,” Zapata’s lawyers wrote in the filing.

DHS claims that the Democratic Republic of Congo had sent documentation saying that it could care for Zapata, prompting skepticism from Zapata’s lawyers on Tuesday. They pointed out that as recently as last Wednesday, Congo hadn’t said it could care for Zapata and that the U.S. government was using its agreement with the country as its justification for deporting her.

Sending a woman with serious medical issues to a country she has no ties to is cruel enough. But refusing to obey a court order to allow her back into the U.S. because of an outbreak that arose after she was deported is an obscene act of callousness, even for this administration. It seems clear that they are grasping at legal straws to keep Zapata from returning, ignoring her own safety.

The 25-page IRS memorandum was given to top Treasury officials last month but it’s unclear if it ever made it to the DOJ. The memo stated that Trump’s lawsuit was filed two years too late. Federal statute requires that people suing the IRS for unfairly released tax information must do so within two years of the infraction. Trump claimed not to have known about the tax information leak until January 2024, but the memo notes that Alina Habba—one of Trump’s personal lawyers—was present at the trial of IRS leaker Charles Littlejohn in October 2023. Trump did not file a complaint until January 2026, over two years later.

The IRS also raised that it may not even be accountable for Littlejohn’s actions, as he was a contractor with Booz Allen with IRS access, not an IRS employee. Regardless of whether these arguments would have worked, it’s clear that the DOJ—controlled by another one of Trump’s personal lawyers—had no intention of making them.

David Schutzenhofer has run Donald Trump’s golf club since 2006, and is effectively consulting on the historic renovation as well as recruiting contractors to the job, The New York Times reported Tuesday. Schutzenhofer has no known training in engineering or architecture, according to the daily.

“Mr. Schutzenhofer is unpaid and is volunteering his time to offer suggestions on this project because he is an American patriot,” Katie Martin, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, told the Times in an email.

Martin specified that Schutzenhofer had provided guidance on the project without becoming a temporary government employee, which, she said, would have required additional ethics training and a pledge to avoid conflicts of interest. She added that Schutzenhofer did not “direct” any federal contracts.

The Interior Department did not elaborate on the specifics of Schutzenhofer’s role with the renovation, which is expected to cost upward of $13.1 million (Trump had initially promised the price tag would hover around $1.8 million).

The White House also dodged questions regarding Schutzenhofer’s involvement. In an email, White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers told the Times: “Thanks to President Trump, the Reflecting Pool will be restored to its proper glory!”

Fixing the Reflecting Pool is a headache that’s plagued pretty much every administration since its construction in 1923.

What makes the Reflecting Pool beautiful is exactly what makes it so difficult to maintain. The pool’s expansive length is possible due to the use of multiple large concrete slabs at its bottom. But those slabs are also prone to serious structural leaks, which requires the White House to replace roughly 16 million gallons of water each year.

But the pool’s shallow depth—which creates its mirrorlike appearance—also detracts from the pool’s health by creating a breeding ground for algal blooms that turn the water green.

The solution, according to Trump, is to paint the bottom of the pool a color that he has described as “American flag blue” ahead of the country’s semiquincentennial anniversary.

Unfortunately for taxpayers, the pricey makeover is unlikely to fix the pool’s fundamental problems.

On Tuesday, Trump’s Department of Justice essentially ensured his taxes would never be properly audited again.

As part of a settlement between the president and the IRS, the DOJ “forever barred and precluded” the IRS from pursuing Trump, his family members, and his companies over any unpaid taxes.

This key addition to the settlement was signed by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. It was not released as part of the publicly available settlement agreement on Monday. Instead, the details were unceremoniously posted to the DOJ’s website a day later. Readers may recall that Blanche took over after Trump reportedly grew frustrated with Pam Bondi’s ability to secure indictments against his political enemies.

Trump has been investigated by the IRS since he was just a humble casino owner. He even falsely claimed that a tax audit meant he could not release his tax returns during his first term (the IRS commissioner clarified that he totally could if he wanted).

Protection from future audits could save the president tons of money in fines. In 2024, The New York Times found one such audit could cost Trump over $100 million.

The settlement is a result of Trump dropping his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS after an employee leaked his tax returns to the Times and ProPublica between 2018 and 2020. Since the suit was dropped, the IRS has also agreed to create a slush fund worth nearly $1.8 billion to pay January 6 rioters and members of Trump’s own super PAC who are deemed to have been unfairly persecuted by the Biden administration.

Critics had already labeled the fund one of the most blatantly fraudulent creations of Trump’s second term. Now Trump and his allies appear to have swindled the federal government for yet more financial and legal gain.

This story has been updated.

Paxton, Texas’s scandal-plagued attorney general, is in a runoff in the state’s Republican primary against incumbent John Cornyn, who has the support of many of his Senate colleagues. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska reportedly told The Hill that she was “supremely disappointed” by Trump’s endorsement, adding, “I don’t understand it.”

Murkowski also said that Republicans will likely have a tougher time retaining the seat against Democratic nominee James Talarico, who is polling very well.

“Based on the numbers that I’ve seen, yeah,” Murkowski said, regarding the risk that the GOP will lose the Senate. “How does that help strengthen the president’s hand when we lose a state like Texas?”

Senator Susan Collins said that she didn’t understand why Trump endorsed Paxton, calling him an “ethically challenged individual” due to his many scandals, which include defrauding investors in a tech startup and an extramarital affair leading to his wife divorcing him on “biblical grounds.”

“John Cornyn is an outstanding senator and deserved in my judgment the president’s support. Obviously it’s the president’s call but I’m disappointed that he did it,” Collins told The Hill.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who for months tried to lobby Trump to support Cornyn, had a serious expression when reporters asked him Tuesday about the president’s endorsement, only saying, “It’s his decision.” Senator Roger Wicker walked into a lunch meeting with his head bowed and ignored reporters’ questions about the endorsement.

“I’m speechless,” Senator Rob Johnson told CNN’s Manu Raju when asked about Trump’s choice, taking a long pause before answering, adding that he “really [had] no comment.”

Unlike his colleagues, Senator Lindsey Graham was optimistic, telling Raju that “you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out the pathway for Paxton is there, but it’s more uphill, and it will cost more.”

In Trump’s own words, “Ken is a true MAGA Warrior who has ALWAYS delivered for Texas, and will continue to do so in the United States Senate.” In contrast, while Trump said Cornyn is a “good man, and I worked well with him,” the incumbent senator “was not supportive of me when times were tough” and “was very late in backing me in what turned out to be a Historic Run for the Republican Nomination, and then, the Presidency, itself.”

If Trump’s endorsement propels Paxton to win in next week’s runoff, Democrats may have a better shot at winning the race, as Paxton’s scandals give him a lot in common with the president. But Texas is a strong Republican state that voted for Trump three times, so nothing is certain.

“Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has not met with any of us. As survivors, we previously sought a meeting with former Attorney General Bondi and Department of Justice officials, but no meeting occurred,” the survivors said in a statement. “We should not have to be this persistent to engage with DOJ—the department responsible for handling the Epstein files, protecting their privacy, and answering for years of secrecy and failure.

“We have already reported abuse and allegations involving Epstein and associated perpetrators to the FBI and federal authorities many times over the course of years. We should not be asked to relive their trauma again and again because the system failed to act. The burden is not on us to keep making reports. It is on the DOJ to investigate credible allegations against perpetrators and co-conspirators, and to account for the government’s mishandling of these matters,” they continued. “Given Blanche’s comments, we are again asking DOJ to meet directly with survivors and their counsel not to ask survivors to start over, but to hear their concerns, explain how these failures occurred, and provide clear answers about the release, redaction, and withholding of Epstein-related records going forward.”

Blanche claimed to have met with the survivors and their lawyers, during an exchange with Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen.

“I spoke to the representatives of some of the Epstein survivors yesterday. They are extremely frustrated that you keep calling for people to come forward with more evidence, but you have not met with them to hear their stories,” Van Hollen said. “So simple question: If I connect you with these survivors, will you meet with them?”

“Absolutely. And what you just said is false. I have met with them. I’ve met with many of the lawyers for the survivors of victims, as did Attorney General Bondi,” Blanche replied. “So whoever told you that unfortunately gave you bad information. I would encourage them to reach out to the Department of Justice.… We absolutely care for victims and we absolutely wanna hear from them and their lawyers.”

“Well I’ve been told directly,” Van Hollen said. “They have not had a chance, at least this group, to meet with you.”

Now it’s the word of the president’s former personal lawyer against the word of 18 Epstein survivors.

Van Hollen: Some Epstein survivors are extremely frustrated that you keep calling for people to come forward with more evidence but have not met with them.

Blanche: What you said is false. I have met with them. I have met with many of their lawyers. pic.twitter.com/3ycRdIDlGq

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 19, 2026

“President Trump has assemblied [sic] a great team in Kash Patel, myself, the White House,” Mullin stated. “We work together all the time to work with these religious establishments. We’ve had FEMA grants they can use to help protect themselves. Unfortunately, for the last 76 days we were shut down, so we’re just not getting those grants out, so they have to hire their own security.”

Mullin is twisting the truth here; FEMA, along with the rest of the Department of Homeland Security, was fully funded 19 days ago. FEMA could have been funded far earlier if congressional Republicans agreed to separate ICE funding from the rest of DHS, which was discussed as early as February.

More importantly, though, are grants for more guns and security around places of worship really the way to go to stop shootings? How about, you know, gun control? The thing that’s successfully curbed mass shootings in dozens of other countries around the world?

To stop shootings at Muslim centers, how about ending the Islamophobic, white nationalist rhetoric that Donald Trump and his Cabinet frequently espouse? Mullin himself is one of the most bellicose government officials in recent memory. He said he understood why a crazed neighbor attacked Senator Rand Paul in 2017, and has made public threats to kill journalists, which he downplayed as joking around after media backlash.

Unsurprisingly, Fox News sleazebag Sean Hannity did not question Mullin’s ridiculous comments on Monday night, nor did he point out that the Islamic Center actually had hired a private security guard, who was killed in the shooting. Amin Abdullah, a father of eight, was credited by local police with preventing more deaths.

Hannity instead opted to fearmonger and ignore the religious aspect of the shooting. “Let’s protect our homeland,” he sneered.

San Diego police say they are investigating the shooting as a hate crime.

The Justice Department chief immediately lashed out while getting grilled on Capitol Hill Tuesday, accusing Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen of lying about a very real case in which a pardoned January 6er—Andrew Paul Johnson—was found guilty of child molestation shortly after Donald Trump freed him.

“That person actually tried to buy the silence of these children by saying that he would pay them some of the funds he was hoping to get from your slush fund,” Van Hollen said, referring to the Justice Department’s forthcoming $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” a taxpayer-funded initiative to effectively give reparations to allies of the president, including riot defendants.

“Can you commit to making the rules so that that person is not eligible for a payout under this fund?” asked Van Hollen.

But Blanche could not provide a simple, affirmative answer.

“Well you’re obviously lying in your question, because there’s no way this person committed to that,” Blanche said. “The slush fund, as you call it, which is not—but I can’t commit—”

“Mr. Attorney General, don’t ever do that again,” Van Hollen interjected, pointing his finger. “I am reporting what he said. He said on the expectation that he hoped to get some of the funds from a payout.”

“But you said from the slush fund, senator, and that didn’t exist when he said that,” Blanche refuted.

“This is the fund that the president and all of you have been telegraphing, all along, would use to help the president’s friends,” Van Hollen clarified.

Later in the same exchange, Van Hollen accused Blanche of being ignorant and unaware of critical happenings under the purview of his office. Blanche, in turn, continued to deflect.

U.S. pardon attorney Ed Martin and DOJ official Jonathan Gross are just two of the figures within the Trump administration who have advocated for financially compensating those that stormed the Capitol building on January 6, 2021.

Last year, Martin told right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson that it would be “only fair” to make the rioters “whole.”

Gross said on a podcast in December 2024 that “there has to be compensation.”

“People’s lives have been destroyed,” Gross said at the time. “And the way they can do that is they can just let everybody file a lawsuit and settle the lawsuits.”

Democrats attempted to stave off such payments in January, when California Senator Alex Padilla introduced the “No Rewards for January 6 Rioters Act,” but the bill has made no progress since.

Thus ends this little drama. The bigger story isn’t over. Altman may have won against Musk, but their mud fight is a grating and relatively minor plot point in the long chronicle of AI companies’ exploiting lavishly funded public-private partnerships in order to force their plans and products onto the rest of us. Indeed, the many ways that the Trump White House is helping this incestuous network of companies steamroll public opposition and regulation should be understood as part of the administration’s broader pursuit of two mutually dependent goals: minority rule and the enrichment of the ultrawealthy.

Donald Trump and Silicon Valley executives both like to pretend they’re transforming the status quo. A reactionary alliance between the right and big business, though, is pretty standard fare. As historians like Nancy MacLean have detailed, corporate leaders have spent decades attempting to insulate themselves from the democratic decision-making that threatens to limit their profits and their fringe ideologies. Trump’s outlandish behavior shouldn’t distract from the fact that his White House is chasing the fairly traditional Republican goals of slashing taxes for corporations and the rich, torching environmental regulations, and rolling back civil rights protections.

The fact that Silicon Valley executives try to claim a vaguely liberal-coded moral high ground is likewise a helpful cover for their own self-interest in minority rule. A recent Gallup poll, for instance, found that 71 percent of Americans oppose the local construction of AI data centers. An Economist/YouGov survey has shown that 70 percent of Americans—including 68 percent of Republicans, and majorities across every age demographic—think AI is advancing too quickly.

