Hegseth got to the culture war stuff early on in his address, bragging about firing a slew of longtime military leaders at the beginning of his tenure as Defense secretary.

“I think the generals heard the message. Those who responded positively … are leading newly focused, and newly empowered and disciplined formations,” Hegseth said. “Those generals who did not? Who clung to the woke department, or seemed to think civilian control of the military is simply a suggestion? Well, they no longer work here.”

“It’s worth saying again, so that the fake news understands it. We are no longer the ‘woke’ department, or the ‘weak’ department. Simple translation of that? No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos,” Hegseth said, calling back to an often used slogan and transphobic slur. “No wimps, no radicals. Just warriors. Just tough, ready, committed troops.… The ideological clowns are out,” he continued. “The patriotic cowboys are in—with testosterone testing on top.”

Hegseth: "It's worth saying again so the fake news understands it. We are no longer the woke department or the weak department. Simple translation of that -- no fatties no trannies no beardos no weirdos no wimps no radicals. Just warriors." pic.twitter.com/ClP833GT5J

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 30, 2026

Hegseth also took time to take cheap shots at the press, of which he used to be a part.

“Our so-called press makes Iranian state media look reasonable,” Hegseth said. “Our media’s shameful lust for political retribution blinds them to the consequences of reckless, so-called ‘reporting.’ So-called ‘journalists’ juiced up on Trump Derangement Syndrome think they’re fighting against our president. But they’re really undermining you. Our warfighters.”

Hegseth: "Our so-called press makes Iranian state media look reasonable" pic.twitter.com/NrhXiTcKs0

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 30, 2026

The Defense secretary also announced Project Meridian, a massive upcoming study on the “future of warfare” led by Elon Musk, Newt Gingrich, and Palmer Luckey. He unveiled the Office of Religious Affairs, an outfit that will report “straight to the top” to “strengthen religious support,” and revealed that he’d be making a further 20 percent cut to military leadership.

The Defense secretary sounds ridiculous. Patriotic cowboys and testosterone testing are not things you want to hear coming from the mouth of the head of the largest military in the world. And yet here we are.

“Send me,” Hegseth concluded, heavily paraphrasing the Bible. “Send me to fight the redcoats. Send me to fight the communists. Send me to fight the Islamists. Send me.”

Hegseth: "Send me to right the Redcoats, send me to fight the communists, send me to fight the Islamists. Send me." pic.twitter.com/M3VjDvIDQD

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 30, 2026

The booklet is a collection of Hegseth’s speeches, but also included a noteworthy foreword by Donald Trump that—seven months into the Iran war—pledged not to send American soldiers into “dumb wars.”

“Our goal is PEACE, which is why we prepare for War—Especially the Wars of the future,” Trump’s foreword declared, according to a copy obtained and shared by ABC News’s Steven Beynon.

“As your Commander-in-Chief, I will not ask you to fight dumb Wars,” it continued. “I will unleash you to be violent, lethal and unstoppable—and I will always have your back. Godspeed, Great Warriors. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

But actions speak louder than words. Since returning to office, Trump’s approach with America’s military has been brash, careless, and at times completely irrational. See: the midnight raid to abduct former Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, the indefensible airstrikes against small watercraft in the Caribbean and Pacific, the sudden abandonment of longstanding U.S. responsibilities in Ukraine and Taiwan, and the White House’s sudden interest in invading Cuba.

U.S. involvement in Iran was arranged following a February 11 meeting between Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and several U.S. and Israeli officials in the White House Situation Room.

It was reportedly Netanyahu’s direct influence—and ensuing pressure campaign—that thrust America into the war. Trump opted for violence without congressional approval, and against the advice of America’s top military commanders, who argued at the time that components of Netanyahu’s plan to attack Iran were “farcical,” according to a New York Times report published earlier this year.

Since then, the war has killed at least 22 U.S. service members and wounded more than 820 others. It has also killed more than 3,500 people in Iran and injured tens of thousands of locals, according to data published by Al Jazeera.

Hegseth made the announcement at his “State of the Force” address on Wednesday afternoon, describing the trio of Trump loyalists as “the best forecasters of future conflict.”

“There are obvious biases and risks to asking ourselves to both ask the questions and answer them. So today we are leveraging a unique source of American advantage—one our adversaries do not have: our innovators, our senior leaders, and our technologists. Big thinkers and doers who will forecast the creative solution to tomorrow’s conflicts,” Hegseth said. “And that’s why today … I’m announcing Project Meridian, an effort led by America’s best minds to study the future of warfare.”

Musk, Luckey, and Gingrich will work with private sector leaders, experts, and Pentagon chief technology officer and former Uber vice president Emil Michael to “creatively look to the future and identify the domains that we must conquer.”

Hegseth:

I’m announcing Project Meridian, an effort led by America’s best minds to study the future of warfare.

Project Meridian will be co-led by three of our nation’s best minds: Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and Newt Gingrich.
pic.twitter.com/rBupINU71r

— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) September 30, 2026

Before the Project Meridian announcement, Hegseth introduced the Autonomous Warfare Command, a unit focused on robotic, artificial intelligence and drone warfare—domains in which Musk and Luckey have a particular interest. Hegseth noted that Project Meridian’s findings would be submitted in the next 120 days with a “full public rollout.” He will be meeting with the three “great minds” later Wednesday.

We’ll have to wait and see what comes of Project Meridian and the rest of Hegseth’s bizarre, Ted Talk–style speech. What makes Luckey, Musk, and Gingrich so uniquely good for the job? Does he really think other countries don’t have industry leaders and politicians as smart as them? That the collective minds of a dotcom-era billionaire, a Zionist VR entrepreneur, and an old partisan really give the U.S some kind of military edge?

“Project Meridian will ruthlessly map the trajectory of wars, domains, and technologies to ensure this War Department, your War Department, dominates the future,” Hegseth promised.

In a press conference Wednesday, Blanche announced that the Department of Justice filed a misconduct complaint in federal court against all but one of the federal district judges in Minnesota, attacking them for speaking to The New York Times for an article published earlier this month about the federal government’s immigration crackdown in the North Star State.

“Seven federal judges in the District of Minnesota talked to The New York Times about cases, some of which are ongoing, in a manner that the Department of Justice views as a clear violation of their ethical duties,” Blanche said. “Their conduct has undermined public confidence in an impartial judiciary in Minnesota.”

According to the complaint, U.S. District Judge Patrick Schlitz had a 90-minute interview with the publication, and six other federal judges in Minnesota also spoke to the Times. Schlitz, appointed by President George W. Bush, said to the newspaper that the Trump administration’s disregard for court orders during its immigration crackdown in the state “created a grave threat to the rule of law.”

“I would say aloud to myself, ‘This just never happens,’” Schlitz said, while declining to discuss active cases.

“They weren’t arresting, in my view, people who were dangerous criminals on the street,” Tunheim said to the Times.

Blanche attacked the judges’ comments in the article as “blatantly false,” saying that the DOJ has asked the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals to investigate the judges, who should “recuse themselves from every case involving DHS, either criminal or civil in nature, because of the obvious bias they have shown in this article with The New York Times.”

That would essentially grind federal court proceedings in Minnesota to a halt, which is probably by design. Trump and Blanche have railed against federal judges who rule against the Trump administration, calling them “activists.” While it is rare for federal judges to speak to the press, it is not illegal, and none of the judges targeted by the DOJ Wednesday mentioned ongoing cases. Schlitz even told the Times that he believes the administration’s violations of his court orders were mostly inadvertent.

“My impression was that most, if not all, of the noncompliance was due to incompetence,” Schlitz said, “not due to conscious defiance of orders.” But even that deference wasn’t enough for Trump and Blanche.

That would put the president on the campaign trail for more than 94 percent of the time between now and November 3, effectively placing him at the center of an election cycle in which Republican candidates have increasingly tried to peel away from his influence.

The breakneck pace of the schedule has also spurred health concerns for a president who was recently caught out of breath after descending a set of stairs and climbing into his limo.

A spate of election-bound, pro-MAGA personalities have already broken from Trump and his agenda in an attempt to curry favor with their local electorates. The growing list includes Florida Representatives Maria Elvira Salazar and Byron Donalds (the latter of whom is running for governor in the Sunshine State), Maine Republican gubernatorial candidate Bobby Charles, and Texas Republican congressional candidate Carlos De La Cruz.

Some hopeful office seekers have even stripped their websites and campaign materials of Trump’s name, taking advice that the White House offered in July when staffers explicitly encouraged midterm-bound Republicans to split from Trump and his sinking reputation.

Top issues weighing down Trump’s popularity include the seemingly endless Iran war, the rising cost of living, an economy and supply chain thrown out of whack by the president’s reckless tariffs, the cost of health care, and the encroachment of AI and the industry’s data centers into American communities—a hot topic that Trump has unequivocally backed.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll published late last month suggested that the president’s influence is waning: Just 13 percent of Americans strongly approve of the president—compared to a 2025 YouGov poll that found 23 percent of people felt the same way this time last year.

Republican attitudes towards Trump have also changed, according to the Reuters/Ipsos poll. Just 35 percent of surveyed conservatives said they “strongly approved” of Trump’s job during his second term. In the same poll, 41 percent of registered voters said that they would vote for a Democratic candidate if the presidential election were conducted today.

But Trump refused to acknowledge the party’s divergence. Speaking with reporters at the White House on Tuesday, Trump insisted that “they all want me to go.”

“I’m one person,” Trump said. “They all want me to ​go campaign.”

The New York Times reports that Yehonatan Ovadia, a religious teacher in Rockland County, New York, had his visa revoked by the federal government for participating in an October 2023 protest against Israel’s actions in Gaza where an Israeli flag disappeared from a local town hall. 

Ovadia belongs to Satmar, an anti-Zionist religious sect that believes a Jewish state cannot be established before the arrival of the messiah. Shortly after the protest, he and another member of the sect were charged with hate crimes before pleading guilty to a lesser charge of disorderly conduct and paying a fine in early 2024. 

In August, the federal government revoked his religious worker visa and Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained him at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. Ovaida, an Israeli citizen who has been in the U.S. since 2022, said he took part in the protest but didn’t tear down the flag. His lawyers sued the government later that month, arguing that the government was punishing him for religious and political expression and conflating that with antisemitism.

“He’s against the Israeli government and the existence of the state of Israel for religious reasons, but to claim that he’s an antisemite is the peak of absurdity,” said Eric Lee, one of his attorneys.

“We demonstrated for Gaza, for the liberation of Gaza, for the rights of the Palestinians and to show to the world that the Jews, real Judaism, want to have peace,” Ovadia told the Times in a telephone interview.

“It is a privilege to be granted a visa or green card to live in the United States of America,” the  Department of Homeland Security said in a statement. “The Trump administration acted well within its statutory and constitutional authority, as it does with any alien who advocates for violence, glorifies and supports terrorists, harasses Jews and steals property.”

The White House has targeted noncitizen pro-Palestinian activists for deportation, including students and permanent residents, ever since President Trump signed an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to go after them for antisemitic activities. When Ovaida applied for an extension to his religious worker visa in 2025, the government demanded court documents and police records, and then stripped him of his legal status. 

Ovaida’s lawyers plan to request his release at a bond hearing Wednesday. If the government gets its way, Ovaida could end up being deported to the country he was protesting against.

404 Media reports that the federal government is using the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program to collect data from Flock, Axon, and other cameras used by local police, so that it can be used for a national surveillance program. The plan is to centralize the data on the government’s servers and make it available to other law enforcement agencies. Data collected by HIDTA can also be shared with the National License Plate Reader Program run by the Drug Enforcement Agency.

The program allows the federal government to get around local and state restrictions against Flock and similar license plate reader companies without oversight. 404 Media learned about the plans through public records and court documents.

The HIDTA program is part of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, which was just recognized by the Trump administration for “managing an automated license plate reader platform that brings together all levels of law enforcement.”

In many states, local police departments can’t even set up license plate cameras without agreeing to send their data to the federal government, 404 Media reports. In Georgia, for example, cities have to sign a memorandum of understanding promising to send their data to the HIDTA program.

Flock cameras are experiencing a backlash from the American public over their warrant-free surveillance and collection of data. They’ve been abused by local police to spy on people unrelated to law enforcement investigations, and have inspired protests at municipal meetings. And they collect far more than license plates: One hacked camera revealed the camera catalogs people, bicycles, small details such as bumper stickers, and, in one case, an American flag patch on a motorcyclist’s bag.

This latest news shows that the Trump administration could be doing anything it wants with the vast amount of data that these cameras collect, skirting the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. A centralized database such as the HIDTA could be misused by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the FBI, or any number of unscrupulous Trump administration officials.

West Virginia Senator and Trump loyalist Jim Justice—mostly known for parading his massive bulldog around Capitol Hill—drew a line in the sand in a Tuesday interview with Politico. Notably, Justice is not running for reelection and does not currently have to win voters over to his side.

“Before you know it, you get people that get carried away in their job and whatever it may be, and all of a sudden, then you’re dragging people away that have lived on your street corner for 15 years, and I don’t know that we need to be doing that stuff,” he said.

“To get better, the first thing you got to do is admit you’re doing something wrong.… And in this situation, with all that’s going on and all the stuff, we probably got to step back from it and say, ‘Maybe we’re doing something wrong here or there,’ and then adjust to that.”

“This is a stunning shift from Senator Jim Justice,” former Obama and Biden immigration policy adviser Andrea R. Flores wrote on X. “The alternative to ICE sweeps is legalization. People who have lived in your neighborhood for 15 years won’t have a path to legal status until both parties come together to create one.”

Kansas Republican Senator Roger Marshall (who is up for reelection) also made headlines for a similar rebuke of the Trump administration just last week.

“When ICE operates in Kansas, it needs to coordinate with our local law enforcement. Our sheriffs and police know these communities better than anyone, and working together keeps officers and residents safe,” Marshall wrote on X after a spike of ICE activity in multiple Kansas towns. “I’m closely following what’s happening in SW Kansas and have been in direct contact with Secretary Mullin and local law enforcement as ICE executes warrants in order to keep Kansans safe.” Marshall is up for reelection this November.

ICE conducted a massive immigration raid in West Virginia earlier this year named “Operation Country Roads.” They arrested and detained more than 600 people in two weeks, the vast majority of whom were eventually revealed to have no criminal record—a far cry from the dangerous people ICE constantly claims to be prioritizing.

“The people are going to benefit directly, whether its teachers that get paid a bonus, whether its people that live in the community get paid a dividend, you could call it a dividend because a dividend sounds right,” Trump said Tuesday evening. “They are going to greatly benefit by what’s happened.”

“And by the way, I’m very good at real estate,” Trump added. “Some of those data centers are absolutely beautiful.”

The president then blamed the hardware sites’ bad reputation on Democrats, suggesting that there was no sensible or justifiable reason that the public could be opposed to their creation.

Trump did not elaborate on how he would ensure that Americans received their share of data center profits, or how much that sum could be.

Data center development is necessary for building out artificial intelligence. Yet despite collectively pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into the critical infrastructure, the tech industry has done a remarkably bad job at marketing its product to American communities contemplating their futures alongside them.

Unaware of any benefits, the public has instead become highly attuned to the inordinate resource drain the centers create: A medium-sized facility can use 110 million gallons of water per year for cooling its hardware—the same amount needed to support a 1,000-household community, according to a 2025 analysis by the nonprofit Environmental and Energy Study Institute.

Meanwhile, Trump has a lot to politically—and personally—gain from championing AI. Days into his second term, the president unveiled a $500 billion public-private venture to support AI development. The project was dubbed Stargate and backed by OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX.

The president’s 2026 financial disclosures also reveal that he’s invested a sizable sum in tech companies pursuing AI projects, spending millions of dollars on stock purchases for Oracle, Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, Amazon, Apple, and Alphabet.

But Trump’s opinion on the matter is seriously at odds with that of the American public. Recent polling indicates that the vast majority of Americans, including Republicans, have no interest in permitting the tech industry to build AI facilities in their backyards. An August survey published by Heatmap revealed that 75 percent of the public opposes data center development in their communities.

The growing divide between the president’s sentiments and the reality lived by the American public should serve as a reminder that Trump—who is worth an estimated $6.5 billion and owns hundreds of business entities and properties around the world—has almost nothing in common with the rest of the country. Trump will never be hard pressed to find drinking water like the residents of Flint, Michigan; apparently doesn’t have to buy (or even pronounce) America’s increasingly expensive “groceries”; and will never experience the crushing toll of the housing crisis (a “big yawn,” he said in June, while profiting off it) or needing to split the cost at the gas pump between credit cards.

Last month, Trump even went so far as to claim that anyone who opposes data center development is “backwards and poor,” a sobering reminder that Trump simply does not understand or care about the interests of the average American.

Our most macho-presenting president since perhaps Lyndon B. Johnson was seen standing in an awkward, knock-kneed fashion in a video clip from his “Super Intelligence” tech executive press conference on Tuesday.

The president’s head, neck, and upper body face one way, while his torso, knees, and feet seem to all face in completely different directions. His rotund abdomen appears to protrude forward, and he moves as if it is physically painful for him to turn his waist and hips when addressing the reporters surrounding him.

The clip was posted by White House communications adviser Margo Martin.

.@POTUS discusses changing the name from Artificial Intelligence to Super Intelligence 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/30AM8nuTjx

— Margo Martin (@MargoMartin47) September 29, 2026

“Lmao bro wtf is this stance,” the large Wu Tang is for the Children account posted on X.

“HAVE YOU EVER SEEN SOMEONE STAND LIKE THIS BEFORE,” another large liberal account inquired. “I’d seriously love to hear from some medical expert. Is this a sign that he has hurt his leg or is it somehow a sign of cognitive decline.”

“The only person I’ve ever seen stand like this was a child who shit their pants,” said another account.

Perfect posture has zero correlation with being an effective and productive politician; Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of the most effective presidents ever, was paralyzed from the waist down for the entirety of his four terms. But for a president as dedicated to projecting strength and power as Trump is, this is a bad look—especially as chatter about his physical and cognitive decline grows louder every time he falls asleep on camera or walks gingerly.

The Washington Post reports that officials with the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation and the National Park Service are unaware of Trump’s military plans for the arch at Memorial Circle in Washington, D.C., near Arlington National Cemetery. They said Tuesday that they will proceed with the existing designs, have not heard from the Department of Defense, and plan to have the landmark open to tourists.

Trump said in a September 20 Truth Social post that the arch would be a “top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch” that would “house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage.”

That appears to be a contrived reason to get legal approval for the arch, which Trump wants to begin construction on in November. If Trump pushes the military plans, “a new or supplemental review would be required,” the executive director of the D.C. Preservation League, Rebecca Miller, wrote in a letter to the administration.

“Putting a drone launching site directly in the landing path for DCA is a stupid, dangerous, and unworkable idea,” Democratic Representative Don Beyer of Virginia said last week. “Trump clearly expects to lose a lawsuit and therefore wants to set up a pretext to argue that the arch is tied to national security. Which is obviously idiotic.”

It appears that someone at the General Services Administration has tweaked the Trump administration’s new America.gov chatbot to prevent it from debunking president’s many lies.

After the tool’s launch on Tuesday, if you asked whether there was “widespread voter fraud” in the 2020 election, the chatbot would state that “No. Official findings did not show widespread voter fraud that changed the 2020 presidential election result.” On Wednesday, however, the chatbot refused to answer, CNN’s Daniel Dale wrote on X.

“I help with official U.S. government services and information. I do not provide political commentary. If you have a question about a federal program, benefit, form, or how to use a government service, ask that and I can point you to official sources,” the chatbot now replies.

The platform provided the same answer to a question about whether Trump had truly inherited the “worst inflation in history,” even though it had originally stated that inflation was not at a “historic high,” Dale posted on X.

The New Republic found that several queries that originally yielded damning-fact checks now summoned similarly canned answers that undermine the usefulness of the tool altogether.

One X user on Tuesday asked: “How many people will lose access to Medicaid and other social services because of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill? One sentence.”

The chatbot initially returned an answer citing the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate that 10.4 million people would lose health insurance by 2034. The next day: “I do not provide political commentary or estimates of how legislation will change Medicaid or other benefits.”

An inability to address changes to health care benefits seems like a pretty major issue for a tool meant to help answer questions about federal services.

In other cases, the chatbot walked back honest answers to simple questions about Trump’s policies.

Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, asked: “Is it accurate to say that the Big Beautiful Bill on average made the poorest people in America even poorer, and the richest people in America even richer, when looking at total household resources? One word answer only please.”

The chatbot initially responded simply, “Yes.” The next day it said, “I do not provide political commentary or assessments of how legislation affected income groups.”

One X user asked for an estimate of how many children would die as a result of federal funding cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID. The chatbot had initially returned an answer citing a study that estimated 4.5 million additional deaths of children under the age of five by 2030. The next day, it said, “I do not provide political commentary or estimates of deaths from legislation.”

Experts have expressed concerns that AI chatbots are overly sychophantic—but clearly the president’s new AI tool takes that to a whole new level.

The venerated performing arts space is “in free fall,” having already bled dry most of its cash reserves, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the Kennedy Center was a dying relic that needs his name—and brand—to survive. But a Post analysis of the living memorial’s financials indicate that isn’t true. The center was more financially sound throughout the decade than it was most years before the pandemic. Its downward spiral began when Trump took the reins in February 2025.

“This was a pretty stable—large, complicated, but stable—organization,” Karen Gahl-Mills, an expert in arts management and director of the Indiana University arts administration program, told the Post. “It had a hard time during the pandemic, lots of people did. And it was pretty stable at September 30, 2024.”

The Kennedy Center did not turn a profit on its performances, but that was expected. The federal site is primarily a congressionally founded living memorial, as well as a nonprofit arts organization. Its lifeblood were ticket sales and donations.

But both of those stopped when Trump needled his way onto the center’s board and into its programming.

“The burst happened up the pipe,” Andrew Taylor, who directs the arts management program at American University, told the Post. “The water stopped flowing into the organization because of the choices the administration was making.”

Most of the people in charge of procuring donor money were let go by Trump officials. Richard Grenell, a political consultant and Trump’s former acting director of national intelligence, was in charge of the center in March when he announced that the center’s development staff had been cut from 94 to 16 people.

The center’s latest tax filing revealed more issues, including a $48 million write-off for pledges that it no longer believes it can collect, according to documents reviewed by the Post.

“This is unusual, that this organization has gone this far south, this fast,” Gahl-Mills told the paper. “It’s not the thing we typically see. It is an organization clearly in distress.”

The Kennedy Center has also chewed through most of its debt reserves, which are projected to hit $9 million by the end of the week—an enormous sink from the $18 million recorded this time last year. That would suggest the space is already scraping the bottom of the barrel for cash to spend, as almost the entire remaining sum is collateral for the loan on the Reach, the center’s 2019 expansion.

Another indicator of the center’s waning health is its recent decision to dip into the endowment for the Washington National Opera, a donation tranche that has historically been untouched.

But its financials are only expected to get worse: The center expects ticket sales to plummet by about two-thirds this year. Gift sales were also down: in Ihe first quarter of 2026, donations fell by about 40 percent compared to the last four months of 2025, according to an internal report obtained by the Post in June.

Meanwhile, Trump is still scheming to affix his name to the property. After a vote to protect federal memorials failed to pass the Senate on Monday, Justice Department attorneys echoed Trump’s claims in court, arguing in a legal filing that “without appropriate recognition” of Trump, “the Kennedy Center will be back where it was at the beginning—a financially insolvent facility and a decrepit, dilapidated, crumbling building, that is bleeding hundreds of millions of dollars in losses and that continues to race toward physical and financial ruin.”

This is a low point, even for someone as rabidly and irrationally pro-Israel as Fetterman. The resolution, introduced by Senators Chris Van Hollen, Tim Kaine, and Bernie Sanders, would have been largely symbolic—requiring a State Department report to Congress on fatal settler violence against American citizens in the West Bank within 30 days of their murders, nothing more. The State Department failing to deliver said report would only trigger a stoppage of some aid to Israel, an issue that Fetterman lives and dies by. The resolution also included reports on the status and conditions of Palestinian-American children from the West Bank who are currently in IDF custody. But thanks to Fetterman and the GOP, Congress won’t even get access to that basic and vital information.

“Tonight, 47 Senators supported my resolution to get accountability for the 9 Americans killed on the West Bank & for Palestinians who face injustices daily. That’s more support than we’ve ever had in this fight,” Van Hollen wrote Tuesday night on X. “Republicans blocked us, but we won’t stop until we get justice.”

Nine American citizens have been killed by Israeli settlers in the West Bank since 2022, with little to no justice from either the U.S. or Israeli government. Palestinian-American journalist and Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh and 20-year-old Palestinian-American and Florida resident Sayfollah Kamel Musallet are perhaps the most notable of the nine deaths. The resolution does not account for the at least 1,000 Palestinians without American citizenship who have been killed in violent pogroms by Israeli settlers in the West Bank since October 7.

The accord lays out criteria for regulation and safeguards for different artificial intelligence technologies, and was signed by five technology company CEOs along with the president. But under the president’s signature, the text reads “President of the Unites States.”

The accord is part of an executive order signed by Trump replacing the use of the phrase “artificial intelligence” with “super intelligence,” reaffirming what Trump said in his U.N. General Assembly speech.

“Welcome to the new world of super intelligence—S.I. Let’s see if that goes. It sounds much better, it is much better, and it’s much more accurate,” Trump said last week. “Let’s see if I have any power. Maybe I do, and maybe I don’t. We’re gonna find out pretty soon.”

Every day, the American public is more and more opposed to the corporate misuse of AI and the proliferation of data centers. Attempting to rebrand AI already opens the president—and the U.S.—up to ridicule. Misspelling “United States” only increases that ridicule. One wonders if a White House aide or staffer used AI to draft the document.

At a private fundraiser in Washington last Thursday, Paxton spoke candidly about the event, according to a recording shared with The New York Times. 

In the recording, Paxton is asked: “Do you feel like he’s a little bit of a drag?” It is not immediately clear to whom the speaker is referring.

“So to be honest with you, the numbers—when we did that convention—it dropped our numbers. Everybody’s numbers dropped. Right now, yeah, not good,” Paxton said.

Three other people confirmed Paxton’s attendance at the fundraiser to the Times. Two recalled that Paxton was asked this question, and one recalled his negative response. The person who recorded the audio opposes Paxton’s Senate campaign. 

Paxton’s comments are obviously a humiliating gaffe for Trump, who backed the attorney general against Senator John Cornyn in a shocking political maneuver. 

The Republican midterm convention in Dallas earlier this month was key to Trump’s plan to energize his base—but polls have shown that Democrats benefited far more than Republicans did. RealClearPolitics’s Generic Congressional Vote, which averages results of other major polls, showed a sharp rise in support for Democrats after the convention, while Republicans’ support stayed about the same. 

Paxton has long struggled to match Democratic candidate James Talarico’s funding. According to their latest quarterly filings with the Federal Election Commission, Talarico’s campaign had raked in $31.6 million, while Paxton had only raised $9.3 million. 

Trump has repeatedly pledged his desire to see Paxton elected but hesitated to commit any part of his $400 million MAGA Inc. war chest to help him win. Earlier this month, Trump held a fundraiser in Houston that was touted as a lifeline for Paxton’s campaign—but the money actually went to the Republican National Convention, according to the Wall Street Journal.  

The president’s super PAC eventually gave $10 million to fund two advertisements for Paxton’s campaign. Meanwhile, Republican donors have been skittish about contributing to Paxton’s campaign amid mounting scandals. 

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

This week, Donald Trump’s trade war with Canada escalated, as an import ban on some Canadian products went into effect. Trump has been raging at Canada for months, but he just said almost in passing that the U.S. gets along with China better than it gets along with Canada. And we think it shouldn’t pass unnoticed how casually Trump just tosses away a major longtime ally.