This overwhelming disapproval is a sign that what companies like xAI and OpenAI have pitched as the inevitable march of progress is anything but. Last year, nearly 50 data center projects worth at least $156 billion were blocked or stalled by local opposition. An analysis from Heatmap Pro found that data center cancellations reached an all-time high in the first half of 2026, with local opposition quelling 20 proposed projects worth nearly $42 billion. Municipal governments from Indiana to New Jersey have passed local bans on data center expansion. Maine’s legislature passed the country’s first-ever statewide moratorium earlier this year, which Democratic Governor Janet Mills eventually vetoed; she suspended her Senate campaign a few days later. In recent weeks, commencement speakers heralding the rise of artificial intelligence as “the next Industrial Revolution” and an unavoidable tool for progress have been enthusiastically booed by graduating students.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, has been more than happy to help the companies that have cozied up to it. In just one recent example, the Department of Justice signaled that it’s “evaluating possible intervention or amicus participation” in a suit being brought against Musk by the NAACP, alleging that Musk’s xAI has illegally installed and operated 27 gas turbines to run its Colossus data center complex near Memphis, Tennessee. In reaction to news that the White House might vet new AI models before they’re released, an anonymous senior White House official assured the press—and worried AI companies—that it was seeking a “partnership” with the industry rather than “government regulation.” Chief of staff Susie Wiles similarly posted on social media that the government is not “in the business of picking winners and losers.”

As opposition to AI mounts, the companies behind it have invested heavily in their lobbying and campaign finance operations. Meta, Nvidia, and Microsoft spent $47.1 million on their combined Washington lobbying efforts last year. OpenAI spent $1 million in the first half of 2026 and has pushed for the White House to preempt state-level regulations on data centers and artificial intelligence. The nonprofit watchdog Public Citizen has found that a quarter of federal lobbyists in D.C. are involved in AI issues. The pro-AI Super PAC Leading the Future—launched in August by Open AI co-founder Greg Brockman and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale (among others)—has raised more than $75 million in advance of November’s midterm elections.

Despite the tens of millions being poured into campaigns and lobbying efforts by billionaires, AI boosters have tried to paint their opponents as the ones who are furthering “elite” interests. In the Jeff Bezos–owned Washington Post, two Palantir executives—Anthony Bak and Mehdi Alhassani—warned that bipartisan opposition to the AI buildout risked making it “accessible only to the wealthy,” arguing that such fights were “the surest way to guarantee that artificial intelligence becomes a tool of the wealthy elite.” This a stupid but predictable argument. For decades, bona fide elites on the right have claimed that a different, self-serving cadre of liberal elites has been the real force behind everything from the War on Poverty to protests against the Vietnam War to seatbelt requirements, and—more recently—climate policy. Today’s AI enthusiasts have subbed out the neocons’ old complaints about the “New Class” for screeds against NIMBYs, doomers, and a shadowy, George Soros–funded “network of Leftist activist organizations” that the Washington Examiner recently blamed for a remarkably bipartisan data center pushback.

These faux-populist grievances are, as ever, nonsense. Musk and Altman have more in common with Trump than with any of the workers whose jobs they constantly talk about eliminating, or some imagined “little man” whom tech executives allege will be left behind by data center moratoriums. Beefs among tech elites are—as author Karen Hao has argued—a distraction from the ground-level fights that are stymying them. “Nothing about this trial or OpenAI’s financial structure,” Hao wrote before the proceedings had concluded, “will change the imperial drive of these companies to consolidate ever-more data and capital, terraform the Earth, exhaust and displace labor, and embed themselves deep within the state to gain leverage over its apparatuses of violence.”

However much AI executives might drone on about utopia and/or apocalypse, their material interests and their visions for the future are deeply aligned with Trump’s—and the generations of right-wingers who came before him. They all want to keep democracy from interfering with their plans for accumulating unlimited wealth and power. They may skirmish in court and on social media every once in a while, but they’re all on the same side.

Democrats might take this step sooner rather than later. Representative Jamie Raskin tells me that House Democrats plan to introduce a bill that would block the fund and other future efforts like it. While it’s unclear exactly how this will play out in each chamber, Raskin says the bill will have the full support of the Democratic caucus and the leadership—and that Democrats will pursue a discharge petition to get it to the floor around the GOP leadership.

“We need to put Republicans on the spot as to whether or not they are going to endorse this rank corruption, or whether they are going to stand up for basic constitutional values,” Raskin said in an interview, adding that he will pursue “straightforward legislation to block this outrageous misappropriation.”

This could prove politically potent in unexpected ways, and Trump’s vile tirade on Monday about his heist shows why.  The fund—which the Justice Department is creating pursuant to its “settlement” of Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS—will be dispensed to alleged victims of government “weaponization.” When a reporter asked Trump why taxpayer funds should go to the January 6 rioters, it set him off.

“This is reimbursing people that were horribly treated,” Trump replied angrily. “They’ve been in some cases imprisoned wrongly. They’ve paid legal fees that they didn’t have. They’ve gone bankrupt. Their lives have been destroyed. And they turned out to be right.”

Emphasis mine. In short, Trump admits his fund is designed to grant taxpayer money to the January 6 rioters for the expressly declared purpose of rewarding them for trying to overturn a lawful election on his behalf with mob violence. Let Republicans defend that.

This whole fiasco is ripe for congressional intervention. The slush fund has been created by Trump’s settlement of his anti-IRS lawsuit—which was itself thoroughly bogus—and the $1.8 billion will be drawn from the Treasury Department’s Judgment Fund, which pays people who have actually won legitimate claims against the government.

That loot will go into a new fund—which experts widely condemn as illegal—and this one is effectively controlled by Trump while operating outside any government procedures. That means no transparency into the payments—and no congressional oversight. The cash will apparently go to whomever Trump wants, since he can fire the fund’s board members for any reason.

How did this happen? To oversimplify, by dismissing the IRS lawsuit as part of this deal, Trump essentially got around the judge who’d been hearing that lawsuit. And because no one has clear standing to sue to block the new fund—save, perhaps, for Congress, but only if it acts as a whole body, which won’t happen under GOP control—the “settlement” payment to the new fund probably can’t be stopped in court. 

So Raskin’s proposal will seek to do two things, he tells me: First, block this fund by legislating a ban on the use of this particular money for Trump’s stated purpose. Second, prevent more funds of this kind from being set up in the future. One way would be to clarify the statute creating the Treasury Judgment Fund so it expressly says no money can be awarded to people who don’t prevail with a valid claim against the government via lawful processes, Raskin says.

“Trump would like to turn the entire federal budget into a collection of political slush funds,” Raskin told me. “We want to get Congress to take responsibility over our spending power back.”

The goal, Raskin said, is “to pass legislation blocking any use of money in this way.” A spokesperson for Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries confirms that he’s supportive of Raskin’s legislative effort.

Raskin says he believes “every Democrat in our caucus” will be behind this. He confirmed that Democrats still believe the new fund is unconstitutional—because its expenditures weren’t approved by Congress—and will still try to contest it in court while also moving forward with legislation. 

Will Raskin’s bill ever get a vote? House GOP leaders will block it. But Democrats recently had success forcing a vote on aid to Ukraine using a discharge petition, which gets a bill to the floor if 218 members support it. Raskin says Democrats are prepared to pursue this tactic against Trump’s slush fund.

“That is the only way that we are going to be able to make this happen,” Raskin said, while noting that Democrats will try to attach it to other bills via the amendment process.

Here’s the rub: Even if the GOP tries to block this bill from a vote, once it is written and introduced, Republicans will be asked why they don’t support it. That won’t be an easy question to answer even without a vote, and if it does get a vote, it’s one Republicans won’t want to take.

It’s easy to get fatalistic about GOP loyalty to Trump. But occasionally Republicans do judge certain things too politically toxic to support. Many revolted against voting for $1 billion to fund Trump’s ballroom, some specifically because the expenditure would be hard to defend amid widespread economic pain.

This same pattern—Trump lavishing billions on himself and his loyalists while ordinary Americans suffer under his economic decisions—applies to his slush fund. This week’s New York Times poll finds Trump’s approval on the economy at 33 percent to 64 percent—31 points underwater. Democrats lead in the generic House matchup by 11 points. Among independents, it rises to 18 points. Independents famously react badly to corruption. The slush fund will be absolutely toxic among them.

There are other angles to attack here, as well. After the slush fund was announced, senior Treasury Department lawyer Brian Morrissey resigned. Though it’s unclear why, Senator Ron Wyden—the ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee— says he will pursue Morrissey’s testimony. “It’s important we hear from Mr. Morrissey and everyone else involved,” Wyden told me in a statement, adding that if Democrats win the Senate, they are “not going to let this go.”

A core myth of Trumpism is the idea of white, male, reactionary victimization: His ascension represents vengeance for his voters, who are the victims of a series of world-historical crimes by non-MAGA Americans and elites alike. As Adam Serwer notes, the slush fund embodies this: It effectively will give “reparations” to reactionaries who attacked our constitutional democracy to prevent all our votes from counting, in a naked effort to destroy multiracial democracy itself.

But most Americans aren’t bought into those Trumpist fictions. When Trump pardoned hundreds of January 6 rioters, large majorities of independents opposed it—including pardons for nonviolent offenders. The middle of the country opposes special treatment for those who tried to violently destroy our constitutional order—and doesn’t accept MAGA victimization mythology.

As the ballroom scandal demonstrates, Trump’s self-dealing is already a huge problem for Republicans. But with the slush fund, Republicans will have to defend the illicit raiding of taxpayer funds to pay off supporters in one of the most corrupt presidential acts in modern history. For good measure, that will include the people who violently attacked our country and injured scores of police officers to boot. Democrats: Do whatever you can to make Republicans vote on this—again and again. Pledge accountability for these crimes against our country if you win the majority. And don’t let up.

“You’re gonna assure us that President Trump will get no proceeds from this [fund] … his family will not get [any proceeds]?” Democratic Senator Jack Reed asked in an intense line of questioning on the recently announced $1.8 billion fund.

“Correct,” replied Blanche. 

“And who will direct the distribution of these, who gets the money?” 

“From the victims’ fund? Well, there’ll be a commission of five individuals that’ll be set up, and they’ll take in requests and claims and decide whether to do anything—”

“Who will name the commissioners?” Reed interrupted. 

“I will … whoever the attorney general is … and one of them will be done in consultation with leadership of this body,” said Blanche, ignoring reports that Trump himself will have ultimate say on who remains on the committee.

After pointing to the resignation of the top lawyer at the Department of Treasury following the announcement of the fund, Reed again tried to point out the lines being crossed with the fund.

“This all seems to be an obvious abuse of power by the Department of Justice, by the president,” the Rhode Island senator said. “He negotiated essentially with himself. You’re his appointee. The IRS are his appointees. He’s the plaintiff. And the American people I don’t think are surprised that certainly all this money is going to his friends, or people … in his orbit. Will you ensure that none of this money goes to anyone convicted in the January 6 attack on the Congress?”

“Well, the commissioners will determine who is eligible to receive the money,” Blanche replied. 

“Who are the commissioners?”

“They’re not named yet.”

“Who will name them?” 

“The attorney general will. It’s not me.” 

“With the suggestion of the president of the United States, your boss?”

“I have no idea if he will or not. I really don’t.” 

“I would be shocked if he didn’t tell you exactly who to put on, and I’d be more shocked if you did not put them on. This is a travesty of the law.” 

Reed then pivoted hard to Blanche’s interview with Maxwell and her special treatment in prison. 

Reed: You talked to Ghislaine Maxwell. A few days later, she was transferred from a high security prison to a very comfortable—

Blanche: That’s not true. She was not in a high security prison. She was transferred from a low security prison to a low security prison.

Reed: I… pic.twitter.com/5duU4ctAqZ

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 19, 2026

“You had an opportunity to go down and talk to Ghislaine Maxwell. And then a few days later she was transferred from a high-security prison to a very comfortable, very comfortable—” 

“That’s not true. It’s just not true,” Blanche responded. “She was transferred from a low-security prison to a low-security prison. You’re looking at me.… That’s verifiable.” 

“Well I don’t think at the other prison she had her own room, she had access to a private shower, she could have pet therapy—” 

“I don’t know if any of that is true, I’m not disagreeing with you—”

“It is true, and you should know it,” said Reed.

“I should know that? Whether an inmate has access to her own shower?” 

“No, no. This is a person of extra special interest to the president of the United States. He’s known her. Why did he send you down to talk to her?” 

“He didn’t send me. I went. You think President Trump called and asked me to go interview a witness in federal prison? I didn’t!” 

“Yes, I do, frankly,” said Reed, talking over Blanche. “Because you know what? The deal was in. He needed someone he could rely upon to talk to her and say, ‘What would she say if she was asked about Jeffery Epstein?’ And you were the perfect choice. And you went down there and suddenly, shazam! She’s out of what is a more confining situation into a much more relaxed federal prison.” 

“Every word that I asked her is recorded and available for you to review,” Blanche said, ignoring the question about Maxwell’s new digs, which included special access to staff-only areas and a service puppy, according to The New York Times.  

“This hearing I think is exposing something, which is to me very frightening,” Reed replied. “From my perspective, you have very little faith to the Constitution and the people of America, and you’re the president’s consigliere.” 