Trump also unleashed his trade advisor to make truly vicious and sneering comments about Canada, to boot. Meanwhile, Republicans themselves are admitting that the trade war with Canada is a big problem for them in the midterms, and getting worse.

So we’re talking about all of it with New Republic contributing editor Virginia Heffernan, who’s been writing well about the economic roots of Trump-GOP midterm woes. Virginia, always great to have you on.

Virginia Heffernan: So good to see you, Greg.

Sargent: So a quick recap. Last month Trump imposed 50 percent tariffs on a range of Canadian imports, and Canada hit back with retaliatory tariffs. Now Trump just banned several other imports—dairy, motorcycles, alcohol. The Times calls this a vicious trade war and says much of our relationship with Canada has unraveled.

Virginia, I’m not a trade expert, but I know enough to understand that Trump completely pulled this whole thing out of his ass to assuage his feelings of impotence and failure. Your thoughts about that?

Heffernan: Yeah. I mean, we’ve come to the part in the Trump proceedings where, to quote South Park, we blame Canada. And when that song—I was just looking it up—came out in 1999, it was considered a punchline, because it would be so outlandish for Americans, however arrogant and absurd we were in the nineties, to blame our trading partner and close ally to the north, who are famous for their mild-manneredness, to blame them really for anything. But here we are.

And this is not playing well with Americans who already are beginning to hold Trump in not just disapproval, but outright contempt. You may have seen that he’s gotten under 30 percent. So one poll showed him at 29 percent. Nate Silver, it seems not long ago, said there was a floor of 40. Now we’ve crashed through, potentially, the floor of 30, which is just amazing.

And it’s what you hear from what I’ve been thinking of as the diesel class. This particular demographic that I just wrote about, who know their way around that big nozzle at the gas station, the lower-down one. They’re truck drivers, they drive the Ford F-class or the Silverado. This thing that diesel is skyrocketing faster than gas.

I mean, when you go to the pump, you see the normal gas prices, and then at the bottom, usually an eye-popping number now for diesel. It’s broken through all records. It’s doubled since Biden was in office. And that group immediately puts the blame on Trump. They put the blame on the trade war with Canada, and they especially put the blame on his war with Iran.

Sargent: Yes, I think that’s absolutely right. There is a certain class of voter out there who’s quite MAGA-adjacent, who understands on a really instinctual level that trade with Canada is good for our country. And these are voters who are concentrated in places like the Midwest and in Maine, and a lot of places where these Senate races are playing out.

Heffernan: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, when we’ve been doing import and export with Canada, because we are connected by land—who do you think are driving over that border, from Maine, from the states that are adjacent to it, from the Great Lakes states? They are these long-haul truckers that Trump has made a big effort to court.

And they are used to passing through that Canadian border, and they want more trade with Canada. They have relatives in Canada. This is kind of more than an ally. It’s a familial relationship that we don’t have with Europe.

Sargent: Right. And Trump just has contempt for the people who we rely on. So let’s listen to Trump talk about Canada this week. Here he’s asked whether a trade deal with Canada is still possible. Check this out.

Donald Trump (voiceover): Well, they want to have a deal with us. They call us all the time. The problem is that they’ve treated the United States very unfairly. They have been one of the worst countries in the entire world. You know, we get along with China, and we make good deals, but Canada’s been really very difficult to deal with, actually. And they feel entitled and, you know, they’re not a state. There’s nothing they have that we need. We have more energy than they have. We have all the lumber you could possibly use. We have everything. We don’t need.

Sargent: Virginia, let’s break this up into two pieces. First, note how casually he slips in the idea that we get along with China, suggesting it’s better than with Canada. I mean, I know he’s trying to own the libs, but he really did own me there. I’m sure he owned you as well. I mean, I don’t feel like that should pass by unremarked on, do you? It’s really disgusting conduct from the president.

Heffernan: Yeah, I mean, it’s own the libs, but it’s also owning everyone who is committed to the idea that democracy and free trade move together—which is a kind of fundamental part of the long peace, that we need these relationships. I mean, we’ve said it many times, but the postwar order is sort of, in America, lying in fragments. It makes no sense.

Sargent:And the remark about Canada feeling entitled—that’s not how trade works. Trade is mutually beneficial.

And the crack about them not being a state—is the idea supposed to be that we’d be treating Canada better if we absorbed it into the United States against the will of Canadians through violent conquest? What’s he talking about?

Heffernan: I don’t know if you saw Mark Carney and Emmanuel Macron, you know, make their romance Instagram official a few days ago—maybe nine or ten days ago. But they were talking about stuff like shutting Trump out of crude oil imports from Canada. They were also talking about their mutual interests in democracy and the rule of law.

And it’s clear who is not interested in democracy and the rule of law—the elephant in the room, who they are intending to rout with this new romance between the EU and Canada.

Sargent: Yeah, it does seem like this is a big component in the world just kind of moving on without Trump’s America, and just sort of shrugging and saying, well, I guess it’s over, Trump’s destroyed the place, so see you later.

And here’s where it gets really ugly. White House trade advisor Peter Navarro, who’s a big architect of this catastrophe, this week warned Canada not to interfere in our elections—which I guess is supposed to mean that Canada isn’t allowed to retaliate against our hostile trade acts. And then at an event in Washington, Navarro also sneered at potential Canadians in the audience, saying this: “Please, if you’re on K Street, get the hell out of our country.”

Virginia, this is like the perfect example of how Trump world and MAGA’s malicious nationalism works. Abusing Canada and Canadians is supposed to thrill MAGA in some way, but as you point out, it’s a total misread of where a big chunk of ordinary rank-and-file Republican voters, and even some MAGA voters, really are.

Heffernan: Yeah. I mean, you may remember the Canadian trucker—we’re now back to the pandemic era—but the Canadian trucker, what was it, some kind of caravan, that were anti-mask, they didn’t want to get tested before they went over the American border. They were MAGA-adjacent, they were MAGA-supportive.

I mean, we saw at least the Canadian diesel class was very much on the right, and very much—you know, Trump was very excited about them then. And now he is not.

Sargent: It’s not just MAGA, it’s also swing voters who are going to be deeply alienated by this stuff. The Los Angeles Times had a really good report on this, in fact. They talked to a bunch of Republicans and found that Republicans think it’s a real problem.

One former chair of the Michigan Republican Party said, “it doesn’t make things easier. It’s not helping.” A Maine Republican media strategist said that the trade war with Canada puts, “another log on the fire of the affordability issue.”

And here’s a real telling one that I think will get you going with your diesel class stuff. There was a focus group held of Michigan swing voters in early September, and eleven of the 13 participants said the trade war was bad for the state, bad for the state of Michigan. One Michigan swing voter said this: “The more we put tariffs on stuff, the more they put tariffs on stuff. Prices are just ultimately going to go up for all of us.”

So swing voters are seeing that Trump’s zero-sum economics is a dead end, and that trade is positive-sum and good for everybody. And I think that’s good.

Heffernan: Yeah. I mean, there’s no history of Americans in, like, the industrial Midwest worried about jobs going to Canada. This is not—right? It’s not like in the NAFTA days, he had locked in on that jobs were going to Mexico, right? Before we sort of realized that the danger was more from automation and maybe China. But there is no history of making Canada a kind of bugbear that is either stealing from us or whatever.

Even in the early days where he was so critical of NATO for not paying their dues—you can usually get some Americans to get mad at Europe, think that they’re so fancy, think that they’re kind of weak and they depend on us and we saved their bacon in World War II. There’s a history of that discourse with France in particular.

But with Canada, there is a big blue-collar population. I know I just said it before, but they have their own diesel class, and they send us crude oil, which is also the source of diesel, the same way it’s the source of gasoline for non-diesel cars. And so this just feels wrong from all sides.

Sargent: I was talking to the Democratic candidate in the House district in Macomb County a while ago, and she was basically telling me that people in that part of Michigan just see themselves as being part of a network that includes Canada, which of course is right across the river in Detroit.

And so—this is Macomb County, which is the home of the Reagan Democrat and so forth, really industrial, central auto manufacturing. And the auto industry for many decades as well has been kind of viewed as this kind of unified thing between Canada and America. It’s not like there’s a U.S. auto industry and a Canada auto industry. They’re one thing.

And so I really do think that something kind of profound is happening here, where, positive-sum relationships with Canadians are getting a second look, in a way, from people who have been told that they should be nationalists, MAGA nationalists.

And so I’m hopeful that there’s actually the possibility here that some of these voters could just understand just how deeply Trump and MAGA and right-wing populist nationalists have been scamming them. Is that too much to hope for?

Heffernan: I think that’s absolutely right. And it’s sort of what Canada’s Mark Carney has said, which is that once Trump started threatening to colonize Canada, he said something like, you can’t unsee it. So he said, basically, once that happened, it was like you’re in a partnership, even a marriage, and suddenly someone flexes that they’ve got all the money, the house belongs to them, they could, beat you up at any time.

And you just don’t come back from that, right? Like, you start socking away your resources and forming other alliances outside the marriage, and you plan to leave. And Carney said, even if we get an ex-president, the jig’s up with this. We’re not doing this.

And I think that that is a way that the voters are feeling, which is like, this thing that we thought was so stable can come apart with the wrong president. It can come apart. And this threat that prices may never go back down, and that they’re expected to jump more—this thing can be destroyed if someone’s determined to do it. And I think Carney’s right. We all can’t unsee that.

Sargent: It’s really almost unbelievable. If you were trying to destroy what’s good about the United States, you would basically do what Donald Trump is doing, pretty much across the board, right?

Heffernan: Yeah. I mean, are you missing—do you ever miss the old World Cup days? That was just last summer, that we had that romance where even Canadians said, these people are so friendly. And the French said everyone’s so friendly, and we love your Buc-ee’s and your Big Gulps.

Well, we still have our Buc-ee’s and our Big Gulps, but it seems like we are perilously low on democracy and rule of law. And that seems to be alienating people even more than bottomless Olive Garden bowls of pasta made them briefly like us.

Sargent: Well, and also we seem perilously low on respect for our longtime allies and friends. And we seem perilously low on, you know, decency.

Heffernan: Yeah, the decency, exactly. I mean, the other thing that Macron cited, in addition to democracy and the rule of law, was free trade, which you’ve brought up, but it’s worth bringing up again.

To imagine that America would become protectionist like this, to this extent, with tariffs of all things, predicated on—you brought up Peter Navarro—just the harebrained craziness. Do you remember, like, when they rolled out the tariffs and they’d been made by ChatGPT, and there was no rhyme or reason to it? It’s just some kind of caprice with these guys.

They have some idea that tariffs are going to be good for us. Then we have the TACO period, of Trump chickening out on really doing tariffs. And now here we are, with rising prices. And no truck driver, no matter how made-in-the-USA he is, is going to say that we need to shut out this trading partner of Canada. We just have a sentimental attachment to Canada that can’t be broken.

Sargent: Well, let me ask you this, Virginia, just to close this out. Is it possible that a decisive victory for Democrats in the midterms sends a renewed message to the rest of the world that we’re trying to get onto the right side of decency and really trying to shrug off this catastrophe that Trump has become for us? I’m not sure if the rest of the world is ready to give us a pass next time.

Heffernan: I worry about that. And certainly at the midterms, I mean, I’m sure they will cheer on any impeachment efforts, or any efforts to undo, you know, Trump’s disastrous policies toward other countries.

And if people are—their emotions—to get out of the war, or at least stop supplying Trump with endless weapons to prosecute that war, they will applaud those efforts. But I don’t know they’re going to trust us again anytime soon.

Sargent: God, that’s dark. Virginia Heffernan, that’s why we have you on. Thank you so much for coming on.

Heffernan: Thank you so much, Greg.

“That can oftentimes lead to a little bit of an increase on gasoline for cars, so we’re looking at it very seriously. We may do it,” Trump told reporters on Sunday. But implementing such a ban could backfire, with such consequences ranging from lower production by U.S. refineries and higher gasoline prices to a disruption of the global economy.

Although the price of diesel may seem esoteric to an individual whose only vehicles run on gasoline, it is intertwined with the larger U.S. economy. Diesel powers such heavy machinery as construction equipment, trucks, buses, ships, and tractors. If higher diesel prices drive up the cost of shipping goods, that extra expense will be reflected in the price tag of those items.

In theory, a person can decide to use less gasoline, resolve to drive less, or purchase an electric vehicle. But diesel use is something from which we don’t get to opt out.

“It’s almost impossible for you to extract diesel from your life as long as you buy groceries, or something on Amazon,” said Rory Johnston, an oil market researcher and founder of Commodity Context. “Your E.V. was likely delivered on a truck that was fueled by diesel.”

Diesel prices topped $6.38 per gallon this week. This is a result of the war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which has severely constricted crude oil exports from the Middle East. But other factors have played a role, including the destruction of Russian refineries by Ukraine and a diesel export ban by both Russia and China. As diesel exports have plummeted from other sources, the United States has been the only country to lift its global supply.

The theory behind restricting or banning diesel exports is that more diesel would remain in the country, and therefore fuel costs would go down: If you ship out less, you keep in more. But the reality of that scenario would be more complicated. The U.S. already produces around 5.3 million barrels per day of distillate fuels, which include diesel, but the domestic demand is only around 3.6 million barrels. Refiners on the Gulf Coast rely on trade to absorb that surplus; if exports are banned, around 1.5 million barrels per day of diesel would be “stranded,” according to analysts at S&P Global.

These risks have left oil industry stakeholders in a tizzy. The American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers have warned that such a ban would “reduce U.S. fuel production, put upward pressure on prices, weaken energy security and hand market share to foreign competitors.” It’s a concern echoed by the folks at the American Petroleum Institute, who fear that a fuel surplus would lead to refineries producing less gasoline and jet fuel along with reducing diesel production.

The U.S. produces diesel at a structural surplus, and there is room for refineries to stockpile diesel if it is unable to be exported. But eventually, refineries will no longer have a reason to continue processing as much crude oil.

“You are going to destroy the financial incentive to process these barrels in the first place, and these refiners will begin cutting runs,” said Johnston. S&P Global analysts predict refiners would ultimately need to cut crude runs by 1.9 million barrels per day.

Commodity analysts at Goldman Sachs have predicted that an export ban would initially lead to a decrease in prices—but only until diesel storage is full. Because different fuels are produced together, such an action would put “upward pressure on gasoline prices,” according to a memo by Goldman Sachs. The bank estimated that gasoline prices could increase by $0.30 per week.

A diesel export ban would also have global repercussions. With less diesel coming from the Middle East, China, and Russia, other countries across the world have been more reliant on American oil. According to API, the U.S. currently supplies around 20 percent of the roughly eight million barrels of diesel traded globally per day. Diesel prices continue to spike largely because the U.S. is the primary source for buyers. This past summer, diesel exports hit a record of 1.9 million barrels per day. In short: Cutting access to U.S. diesel would be immediately felt across the world.

“If taken to the extreme, you have a situation where the United States, the preeminent global refining hub on the planet, is cutting back refining runs at a time when refining capacity has never been tighter globally,” said Johnston.

Other countries are bracing for this possibility. Dan Jorgensen, the European Union’s energy commissioner, recently sent a note to member nations urging them to cut gas and electricity consumption.

“It is not in the interests of anybody, not the U.S., not us, to not have as free a flow of energy as possible in these difficult times,” Johnston told reporters at a meeting of European ministers.

The president may choose to restrict diesel exports rather than fully banning them. Trump administration officials certainly seem wary of extreme measures. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has been adamant that a full ban on diesel is not in consideration, saying last week that “nobody wants a full blanket ban or zero exports of diesel.” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said earlier in September that such a ban would not lower prices in the long run.

That said, there is considerable political calculation behind support for an export ban. Republicans are in danger of losing control of both chambers of Congress in the November midterm elections, and increased costs do not make for a winning message. Moreover, higher diesel prices could discourage farm producers—generally a reliable GOP voting bloc—from supporting Republican candidates, or casting a ballot at all. Some Iowa lawmakers have been particularly vocal in their support for an export ban, including Representatives Zach Nunn and Marianette Miller-Meeks, both of whom are locked in tight reelection battles.

But if the Trump administration wants to ban or restrict diesel exports with the goal of easing prices, there isn’t much time left to act. The election is just over one month away, and lower diesel prices would not be immediately reflected at the grocery store, for example.

“They’re running out of time for it to matter to voters,” said Johnston. “It takes time for it to hit the wholesale market, then from there it takes time to hit the retail market.”

Today, as we witness one of the dumbest wars in history unraveling in Iran, an inept health and human services secretary working to bring back measles and polio, a Republican Party wherein only 20 percent view the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol as a violent insurrection but 71 percent deny Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and an administration that refuses to properly regulate AI and crypto industries that threaten the economic well-being and safety of all, Cipolla’s contention is as apt now as when he first proposed it in The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, in 1976—an era when the country, and indeed the world, was similarly roiled by sociopolitical rage and seemed on the brink of a catastrophe.

An Italian economic historian and UC-Berkeley professor who’d seen fascism firsthand and was writing in the wake of the Vietnam War, Cipolla wanted to determine how advanced societies commit truly stupid acts. Originally crafted for his friends, but selling over half a million copies once published, his treatise lies somewhere between satire and serious scholarship, involving a bit of humor and speculation while also applying the laws and language of scientific inquiry and a valid argumentative style. As he wrote in the introduction:

Let me point out at this juncture that most emphatically this little book is neither a product of cynicism nor an exercise in defeatism—no more than a book on microbiology is. The following pages are in fact the result of a constructive effort to detect, know, and thus possibly neutralize one of the most powerful dark forces that hinder the growth of human welfare and happiness.

Cipolla divided people into four groups: the helpless, whose actions harm themselves but benefit others; the intelligent, whose actions benefit themselves and others; the bandits, who enrich themselves while harming others; and the stupid, whose actions harm others while producing no benefit to themselves. This latter group is Cipolla’s main concern. “No matter how high are one’s estimates of human stupidity,” he wrote, “one is repeatedly and recurrently startled by the fact that a) people whom one had once judged rational and intelligent turn out to be unashamedly stupid; b) day after day, with unceasing monotony, one is harassed in one’s activities by stupid individuals who appear suddenly and unexpectedly in the most inconvenient places and at the most improbable moments.”

Undoubtedly, you’re pondering all of the stupid people you know. But the real danger, Cipolla contended, is when stupid people gain power, exponentially increasing the danger to us all. In this scenario, the stupid will have at their disposal means of destruction created by the intelligent—armies, weapons systems, monetary levers, media influence—and will oversee industries often controlled or influenced by bandits, weakening the institutions designed to monitor them. Imagine, if you will, if an extraordinarily stupid man were to somehow become secretary of defense, jeopardizing both our soldiers and our position in the world while also promoting a testosterone-based culture that could damage our forces for years. To avoid this, Cipolla said, it is the job of the intelligent to keep the stupid in check. If they fail to do so, societies head downhill fast.

Such a fate is not easy to avoid in democracies, which are plagued by the stupid. “Within a democratic system, general elections are a most effective instrument to ensure the steady maintenance of [stupid people] among the powerful,” Cipolla wrote. This is because politicians often have to appeal to the stupid in order to maintain power, ensuring that stupid politicians will always make up a fraction of government officials.

We cannot say for sure what Cipolla would have made of President Trump’s efforts to build a giant ballroom at the White House, his spending countless hours posting social media memes of himself, the nearly $200 million taxpayers have footed for his golf outings, or the UFC and Grand Prix events he hosted at the White House. In fact, it’s difficult to even say whether Trump is more a bandit or just plain stupid—or whether his administration is filled with more obvious bandits who are simply in it for themselves, like Scott Bessent and Marco Rubio, or crazy idiots who actually think they’re doing some good while sailing us toward disaster, like Pete Hegseth and RFK Jr. But it’s likely Cipolla, who died in 2000, would’ve given high marks on the stupidity scale to the administration overall, and seen it as a validation of his theory.

The theory rest on five “laws,” which are as follows:

1. Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
2. The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people infallibly turns out to be a costly mistake.
5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

The second rule—the idea that stupidity is universal among groups and independent of other characteristics, including wealth, education, and social status—is somewhat counterintuitive, but think about some of the Ivy League fools we see in government today: Ted Cruz (Harvard), RFK Jr. (Harvard), Sam Alito (Yale), Clarence Thomas (Yale), Josh Hawley (Yale). Or rich morons like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. In fact, even more dangerous than a stupid person with power is a stupid person with power and credentials—they’re more likely to think they actually know what they’re talking about.

Cipolla allowed, as well, that certain people may shift from one classification to another. Andrew Carnegie, for instance, might be considered a bandit for the first half of his life and an intelligent benefactor for the latter half. Some people might even seem helpless one day and stupid the next. To account for this, Cipolla ruled that we must go by overall average behavior, and he created a four-quadrant chart—like New York magazine’s “Approval Matrix”—for mapping people according to their helplessness, intelligence, banditry, and stupidity.

Among the helpless Cipolla counted those who are self-sacrificing as well as those who are perhaps just plain hapless, so the name is a bit of a misnomer. It would mean that Clara Barton, Henry David Thoreau, and Martin Luther King might be a part of that category, though one could argue, too, that each received the benefit of working toward a more just and equitable society. It’s also difficult to say that they were not intelligent, as they clearly were.

If we were to do a current-day chart, you would find most of the Trump administration leadership in either the “bandit” or “stupid” quadrant—though their exact coordinates on the chart would undoubtedly be a matter of debate. Some might reasonably argue that Trump himself should be on the stupid side. I’d put him close to there, as many of the things he does are just plain stupid. But I contend that his utter stupidity cannot match his unadulterated greed, so I would put him in the “bandit” quadrant but right beside “stupid”—and as far away from “intelligent” as possible. Other top Republicans in that quadrant might include Mike Johnson, Marco Rubio, Scott Bessent, JD Vance, and Kash Patel, while those more worthy of the “stupid” quadrant are RFK Jr., Pete Hegseth, and Tommy Tuberville.

What puts the United States in an unusually dangerous position, though, is the peculiar mix of smart and stupid we’re experiencing right now. The scientists who built the atomic bomb and helped us win World War II were keenly aware of the dangers posed. After the war, Robert Oppenheimer advocated for limitations and cooperation, understanding the nuclear age we had entered. Harry Truman—a capable president—was smart enough to put our nuclear program under civilian control.

Compare that to Washington’s utter failure to regulate AI, even though the leading AI firms themselves are warning that their technology could destroy humanity. As the most advanced AI models become increasingly emboldened, breaking out of their sandboxes and attacking government websites, the GOP-controlled Congress has largely looked the other way while Trump babbles about renaming artificial intelligence as “super intelligence.”

It’s like we built a hydrogen bomb, then entrusted Gordon Gekko to make a profit off it and Barney Fife to monitor him. What could go wrong?

Everything, according to Cipolla’s theory. “In a country that is moving downhill,” he wrote, the “fraction of stupid people” remains constant; “however, in the remaining population one notices among those in power an alarming proliferation of the bandits with overtones of stupidity ... and among those not in power an equally alarming growth in the number of helpless individuals.… Such change in the composition of the non-stupid population inevitably strengthens the destructive power of the [stupid population] and makes decline a certainty. And the country goes to Hell.”

It may be too soon to know whether we’re on that course in the U.S. We may not know until it’s far too late. But it’s alarming enough that Cipolla’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek theory from a half-century ago seems perfectly apt to the state of America today.

Raskin told the AP that overseeing “systemic corruption” under President Donald Trump is a “gargantuan” task, and Raskin and Blumenthal both advised Reuters that no definitive list of top-priority targets yet exists. So much corruption, so little time! 

There is, of course, plenty to investigate with no corruption angle per se, just catastrophic and/or illegal governance. For example: You could hold an entire hearing to calculate how many people Robert Kennedy, Jr., has killed as Health and Human Services Secretary (though lately a corruption angle on Kennedy has surfaced, too, involving $4 million in book advances and free flights to Fiji and Greece). Certainly Kennedy has not killed as many people as Pete Hegseth has by dropping bombs on fishing boats in the Caribbean that may or may not be conveying drugs (234 dead). Not to mention the other couple thousand civilians Hegseth’s killed in an Iran war nobody wants. And Hegseth and Kennedy are pikers compared to the triumvirate of Elon Musk, Russell Vought, and Marco Rubio. By shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, these three people, one of them a devout Christian fundamentalist, have killed 781,343, according to an estimate by ImpactCounter.com, of whom 518,428 were children. According to the Gates Foundation, child deaths, which since 2000 have been cut in half globally, rose worldwide in 2025—the first increase of this century. Gentlemen, take a bow. Now raise your right hand.

But if the Democrats hope specifically to hold crooks accountable, by which I presume Jeffries and Raskin mean kleptocrats who use their governmental positions to line their pockets, they will need to assemble a list of top-priority targets. Not being quite so busy these days as Raskin, Garcia, Whitehouse, and Blumenthal, I’ve come up with the following five. At the very least, I think it’s a strong first cut.

The UAE AI Chips Affair. The mother of all Trump family financial scandals. It begins with a president-elect of the United States entering into a business partnership with a foreign nation four days before his second inauguration. Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who runs the sovereign wealth fund of the United Arab Emirates (Tahnoon is also brother to the UAE president) purchased, for $500 million, a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial, or WLF. WLF is a cryptocurrency company, created two months before the 2024 election, in which the Trump family owns a 38 percent equity stake (initially it was 60 percent), and from which the Trump family extracts 75 percent of net proceeds from token sales, even though nobody in the Trump family appears to have invested a dime in WLF. The UAE partnership deal was signed by Trump’s son Eric.

Sheikh Tahnoon also put $31 million into business entities associated with the family of Steve Witkoff, a WLF co-founder (his son Zach is chief executive of WLF). Before the money changed hands Witkoff was named Trump’s envoy to the Middle East. The UAE, please note, is situated in the Middle East.

That all happened in January 2025. In May of that year, Sheikh Tahnoon purchased $2 billion of a WLF stablecoin called USD1 to invest in Binance. This transaction was arranged by a felon named Changpeng Zhao, who’d spent four months at the Federal Correctional Complex Lompoc for violating various securities laws. He was also Binance’s chief executive until his 2023 plea deal required him to step down. Zhao supplied WLF with more than a dozen Binance engineers to help set up USD1. Five months later, Trump pardoned Zhao. An October Wall Street Journal piece suggests the pardon was understood by both sides to be payback for Zhao’s invaluable help in launching WLF.

Sheikh Tahnoon got an even bigger payback. He’d been lobbying the Trump administration to allow the UAE to purchase advanced AI chips that the Biden administration previously denied that nation. The Biden administration denied the UAE the chips because it had pretty good evidence that a company of which Tahnoon was chairman shared advanced technology with China, which in turn used that tech to upgrade its long-range missiles—missiles that could be used to shoot down United States jet fighters should the United States try to halt a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “Intel was flashing red,” one former US official told Demetri Sevastopulo of the Financial Times last October. Tahnoon’s company, G42, has denied that it shared the technology.

Two weeks after the UAE’s $2 billion stablecoin purchase (and only four months after the UAE purchased 49 percent of WLF) the White House greenlit the UAE’s purchase of the advanced AI chips. Steve Witkoff was involved in this transaction himself! In dollar terms, this is the biggest bribery scandal in United States history. It makes Teapot Dome look like shoplifting a candy bar. And unlike Teapot Dome, this scandalous transaction enriched a sitting president.

Witkoff should be called to testify. WLF said at the time of the chips announcement that Wikoff was “in the process of fully divesting from WLF.” But three months later a financial disclosure form showed that Witkoff still owned a piece of WLF. Zach Witkoff also looks like a promising witness, if only because he has a big mouth.