“Your perspective is completely wrong, senator,” said Blanche.

“Well, I think the facts will prove me right. Thank you.”

Trump is attempting to have an enormous ballroom for himself built in the hole—more fitting symbolism given the state of the American economy.

At the press conference, Trump picked up a poster-board mock-up of the ballroom and began to ramble.

“It’s so beautiful,” Trump said, holding the mock-up to his chest. “See, I look so thin. They’ll say, ‘Oh, he’s gotten so thin.’ It’s because I’m holding this. You don’t have to look at my waist. You can look at this. You saw enough of my waist all over President Xi in China.”

Trump: See? I look so thin. It’s because I’m holding this. You don’t have to look at my waist. You saw enough of my waist all over President Xi in China. pic.twitter.com/V25GsVMqV5

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 19, 2026

A few things here. First, the fact this is one of the more coherent jokes delivered by the president during his second term should tell us all something about the state of his mental health.

Secondly, Trump’s waist was “all over” Xi Jinping during his China trip? Phrasing, dude.

Thirdly, this is a rare piece of self-deprecating humor from our commander in chief, who almost never jokes about his own pudginess. Indeed, Trump’s bodily measurements have been contentious for years—his 2025 medical listed him at six feet, three inches tall and 224 pounds, which was comparable to Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver A.J. Brown.

That medical exam, however, also revealed that Trump’s body mass index was in the “overweight” category. (Trump fell into the “obese” category in 2020, so this was actually an improvement.) That, plus the president’s penchant for Diet Coke and McDonalds, means even an egotist like Trump understands he’s no Chalamet.

Trump has for months claimed the ballroom project will be entirely funded through “donations,” but Senate Republicans, at the president’s request, have directed $1 billion in taxpayer money to go toward ballroom “security.” The allotment was recently deemed spurious by the nonpartisan Senate parliamentarian, so Trump has, of course, moved to have her fired.

Tuesday’s press conference above the pit was actually catered by the White House. Bacon, egg, and cheese breakfast sandwiches, Coca-Cola, and Diet Coke were on offer, with nary a fruit or vegetable to be seen.

Kean’s office has been blasting out cheery newsletters, written in the congressman’s voice, despite his long-standing absence.

“In Congress, I am focused on delivering real results for our law enforcement and local communities,” read one recent e-letter. “I will always stand with our men and women in blue.”

The letter was quickly called out by other politicos. Aaron Fritschner, chief of staff to Democratic Representative Don Beyer, wrote on X that “Tom Kean’s office is still sending out constituent newsletters like the guy hasn’t vanished off the face of the earth.”

CNN journalist Andrew Kaczynski called the newsletter’s tone “creepy and weird,” given Kean’s inexplicable disappearance.

Kean consultant Harrison Neely fired back, claiming that the charge was “rich” coming from a “‘journalist’ who has called the Congressman’s daughter and family members of staff.”

In return, Kaczynski snarked: “Consultants for Tom Kean are now attacking reporters for inquiring about his whereabouts.”

Kean was missing in action for weeks before he offered any explanation. His meager response was the culmination of a small pressure campaign fronted by journalists, his constituents, and his tristate Republican allies.

Last month, Kean told House Speaker Mike Johnson over the phone that he was dealing with an unspecified “personal health matter.” Neely told Politico that Kean will be “back on a regular full schedule very soon.”

Since then, Johnson has confessed he doesn’t know when Kean will return, while aides to GOP leadership have said they “don’t have any idea what’s going on” with Kean.

Kean was elected to represent New Jersey’s 7th congressional district in 2022, and is months away from being thrust into a contentious midterm reelection cycle. He is currently unchallenged in the Garden State’s Republican primary, scheduled for June 2, but is likely to face tremendous opposition from Democrats come November. Over the last several months, New Jersey’s 7th congressional district has shifted from a “lean Republican” advantage to a total toss-up, according to an analysis by the Cook Political Report.

His absence in the race has apparently inspired his competition: The topic practically consumed his potential competition during a Democratic debate on May 12, according to the Bergen Record.

Speaking to the press outside of the White House Tuesday with his prized ballroom under construction behind him, Trump bragged about the economy in his first presidential term, claiming that it was “the best economy we’ve ever had” and that “this term is going to blow it away, I think,” even with the Iran war.

“I thought the market would go down 25 percent, and I was OK with that to get rid of a nuclear potential holocaust. Would have been a nuclear holocaust. So, going down 25 percent’s OK when you get rid of a nuclear holocaust, so, uh, most people agree with me,” Trump said.

Trump: "I thought the market would go down 25%, and I was okay with that to get rid of a nuclear potential holocaust. Going down 25% is okay if you get rid of a nuclear holocaust. Most people agree with me." pic.twitter.com/A4AYX9b6Kf

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 19, 2026

Trump went on to brag about how the war is being received by the American people, telling reporters, “Politically, I’m doing good.

“Everyone tells me [the war] is unpopular, but I think it’s very popular. When they hear that it’s having to do with nuclear weapons, weapons that could take out Los Angeles, could take out major cities, very quick, when they hear that—I tell you what, when we explain it to people, I don’t really have enough time to explain to people. I’m too busy getting it done,” Trump said. “I think it’s frankly very popular, but whether it’s popular or not popular, I have to do it, because I’m not going to let the world be blown up on my watch. Not gonna happen.”

Trump on his war against Iran: "Everyone tells me it's unpopular, but I think it's very popular. When they hear that it has to do with nuclear weapons that could take out Los Angeles, when we explain it to people-- I don't really have enough time to explain to people." pic.twitter.com/F2rtnBFazQ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 19, 2026

In reality, the war is so unpopular that it has brought down Trump’s approval rating to its lowest level ever, according to a recent New York Times poll. The same poll found that most Americans think the war isn’t worth the cost or that the economy is going to improve. Meanwhile, Trump goes back and forth between threatening to break the ceasefire with Iran and claiming a deal is close. It’s little wonder that most Americans lack confidence in the president.

Senators Adam Schiff, Dick Durbin, and Richard Blumenthal want to know whether Blanche, who previously served as Trump’s personal defense attorney, has recused himself from President Trump’s personal civil lawsuits against the government.

“Since last year, the Department has systematically dismantled the agency’s internal guardrails, gutting both the career ethics staff and the Office of Professional Responsibility, and has refused to provide any answers to Congress about these egregious actions,” the senators wrote in a letter to Assistant Attorney General for Administration Jolene Lauria.

The letter contains 10 questions about whether Blanche has recused himself from Trump’s cases, as well as whether he has received ethics advice about his past representation of Trump in personal matters. The senators are also asking, “What is the last date that Mr. Blanche provided personal legal advice to Donald Trump or served as his personal attorney?”

The letter cites CNN’s report last week that Blanche was told in March 2025, after he joined the DOJ, that he had to recuse himself from Trump’s personal cases against the government by Joseph Tirrell, the top ethics lawyer in the department.

“Recent public reporting revealed that in March 2025, less than two weeks after assuming the role of Deputy Attorney General, Mr. Blanche was explicitly and formally advised by the Department’s top career ethics lawyer that his recusal from legal cases involving President Trump in his personal capacity was necessary,” the letter said.

A DOJ spokesperson told CNN that Blanche “is recused from many cases before DOJ. In any cases that are still ongoing where he previously represented someone, he is recused.”

“To the extent DOJ is investigating something related to the President for which Todd was previously representing him, then hypothetically yes, he would recuse,” the spokesperson said, but added that this remains a “hypothetical.”

That’s not particularly reassuring, considering that Trump now has a slush fund to compensate his supporters whom he thinks were unfairly punished, and this could include anyone from January 6 insurrectionists to election deniers. On top of that, Tirrell was fired in July, and he’s currently suing the DOJ. Are ethics no longer a concern at the DOJ?

Trump pressured Senate Majority Leader John Thune in a private phone call Monday to fire Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, according to reporting by Semafor and NOTUS. Two days earlier, MacDonough ruled against Senate Republicans allocating $1 billion for the president’s ballroom project in their budget reconciliation bill.

Despite Trump claiming for months that his ballroom would be entirely funded through donations, his cronies in the Senate have tried to sneak in an extra billion for “securing” the space (which is not even built yet). The proposed reconciliation bill also funds the Department of Homeland Security through 2028.

MacDonough, the first woman to be appointed parliamentarian, has served in the role since 2012. One of her jobs is to review all reconciliation bills and cut provisions the Senate cannot make a good case for. While her cuts aren’t technically binding and can be overruled with a majority vote, ignoring her would be a huge break from precedent—and we all know the Senate loves precedent.

Thune was dismissive of the idea of firing MacDonough, according to NOTUS.

“No,” the majority leader told NOTUS when asked if he would consider the idea. “We’re going through a process that we go through every time we have a reconciliation bill and the people on both sides are mad at the parliamentarian. That’s been true.” Thune also let things slide in 2025 when Trump moaned to him about MacDonough’s rulings on Medicaid provisions.

The phone call represents yet another attempt to influence the legislative branch from our current commander in chief, who routinely decries people and policies that don’t benefit him on social media.

Republicans are not expected to take out this “security” allotment but instead adjust the clause’s language and potentially ask for less money. If MacDonough clears the new version, the bill could go to the Senate floor for a vote in the next few weeks.

Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy—who was just defeated in a primary against Trump-endorsed Representative Julia Letlow and state Treasurer John Fleming—sounded off in opposition to the slush fund.

“We are a nation of laws; you can’t just make up things.… It is as if somebody sued themselves and agreed upon a settlement with themselves that’s going to be funded by the rest of us,” Cassidy told NBC’s Sahil Kapur Monday night. “Now if that’s the case, what? Wait a second! I just came off the campaign trail. People are concerned about making their own ends meet, not about putting the slush fund together without a legal precedent.”

Cassidy’s right. Trump created the slush fund as part of a settlement after suing his own IRS, setting aside nearly $1.8 billion of taxpayer money for anyone who felt unfairly targeted by the Biden administration— from January 6 rioters to right-wing think tanks, to the president’s own super PAC. The fund’s guidelines also note that once a recipient has received their money, the Trump administration has “no liability whatsoever for the protection or safeguarding of those funds, regardless of bank failure, fraudulent transfers, or any other fraud or misuse of the funds.”

While the Republicans maintain their complete radio silence on the president’s self-enrichment scheme, Democratic senators have launched a separate probe into Assistant Attorney General Todd Blanche and whether he’s actually recused himself from the president’s personal legal matters given that he used to be Trump’s personal lawyer.

As Paramount closes in on its potential deal with Warner Bros. Discovery, executives at the networks are considering avenues to remove Weiss from her position overseeing CBS News.

The top brass is reportedly having informal discussions about changing Weiss’s mandate, particularly as the groups look ahead to a potential merger with CNN. Instead, they would bring in a new, more experienced executive to run the department, giving Weiss “less control over the linear product,” reported Puck News Monday.

It’s unclear how formal the talks to reorient Weiss have been, but she would likely lose day-to-day control over several major CBS properties, including Evening News, CBS Mornings, and 60 Minutes. Weiss would maintain broad editorial influence but would largely be shifted to oversee the news division’s digital growth.

A spokesman for Paramount told Puck that “Bari has the full support of Paramount and David Ellison as the editorial leader overseeing CBS News and 60 Minutes. Reports suggesting otherwise are inaccurate.”

Weiss, the founder of the pro-Israel blog The Free Press and a former New York Times opinion columnist, was tapped as the newsroom’s newest chief late last year, despite the fact that she had never worked in broadcast, lacked traditional reporting experience, and had also never run a major news operation.

Her tenure has so far lasted seven months, but her business decisions atop the news giant have unequivocally and single-handedly divorced CBS News from its decades-long place within America’s prestige news media circuit.

What was once crowned the “gold standard” of broadcasting, and the home of some of journalism’s most venerable names, such as Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, has since devolved into a graveyard for journalism ethics.

Under Weiss’s stewardship, CBS News has killed critical stories in order to save face for the Trump administration. In December, Weiss pulled the plug on a 60 Minutes segment investigating the result of Donald Trump’s mass deportation program, focusing on Venezuelan immigrants who had been deported to El Salvador’s notoriously brutal CECOT mega-prison.

The network has also lost a cadre of veteran journalists, whom Weiss replaced with the likes of Peter Attia—who was ousted from his role as an on-air contributor shortly after his hiring was announced due to his various ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

Yet Weiss’s appointment was merely the cherry on top of a large portion of recent chaos at CBS. In the last year, parent company Paramount undermined itself by settling multimillion-dollar lawsuits with Trump over CBS’s fair and accurate coverage (in an apparent bid to butter up the administration ahead of a multibillion-dollar merger with SkyDance). That resulted in the loss of two storied showrunners, including 60 Minutes producer Bill Owens and CBS News chief Wendy McMahon, who rejected Paramount’s approach to handling the groundless lawsuit.

The Financial Times reports, citing unnamed sources, that Trump himself raised the idea. The White House didn’t mention the proposal in its fact sheet about Trump’s visit, and its spokespeople declined to comment. But Trump has railed against the ICC in the past, demanding in December that it change its founding document to guarantee that it wouldn’t charge himself or any other American officials.

Trump, along with his Republican allies in Congress, has also blasted the ICC’s decision to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. In February 2025, the White House imposed sanctions on the court itself, and last August, Secretary of State Marco Rubio went further by sanctioning the court’s judges.