Trump’s IRS Indemnity. Trump filed a $10 million lawsuit against the IRS last January over the leak of his tax returns to The New York Times. The tax returns leaked during Trump’s first term, so in effect Trump was suing himself, and the lawsuit was filed during Trump’s second term, so in effect Trump was negotiating a settlement with himself (via a Justice department over which Trump exercises improper control). The settlement was that Trump would get a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” (i.e., slush) fund to compensate people he believed were prosecuted unjustly, plus immunity from any pending tax audits. In July, District Court Judge Kathleen Williams voided both settlements. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche then rescinded the anti-weaponization fund. He did not rescind the indemnification agreement.

Nobody puts it past Trump that he might try to revive the slush fund, whose cancellation (like its creation) is, for complicated reasons, a matter of some legal doubt. But the main question for congressional investigators is what, if anything, the IRS did in response to that indemnification deal that Blanche never rescinded. Was Trump being audited? Is he being audited now? Were existing audits cancelled? These questions should be answerable in a congressional hearing even if the content of those audits must remain confidential. 

Pete Hegseth’s Blood-Money Insider Trade. In March, the Financial Times broke the story that a Morgan Stanley broker representing Pete Hegseth attempted to make a multimillion-dollar investment in defense companies on the eve of the Iran war. The broker approached BlackRock about Hegseth investing in BlackRock’s Defense Industrials Active Exchange ETF, or exchange traded fund. An ETF is sort of similar to a mutual fund but it bundles multiple stocks and bonds into a single financial instrument that trades like a stock. A Pentagon spokesman denied Hegseth’s broker made any such inquiry, but the FT had three sources confirming that he did. Advantage: FT.

The purchase never took place because, for some reason, BlackRock’s Defense Industrials Active Exchange ETF was not available to Morgan Stanley clients. Conceivably BlackRock threw a boulder in Hegseth’s path because it understood these discussions were destined to become the subject of an investigation. According to the FT, the matter was “flagged internally.” That means multiple BlackRock employees who know about this should be available for Congress to subpoena. 

My guess is BlackRock also created an internal paper trail, because if you were BlackRock and you’d “flagged internally” a blatantly corrupt attempt by a sitting secretary of defense to get rich off the war he was overseeing, wouldn’t you create a paper trail so that nobody later could accuse you of misbehavior? As I noted last March, this is low-hanging investigatory fruit. All that’s really necessary is to send a few subpoenas to BlackRock.

Trump’s Memecoin Racket. Trump made more than $2 billion in income in 2025, according to his June financial disclosure. The single biggest component was licensing fees for a memecoin called $TRUMP that Trump hawked on social media. It earned him $635 million. Two-thirds of all investors in the $TRUMP memecoin—988,905 people, according to the crypto analytics firm Nansen—lost a total of $3.81 billion. ($TRUMP briefly traded at about $73 in January 2025; as I write this, it’s trading at about $2.) But for Trump it’s all upside because he collects a transaction fee on every $TRUMP trade, including $TRUMP tokens sold by MAGA suckers at a loss. Nice work if you can get it.

Trump’s swindle of credulous followers is an interesting angle for investigators to follow, but an even more interesting angle would be to study the motives of people who buy $TRUMP in sufficient quantities to score an invitation to a VIP reception with Trump. This group appears willing to lose money on Trump memecoins so long as it gains them access to Trump. Trump’s hosted two such receptions. In 2025, the attendees were 25 investors who held, according to the Financial Times, a median $3.2 million in near-worthless $TRUMP memecoins. In 2026 the attendees were 29 investors who held a median of $539,000 in even-more-worthless $TRUMP memecoins. The top purchaser in both contests was Justin Sun, whom the Securities and Exchange Commission charged with fraud in 2023. Curiously enough, in March the SEC settled the case for a paltry $10 million and on social media Sun pronounced himself “very pleased.” Sun is an obvious star witness to any investigation, but other contest winners should be called to testify also; FT said in April that it was able to identify 27 of the 29 most recent attendees (though, exasperatingly, it didn’t say who they were). 

Diplomacy For Sale. We come, finally, to the sprawling Trump family. Donald, Jr., is of course a fat target and merits investigation for various suspicious investments, including in several defense companies, one of them a startup that received a $620 million loan from the Pentagon after White House aide Peter Navarro intervened, according to a May ProPublica investigation. (Don, Jr., “formed a close bond in recent years” with Navarro, ProPublica’s Robert Faturechi reported, and even visited Navarro when he was in prison for defying a congressional subpoena.)  There was also the matter of Don, Jr.’s wedding afterparty in the Bahamas, bankrolled to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars by Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close enough to Putin that Ukraine imposed sanctions on him. This story (also broken by ProPublica) was lurid enough to prompt Senator John Curtis of Utah, an actual Republican, to call on the Senate Judiciary Committee to investigate. 

Tempting though Don, Jr., is, I think it would be wisest to start with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, because Kushner is peddling influence even as he works for Trump’s administration as a sort of ambassador-at-large negotiating, in partnership with Witkoff, peace deals in Israel, Iran, and Ukraine. Earlier this month Dexter Filkins of The New Yorker reported:

A classified report produced by a European intelligence agency states that Trump and people around him have discussed several potential contracts in Russia. The report is not dated, but the European official who gave it to me said that the details were first discussed sometime after Trump invited Putin to Anchorage, in August, 2025. 

The proposed business ventures mentioned in this classified report were strikingly specific:

The document lists ten potential ventures, which it says appear to “have been originally designed by the Kremlin’s political and business elites.” They include reopening the Nord Stream 2 pipeline under American control, resuming ExxonMobil’s operations in Sakhalin, and drilling for oil in the Sea of Okhotsk. According to the report, there was discussion of unfreezing Russian assets that are held under American sanctions. The document mentions people who might participate, including Trump, Witkoff, and Kushner.

A Kushner spokesperson told Filkins that no United States officials would profit from the deals under discussion. But Kushner’s $6 billion venture capital firm, Affinity Partners, is already funded in large part by sovereign wealth funds in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, all of them situated, of course, in that same Middle East where Kushner is negotiating peace deals (or anyway trying to). After Kushner joined the Trump administration he personally solicited $5 billion in investments, according to a March 2026 report by Rob Copeland and Maureen Farrell in The New York Times. 

Affinity, though possibly not Kushner himself, approached the Saudis this year to increase their investment. The Saudis already invested $2 billion in Affinity back in 2021 over the objections of its sovereign wealth funds advisers, who pronounced Affinity “unsatisfactory in all aspects” and in particular judged “excessive” its proposed management fee. But that was before Kushner reentered government to negotiate peace deals in, among other places, the Middle East. “Mr. Kushner’s fund-raising,” The Times’s Copeland and Maureen Farrell reported, “is expected to stretch on for the better part of this year.” I would guess many affinities have been identified.

An investigation of Affinity Partners should be a top priority.

Those are my top five scandals to investigate. There are, of course, many other kleptocracy scandals, many of which I’ve documented (see “The Trump Family’s Ever-Expading Portfolio of Corruption,” March 2025, and “How Trump May Be Cashing In On A Weakening Dollar,” October 2025, and “Trump’s New Bank Is His Most Naked Scandal Yet,” August 2026). But Democrats will need to pace themselves. These five represent, I think, the most promising initial pr0jects.

There’s a paradox at the center of Talarico’s spirited bid. He’s running in a state that Donald Trump carried by 14 points in 2024. Yet he’s actually leaned into the moral issues around immigration more aggressively than most other Democrats running in tough areas have this cycle, despite it being widely touted as Trump’s “strength.” Democrats can learn from this—and not in the ways they might think.

Last week, during extended remarks in Austin, Talarico seized on the news that ICE shot a local Venezuelan immigrant in the back—he’s now in detention—to make an expansive moral case that immigration is good for our country. He called for “more legal pathways” for immigrants to come here and “live the American dream,” which he said would make our country “richer and stronger.”

In those remarks, Talarico called for those broadened legal pathways on top of a path to citizenship for longtime undocumented residents and increased border security. In short, Talarico called for more legal immigration, said this would benefit our country, and even declared: “I think most Texans support all of those goals.”

Lurking behind this declaration—that a majority of Texans support all those things—is a genuine theory of the case. It’s that Trump’s agenda—the masked ICE thugs snatching grandmas and children, the killings of U.S. citizens, the overt white nationalism in official government communications—has opened the door to creating a new pro-immigrant consensus, even in a place Trump won overwhelmingly. By delivering such a message in Texas so frontally, Talarico is already on the road to accomplishing something potentially seismic.

Here’s why. After Trump’s 2024 victory, some observers suggested his gains among Hispanics in the Latino-heavy Rio Grande Valley, along the Mexican border, suggested he’d forged a new, multiracial working-class coalition. In that narrative, even Latino U.S. citizens were gravitating toward Trump’s anti-immigrant restrictionism, in a durable realignment that would change U.S. politics.

But now that dream seems to be coming apart. This is very visible in the Texas Senate race, where Trump is badly alienating Latinos—mostly because of the economy but also due to immigration—and leading them to support Talarico.

I’ve obtained new data that drives the point home. In August, Texas Southern University polled three competitive House districts in Texas—the 15th, 28th, and 34th. These Latino-heavy districts, which abut the border’s southernmost portions, all swung hard toward Trump, heavily driving the “realignment” narrative. Yet the poll found the Democratic challenger leading the GOP incumbent in the 15th by five points and the Democratic incumbents leading their GOP challengers in the 28th and 34th by 11 and three points, respectively.

Here’s where it gets interesting. I asked for the survey’s breakdown of how Latinos in the districts view Trump on these issues. The answer: In Texas’s 15th, only 36 percent of Latinos approve of Trump on immigration and border security, while 61 percent disapprove—25 points underwater. In the 28th, that’s 36–60, or 24 points underwater. And in the 34th, that’s 36–62, or 26 points underwater.

“They thought they were getting a secure border and public safety, not the deportation of friends, co-workers, fellow parishioners, and relatives,” Mark Jones, who co-directs the Texas Southern University poll, told me, speaking about Texas Latinos.

Talarico’s campaign sees the Rio Grande Valley as critical. He rolled out his immigration plan there, and he’s done around a dozen events in the region. The region’s turn against Trump helps explain why Talarico’s getting around 60 percent support from Latinos statewide—a huge turnaround from 2024, when Trump won 55 percent of them.

In one sense, these numbers are not good enough. Political consultant Mike Madrid, an expert on the Latino vote, argues that this might not be happening without the bad economy. He notes that Trump’s ability to still reach the mid-30s with Latinos on immigration—despite all he’s done—suggests Democrats must do more to turn them into a pro-Dem voting bloc, rather than a swing constituency.

But this also suggests a big opening. Trump has thrown away his 2024 gains with these voters, meaning Democrats can try to seal the deal long-term. In redder areas, they can lead with the economy and border security, and pair that with a welcoming message for immigrants, which is now sellable even in red areas due to Trump’s savage inhumanity. “Democrats have been given a golden opportunity, a second chance to reconstitute a working-class coalition,” Madrid says.

It should also be acknowledged that one reason for Talarico’s gains is likely that Talarico has distanced himself from Joe Biden’s immigration record, repeatedly declaring that Biden failed on the border. Talarico’s plan is also heavy on adding border security. “That’s where the conversation begins,” Madrid notes.

Talarico alludes to this himself with one of his frequent formulations: “Our border should be like a front porch—it should have a welcome mat out front and a lock on the door.” The “lock” is important. But let’s not neglect the “welcome mat” part.

After all, Talarico’s plan calls for ICE to deprioritize the removals of longtime undocumented residents while focusing on dangerous criminals. It calls for a path to citizenship for many undocumented groups, though it’s not the large-scale amnesty that Senate Democrats passed in 2013 (which the GOP House killed). It would create new legal pathways for immigrants to come here and work. It would maintain channels for asylum-seekers and refugees while calling for more judges to adjudicate such claims faster.

It’s hard to evaluate this without more details. Would it mean going back to Biden-era levels of refugee admission? A resumption of Temporary Protected Status for groups facing horrific home-country conditions, which Trump has largely killed? Tougher standards for achieving asylum here than under previous Democratic presidents? Talarico’s campaign has not elaborated.

But in its broad strokes, this is a humane, pro-immigrant agenda. Talarico’s baseline values hold that immigration is good, it enriches our country in innumerable ways, and we should facilitate and encourage it, including among those seeking humanitarian sojourn here.

True, if there is space for this message to resonate now, it may be because Trump mostly closed down the border, creating the impression that undocumented immigration has been “solved.” Which might mean that in difficult territory, Democrats now have to convey—as Talarico does—that they won’t allow a reversion to the Biden-era status quo ante. Explaining how to accomplish this while rebuilding a far more humane system is a genuinely difficult challenge.

But still, the ingredients are coming together for a big Democratic reset. “Most Americans are pro-immigrant,” Talarico said during the Austin event. “Throughout American history, immigrants have always made us richer and stronger.” He rejected the idea that “you’ve got to pick between security and welcoming the stranger,” stressing: “We don’t have to pick between those things.”

Talarico, who regularly speaks about his faith, is consciously using biblical language here. The duty to “welcome the stranger” is deeply felt in American life, as Bill Kristol has argued, and not just as a religious duty. The suffering and injustice borne by the immigrants all around us—our “neighbors,” as Talarico put it—have become crushingly omnipresent facts of life as the banal cruelties of Late Stage Trumpism relentlessly grind us down.

But win or lose, Talarico has already demonstrated that even in deep-red Texas, people want something higher, something better. We all do. Democrats: Don’t hold back. Speak to this still-flickering sense of hopefulness forthrightly and unflinchingly.

Trump has been lying about all this. Multiple inquiries have produced much evidence showing that Putin messed with the 2016 election to boost Trump’s chances. Even a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee investigation overseen by then-Senator Marco Rubio concluded in a 2020 report that Putin “ordered” the Russian operation in part to “help the Trump campaign” and that Trump aided Putin’s operation by “minimizing Russian involvement.” 