Russia has its own concerns about the ICC, as the court has issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes committed during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Trump probably thinks that with this potential alliance, he could nullify possible ICC charges against the U.S. and Israel, and curry favor with Russia in the process.

The U.S. has a law on the books, the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act, which allows it to use “all means necessary and appropriate” to free any members of the U.S. military and “covered allied persons” who are detained by the court. As egregious as this law is, apparently it does not go far enough for Trump, who thinks he and Israel are unbound by any international laws.

Treasury General Counsel Brian Morrissey resigned shortly after the fund was approved on Monday, according to The New York Times. Morrisey has yet to publicly comment. He served for only seven months.

The fund—created by Trump in exchange for dropping his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS—allows anyone who feels they were wrongfully targeted by the Biden administration to seek damages. This includes, but is not limited to, January 6 rioters, right-wing think tanks, and the president’s own super PAC. While Trump claims he “wasn’t involved in the whole creation of it,” he controls who sits on the board of the fund.

There’s also a massive disclaimer that states that once the funds are disbursed, his administration has “no liability whatsoever for the protection or safeguarding of those funds, regardless of bank failure, fraudulent transfers, or any other fraud or misuse.” The move preemptively dodges any future legal issues that may arise from awarding funds to people who went to jail for assault and sedition (and have committed other crimes since).

The outcry has been swift and widespread, with Senator Elizabeth Warren calling the slush fund an “insane level of corruption—even for Trump.” California Governor Gavin Newsom said it was “waste, fraud, and abuse in the flesh.” Maybe those same feelings about this blatant self-enrichment scheme got to Morrissey.

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 you may have heard by now, the Justice Department just announced that it has reached an agreement with Donald Trump to settle his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. Guess who controls the Justice Department? Donald Trump. The settlement will transfer nearly $1.8 billion to a new fund that reportedly will be controlled by Donald Trump.

So in short, Trump effectively ordered his own DOJ to reach an agreement with him to transfer over a billion dollars in taxpayer funds into a new fund that he apparently controls and can use to reward allies. How is this possible? Is there any recourse? And also, isn’t this going to backfire? A new poll shows Trump is getting absolutely crushed on the economy. So good luck, Republicans, defending this new arrangement.

We’re working through all this with legal expert Harry Litman, who writes for The New Republic and presides over the Talking Feds podcast. Harry, good to have you on.

Harry Litman: Hey, good to be here, Greg. Thanks.

Sargent: So let’s quickly set the stage. Back in January, Trump sued the IRS for $10 billion due to his tax returns getting leaked during his first term. Trump was in control of the IRS when that happened. So the lawsuit is baloney.

But let’s put that aside for now. DOJ, which theoretically is supposed to be defending the IRS against Trump’s lawsuit, now reached an agreement with Trump to settle the suit. A judge was probably set to throw the suit out, but this new arrangement circumvents that. Harry, can you explain in really simple terms what just happened here with the settlement?

Litman: Yes. Greg, the judge said, I want to hear from you why there is actually a lawsuit here, because the Constitution says you have to have two parties opposed to each other. Trump here looks like he’s controlling both sides.

So by doing this so-called voluntary settlement, the DOJ hopes that it doesn’t have to face the music on saying whether it’s a real lawsuit or not. And they can just go around and create this fund without any use of the court.

Sargent: This is all designed to circumvent the judge, right? The judge was about to rule potentially and say this lawsuit is bullshit—we’re throwing it out. By doing this settlement, now DOJ has circumvented the judge.

Just to back up for context, there’s something that already exists called the Treasury Department Judgment Fund. Now this entity pays out money to victims of the U.S. government who successfully bring claims against the government. That fund is subject to various statutory restrictions and oversight since Congress created it.

But now by reaching this settlement, DOJ has created a situation under which that particular fund pays nearly $1.8 billion to this separate new fund. And this new thing will supposedly be used to pay whoever Trump and his allies decide has been victimized by supposed weaponization of the government.

But the key thing here, Harry, if I understand this correctly, is this new entity won’t be in the control of the U.S. government in any sense. Per further reporting, Trump will have total control over the fund’s members. It operates outside the U.S. government.

It’s just a fund that’s been filled with taxpayer money that Trump controls. So this fund—Donald Trump hopes—will not be subject to any kind of congressional or constitutional constraints of any kind. Correct, Harry?

Litman: Correct. Or maybe you could say, Greg, constraints that anybody will enforce, because there are constraints here. Even with what the DOJ is saying, Congress has permitted DOJ to settle, but only real lawsuits.

So under the very statutory authority, Congress has appropriated a bunch of money and normally DOJ has a lot of discretion in how to use it. But the proper reading, I think, is it’s got to be for a real lawsuit, which this isn’t. The big question, though, will be who can oppose it?

Sargent: Okay, Harry. So what you’re saying here is that this fund can only exist theoretically under the law—this new fund that Trump’s creating—if the lawsuit that Donald Trump and DOJ are settling with each other is a real lawsuit. But the rub becomes who decides whether the lawsuit is real or not. Does the judge have the authority to step in and say, this is not a real lawsuit, therefore the settlement is void, or not?

Litman: And now we come to the question, who can make the claim? Who can say it’s not a real lawsuit? You can’t cheat the taxpayers out of $1.8 billion, especially to pay off January 6th offenders. And a quick aside here, Greg—we don’t even know the names of who will get money under this. They don’t have to say.

It is illegal because Congress has said you can use this money only to actually settle real cases. And it’s a fake case. But who can come in now and say this fund is phony baloney? They’re going to say nobody has standing. Members of Congress—93 of them filed a brief this morning saying you can’t do that, but they don’t, I think, have standing. They’ll say that you can’t go to the court now because the case has been voluntarily dismissed. It is violating the law. It’s going to be—can they get away with it?

Sargent: Okay. But to be clear, the judge cannot step in and say this lawsuit is not real, precisely because Donald Trump has settled it and has now removed it from the agenda?

Litman: Very close: Because he’s voluntarily dismissed it. So that goes over there. She can say, you really were abusing me and there’s a rule that says you can’t—I’m thinking of sanctions here. She can say other things, but I think this separate creation of the fund, she now—and this is the design—no longer can really do anything with. And they will take her right away up to the higher court if she tries.

Sargent: So DOJ can enter into a settlement with a private individual who happens to be the president with no judicial oversight whatsoever?

Litman: It all depends—if I can be Clintonesque here—on the meaning of what “can” means. It’s not legal. The question is, can they be stopped?

This is many levels of outrage. They’re screwing Congress’s instruction. They’re really abusing and exploiting the court. And of course, they’re lying to us and [it’s] all about trying to whitewash the January 6th episode. The “can” here means can they get away with it, as it so often means in the Trump administration—not, is it illegal. It is illegal.

Sargent: Okay. Now this entirely circumvents Congress. Congress didn’t create this fund—the Trump fund—though it did create the bigger thing that the money is coming out of. As you pointed out, a number of Democrats just entered a filing in the court where the lawsuit was being litigated, arguing that Trump and DOJ colluded to agree on this corrupt settlement payout to Trump’s fund.

These Democrats say this empowers the judge to step in and invalidate the settlement. Where are you on this? Do these Democrats have standing or not? How does that get decided?

Litman: It gets decided in the first instance by the court. And I wish they did, but the law out there—and the law that they’ll bang right into if it goes higher—says that they don’t, that it’s really for Congress to push back. I do think, Greg, now that people are aware of what happened, you’re going to see oversight, you’re going to see a spotlight.

But I think a motion to invalidate the settlement itself—DOJ will come in and say no standing. And I think, if not at the district court level, higher up the courts will agree there’s not standing from the congressmen. Go and do your political pushback.

Sargent: Could a majority in Congress have the standing to do this?

Litman: Very possibly. If Congress was doing it as an entity, which they’re not. But it doesn’t really—if there were a majority in Congress against it, they would pass a law, namely: we’re the ones who appropriate money. You can’t use our money just to do your slush fund here. Here is the law.

Of course he would veto it, but yes, if everyone were in on it—and, the political oversight, is going to cause Republicans to be in an uncomfortable spot of supporting this totally rank violation, including the possibility that if all of Congress were to come in, possibly there’d be standing.

Sargent: Right. Just to be clear for people, if Republicans in Congress wanted to put a stop to this today, they could pass a law saying that what Trump is doing is not permitted. Trump would probably veto it. And then Republicans could join with Democrats to override the veto. So if Republicans wanted to stop this, they could, right?

Litman: Your scenario, Greg, 100 percent solid. Were they to do that and pass a law? Can’t do it. Congress appropriates money, after all. That’s one of like six problems with what he’s trying to do here.

Sargent: Right. So just to be clear, Republicans won’t do this. They will fully allow Trump to go forward with really one of the most corrupt schemes I think we’ve seen in modern memory, right?

Litman: I think so. I think this is the worst thing that’s happened in the government since the actual pardons on January 6th. I do think the Democrats will try hard to force some kind of vote that makes Republicans have to take some ownership here, because this stinks to high heaven and no Republican will want to put their imprimatur on it. So that’ll be the political maneuvering—to try to make that happen.

Sargent: I want to point out for people that it’s very easy to get cynical about Republicans going along with everything that Trump does. And I do expect them to mostly go along with this one, but they don’t always.

They are stopping the ballroom money—the billion dollars that Trump and the White House are demanding for security for his ballroom. Republicans are genuinely split over that and the fate of that is hanging in the balance. So here’s a case where I think this could be just as hard for Republicans to support.

Litman: Look, I really agree. He is now at record levels of 22 percent more disapprove of him than approve. If Democrats can maneuver to put them on the hot seat—I think a lot of who would actually be for, here’s what’s going on here, Greg.

If he had just come out and said, I’m going to give out $1.7 billion of your money—sorry about how expensive gas is—to the people who stormed the barricades, people would really have a political meltdown. He’s doing that, but worse, because he’s trying to, in a convoluted and secretive way, make it look like it’s just a settlement of a case, which it is not. So yes, if Republicans have to own it in some way, I think that could really pose the possibility of more space and daylight between them and Trump now.

Sargent: And let’s clarify—Trump is going to control this fund. All the members are appointed by acting attorney general Todd Blanche, and Trump can fire them at will for any reason.

Now to your point about how this is going to be bad for Republicans, we just had a New York Times poll with absolutely brutal news for them. Trump’s approval is only 37 percent and on the economy, it’s 33 percent with 64 percent disapproving—31 points underwater on the economy.

Meanwhile, Democrats are leading Republicans in the generic House ballot matchup by 11 points among registered voters, 50 percent to 39 percent. Among independents, Democrats lead by 51 to 33—that’s an 18-point lead. That’s staggering. And Harry, independents hate corruption.

So if I’m a House Republican, I’m absolutely dreading having to defend an arrangement where Trump is getting handed a $1.8 billion slush fund while ordinary Americans are suffering economically, right?

Litman: So we just on our podcast—two Republicans, David French and Mike Murphy, former Republicans—said, if that 11 percent generic advantage for Democrats holds, then all of this Sturm und Drang about the Supreme Court gerrymandering will just go away and be an asterisk. But that’s the question.

But I surely agree. This news on polls is, I think, unprecedentedly bad. We are getting very late in the day for them to have to defend such a stinking-to-hell arrangement as this phony baloney settlement is.

Sargent: Okay, Harry, just to make this simple—what’s going to happen? Is he going to get away with this or not? How do you see it playing out?

Litman: So I think it’s going to be a political question. So I might punt that back to you. I do think that the judge is going to come in and say, the nerve, how can you do this, and make trouble. But it won’t be trouble that goes to the lawsuit. So I think it will come to Congress.

And I’m on this very issue—I think I have been seeing around corners for a while—but this one, if you put a gun to my head, and I’m so sorry, readers of The New Republic and fans of The Daily Blast, as you should be—I think if they really push it, they’ll get away with it. But it may come back to bite them in an impeachment if the House changes sides.

Sargent: So the judge is basically going to say, I’m sorry, Democrats who have brought this action, you don’t have standing to do it.

Litman: Right. I’m going to want to hear from the lawyers, I want to assign sanctions, but I cannot step in and make this slush fund go away.

Sargent: At the end of the day, Republicans are going to regret this victory for Trump. Harry Littman, thanks for walking us through all that complexity, man. It’s pretty dispiriting stuff.

Litman: Hey, thanks a lot, Greg. Always good being with you.

Simenon, like many of his characters, lived an only superficially middle-class existence: writing in his office every morning (sometimes atop a houseboat), going downstairs to enjoy his wife’s freshly cooked meals, playing with his children—and then disappearing for a few hours every afternoon or evening to meet up with women in brothels or local bars. The middle-class life, he believed, was only pleasurable if you were constantly cheating on it; and to him, intimate pleasures were a lot more enjoyable if you kept them clandestine.

Simenon the man was, in fact, the very opposite of his most famous detective, the always-about-to-retire Jules Maigret, who was most happy in only a few places: at his job arresting murderers, on holiday (during which he often solved murders as well), pottering in his garden, eating at the table prepared by his wife—the formidable Madame Maigret—or escorting her arm-and-arm to local cinemas. One of the most unusual detectives in modern fiction, Maigret lacks the penetrating intellect or forensic skills of Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, and rarely needs to use pistols or fists on the various criminals he encounters, unlike hard-boiled contemporaries such as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Instead, Maigret’s entire “method” is to spend time in the homes of his suspects, drink beer and eat meals in their local cafés, and follow them (or have them followed) to see where they go and who they spend time with in the course of a normal day.

Although Simenon is best known for the Maigret novels, he was most proud of and creatively committed to his less popular “dur” novels, or “hard” novels, which he wrote over intensely brief periods of time, and only after a complete health exam and “all clear” had been delivered by his doctor. (He claimed that when he put himself in the minds of his often distraught characters, his heart and nerves suffered similar, health-challenging stress.) The hard novels are much darker than the Maigrets: After all, Maigret has a home to go to at the end of the day, and all the novels’ horrors are visited on the men and women he investigates. Meanwhile, the hard novels are not really mysteries; they are simply about people who commit crimes and can’t seem to hold themselves together, and while occasionally they are pursued or arrested, the detectives are fairly inconsequential. And it is these works, which Picador is now issuing in new translations, that show most clearly Simenon’s obsession with furtive desires and misdeeds to the exclusion of nearly everything else; in them we see a writer who could see in an ordinary person tremendous depths but at the same time finds almost nothing worth noting in the occupation of Paris—through which he lived more peacefully than most—the rise of fascism, and the conflagrations of World War II.

Born in Liège in 1903, Simenon spent the first part of his life exploring the two most obvious extremes of his nature—that of the middle-class conformist and that of a world-spanning explorer of continents, foreign cultures, and sexually available women. The son of middle-class Walloons, he grew up accustomed to sometimes excruciatingly dull rituals—family dinners and holidays, taking in lodgers, and office-bound occupations. Even if stale to the young Georges, he used parts of this life affectionately in his fiction: He claimed that Maigret was based on his father, who died of a heart condition when Simenon was only 18.

Despite a good Catholic school education (where he learned to dislike nuns) and an interest in medicine, at the age of 15 he was hired by a conservative Catholic newspaper, and quickly graduated to become their chief crime reporter, as well as filling regular opinion and gossip columns. From a young age he was producing so much work so quickly that he began using a pseudonym (the first of many), Georges Sim—under which he published his earliest, crudest, apprentice-level crime novels. After military service, he moved to Paris in 1922, married young to an artist, Régine Renchon (whom he referred to as “Tigy”), and began cheating on her immediately and to a prodigious extent. He claimed to have slept with many thousands of women, and had a decades-long affair with the family’s housekeeper, as well as a briefer liaison with the American performer Josephine Baker.

Many of the “dur” novels draw on the illicit atmospheres that Simenon seemed to enjoy in his secret life. His “dur” protagonists find themselves in unusually extreme predicaments. These deeply flawed characters possess an inarticulable desire for new passions and frontiers. Unfortunately, when they are led away from their cozy homes and communities, they often get lost in a strange naturalistic jungle they both desire and fear, and become easily scared, enticed, seduced, enraged and ignited. They don’t have any innate desire to commit criminal acts, but once they find themselves exiled from their normal and predictable social relations, they feel enlivened by doing all the things they aren’t supposed to do.

In one of Simenon’s best and most often translated novels, The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By (1938), the protagonist, Kees Popinga, has worked most of his dull adult life as a clerk until he abruptly learns that his boss has stolen all of the firm’s money—and the money of his clients. After Kees accepts a small share of the bounty, he is drawn into a world in which most people (like his boss) steal what they need or want, and have sex with whomever they like; by the novel’s end, he has committed a murder and goes almost insanely happy taunting the police about it. By this point, there’s nothing he can do but make his exit from society—through either suicide or imprisonment.

And in The Blue Room (1964), a middle-aged man is awoken from his tranquil family life by an affair with a childhood friend whose passion is so great that she bites his lip until he bleeds. When he tries to end the affair, she does not want to let go, and commits a murder in which the police consider him an accomplice. (As his brother warns, the affair “may be over for you, but not for her!”) Like several Simenon novels, The Blue Room develops as an official investigation into a man’s past—and yet the protagonist never seems to understand his life better, or more quickly, than the police and psychiatrists who are asking the questions. For him, the most significant aspect of the affair is that the room in which he often met his lover was painted the color of the laundry detergent his mother used when he was a child. The truth of life, Simenon’s characters often conclude, is as significant to them as it is inexpressible to anybody who thinks they know them.

In one of his best late novels, The Neighbors (1967), a middle-class husband becomes obsessed with a woman who moves in next door, staying awake until late at night to hear her making loud, passionate love to her gangster-looking boyfriend; and once this no-longer-tranquil middle-class husband follows her into the unknown streets of her life, the pretensions and formalities he has long relied upon start to break away, leaving him vulnerable, confused and, to some degree, invigorated. In Belle (1952), yet another shut-down middle-class husband learns that someone has raped and strangled his au pair in her downstairs room while his wife was out and he was tidying the kitchen. When the police and neighbors treat him as a suspect, he is insulted—but soon appreciates that others consider him capable of committing monstrous acts. There are many gradations of guilt in Simenon—from the withdrawn unassuming people who only feel guilty about what they might be capable of all the way up to the serial murderer in The Hatter’s Ghosts (1949), who kills both methodically (his chosen method being a cello string) and out of unpredictable spontaneous rage.

Just a list of Simenon’s titles conveys the commonly beleaguered subjectivities of his psychically imperiled men and women. The Reckoning. Red Lights. The Strangers in the House. Black Rain. Strange Inheritance. Last Refuge. Lost Moorings. The Long Exile. Magnet of Doom. Sometimes, this sense of peril refers to the eternal, quotidian strangeness of living next door to anybody you don’t know—such as The People Opposite, or simply The Neighbors. In Simenon’s universe of slippery slopes and shadows emerging from alleys, the biggest worry isn’t simply that the neighbors might be spying on you—it’s even more disturbing when you’re enticed into spying on them.

Preoccupied by secret urges and hidden wrongdoing, Simenon proved strangely oblivious to the horrors that were unfolding in the open all around him. Awaiting the arrival of his first child in Nieul in 1939, Simenon worried about whether he would see “the garden bloom” in time for his son’s birth, and took little notice of the ravings of one Adolf Hitler. (In his memoir he recalls distantly that “a man with a hoarse and commanding voice had been screaming over the radio in a language none of us understood.”) Simenon purported to find mass politics largely oppressive, bourgeois, and predictable. In 1938 he told a journalist, who was inquiring about his support for the monarchist movement: “I love ordinary people, real ones, and I am therefore horrified by democracy.”

It is hard to think of another writer who produced so many “realistic” novels that more or less ignored the seismic upheavals of the day. Who else, having lived through most of the occupation in Paris, could have published a novel entitled Maigret in Vichy (1968), describing an adventure in the famous spa town without any reference to the French collaborationist government? And in one of the very best Maigrets, Signed, Picpus (1944), written and serialized in the mid-forties, Maigret strolls through his standard milieu of Parisian bars and brothels without spotting a single Nazi soldier, or reflecting for one moment on the historical situation in which he finds himself. Instead, Maigret and his fellow Parisians enjoy their normal seasonal routines of taking country holidays and playing cards at the local club.

Even The Train (1961), one of the rare Simenons that actually places characters in a recognizably specific period of history—when Belgians were fleeing the German advance in 1939–40—focuses on a raw simple human relationship that develops between a man and a woman. The Train was based on Simenon’s experience in 1940, when he was assigned by the Belgian government to organize evacuations. It is narrated by a mid-level seller and repairer of radios, who gets separated from his wife and children, and finds himself jammed into a crowded cattle car where he meets and develops an urgent passion for a young Jewish woman. As usual, Simenon never uses his narrative situations to make political statements, or effect political opinions on the part of readers; the narrator’s eventual betrayal of the young woman (when he meets her in the streets of Paris a few months later, he coldly walks away from her request for help, anxious to get back to his safe home) doesn’t ask the reader to condemn him, but rather simply to understand that, by turning his back on the most significant event in his life, he lost a way to the best part of himself. As Simenon’s biographer, Pierre Assouline, wrote, Simenon wasn’t interested in war as an issue of politics or history; he only used it as a setting on which to explore “a personal encounter between man and his destiny.”

His political affiliations were routinely questioned during and after World War II by both partisans and politicians who couldn’t help noticing that Simenon had carried on successfully publishing his novels in occupied Paris throughout the ’40s—not to mention that he was the most often filmed French novelist of the period, especially when it came to working with the German-owned film company Continental. The actress Simone Signoret later noted that “if there was a division among actors, it could only have been between those who agreed to work for the Germans at Continental and those who refused.” Simenon was one of the writers who quite happily agreed.

Simenon was investigated several times for collaboration; while he received a rather shaky exoneration in 1945 (they judged him not to be a traitor, but just a selfish writer), he left France for many years, setting up new homes along the Rio Grande in Texas and, for an especially lengthy stay, in Connecticut, where he wrote some of his greatest “durs,” perhaps because the snowy winters kept him locked away in the house with few distractions.

One of his best Connecticut-set thrillers, The Man on the Bench in the Barn (1968)—now in a new translation from Picador titled The Hand—describes yet another unassuming man who, at a party, spots his wife making love to one of his best friends (who is visiting from abroad); returning home in a snowstorm, their friend gets lost from them, and when the narrator pretends to go out looking, he instead spends some blank time smoking cigarettes in the barn. It’s a perfect example of the Simenon method—set up the situation early, in which the protagonist makes a decision that changes the course of his life, and then wind tight the narrative clock. On each page, the first person narrator feels the authorities encroaching upon the secret truth that is in him. There’s no way out of such a situation for the protagonist—except, of course, to see it through, in Simenon’s words, “to the end.”

In Connecticut, Simenon lived with his secretary Denyse Ouimet, a young woman he had met in New York—a romantic adventure that he wrote about in one of his most autobiographical novels, Three Beds in Manhattan (1946). They married in 1950, a day after his divorce from Tigy came through. By the time he returned permanently to Europe in the mid-fifties, he was growing estranged from both his current and ex-wife; and while he continued moving—from Switzerland to Paris to Épalinges—he quite suddenly quit writing in 1972. He never gave a very clear explanation for why he quit writing so suddenly, but claimed that conflicts with his second ex-wife, who was going in and out of hospitals for alcohol abuse, made it increasingly hard to concentrate.

Simenon was clearly a man who loved to indulge himself, but even his indulgences began to lose their attraction. He cut down on drinking, settled down with a woman in a “small pink house” in Lausanne, Switzerland, and not long after the suicide of his beloved daughter Marie-Jo in 1978, began writing his memoirs, beginning with the large, dense, and fascinating Intimate Memoirs (1981), recalling the endlessly active life of a man who seems capable of forgiving almost anybody for anything, especially himself.

At his best, Simenon turned his forgiving nature on the most dissipated and distressed souls. In his fiction, he expresses continual sympathy for his characters, especially those who represent the most extreme emotions of human life—whether they are isolated, lonely, angry, jealous, passionate, withdrawn, or (more often than not) homicidal. This is probably because, for Simenon, fiction wasn’t a matter of producing good prose or clever imagery and turns of phrase; it was about exploring the inner life of people who might appear simple and common, but who harbored deep and often unrestrainable intensities. When he wrote, Simenon explained, “All the day I am one of my characters. I feel what he feels.” And however horrible, or simply unattractive, they might be, he tried “to make each one of those characters heavy, like a statue, and to be the brother of everybody in the world.”

He was proud to relate that when he encountered or heard from readers, they never spoke “about my beautiful style.… They say, ‘You are the one who understands me.’”

Other cities and states that have found themselves in the same boat are also pushing back. Maine tried to pass a moratorium on new data centers, but Governor Janet Mills vetoed it. Residents in Utah fought a data center before their county board, over objections, approved one the size of Manhattan. In Festus, Missouri, voters took the unusual step of ousting every single City Council member running for reelection who had voted in favor of installing a center near them. (Opponents have also filed a lawsuit, but the facility is going ahead for now.)

Backlash to data centers is everywhere, and it’s growing. But if it’s clear where popular opinion is when it comes to these resource-intensive operations, which often get pushed through in secret, it’s less clear where this is headed politically. After all, not all voters who are angry will unite and take the action that Festus did. Will the anger people feel at Big Tech turn into votes?

In some ways, the anger over data centers is part of a broader trend. People are unhappy about Big Tech’s dominance and the relentless advance of large language models, at least the ones most people come into contact with, such as ChatGPT and Claude. Half of Americans report being more concerned than excited about AI, and they’re particularly worried about its impact on creativity, mental health, and people’s jobs. Despite these worries, and without much evidence of the benefits of LLMs, American workplaces and schools are welcoming them with open arms—and without many guardrails. That’s exactly what AI’s biggest proponents want: more growth without regulation.

Americans, however, want to regulate these companies; majorities of both Republicans and Democrats think the government has done too little on this front. Indeed, some of the backlash against data centers has had to do with whether the facilities have checks on what they can do in the communities they’re in and whether their neighbors have any protections against them. Tales of data centers draining water and raising electricity bills are everywhere.

The first data centers were clustered mostly in urban areas, but most new ones are planned for rural areas, especially in the South and Midwest. These rural locations, where land ranges over broader jurisdictions, can make it difficult to target the decision-makers, but the people in these areas are no less concerned about how AI may affect their communities. The Rural Listening Project from United Today, Stronger Tomorrow, for instance, found that three-quarters of the rural residents it surveyed were worried about the impact AI would have on the political process, and 68 percent were concerned about the impact it would have on local resources, like water.