Yet Trump has essentially won the messaging war over the Russia scandal. Putin’s intervention—which included a hack-and-leak operation that targeted and impeded Hillary Clinton’s campaign and an extensive covert social media campaign that pumped divisive posts, including pro-Trump material, into the feeds of American voters—was one of several factors that contributed to Trump’s narrow victory that year. And Trump, in what was arguably an act of betrayal of country, aided and abetted a foreign adversary’s attack on American democracy by echoing and affirming Putin’s denials that he had meddled in the election. But all of this is barely mentioned these days. Not by Democrats. Not by many in the media. 

Trump’s claims of deep-state persecution, though, still ring out—and not merely as a personal pet peeve. At his urging, the Justice Department is pursuing a baseless criminal investigation of former officials in the Obama and Biden administrations who participated in Trump-Russia investigations, looking to prove the existence of a grand conspiracy against Trump. And Trump’s puzzling relationship with Putin remains significant, as Trump charts an erratic course regarding the war in Ukraine and pursues his own war against Iran, which is drawing crucial support from Russia, which is passing satellite targeting and other intelligence to Tehran and sharing missile technology. Discussing the conflict in Ukraine, Trump has at times characterized Putin and himself as co-victims of “Russia, Russia, Russia”—as if it were a bonding experience that affects his approach to the war in Ukraine. Over the objections of America’s closest allies, Trump has invited Putin to attend the upcoming G20 meeting that will be held in a Trump resort in Florida. 

How Trump Won the Russia Battle …

Despite their relevance to today, the 2016 Russian attack and Trump’s complicity have been memory-holed. Neither were prominent issues in the 2020 and 2024 elections—even though during those campaigns, Russian intelligence again mounted operations to tarnish the Democrats. In 2020, a Ukrainian legislator named Andriy Derkach, who was a Russian agent, teamed up with Rudy Giuliani, then Trump’s personal attorney, to spread false claims of Joe Biden corruption (this is according to Trump’s own Treasury Department, which sanctioned Derkach). In 2024, Russian disinformation operatives pushed a host of fake allegations about Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, including the false charge that Walz had inappropriately touched a student when he taught high school—an allegation seen by millions of social media users. Trump dismissed reports of these Kremlin interventions with his all-too familiar “Russia, Russia, Russia” mantra.

Some might consider Trump’s complicity with acts of (information) warfare against the United States to be a bigger scandal than Watergate, Iran-Contra, or other presidential disgraces. So how has he gotten away with this? Trump’s triumph on the Russia front provides a lesson about his tactics—as well as those of the Democrats.

His strategy for surmounting the Russia scandal boiled down to deny, define, deflect, and repeat. 

When Moscow’s attack on the 2016 election first hit the headlines, Trump and his top aides responded simply: They denied any such thing had happened. It didn’t matter that experts and government officials confirmed the Kremlin’s interference. Trump and his crew kept insisting the hacking and leaking of Democratic emails and memos were not Russian operations. 

Next—without conceding Putin had interfered—they established a high bar for wrongdoing. Trump and his team insisted that there was no collusion between the Trump camp and Russia—that is, Trump and his aides had not directly conspired with Putin’s operatives to pull off this caper. They defined the scandal as turning on the question of whether there was proof of Trump’s participation in the Russian scheme. Trump had backed Putin’s denials and enthusiastically exploited the leaked material—even calling on Russia to hack Clinton. That could be viewed as serious misconduct for a presidential candidate. But Trump and his associates made collusion the issue. 

Not until long after the election did the public learn that top Trump campaign aides met with a Russian emissary at Trump Tower after being told she was part of the covert Kremlin effort to assist Trump and that, during the race, Paul Manafort, the chair of Trump’s campaign, was interacting with and sending internal polling data to a former business associate who was a Russian intelligence officer (according to the Senate intelligence report). Was any of this collusion? Perhaps. But collusion is not a legal term, and Trump and his defenders successfully contended that all that counted was whether he had played a part in the assault itself. (When special counsel Robert Mueller released his final report, he noted he had uncovered no evidence of Trump’s involvement in a criminal conspiracy, which allowed Trump and his loyalists to claim he was exonerated, though Mueller identified other acts of Trump wrongdoing and possible crimes, including obstruction of justice.)

Third, while denying there was any wrongdoing and defining the terms of the scandal to his advantage, Trump also engaged in a series of deflections. Looking to change the subject, he alleged that President Obama had spied on him during the 2016 campaign. (There was no evidence of that.) He and his allies also focused on the Steele dossier, a collection of memos that former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele had compiled for an opposition research firm retained by the Democrats. These memos, never meant for public consumption, contained gossip, speculation, and unproven allegations about Trump and Russia, including the claims that Trump had been filmed cavorting with sex workers during a Moscow visit and that Putin possessed blackmail material on him. 

Trump and his supporters worked hard to shift the entire Russia affair toward the Steele memos, falsely charging the Democrats had concocted the dossier to trigger a bogus investigation. (The Steele memos had nothing to do with the launch of the Russia investigation, as multiple probes have concluded.) They also fixated on the FBI’s improper use of the Steele information to obtain a surveillance warrant for a former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser named Carter Page—a violation of his civil liberties.

Trump and his advocates endlessly decried the Steele memos and the Page warrant—a serious matter—to distract from the Russian operation that helped Trump and Trump’s own actions that bolstered Putin’s denials. In 2019, Republican Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, which investigated the Steele dossier, broke ranks by saying, “There is a Russian investigation without a dossier.” But Trump, MAGA, right-wing media, and top House Republicans insisted otherwise. They asserted that Trump was set up by the Steele dossier and deployed that conspiracy theory to discredit the entire Russia probe and all discussion of Putin’s assault.

In addition to denying, defining, and deflecting, Trump stuck with a tried-and-true marketing ploy. He repeated his shorthand dismissals of the Russia scandal. Over and over, he called it a hoax and a witch hunt, and whenever he was challenged or new information emerged, he wailed, “Russia, Russia, Russia.” He’s done that for years. As new controversies arose—such as his handling of the Covid pandemic, the criminal investigations of his incitement of the January 6 riot, his swiping of top-secret documents when he left the White House in 2021, and the Jeffrey Epstein scandal—he branded them continuations of “Russia, Russia, Russia.” It became a bumper sticker slogan encapsulating his claim that he was the target of a never-ending plot waged by diabolical government officials. With his persistent “Russia, Russia, Russia” chant, he drowned out discussion of what actually occurred. He transformed one of the most serious scandals in U.S. history into a dismissive three-second soundbite. In the absence of a countervailing message, this worked. 

… And How the Democrats Lost It

Which brings us to the Democrats. Not only did Trump win this battle; the Democrats lost it. 

After the 2016 election, they did much to keep the Russia issue alive, demanding investigations and accusing Trump and his campaign of skullduggery. Some overpromised that evidence of collusion was soon to come. But after Mueller did not uncover a smoking gun on collusion, the Democrats mostly dropped the matter. Only Trump was interested in revisiting the Russia story—as a tale of nefarious deep-state conniving against him. 

You cannot win a war you do not fight. Not long ago, I asked Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island to explain why the Democrats gave up. He had not played a major role in the tussle over the Russia narrative. But for years he has released reports and delivered speeches on Republican and right-­wing efforts to use “dark money” to shape the nation’s political conversation, and he has criticized his fellow Democrats for not vigorously countering the far right’s well-­financed messaging operations.

Whitehouse broke down the Democrats’ shortcoming into three parts: their nature, their infrastructure, and their bad habits. “As to our nature, we’re inclined to believe the truth will out,” he said. “Once you establish facts, you can move on. But propagandists and autocrats know that’s not true.” Their rule is simple: Keep banging the drum, and never stop promoting fundamental falsehoods. That’s what Trump had done with his “Russia, Russia, Russia” slogan. 

As for infrastructure, Whitehouse pointed out, “We have no war room, no ops center in Democratic politics to see to it that long-­term fights are maintained. Meanwhile, conservative groups persist and persist, whatever the message is: the deep state, climate denial, the Russia hoax. It’s hard to take on an institutional apparatus without one of your own.”

Regarding bad habits, he bemoaned that the Democrats hadn’t had “much fight in us for a while.” Biden, when he was president, was consumed by process and the quest for consensus; Barack Obama promised to be a post-­partisan president. “It’s been a long time since we had a forceful Democratic bully pulpit that projects itself as strongly as Trump,” Whitehouse said. “We don’t have much memory as to what a fight is. We have a baseline belief we’re on the side of good and that will win out. But Trump just talked us into the ground.”

The Democrats, who initially were fierce in pursuing investigations and excoriating Trump for siding with Putin and exploiting Russia’s attack, could not maintain that level of intensity, as Trump hammered away with his hoax–witch hunt hogwash. After the Mueller report was released, it was time for them to move on. The Trump-­Russia scandal, as they saw it, was over. Even when it was clear during the 2020 and 2024 campaigns that Putin was targeting influence operations at Americans to benefit Trump, the Biden campaign and then the Biden administration did not make much noise about Moscow’s interventions. Nor did the Harris campaign.

The Mueller report was not the end of the story for Trump and the Republicans. They falsely contended it demonstrated the Russia investigation was a big nothing and absolved Trump, and they pressed this message as part of their unremitting, years-long campaign to obliterate the Russia scandal and remove the stain of Putin’s interference from Trump’s 2016 victory. They deftly turned the unproven allegation of collusion into an effective attack on the entire Trump-Russia narrative—­ and on their political opponents and the media. Ever since, Trump has constantly deployed his false depiction of the Trump-­Russia scandal to delegitimize all the criticism and accusations of wrongdoing he subsequently faced.

“Narrative construction and narrative maintenance is an essential and robust part of Trumpian politics,” Whitehouse said. “Everything runs second to that. Their narrative has been manipulative, purposeful, and combative. We Democrats, however, believe that reality and truth once established is solidly set.” But in politics, an unopposed narrative can conquer facts. 

For years, Trump and his MAGA Republicans have cast the Democrats as ferocious Machiavellian warriors fiercely conspiring around the clock with their behind-the-scenes allies to crush Trump and his movement. Yet Whitehouse considered his party mostly feeble in the messaging war against Trump, and its flaws had allowed Trump to not only survive the Russia scandal but to weaponize it against his political foes and critics.

Trump’s messaging-war tactics are far from foolproof. They haven’t worked in regard to the Iran war, his mass deportation crusade, or his economic policies. Perhaps that’s because the realities of these decisions are right in front of people. The war has not been won, and it has raised the cost of gasoline. Hundreds of thousands of people—many without criminal records—have been apprehended, with many brutally deported. And inflation has not been tamed. No matter how frequently Trump declares there is no affordability crisis (deny), current economic problems are Biden’s fault (define), and the Democrats are Commies looking to destroy the nation (deflect), Americans can see and feel the consequences of these decisions.

In the case of the Trump-Russia scandal, with much of the story being a confusing tangle of accounts of clandestine actions, Trump had an easier time and could use his salesman and carnival barker talents to create and perpetuate a self-serving narrative, especially with the Democrats yielding the field.

This is not just a (one-sided) fight over history. With the war in Ukraine still raging and with Putin continuing his subterranean battle against the democracies of the West through covert influence and sabotage operations—as has been recently reported, his clandestine disinformation operatives are now targeting the midterm elections—a clear understanding of Trump’s relationship with Putin and Russia remains necessary. And though Trump is low in the polls, Democrats still must figure out how to forcefully engage in long-term narrative politics. Trump managed to survive the Russia scandal and prevail in that messaging battle.

His reliance on deceit and distraction may yet cause him to lose the larger war. But other scoundrels, no doubt, will follow his “Russia, Russia, Russia” example, and this episode, as well as the entire Trump era, shows us how vital it is that responsible politicians and journalists learn how to better confront the big lies of our political demagogues.     

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced Tuesday the implementation of the “anti-sharia law” he signed earlier this year, officially designating 90 groups as terrorist organizations, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, the largest Muslim advocacy group in the nation.

Florida’s authority on the matter superseded the State Department, which does not list CAIR as a terrorist organization, thanks to a state law (H.B. 1471) that went into effect in July. That allowed Florida’s domestic security chief to officially identify terrorist organizations without the involvement of the federal government.

The state government proceeded with the matter without input from the public.

The Muslim Brotherhood and antifa also received the terror group designation. Other groups targeted by the action include the Venezuelan crime syndicate Tren de Aragua, two Mexican drug cartels, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran.

The groundwork for the new labels came by way of an executive order DeSantis signed last December. At the time, CAIR’s Florida chapter sued DeSantis, claiming that the order, which stripped the group’s access to state resources, was unconstitutional.

Another lawsuit from the group is expected following DeSantis’s latest action.  

“There is nowhere in that notice any allegation or evidence that CAIR has engaged in any violent or dangerous act in violation of Florida or U.S. law,” Hina Shamsi, the director of the ACLU National Security Project, said Tuesday following the decision, noting that the ACLU plans to file for a preliminary injunction on behalf of CAIR’s Florida chapter. “And that’s the first requirement for something as serious as this.”

Shamsi added that the “relentless” effort to label CAIR as a terrorist organization is “unnecessary, unprecedented, and unconstitutional.”

The Department of Justice accused Garcés Pérez of ignoring federal agents’ instructions and driving away from them when they tried to pull him over in Austin, Texas. As he left, the DOJ claimed, his driver’s side mirror hit one of the agents in the chest. An ICE agent said that after a short, high-speed car chase, Garcés Pérez tried to hit him with his car, at which point the agent said he shot into the car and hit Garcés Pérez in the back.

Parts of the incident were captured by a body camera, according to the DOJ, but only still images have been released to the public so far. Garcés Pérez disputes the government’s account, stating that a black SUV came out of nowhere and tried to hit his car while he was in the middle of a food delivery.

Garcés Pérez said that he thought the SUV was an aggressive driver and tried to drive away, only for the SUV to ram his car and turn on its police lights after the crash. He was then shot after the car was stopped, according to The New York Times.