The surge of data centers popping up may have awakened a giant new political coalition against them. Residents across the country are turning out to normally sleepy county and city meetings in droves to oppose data center proposals. The strength of the opposition may have something to do with how rapidly and secretly these unpopular projects were pushed through. Kate Hess Pace, the executive director of the Indiana organizing group Hoosier Action, said that many of the siting decisions she’s seen in communities around her were made by public entities in private, without much public review. “It did kind of open people’s eyes a little bit to local decision-makers, like, who decided this?”

Pace said that worries over data centers have drawn more of the people in communities she works in into politics, but they’re struggling to find a home. There are scattered Democratic candidates trying to define what responsible AI growth should look like, and how Americans should be protected from the fallout, but neither party has made it part of their pitch so far in the midterms. Politicians generally, both Democrats and Republicans, say they want to save Americans from paying more in energy costs because of them, but they haven’t done anything. For the most part, the decision-making has been happening on the local level, and those demonstrating leadership on the issue are mainly local politicians and leaders.

So far, the Democratic Party has centered its midterm pitch to voters around affordability issues, addressing the high cost of everything from housing to gas, caused in part by the Trump administration’s policy chaos. Many of the anxieties around artificial intelligence are similar and related, including future job security and families’ rising energy costs. As of yet, however, voters haven’t seen a plan that ties all of these issues together in a way that addresses their concerns, and they don’t know what that could look like. David Dodge of the Rural Listening Project said that many of the rural voters they spoke with wanted tech companies to be held accountable but have little faith that their government will do so. “They don’t trust the people in power to do the right thing,” he said, and don’t believe they’ll “actually make a difference.”  

Coupled with a growing wariness over how big companies behave, that doubt actually provides an opportunity. It gives Democrats an opening to champion issues related to class, corporate power, and affordability with voters who are increasingly angry about the status quo. While a few Republicans, notably Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, have proposed regulations, the Trump administration has largely pushed deregulation and even tried to keep states from passing their own rules. That leaves the field open for Democrats to define an agenda that addresses voters’ concerns and protects them from the future harms from both AI and data centers—and potentially turn some of the swelling anger into support at the polls.

That was a cool 18 months ago. But then came this innocent question: “Will politics bring it back to Earth?” America’s pervy politics did not disappoint. Back to earth the economy plummeted—and then lower still, into the current Trumpian basement. As of late April, Americans feel worse off economically than we have in the last 25 years.

Remember when 16 Nobel Prize–winning economists, including Joseph Stiglitz, signed a letter warning that Donald Trump would fire up inflation? “Americans are concerned about inflation, which has come down remarkably fast,” they wrote. “Donald Trump will reignite this inflation, with his fiscally irresponsible budgets.” They were right. But that was the summer that God was stumping for freshly felonious Trump. Screw the brainiacs. JD Vance waved away their predictions in his vice presidential debate with Tim Walz. Economists, Vance said, “have Ph.D.s, but they don’t have common sense and they don’t have wisdom.”

Vibes, then. Hunches. Vance added, “We’re going to get back to that commonsense wisdom so that you can afford to live the American dream again.”

And so, just weeks after both the Economist report and Vance’s dismissal of all of economics, American voters put Trump back in the White House, where in short order he crashed the U.S. economy like a SpaceX rocket.

From his tariff jamborees to his daft warmongering, Trump’s caprices have now thoroughly degraded daily life in these United States, bringing us high inflation, rising gas prices, and sluggish economic growth. It further turns out that siccing a masked and armed police force on expats, foreign nationals, and immigrants demoralizes a nation and squeezes the labor supply.

Now the economic experts, the ones JD says lack common sense, are seeing something truly dystopic: a global loss of faith in the U.S. According to former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, foreign governments and institutions just aren’t betting on us anymore. A collapse in demand for U.S. Treasury bonds would leave the Fed as the only major buyer, which could trigger a so-called “doom loop”—a vicious spiral in which the U.S. government holds its own debt. This would spike both inflation and the national debt, which already stands at a desperately high $38.5 trillion, and counting. No wonder gold is still going up; bears are retreating from the catastrophic damage Trump has done to the dollar and America’s reputation as a solid investment.

Not long ago, former Attorney General Pam Bondi bellowed about the Dow to distract from Trump’s starring role in the Epstein files. Since Trump started his war in Iran, the notion that the S&P 500 is chugging along on AI madness and manic data-center buildouts is cold comfort to Americans facing a 17.9 percent surge in energy costs. Core inflation, which was 3 percent when Trump took office in 2025, hit 3.8 last month.

And that’s before we crank back in vibes. Bad vibes are our biggest product these days. We now churn out vague despair like our grandfathers built cars. We had that unjustified “vibecession” in the economic heyday of 2024, but now we’ve vibed our way into actual financial suffering, as Republicans have ceded the economy to Trump’s recklessness.

Consumer confidence is at an all-time low. A new CNN poll found that 77 percent of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, say Trump’s policies have spiked the cost of living in their communities. According to the recent University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers, some 69 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of inflation and prices. No wonder Trump’s approval rating stands at 30 percent on the economy as a whole, a career low.

Consumers and investors can lose confidence in an economy for a number of reasons, and our faith in the future is often independent of actual inflation numbers. But crises of confidence can be self-fulfilling. As we squirrel away money against inflation, real or imagined, the economy stagnates.

John Maynard Keynes called consumer confidence “animal spirits.” Confidence and animal spirits are not just about shopping sprees; they’re the public’s life force. Keynes noted that animal spirits in a population can be fickle and unpredictable, bipolar. When they are high, people are courageous and forward-looking; we’re inspired to take action, improve our lives, leave home, make changes. Other times we’re scared and bed rotting. The future seems expensive and bleak, not worth the bother.

That’s where we are now, down with the blues. Infuriatingly, this mood comes a year and a half after the U.S. economy was going great and self-sabotaging voters decided to do it in. Unlike in 2024, this time the facts have joined up with the prevailing mood. Nobel economists are in sync with common sense, and the numbers are in sync with the vibes. Trump insisted, over and over, that Biden’s economy was “failing” in 2024, when it was in fact the envy of the world. Then he came into office and showed everybody what failing really is.

These aren’t exactly barn-burning statements. The latter is only scandalizing, to some, because he was referring to Trump’s odds of winning in 2024. (He was, of course, wrong.) On practically every other level, Cornyn is about as orthodox a neoconservative as they come—trafficking the same revanchist, free-market dogma as decades of Republicans before him. (After the U.S. Supreme Court decision to repeal Roe v. Wade, for instance, he tweeted, “Now do Plessy vs Ferguson/Brown vs Board of Education.”) But in his 24 years as senator—six of which were spent as Republican whip, the second-highest ranking position in the Senate Republican Conference—the ground has shifted beneath his feet.

This isn’t to say the party “left him,” as other longtime politicians have lately complained. If anything, Cornyn has gone great lengths to keep with the times, and in an increasingly cloying manner. On May 12, he introduced a bill to rename U.S. Highway 287 “Interstate 47,” in honor of Trump’s term as the forty-seventh president. A day prior, he downplayed his previous opposition to lifting the federal gas and diesel tax after Trump floated the idea to combat costs due to his war in the Gulf. And online, the septuagenarian frequently rails against Democrats with “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

It’s all somewhat undignified, but these are undignifying times. In any case, these self-flagellations weren’t enough. On May 19—already a day into early voting—Trump endorsed Paxton, christening him a “true MAGA Warrior.” “John Cornyn is a good man, and I worked well with him,” Trump continued, “but he was not supportive of me when times were tough.”

Trump had been uncharacteristically quiet about who he supported leading up to his last-minute endorsement. In early March, The Atlantic claimed Republican strategists “expected” him to endorse Cornyn. (It wasn’t the first rather convenient rumor of this sort.) While Cornyn has far outraised his opponent, the latest poll from the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs shows Cornyn trailing Paxton by three points. With Trump’s (albeit late) endorsement, Paxton likely has the momentum needed to clinch the primary. Before the March primary, he endorsed more than 130 Republican candidates across Texas; most of them won.

Paxton is, according to the aforementioned ad, “the conservative fighter they couldn’t cancel.” The “they” here refers to a sizable cohort within the Texas Republican Party—and maybe his ex-wife, state Senator Angela Paxton, who divorced him last July “on biblical grounds” (i.e., adultery). When it comes to the general election against the Democrats’ choirboy, James Talarico, most polls agree that Paxton is weaker than Cornyn, due largely to all of the former’s dirty laundry.

In 2015, less than a year into his first term as attorney general, Paxton was indicted on securities fraud charges. In 2020, seven of his most senior staff members accused him of “abuse of office, bribery and other potential criminal offenses.” A couple years later, he was impeached by a Republican supermajority state legislature, only to be narrowly saved by the state Senate. In 2023, federal prosecutors tried picking up where the impeachment left off, but weeks before Trump took office, the Department of Justice decided against pursuing charges. One might think this record would damage him in the eyes of voters—and in fact, Cornyn’s cohort is banking on it—but, as Paxton’s campaign website states (directly above a photo of himself with Trump), “He’s taken the hits and kept fighting,” again and again and again.

Last March, in an excellent Texas Monthly piece, Christopher Hooks argued Trump’s silence surrounding the Senate primary “may have set in motion a subtle shift in the way Republicans here think about [Trump] and plan for the post-Trump era.” Whereas a decade ago Trump was the insurgent candidate bulldozing the Republican establishment, today he is the party establishment, and “a short-termer, if not yet a lame duck.” Come November, the race against Talarico may actually prove competitive; it may have made more sense for a president approaching the midterms to fall in with the more palatable candidate—to prioritize “electability,” broadly construed—but that would’ve snubbed the very crowd Trump relied on to consolidate power.

In a state that has for years represented the bleeding edge of the conservative movement, the MAGA coalition hasn’t exactly frayed so much as adjusted based on the signals it received from the grassroots, and those signals, slowly but surely, are falling out of alignment with what Trump necessarily needs. In endorsing Paxton, he fell back on the fact that Cornyn had doubted his ability to bounce back after losing the 2020 election. Even so, it’s unclear whether Trump is tailing his own base in this case; choosing Paxton satisfies the party’s faithful and energizes the activists on the ground, but also carries consequences that will outlast his term as president.

While powerful in its own right—and supercharged in recent years—the Texas Office of Attorney General is, for the most part, a springboard to other roles in government. Before reaching the Senate, Cornyn himself left a cushy job on Texas’s Supreme Court for the office, where he stayed from 1999 to 2002, only to be replaced by Greg Abbott, who held the role from 2002 until sweeping into the governor’s office in 2015. Together, Abbott and Paxton contorted the role into a hyper-disruptive arm of conservative lawfare, incubating future candidates like Senator Ted Cruz and training the next generation of federal judges. (Paxton boasts about having sued the Biden administration “over 100 times.”)

In between cudgeling Texas’s Democrat-led cities into compliance, however, Paxton has also targeted the “legal frameworks” established by former state Attorney General Cornyn. A recent analysis by the Texas Observer showed Paxton overruling Cornyn’s opinion that gave discretion for demographics to be considered in higher education, which of course elicited a “sprawling” screed on so-called DEI. Soon thereafter, he withdrew Cornyn’s 2001 opinion making room for noncitizens to get occupational licenses; Paxton accused him of having “put Texans last by rolling out the red carpet for the invasion of our state.”

Democrats haven’t won a statewide seat in Texas for over thirty years; that this so-called “invasion” of Texas has apparently continued under their watch is invariably blamed on other figures, local and national. But more recently, the target of Republicans’ ire has been other Republicans—and whether they’ve gone far enough.

While the issue of immigration has somewhat faded in importance among Texas voters, the goalposts among Republican leaders have shifted toward new and old fears of “Islamification,” mirroring the split within the MAGA movement surrounding H-1B visas, which allow employers to hire foreign workers for “specialty occupations.” H-1B visas have, improbably, reared their head as an issue among the candidates for the Texas Railroad Commission, the state’s oil regulator, though of course they aren’t within the office’s purview. Not for nothing, H-1B visas were a policy of George Bush Sr., signed into law in 1990. One generation of Republicans created the “problem” that the latest one now wants to fix.

In late April, a Republican strategist spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity to assess the Texas Senate race. In their view, it was “a mess,” and a “failure by multiple entities to do their part.”

I’d argue that failure is part of its function. The beating heart of right-wing activism in Texas has for years relied on the animus created in reaction to the region’s rapacious appetite for growth to deepen its base. When there isn’t a Democrat to blame, the ire turns toward “Republicans in name only,” which is applied mostly to the veterans of the Bush era, and more recently toward the Tea Party elite like Ted Cruz, who still appears to be licking his wounds after Tucker Carlson’s thrashing on his podcast over Israel and the war in Iran. Notably, Cruz’s positions in that interview aren’t far off from the Trump administration’s official policy—that is, supporting Israel and protracting the war in Iran. (Cruz opted not to endorse either Senate hopeful, but as a Tea Party firebrand, he hasn’t always seen eye to eye with Cornyn.)

For decades, Texas’s political class got rich off the fat forked over by oil magnates and technocapitalists, real estate moguls and logistics empires. It overlooked most of its residents’ living conditions in favor of tax incentives aimed at enticing international investment. But the secret to their success was—and still is—their willingness to eat their own. With Trump’s endorsement backing his base and cutting against strategists’ conventional wisdom, the hope may be it acts as an offering to keep hungry mouths at bay.

* This post has been updated.

Thinking the email must be a prank, they sent a screenshot to a group chat with their best friends. “Look what Marcus is trying to do to mess with us!” Carpenter wrote. Silva was the ex-husband of another of their close friends, Lauren. For years they had heard stories of his abusive behavior, from verbal insults to going through her phone and hiding her car keys. The previous summer, Lauren had finally decided to divorce him. Then, as she was preparing to leave, she discovered she was pregnant. Terrified of being trapped in the relationship, she asked Noyola and Carpenter to help her obtain abortion pills. Over the years, Silva had made it clear he disliked his wife’s friends. So they weren’t surprised that, even after his divorce was finalized, he was still trying to harass them.

A reply popped up in the group chat. “Where are y’all right now? Don’t leave!!” one of their friends instructed. “This is real.” Googling around, she had found out that the emails weren’t a stunt at all; Silva really had filed a lawsuit. “Jackie Noyola and Amy Carpenter assisted … in murdering Mr. Silva’s unborn child with illegally obtained abortion pills,” the court papers read. The lawsuit contained snippets of conversations taken from Lauren’s phone, such as information about Aid Access—a telemedicine website the suit described as “a criminal organization that illegally ships abortion pills into Texas”—that Noyola had sent to her. Silva was being represented by Jonathan Mitchell, a notorious conservative attorney. Texas law prevents women from being sued for accessing abortion, so the two friends were named as the defendants.

“We just started spiraling,” Carpenter said. “There were documents out there with ‘murder’ written next to our names.” The pair knew that many of their work clients and co-workers leaned to the right, and they began to worry about how the suit could affect them professionally. Silva was seeking one million dollars. He had filed in Galveston County, a region known for a conservative court system that could well be sympathetic to him.

The women gathered their stuff and hurried home. For the next two weeks, they didn’t leave their houses, hoping to avoid being served papers while in a boardroom or client meeting. In between remote work, they compulsively scoured local news and social media, trying to gauge the atmosphere. It was surreal to see their private friendships splashed across the internet.

“The lengths that he took to basically inconvenience our lives were pretty shocking,” Carpenter said about Silva. “And the law gave him the power to do that,” Noyola added.

Four years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the anti-abortion movement has launched a fresh battle—this time, against the women using telemedicine to get abortion pills. These services have transformed access to reproductive health care—not just in states with abortion restrictions, but for pregnant people across the entire United States. Despite the Dobbs ruling, telemedicine helped overall U.S. abortion numbers slightly increase, from 1.124 million in 2024 to 1.126 million in 2025.

Medication abortion now accounts for roughly two-thirds of all procedures and, at least in theory, can be accessed by anyone with a Wi-Fi connection and mailing address. The immense success of this health care innovation means that conservatives now see it as the main hurdle in their battle against abortion—and lawsuits like the one Carpenter and Noyola were served are a key weapon in their arsenal. In December 2025, Texas passed a bill allowing private citizens to sue out-of-state providers who send abortion medication into the state, in a direct challenge to the “shield laws” passed elsewhere to protect such providers from prosecution. In May, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals briefly suspended the provision of mifepristone by telemedicine, in response to a legal attempt in Louisiana to force the Food and Drug Administration to require in-person assessments. (Later, the Supreme Court temporarily restored access.) Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is seeking an injunction against the nonprofit Aid Access and a California doctor, Rémy Coey­taux, and has also sent cease-and-desist notices to Coey­taux and two other online pill resources, Plan C and Her Safe Harbor. In addition to Louisiana, two other red states have filed cases against the FDA: Florida is seeking to end nationwide access to mifepristone by withdrawing FDA approval; and Missouri wants to invalidate every FDA policy decision on mifepristone except the original approval more than 25 years ago.

On top of these efforts, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has ordered a safety review of mifepristone, which scientists worry will be politicized, and in March 2026, Senator Josh Hawley introduced a bill that would strip mifepristone of its FDA approval, ban its use for pregnancy termination, and create a pathway for women to sue its manufacturer. Although criminalizing women for taking abortion pills has long been a red line that conservatives said they would never cross, even this pledge appears to be cracking: In March, a 31-year-old woman from Georgia was charged with murder for taking abortion pills.

One leading figure in Texas’s battle against “pills by mail” is Mitchell, the lawyer who represented Silva. A onetime clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, Mitchell is also among the architects of the pre-Dobbs “Texas heartbeat act,” which gave citizens the power to sue health care professionals in the state who provided abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. In his private practice, Mitchell has launched multiple lawsuits on behalf of individuals against those who have “aided and abetted” terminations.

A frequent argument, which can be spotted in Mitchell’s filings as well as in the various recent House bills and state lawsuits, is that the pills are harmful to women. Hawley has used evidence from a non-peer-reviewed study by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank, to assert that women need to be “protected” from the medication. The study claimed that 11 percent of women experience “adverse effects,” but it appears to have included normal side effects such as bleeding in this category. Louisiana’s case against the FDA, which is supported by the Alliance Defending Freedom and led to May’s temporary telemedicine ban, has been brought on behalf of a woman who claims that her boyfriend forced her to take the pills. And two of Mitchell’s recent cases allege that men used the medication to coerce their partners or ex-partners into abortions.

“Private lawsuits are the best promise to really overcome these shield laws,” said John Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life, when I spoke to him in March. The public should expect more such cases in the coming months, he added. According to him, the pills aren’t dangerous only for the women who order them: “They are dangerous because they are empowering some of the worst guys out there.”

However, reproductive rights advocates claim the opposite is true: that the types of lawsuits being spearheaded by figures such as Mitchell are giving abusive men a new weapon to harass and control their partners. Those men are being enabled and empowered by both politicians and courts.

Carpenter, Noyola, and Silva’s ex-wife, Lauren, worked together at the same Houston bookkeeping firm. (Lauren is not her real name; TNR is using a pseudonym to protect her identity as a survivor.) Over the years, they became a tight-knit trio of best friends, organizing trips, celebrating holidays together, and taking turns watching one another’s kids. When they weren’t working or hanging out, the three texted constantly, discussing TV shows or dissecting the latest Taylor Swift release. Sometimes, Lauren used these conversations to vent about her husband’s volatile behavior. According to court documents, he often insulted and belittled her, and he tried to control how frequently she left the house and with whom she spent time. Silva was unemployed—Lauren was the sole provider for him and their two children—and he would get jealous of the time she spent at the office and demand access to her phone. She confided in her friends that she was continuing the relationship for the sake of her kids and feared being trapped in the abusive cycle forever.

Everything came to a head in April 2022, when she decided to bring Silva along to a company picnic. “He got extremely, belligerently drunk, and we ended up having to call the cops on him,” Carpenter remembered. He screamed that Lauren was a “slut” and an “unfit mother,” and he began insulting her friends. That night, he was arrested but not held. According to Carpenter and Noyola, the incident was the catalyst his wife needed to finally leave. In May 2022, she filed for divorce. The couple were still living together at the same address, however, and in early July Lauren discovered she was pregnant.

She and her friends texted as they always did. At one point, Carpenter asked Lauren what she wanted to do. “Not questioning if this is what needs to happen, I know it does,” she replied. She was scared she would never leave the relationship if she didn’t terminate, she explained. Texas had passed its “heartbeat act” almost one year earlier, and the atmosphere was thick with confusion about the options available to someone who wanted an abortion. The clinic that had previously stood down the road from their office was now closed. Noyola reached out to an old college friend—Aracely Garcia, who was named in the suit as a third defendant—who she knew was active in women’s rights circles. She soon learned that there were still ways to access pills in Houston. “If I don’t have to travel that would make things so much easier,” Lauren wrote. On July 14, 2022, she took the pills. “Your help means the world to me,” she texted her friends. “I’m so lucky to have y’all. Really.”

Unbeknownst to her, Silva had twice rifled through her purse, and found both the text messages and then the first of the pills. Rather than try to stop her from terminating the pregnancy, he quietly photographed the conversations and placed everything back where he found it. On July 18, he went to the local police department to file a report. “He told me he knew,” Lauren texted her friends, distraught. “Now he’s using that against me and saying he will send me to jail if I don’t do what he wants.” Silva was demanding that she sell the house and give him primary custody of their kids.

The woman pushed ahead with the divorce, which was finalized in February 2023. A month later, Silva filed his suit. Although Lauren could not be sued directly, she was subpoenaed in the case against her friends, and the papers contained plenty of inflammatory language about her. (She successfully fought the subpoena.) Details about her private life were now completely public.

Experts who worked on the case are clear about the lawsuit’s goals. “My impression was always that this was never really a wrongful death lawsuit,” said Kendall Speer, an attorney who represented Noyola and Carpenter. “He wasn’t really suing for the injury of losing his unborn child. His goal was always to hurt his former spouse and her friends.”

It’s not just friends or family members in the firing lines of Mitchell’s cases. Another recent lawsuit names the California doctor Coey­taux as a defendant. The case has been filed at federal level, presenting a direct challenge to the state’s shield laws. It has also become a cause célèbre among anti-abortion advocates, who say it is proof that pills by mail can enable abusers. The plaintiff is Jerry Rodriguez, a 57-year-old man from the Houston suburbs, who says his girlfriend became pregnant in July 2024, one month after they started dating. According to the papers, her estranged husband, Adam Garza—they were separated but not divorced—was displeased. He purchased abortion pills for her online from Dr. Coey­taux, the lawsuit alleges, and pressured her to take them at her mother’s house.

Rodriguez’s girlfriend got pregnant again in late October 2024, and Rodriguez claims that Garza gave her pills yet again, this time when she was three months along. By the time Rodriguez filed the suit, in July 2025, the woman was pregnant once more, this time two months along, and he was seeking an injunction to stop Garza from giving her more pills.

The woman and her family, whom TNR is choosing not to name, said they cannot comment while the case is ongoing. However, a police report from neighboring Harris County, as first reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, shines a light on a different side of the story. At 9:30 p.m. on October 29, 2024, officers were called to a medical center in Webster, a small town on the southeastern outskirts of Houston, to interview Rodriguez’s girlfriend. They noted that she had cuts and scratches across her chest and face, as well as red marks on her neck consistent with strangulation. She told them she had been with Rodriguez at a local motel, where he noticed that she was wearing a new set of nails. Growing angry, he grabbed her by the throat and slammed her to the ground, then throttled and repeatedly punched her. When he went to the bathroom, she managed to escape, running down the road to shelter in a nearby Waffle House. Over the past five months, she explained to the officers, Rodriguez had strangled her eight times and threatened to kill her, promising her that she would be “his 15th kill.” As the officers noted in their report, he had a previous domestic abuse conviction from 2006.

According to the woman’s public Facebook posts, she gave birth to a baby in February 2026. The following month, court filings show, she sued Rodriguez for child custody and was granted a temporary restraining order. A recent social media update shows her standing next to Garza, the estranged husband who allegedly forced her to take the pills, gazing at him while looking happy and radiant. “He’s still the first one I call if I’m in need of help, advice, or need to vent,” she wrote. “So thanks, Ad. For just being you. A genuinely good father, friend and man.”

Silva and Rodriguez aren’t the only plaintiffs of Mitchell’s who have been accused of mistreating their partners. In 2024, Mitchell submitted a petition on behalf of a Texas man, Collin Davis, requesting the power to investigate his former partner’s trip to access an out-of-state abortion in Colorado. The woman’s lawyer described her relationship with Davis as “toxic and harmful.”

Other previous cases of Mitchell’s include at least seven petitions targeting abortion funds, providers, and women’s health researchers. Paxton, the Texas attorney general, cited a lawsuit of Mitchell’s in his indictments. That case, filed last August in Corpus Christi, was on behalf of a 37-year-old woman called Liana Davis, who said her boyfriend had spiked her drink with the pills. So far, none of Mitchell’s suits have been successful. Marc Hearron, a lawyer at the Center for Reproductive Rights who is representing Coey­taux, predicts that the latest won’t be either. “These are crazy cases,” Hearron said. “These are not how wrongful death is supposed to be used.” To prove a wrongful death, he explained, “you need to have a wrongful act.” To get around this, Mitchell is trying to resurrect the Comstock Act, a dormant nineteenth-century “chastity” law that prohibited mailing any type of “obscene” material, including birth control, pornography, and sex toys. But even if these cases aren’t seeing results in the courtroom, they are still making an impact. The National Domestic Violence Hotline found, in a 2024 survey, that hundreds of survivors said their partners had threatened to sue them or call the police if they had an abortion.

Mitchell did not respond to a request for comment for this article. In previous interviews, however, he has claimed that he is not an anti-abortion activist; rather, he simply wants to challenge the Supreme Court’s authority. Hearron is skeptical of this argument. “It’s clearly ideological,” he said. Take the example of Davis, whose drink was allegedly spiked. “There’s a clear tort there for harm to the woman’s body, but he didn’t bring that claim,” he explained. Instead, Mitchell sued for wrongful death of the fetus.

The cases represent an acceleration of a tactic that has been brewing for years. In 2019, Ryan Magers, a 19-year-old Alabama man, made headlines around the world when a judge allowed him to sue a local women’s health clinic on behalf of his ex-girlfriend’s aborted fetus—the first time such a decision was allowed. “I’m here for the men who actually want to have their baby,” Magers said when announcing the lawsuit. The father of his ex-girlfriend, who was only 16 when she became pregnant, spoke anonymously to The Washington Post, saying the family was “distraught” over the case. He explained that she was no longer with Magers, who was unemployed, and that he had been pressuring her to have sex.