Since the incident, Garcés Pérez’s lawyer Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch said that he has languished in ICE custody without adequate medical care, having spent just three hours in a hospital before being taken into ICE’s detention center in Pearsall, Texas, without being able to see his wife. A spokesperson for Lincoln-Goldfinch said in a statement Tuesday that the bullet is still lodged in Garcés Pérez’s body even after nearly nine days.

“Rather than provide the life saving medical care he needs, DHS and the government are playing games with his life,” the statement said.

Hegseth is plotting to cut 20 percent of the Pentagon’s slots for admirals and generals, two officials told The Hill Tuesday. The secretary will formally announce the reductions during his State of the Force address in Quantico, Virginia, on Wednesday.

Hegseth has already overseen a vast reduction in the number of top-ranking military personnel. At the time of his confirmation, there were 10 four-star generals on active duty. Now there are just five—the smallest number to lead the service in years.

In May, Hegseth signed an order directing the U.S. military to slash the number of active-duty four-star generals, as well as general and flag officers, by 10 percent, and reduce the number of general officers in the National Guard by a minimum of 20 percent. At the time, Hegseth claimed the “Less Generals, More GIs” policy would allow for a leaner military structure, but provided no guidance for how these cuts ought to actually be made.  

In April, Hegseth fired Army chief of staff Gen. Randy George, and forced out at least three senior officers who were believed to be in the running to be George’s replacement. All in all, Hegseth has forced out at least half a dozen senior officers, undermining military readiness in the ongoing campaign in the Middle East. 

Hegseth’s leadership has come under increased scrutiny amid mounting reports that he concealed casualties among U.S. service members, depleted the U.S. military weapons stockpile, directed massive, unchecked government spending, and allowed horrific conditions aboard long-deployed U.S. ships that led to a number of attempted suicides. 

There’s also the matters of killing schoolchildren and nearly starting World War III—both tied to his overreliance on artificial intelligence.

Earlier this month, the House announced that it would end its voting session early in order to avoid an impeachment vote on Hegseth. The vote won’t take place until after the midterm elections, but a number of Senate Democrats have already signaled that supporting an impeachment vote against the secretary would be a worthwhile use of political capital, Punchbowl News reported Tuesday. 

The nation’s highest judiciary on Tuesday paused a lower court ruling that blocked the government from deporting people to locations they had no relation to without due process. The decision came by way of an emergency ruling that did not include a vote count, though it did note that Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson would have denied the request to resume the deportations.

The Supreme Court is expected to pick the issue back up again in December when it will hear oral arguments. A final ruling is expected next year.

The outcome is a major win for the administration, which has spent more than a year and a half shipping people to countries around the world as part of its mass deportation program.

But it isn’t the first time that the court has weighed in on the matter. In June 2025, the court overruled a lower court decision regarding a class action lawsuit, granting the executive branch the ability to deport individuals without objection, even if the deportees are likely to face the risk of death or grave harm in the new locale.

The government has deported nearly a million people since Donald Trump returned to office, according to a CNN report published last week. Some of those individuals have been sent to countries with histories of human rights abuses.

At least 25,000 people have been deported from America to developing countries under the guise of Trump’s “secure the border” agenda, according to a social media post by Homeland Security’s legal chief James Percival last week, who added that “third country removal is an essential public safety tool.”

Such reasons, according to Percival, include the possibility that a home country might reject a person’s return, as well as the inordinate costs associated with actually sending an individual back to their country of origin, particularly if the country is far from the U.S.

“Imagine, for example, that DHS needs to remove a single illegal alien to a remote country halfway across the world. Is DHS supposed to spend a fortune chartering a private plane for one law breaker?” continued Percival.

Percival then echoed Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric, claiming that many of the immigrants facing third country deportations are the “worst of the worst” types of criminals, suggesting that these individuals—who are not tried before they are deported—are “child rapists” and “killers.”

“Before President Trump came along, the U.S. government typically just released these people after six months because they could not or did not care to find a third country,” Percival claimed.

This story has been updated.

Inside Washington

Katie Hobbs is holding the line in Arizona. Now, she’s under attack.

With midterms that could shift control of Congress rapidly approaching, the gubernatorial election in Arizona might not be high on the average Democrat’s radar. But incumbent Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs is facing a potentially hard race in a state Democrats don’t want to lose. 

Hobbs is “the person who is keeping the legislature at bay,” explained Thomas Volgy, a professor at the University of Arizona and the former mayor of Tucson. The governor’s veto power is currently the last line of defense against right-wing legislation passed by the Republican-controlled state Senate and House of Representatives. On one Friday in late June, for example, Hobbs vetoed 88 bills, including a bill that would have banned the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion measures in hiring and another that would allow people who detransition to sue the medical providers who aided in their gender transition care. As of mid-July, Hobbs had signed 993 bills into law and vetoed 541 since assuming office. “Her responsibility as a Democratic governor is to make sure the legislature does no harm,” Volgy added.

Since she took office in 2023, Hobbs has also presided over a number of crucial policy fights, and is making the pitch that she needs four more years to see them through. 

“In my second term, I will continue to prioritize lowering costs, creating good-paying jobs, protecting water, and investing in public education,” Hobbs wrote in a statement to The New Republic. “I want to put Prop 123 on the ballot to secure much-needed support for Arizona’s public schools without raising taxes, while continuing to crack down on waste, fraud, and abuse in the ESA program,” she said, referring to a proposition to raise money for public education and the state’s “Empowerment Scholarship Account,” or ESA program, which is a school choice funding program.

Arizona’s ESA program was established in 2011 and became universal in 2022, giving students public funding to spend on private education. The program is, unsurprisingly, controversial among state Democrats. “Enacting meaningful reform to Arizona’s out-of-control ESA program is critical,” said Stacy Pearson, a state Democratic strategist and co-founder of Lumen Strategies. “We’ve got districts across the state closing public schools” because state funds are used for the ESA program instead.

Arizona is one of seven states in the Colorado River Basin. The next negotiations for water rights in the region will take place in 2028. The governor plays an active role in those negotiations, directs the state Department of Water Resources, and, of course, holds veto power over legislation that could threaten the state’s water supply. As governor, Hobbs has focused on conserving the state’s groundwater resources, even if it means blocking housing development in some cases. Early in her term, she canceled the land leases of a Saudi Arabian farming company, Fondomonte, which her administration said was excessively pumping groundwater to grow alfalfa. While Hobbs has focused on conservation, Biggs is a proponent of desalination efforts, which Hobbs hasn’t focused on as governor. 

Polling throughout the summer showed Hobbs leading her opponent, Representative Andy Biggs. Some of those leads were more significant than others: In a mid-August poll, she was up 15 points, while a different poll conducted at the same time showed her only up two points. But public polling has been limited since mid-August, and there was a significant development at the end of that month.

Hobbs, who only won her 2022 election by some 18,000 votes, has been plagued by an investigation into alleged pay-to-play scandal: a foster care provider who donated hundreds of thousands to her campaign, and was subsequently awarded a rate increase by the state. On August 21 this year, the state attorney general announced that there was no evidence that Hobbs broke the law, and declined to prosecute her. Though the attorney general’s investigation absolved Hobbs of any blame, Republican-aligned offices and groups like the auditor general’s office are conducting their own reviews. Republicans in the state house hired a Trump-aligned attorney to investigate Hobbs, and Republican lawmakers issued subpoenas to Hobbs, the attorney general, and others in mid-September. (One of those lawmakers, State Senator Jake Hoffman, stepped down from leading the investigation after The Arizona Republic raised questions about over $1 million received by his political consulting businesses to help elect Biggs.)

Hobbs’s campaign has argued that Republicans are using the now-closed investigation to smear Hobbs ahead of the election. “With just 27 days until early voting begins, it’s no surprise partisan extremists are launching desperate political stunts,” Michael Beyer, Hobbs’s communications director, wrote recently in response to attacks by Biggs.

Volgy doesn’t think the investigation into Hobbs is the biggest factor in this race. “The driving force behind this election is Donald Trump, and he’s doing very badly in the state,” he said, citing the Iran war and rising costs. President Trump has a net approval rating of -19 points in the state, an all-time low for the president.

“Getting reelected in a red state is going to give her an opportunity,” Pearson said, to do more of what she’s already been doing. “To just shut the system down until meaningful reform is on her desk.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

President Trump’s announcement on Monday of a plan to build a $15 billion steel mill in eastern Iowa comes amid increasingly bad numbers for him in that state. Last week, a Marist University poll not only found Democrat Josh Turek up eight points against Ashley Hinson in Iowa’s Senate race—it also found that 43 percent of respondents “say their congressional vote is mostly a vote against President Trump.” The same poll also found Democrat Rob Sand up a shocking 12 points against Republican Zach Lahn in the gubernatorial race. Voters disapproved of Trump 58 percent to 41 percent.  

News outlets on Monday widely gestured to the midterm context in reporting the steel mill news. Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks, who’s currently either neck and neck with or slightly trailing Democratic challenger Christina Bohannan in Iowa’s 1st congressional district, announced mid-Monday that she’d be joining Trump for the announcement event—and added that the steel mill would be located in Lee County (part of her district). The Des Moines Register’s Brianne Pfannenstiel on Monday pointed readers to prior coverage “about a mysterious company buying up land in Lee County,” as well as a reported “special legislative session to address a tax incentive package for this deal,” explicitly pitched as coming “*before* the midterms.”  

Whether this gambit will pay off amid voter frustration over a lot of other problems, though, remains to be seen. The Iowa Capital Dispatch reports Hinson taking heat from voters frustrated over high fuel prices and Trump’s war on Iran. Meanwhile, Trump is continuing his vendetta against the Des Moines Register over a poll published shortly before the 2024 presidential election. After a judge threw out Trump’s lawsuit against the Register last week, a member of the president’s legal team told Politico that they’d be taking the case to the Iowa Supreme Court.

Elsewhere:

• The Guardian reports shocking findings from a Center for Biological Diversity review of federal records: Almost 25 percent of continental U.S. rivers contain dangerous levels of the herbicide atrazine, a potent hormone disruptor known to “chemically castrate” frogs, which can damage human reproductive systems as well as numerous other organs. (Unsurprisingly, it’s especially hazardous to developing fetuses and children.) Read Tom Perkins’s full report for more on how atrazine became so widely used in the U.S., despite being banned in dozens of other countries.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

Tuesday at noon, New America hosts “Power at the Polls: Confronting Basic Barriers to Accessible Democracy,” a virtual discussion about factors jeopardizing voting rights for Americans with disabilities. Speakers will include Rebecca Cokley, Mia Ives-Rublee, Dom Kelly, Lee Drutman, Asim Dietrich, and Sydney Saubestre. 

Tuesday at 1:30 p.m., the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution hosts a forum on “meeting long-term care needs for an aging United States.” Panelists will include Maggie Elehwany of Argentum, Nicole Howell from the National Council on Aging, Haeyoung Yoon of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Stanford economics professor Neale Mahoney, University Hospital CEO Carole Johnson, the Urban Institute’s Tisamarie Sherry, Jonathan Cohn of The Bulwark, and Brookings’s Aviva Aron-Dine and Tara Watson.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Four Questions For: Lindsay Owens, president and CEO of the nonprofit advocacy group Groundwork Collaborative

Q: How did your new book come about?

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

On this day in 1962, President Kennedy authorized the use of federal troops to integrate what public university? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

—Michael Tomasky

The Wall Street Journal reports that the White House paid for multiple pro-Trump ads specifically with money from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. 

The ads in question praise the president and highlight claims of his achievements in office. One of them plays the JMSN song “Love Me” as President Trump declares “America will never be a Communist country.” Another seemed to copy a 2024 campaign video, where a black-and-white Trump is walking while his voice talks about “the final battle.” Another shows pictures of Mount Rushmore while Trump narrates, “The United States of America is the most successful, most accomplished, most exceptional nation ever to exist in human history.”   

Trump reportedly was involved in the ads’ creation and pushed for them himself. They include a “paid for by the U.S. government” disclaimer, which would seem to violate federal laws, such as the Hatch Act, against the executive branch promoting political causes. The Trump administration claims they are public service announcements. 

In a letter to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin on Tuesday, Democratic Senators Patty Murray and Chris Murphy said that “using government funding to create or air political ads like the ones that have been running over the last few days is illegal and a shockingly corrupt misuse of taxpayer dollars.” They reported that Trump has set aside $20 million of DHS funds for the ads.

“The American people deserve answers about how this president is literally stealing their tax dollars to air campaign ads celebrating himself—while doing nothing to help them afford health care or housing. These ads need to immediately come off the air, taxpayers need to be paid back for this theft, and everyone responsible needs to be held accountable for this corrupt and illegal propaganda,” the senators wrote. 

The ads have aired almost 90 times across national television as of Sunday on networks including MS NOW, CBS, Fox, and Newsmax, costing an estimated $337,000. They’ve also aired on local stations 2,311 times at an estimated cost of $1.4 million. 

“These public service announcements are about reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad,” a White House spokesperson said last week. “The ad is educational and unapologetically patriotic. We should be proud of our country.”

Last week, the Justice Department announced that Oxygen Forensics CEO Lee Reiber (an American) and Russian national Oleg Sergeyevich Davydov had been arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud. They were also accused of orchestrating a scheme to conceal the company’s Russian ownership from the federal agencies to which they supplied phone hacking software.

The government knew of this by at least August 28, when Oxygen Forensics sued a former employee turned whistleblower, Max Weissberg, for making the plot public. Nonetheless, the State Department agreed to a $50,000 contract with Oxygen Forensics that same day, according to federal procurement data obtained by PunchUp.

Reiber advertised that his company, which provides forensic and archival services for electronic data, exclusively sold American-made software and had no foreign ownership.

Yet five Russian nationals, including Davydov, allegedly owned and controlled Oxygen Forensics through a holding company based in Cyprus, according to a criminal complaint released by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California. The company’s software, too, was Russian, the complaint alleged.