The case was eventually dismissed, but it still managed to catch the attention of another man, Mario Villegas, from Arizona, whose wife at the time had been prescribed abortion pills by a clinic in 2018, according to reporting by ProPublica. Villegas reached out to Magers’s lawyer, Brent Helms, and was put in touch with a local attorney. In 2020, he opened an estate in the name of “baby Villegas” and launched a copycat case, suing the clinic for wrongful death.

According to court records, the woman had told the clinic that her relationship with Villegas was unstable, and alleged that her then-husband had even accompanied her to some appointments. Although most of the counts have now been dismissed, the woman’s lawyers still declined to discuss the case on record, citing ongoing fears for her safety.

Experts warned at the time that lawsuits like these could become more common, and that they could be used by men to harass their ex-partners. As similar cases stack up in county courts and make their way into attorney generals’ statements, these predictions appear to be coming true.

The “abortion pill” is actually two separate pills: mifepristone and misoprostol. The first must be swallowed whole. Then, one or two days later, the misoprostol is taken, either dissolved in the cheek, under the tongue, or inserted into the vagina. After around one to four hours, the woman will begin to bleed, much like a miscarriage, and the pregnancy will end.

Misoprostol, which was originally developed in 1973 to treat peptic ulcers, was labeled as unsafe for pregnant women, as its side effects included miscarriage and uterine contractions. At some point in the late 1980s, women in Brazil—where abortion was and still is illegal—realized that these side effects could come in handy for ending unwanted pregnancies. A whisper network of sorts developed, and doctors soon noticed that the numbers of women coming to the emergency room with hemorrhaging and infections from unsafe home abortions had dramatically dropped.

Mifepristone, its sister drug, was developed in the 1980s by French pharmaceutical company Roussel-Uclaf, with the express purpose of finding a safe, noninvasive alternative to surgical abortion. It was approved by the FDA in 2000. When taken together, the two medications are up to 98 percent effective at ending pregnancies up to eight weeks. Doctors are usually licensed to prescribe them only in the first trimester, although they can also work if taken later. Because misoprostol is used in treating other medical ailments, most of the current legal attacks are targeted at mifepristone.

Together, these two pills have transformed access to abortion, both across the United States and in other countries where women and pregnant people face restrictions to terminations. In 2005, the Dutch physician Rebecca Gomperts launched the nonprofit Women on Web, the world’s first telemedicine abortion service, which ships the pills worldwide—including to countries where abortion is outlawed. Patients must first fill out an online consultation form, then a multilingual help desk guides them through the process. Multiple studies have found that telemedicine is just as safe and effective for providing care to women seeking medical abortions as in-person doctor visits. After the court of appeals briefly blocked the mailing of mifepristone in May, many remote providers pledged either to carry on providing the drug until the legislation played out or to switch to prescribing misoprostol only.

Despite this evidence, many countries resisted introducing telemedicine, concerned that in-person appointments were important safeguards for estimating gestational age. In the United States, throughout the 2000s and 2010s, women were required to collect the first of the two pills from a medical clinic. This all changed during the Covid-19 pandemic. In April 2021, the Biden administration allowed women to access the pills remotely for the first time, siding with a judge’s ruling that the in-person laws were putting women in danger. Medical practitioners soon found that health outcomes were the same as when pills were dispensed in person. The policy was still in place when the Dobbs decision led to the overturn of Roe in the summer of 2022. Massachusetts quickly passed a “shield law,” which protects health care providers who send the medication across state lines, followed by California that September. Today, eight states have shield laws that include protections for telehealth providers. Collectives of activists and health providers—such as Aid Access, the U.S. offshoot of Women on Web—have partnered with clinicians and pharmacies in shield states to create services for women in red states.

Anti-abortion advocates are now coordinating multipronged attacks on the medication, providers, and those who may need to take it. Twenty-five Republican members of Congress have asked the Environmental Protection Agency to investigate whether the drug could be contaminating the water supply, and Representative Mary Miller of Illinois has drafted legislation that would require women to use “catch kits” when using the drug to end a pregnancy, rather than flushing the remains away.

“We really need to approach this issue like we do the opioid crisis, where there is consensus that this is doing damage to individuals,” Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life, told me on a Zoom call. “We actually have policies that are being completely ignored.” According to him, shield laws are “helping sabotage the enforcement of valid legislation in other jurisdictions.” Although he said he supports the various challenges to mifepristone that are being brought to the FDA, he also wants to see the dormant Comstock Act enforced—the same demand Mitchell makes in his lawsuits. “We have a federal piece of legislation that says mailing abortifacients is illegal, and the federal government has just decided not to enforce that law,” Seago explained.

The organization has put out calls on social media for women “harmed” by abortion, or those related to them, to launch civil suits against abortion providers. “We assist those who are seeking [these cases], make sure they’re connected with the right attorneys and legal resources,” he said, although he denied having assisted with any of the cases that have been brought to date. Because the shield laws make it hard for officials to bring criminal proceedings against providers, Seago believes civil cases are the best way forward.

He mentioned the cases brought by Mitchell’s plaintiffs Rodriguez and Davis as examples of how pills by mail can be used to force women into abortions against their will. “This is the kind of evil we are allowing when we say all that is required to get abortion pills in the mail is a credit card,” he said. “There’s no medical oversight.” He’s not the only anti-abortion advocate to cite such concerns. The Heritage Foundation has published reports on “abortion pills, coercion and abuse,” and the nationwide 40 Days for Life campaign has created an interactive map of “forced abortion scumbags,” tracking cases around the world where men have been prosecuted for administering abortion pills without consent.

I asked Seago what steps can be taken to ensure that these private suits are not abused by men to harass or humiliate their ex-partners. “We haven’t seen any of those types of cases,” he said. “We put in law that her name can’t be public, that her identifying information cannot be public in these cases, because we really want to make sure that the focus is never to do her harm.” Legal experts confirmed that Texas’s December 2025 bill, which allowed individuals to sue out-of-state pill providers, does indeed contain a clause that the woman cannot be named. They stressed, however, that this won’t necessarily stop cases from being weaponized by abusers. “The woman’s name is often likely to be leaked,” a spokesperson from the Center for Reproductive Rights said. “The media attention is part of the larger strategy to scare people away from accessing care.”

Around once or twice a week, Susan (not her real name), a 63-year-old retired ob-gyn, sits down at her Massachusetts kitchen table at around 7 a.m. and starts sifting through her emails, reviewing medical forms filled out by people from all over the United States who have requested abortion pills by mail. Some have come to her through a resource website such as Plan C, some through Reddit or ChatGPT, and some have even spotted a sticker pasted in a public bathroom. She checks their age—Massachusetts law dictates that the pills can be supplied only to those who are over 16—tries to understand how far along they are, and then reads through their medical history.

If all looks OK, she hits “approve.” Another team member then orders the pills from the pharmaceutical company, a different person processes the payment, and a fourth takes the discreet white envelope to the post office. Two weeks later, the patient will get a follow-up email to check whether everything’s OK and to gather feedback. The entire process is split between different individuals to make it harder to identify those involved. Some days, Susan might have a quiet shift; other days, she’s glued to her screen until bedtime.

Susan is one of five prescribing clinicians at The Map, a telemedicine abortion service founded by Cambridge Reproductive Health Consultants shortly after Massachusetts passed its shield law in summer 2022. The name was purposefully chosen to be innocuous. The organization briefly switched to misoprostol-only prescriptions after May’s ruling, and will do the same in the face of any other challenges to the supply of mifepristone. “I’ve always provided abortions because I thought that was my job,” Susan said. She described Donald Trump’s first 2016 election, however, as “a bonk on the head that things were starting to look grim.”

Angel Foster, a professor at the University of Ottawa and The Map’s M.D., said the team has cared for almost 50,000 patients since officially launching in September 2023. Around one-third of these are in Texas. People don’t feel threatened by the recent lawsuits coming out of red states, Foster said. Rather, the media coverage has led to an increase in those seeking the services. “Suddenly more people realize that you can get an abortion this way in Texas,” she said. The multiple anti-abortion laws that Texas has introduced, and the hastiness with which some were written, mean that the team deals with patients confused about their rights and the legalities “every single day.” “For most people, when they hear that something is illegal, they think it’s illegal to do it, not that it’s just illegal to provide it,” she said.

The process is no different than when she was working in a brick-and-mortar clinic, Susan said. “In some ways it’s even more accessible,” she added, “because the clinics were often few and far between, and often had long waiting times.” Foster said that, while the profile of most patients is similar to what health care professionals have always seen, there has been an increase in inquiries from rural areas of red states, as well as from women who already have four or more children. “We think these folks were unable to get abortion care prior to Dobbs because they just couldn’t get to a clinic or couldn’t do multiple visits,” she said.

It’s standard for clinicians to ask screening questions to check whether the patient is ordering pills for themselves and is not being coerced. “I’m not looking them in the eye or seeing who they show up with, so maybe it’s a little harder to ascertain than before,” Susan said. “I would say the opposite scenario is far more common—they’re not allowed to seek an abortion even if they want one, or they’re being coerced into sex, or they’re having their birth control sabotaged.” A survey by The Map found that 8 percent of their patients had experienced intimate partner violence during the pregnancy they terminated. The team regularly receive thank-you messages from women telling them that the service helped them leave an abusive relationship.

Back in Texas, Sonia Corrales, the deputy CEO of the domestic violence nonprofit Houston Area Women’s Center, has seen multiple examples of the relationship between reproductive freedom and gender-based abuse throughout her 34-year career. “Every day we see how domestic abuse is about power and control,” she said. “We hear story after story where survivors are telling us their abusers are sabotaging their birth control, they’re forcing pregnancy through sexual violence.”

They also hear stories of survivors being forced into abortions they didn’t want, she said, but she stressed that it’s important to look at the overall picture. Abuse is about “preventing somebody from having control over their bodies or making choices about their bodies,” she said. “And when you have laws that remove any kind of access, then that dynamic is strengthened.” A landmark study on the life outcomes of abortion patients found that accessing terminations was associated with a long-term decrease in experiences of intimate partner violence, while carrying the pregnancy to term was not.

Jennifer Holland, the author of Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement, explained that activists have always painted abortion as dangerous for women, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The idea of coerced abortion—be it at the hands of partners, families, or providers—has been present in their arguments for decades. “There’s a deep-rooted belief that motherhood is women’s God-ordained role,” she said. “It’s this idea that women always want to be mothers, and anything that interrupts that cannot have come from the woman herself.” The possibility that a woman could freely choose an abortion goes against core beliefs about who women are.

After the initial shock and uncertainty, the local district attorney confirmed that the state would not be pursuing criminal charges in Noyola and Carpenter’s case. The two friends countersued Silva for invasion of privacy. They were gearing up to face him in a criminal trial, set for October 2024, when he and Mitchell dropped the claim just a few days before proceedings were due to start. The relief that it was finally over was mixed with disappointment at not getting their day in court. “We wanted to put him in the losing chair—not just him, but all these losers and abusers—and be like, no, you are not going to win,” Noyola said. “It was pretty upsetting,” added Carpenter. “He just got to cause all that trouble for nothing.”

Although Garcia, who was named as a third co-defendant for having helped supply the pills, did not respond to a request for interview, she released a statement at the time. “I have been an abortion advocate and a resource to my community for over 10 years,” it read. “I don’t intend to ever abandon my cause or my home state of Texas no matter how much the state and others try to intimidate us.”

While life has mostly returned to normal for the two friends, one thing has irreversibly changed: their relationship with Lauren. As soon as proceedings started, the two were told by their lawyers to avoid contact with her—a standard process during litigation, to avoid the accidental creation of new evidence—and, if they did speak, to make sure the conversation was recorded. Lauren left their company soon after the lawsuit was dropped.

Although the pair’s case may be settled, the confusion over how and where to access an abortion remains a daily struggle for women in Texas. The patchwork of laws and various regulations is confusing at best, terrifying at worst. At one point in our conversation, Carpenter admitted that she almost stopped herself from Googling “Texas abortion laws” as we talked. “I was like, ‘Oh no, I probably shouldn’t do that,’” she said. “It’s these little things that affect you.” “It’s not just placing fear on the people who are obtaining it, it’s placing fear on the people helping provide it,” Noyola added. “I know of situations where people have had to go across the border into Mexico to take these pills or go to the doctor.”

Yet the women hope their case doesn’t scare others from helping a friend in need, and that women continue to be resourceful and to support one another. “Don’t let them win,” Noyola urged. “At the end of the day, I sleep well at night knowing I was a good friend,” Carpenter said. “I would do it all over again to get her to where she is now.”

The agency offered a formal proposal Monday to repeal Biden-era regulations on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS, a.k.a “forever chemicals,” because they linger in the environment for hundreds or even thousands of years.

If finalized, the proposal would rescind protections against GenX, PFHxS, PFNA, and PFBS, four of the six PFAS outlined in the Biden restrictions, and delay a requirement to filter out PFAS by 2029 until 2031.

David Andrews, chief science officer for the Environmental Working Group, told The Washington Post that the decision was “a betrayal of public health and the mission of making America healthier. Safe and clean drinking water should be a right for everyone in this country.”

“Slow-walking this is really just going the wrong direction,” he added.

In addition to infuriating environmental advocates, the move is also sure to inflame the Make America Healthy Again sect of Trump supporters, who have criticized Zeldin’s willingness to allow chemical companies to dictate policy.