Several executive agencies were affected by the scheme: the Defense Department and components of the Department of Homeland Security, including the Secret Service, the National Computer Forensics Institute, Homeland Security Investigations, and the DHS Office of Inspector General, according to the complaint. But the federal procurement data would suggest that the State Department—as well as the U.S. Embassy in Zagreb, Croatia, which awarded the contract—could also have been compromised.

The Virginia-based group allegedly concealed its true ownership after the U.S. imposed additional sanctions on Russia in early 2022, following its invasion of Ukraine. Months later, Reiber—of Boise, Idaho—was appointed the company’s CEO, president, and chairman of the board, while mentions of Russian ownership were stripped from the company’s public filings, according to the complaint.

Details released in the affidavit suggest that Reiber was well aware of the conspiracy. In November 2023, Reiber wrote to Davydov and the other alleged Russian accomplices after a reporter asked about Oxygen Forensics’ connection to a Russian company. Reiber noted at the time that the reporting “could destroy” a pending contract with the National Computer Forensics Institute, and that the “current existence of this company hangs in the balance,” according to the criminal complaint.

Patel announced the addition of a new name to the agency’s Top 10 Most Wanted List on Tuesday, and bragged about the agency’s rate of successful captures under his leadership.

“This FBI has had historic success manhunting Ten Most Wanted fugitives—since the start of the Trump administration, we’ve captured TEN of the Top Ten Most Wanted, 2.5 times the number of TMW fugitives captured during the previous four years combined,” Patel wrote on X.

However, Patel’s FBI has imposed new policies that manipulate that data by adding the names of fugitives who are expected to be imminently captured, according to MS NOW.

Those aren’t the only statistics that Patel is padding: The director also instructed FBI field offices to include any suspects arrested in the presence of agency personnel to be included in official arrest counts, MS NOW reported.

So when Patel claims that his agency had “forty-five thousand violent offenders arrested last year, twice as many as 2024,” that includes suspects in cases led by local police departments and other federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security.

The double counting didn’t help to remove more alleged criminals from the streets, but it did give Patel a handy statistic to cite when he’s dodging questions about his alleged excessive drinking, unexplained absences, and other erratic behavior.

At an event held by the MAHA Institute, run by anti-vaccine activist Mark Gorton, Kennedy said he wanted the federal government to collect Americans’ health data, including doctor’s visits, so it could be shared with independent researchers and be searchable by AI, The Guardian reports.

RFK Jr. seemed to believe the data could help AI prove the long-debunked connection between vaccines and autism.

“We need to use America’s health data to determine whether the food we eat, the chemicals we encounter, the vaccines that we’re administering, the other environmental and lifestyle exposures are contributing in one way or another to the chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy said at the event Monday.

“Your health information should follow you wherever you go,” Kennedy added, noting that tech companies, insurance companies, and health care providers are already doing that through apps, and that health records are easier to access for the government as a result. Kennedy is already collecting data from the agencies in his department, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

“Medicaid is a really useful vehicle for studying … because there are hundreds of millions of lives in there, including tens of millions of children who’ve been in that program for 10 or 20 years,” Kennedy said. “Medicare gives us enormous amounts of information on older Americans and people with disabilities.”

Regarding AI, Kennedy said that it has been a boon to his efforts.

“Studies that used to take years, you can do them literally in seconds. You can ask questions and you can get immediate answers, and that’s what we’re doing today,” Kennedy said. “[AI] can help researchers find patterns across millions of health histories that human beings could never find by reading those records one at a time.”

Throughout his remarks, Kennedy kept bringing up vaccines as a major, if not the main, reason for his initiative, mentioning that the CDC has a Vaccine Safety Datalink that compares health outcomes for unvaccinated and vaccinated people and is looking at vaccine ingredients, their timing for infants, and other factors.

The whole thing has alarming implications. Kennedy already has faced criticism for proposing an autism registry and been lambasted by a federal judge for using fake studies created by AI. Kennedy didn’t mention any safeguards for Americans’ health data in his remarks, and his entire vision seems to be based on his anti-vaccine agenda. Despite, or even because of this, he still has a job in the Trump administration.

Predictably, the administration pitched the rollback as a godsend. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said its “Freedom Means Affordable Cars” initiative would “significantly reduce the cost of vehicles” and “revive the beating heart of American manufacturing and unshackle the nation’s automotive industry to produce safer, more affordable cars that American families want to buy.” Meanwhile, legacy U.S. automakers General Motors and Ford, and Stellantis—the European company that owns heritage brands like Dodge and Jeep—have welcomed the news, saying the new rules would “align regulations with market realities.”

But Trump’s relaxed standards get the problem of fuel prices inside out and upside down. It isn’t Biden’s supposed “E.V. Mandate” that’s been plaguing drivers and Detroit. While the administration has framed its war on fuel efficiency as a means of boosting the U.S. auto industry, carmakers’ Trump 2.0–era pivot away from fuel efficiency is coming back to bite them. At home and abroad, especially, consumers are opting for foreign competitors’ hybrid and E.V. models, which typically cost less to buy and drive. Coupled with tariffs that are raising costs across the board, this White House could end up being historically bad for Detroit.

For as much as Republicans have accused climate hawks of leading a war on cars, Trump’s foreign policy has done more to penalize driving than even Biden’s most zealous green bureaucrats. Gas prices in the U.S. have risen 43 percent since the start of the Iran war, costing drivers an estimated $43 billion. Those expenses come on top of new car prices that are now hovering around $50,000, not to mention rising borrowing costs and auto insurance premiums. Trump has imposed punishing tariffs on Canada—by far the largest export market for U.S. automakers. Just three months into a 25 percent import fee, sales of U.S.-built cars in Canada have dipped from 35.4 percent to just 28.4 percent. Those tariffs have prompted retaliatory duties from our northern neighbor, and are scheduled to double on January 1. Taken together, these developments represent a threat not just to sales in Canada but to U.S. manufacturing, which has been structured around long-standing free-trade agreements among North American countries. GM and Stellantis have already reported billions of dollars in losses as a result of tariffs. More than a third of the 75,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs lost since January 2025 are in motor vehicles and parts production.

All this is taking a visible toll on the auto industry. Ford sales are expected to drop by 8.8 percent for the first three-quarters of this year, with a 6.2 percent drop projected for General Motors, per Cox Automotive. The two legacy Detroit brands are on track to lose more market share in the U.S. than any other U.S. automaker, bringing overall “Big Three” market share to an all-time low of just 36 percent. Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, these companies have written off tens of billions of dollars’ worth of Biden-era investments in E.V.s and more fuel-efficient models to focus on selling gas-powered trucks and SUVs, including the powerful and gasoline-thirsty V8 engines. As gas prices have risen, a big beneficiary of Detroit’s doubling down on expensive gas-guzzlers has been brands offering relatively affordable hybrids to consumers wary of pain at the pump. Hyundai’s sales are likely to overtake Ford’s this quarter; hybrids now account for one in seven vehicles sold in the U.S., up from just 3 percent in 2020. Analysts expect domestic hybrid sales to double over the next decade. These trends could even help Toyota take General Motors’ spot as America’s bestselling automaker.

Even bigger storms are brewing. General Motors’ chief financial officer, Paul Jacobson, recently warned that the company’s competition in the U.S.—which largely bars Chinese cars—was intensifying as the U.S. becomes a “safe haven” for foreign automakers being pummeled in their domestic and international markets by brands like BYD and Geely. It might now only be a matter of time before those brands are allowed to compete in the U.S. too; Trump has even signaled he’d be open to it. Legacy automakers’ decades-long dominance within America’s safe haven for big, expensive trucks and SUVs may be numbered. As the competition gets closer, they might have buyers’ remorse for following Trump’s lead.

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday, Senator Eric Schmitt asked Smith whether he had attended an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and Atlanta Hawks on February 3, 2024, in Atlanta. For context, Schmitt added, that was the day after Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis revealed her affair with prosecutor Nathan Wade. 

“I definitely did not go to a Hawks game,” Smith answered, and suggested that he hadn’t spent any time in Atlanta, and had never met with Willis or Wade. 

Then Schmitt accused the former special counsel of perjury. 

The Missouri Republican’s staff displayed a poster board that the senator claimed showed a series of text messages from Smith’s team that allegedly discussed his plans to attend the Hawks game. Almost as soon as it was put up, it was pulled down again. 

Smith was unable to offer a response to the accusation, noting, “You just took it down really quick.” Schmitt refused to hold the board up again, instead calling Smith a “dirtbag.”

Later, Smith circled back to clarify that he remembered attending a college basketball game in February 2024 between the University of Maryland and the University of Iowa during which Caitlin Clark had played.  

Senator Amy Klobuchar then offered a possibility: “Could it then be that University of Iowa was the Hawkeyes?” she said. 

Schmitt interjected that Klobuchar was trying to “rehabilitate the witness.” He insisted that the text messages—which again, he’d not allowed anyone to review—“could have obviously been related to the prosecution that was coordinated in his office in Atlanta.”

“I think people should have their facts straight before they accuse someone of being a dirtbag, and not get the teams wrong,” Klobuchar said. 

Shortly after, Klobuchar was able to confirm Smith’s story. 

“The game was in fact in Maryland, Mr. Smith,” she said. “And I would just say, for a U.S. senator to have false information and imply, based on a confusion about the name of a team, which I knew knowing my Midwestern sports, and imply that you were in another city, that you were somehow involved that day in what was happening in Georgia and then call you a dirtbag is something that deserves an apology.”

🤡 Eric Schmitt beclowns himself during Jack Smith hearing 🤡

Schmitt concocted an elaborate conspiracy theory that Smith traveled to Atlanta to go to a Hawks game and collude with Fani Willis, and briefly displayed his "evidence" on a poster board before accusing Smith of… pic.twitter.com/wDMiVrrKBF

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 29, 2026

A closer look at the supposedly damning text messages Schmitt attempted to display showed that they made no mention of the “Hawks”—failing further to back up his far-flung line of questioning.

Republicans appear so desperate to attack the former official, who says he found proof “beyond a reasonable doubt” that President Donald Trump committed “serious crimes” related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and steal classified documents to advance his own career, that they are willing to resort to absurd antics and allege ill-informed conspiracy theories.

Later Tuesday afternoon, Schmitt attempted to defend his face-plant moment in an appearance on The Charlie Kirk Show. 

“It was the only NBA or NCAA’s Men’s game going on that time in Atlanta. He claimed later that he was at another game,” Schmitt said. “My job is to ask the questions, he’s already—and if that’s what his answer is, then that’s what his answer is.”

Schmitt admitted that he wasn’t really asking fact-finding questions, but was looking for a gotcha moment. 

“Jack Smith has lied under oath time and time again, and so the purpose of today is just to get him to answer a bunch of questions and to see if he ensnares himself in more lies because he’s done that before,” Schmitt said. 

But it seems that the lawmaker’s lazy research—and conservatives’ total dismissal of women’s sports—got in the way.

This story has been updated.

The new technology, hosted on America.gov, was unveiled during a summit Tuesday morning. It’s supposed to act as the new face of the federal government, a way for the general public to access publicly available government information in a familiar chatbot format.

In relatively brief remarks, Donald Trump pledged that the access point was built with cutting-edge technology that would not save or risk user data.

“With America.gov, for the first time in history, the government is offering an experience that matches and in some ways even exceeds the state of the art,” Trump said.

“It’s built from the ground up with your privacy and security in mind,” Trump said. “They’ve used a brand new technology—it’s absolutely brand new. It’s amazing, people don’t even have access to it for the most part, to ensure that your personal information is not collected or stored and your conversation disappears when you leave and everything stays totally private.”

But his confidence in the burgeoning portal only extended so far.

“Cannot, in theory, be hacked into,” Trump continued, ad-libbing that when “they figure a way to do that, we’ll end it.”

“Because they always figure a way, right?” Trump said. “If anything does happen. We think it might not happen.”

Trump on his new America dot gov website: "It cannot in theory be hacked into. And when they figure a way to do that, we'll end it, because they always figure a way, right?" pic.twitter.com/EI551hjSkB

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 29, 2026

The site was created by Airbnb co-founder and U.S. Chief Design Officer Joe Gebbia with the intention of centralizing numerous government databases and websites for easier public consumption, creating a pathway for users to access federal information without needing to navigate the “maze” of government websites.

The administration said that the platform could eventually be used as a waypoint for passport applications, name changes, campsite reservations, and even Medicare plans.

Several conservative personalities lashed out against the ad on social media for depicting “Brad,” who chooses not to work and plays video games on his couch instead, over the right-wing stereotypes of women and people of color living off of government assistance.  

Some critics online don't like my welfare work requirement ad. Next thing you know they’ll say I should have used cookies instead of cheese balls. If you are able-bodied you should not collect welfare simply because you choose not to work. Period. WATCH-> https://t.co/W9BAjVRkSA

— Sarah Huckabee Sanders (@SarahHuckabee) September 28, 2026

“This Republican ad calling out welfare leeches uses a young white male named ‘Brad’ as the villain. Meanwhile, back in reality, women are significantly more likely to be on welfare than men. And black people are astronomically more likely to be on welfare than white people. So the number of single young white male ‘Brads’ abusing the welfare system is minuscule,” posted Matt Walsh. “Practically non-existent. But of course Republicans don’t have the balls to do this ad with ‘Shaniqua’ as the villain. Even though that would actually be an accurate portrayal of the problem at hand.” 

Failed far-right Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback also disliked the ad and threw in some misogyny with his racism. 

“White men named Brad don’t typically commit welfare fraud,” Fishback wrote. “I’d recommend you start with the baby-momma with a BMW who just got back from her Carnival Cruise.”

“Almost zero white men under the age of 62 are on welfare. 69% of all immigrant classes are on welfare. The GOP is filled with anti White leftist,” wrote right-wing poster Paul (@WomanDefiner). 

Right-wing influencer RAMZPAUL said Sanders “needs to apologize for her blood libel.”

“Sarah Huckabee never had a real job. Her daddy was a two-time governor. She never worked in the private sector. She never served in the military. Her entire qualification was her daddy,” the influencer added. “Maybe she should be cut off the taxpayer funds and get a job as a waitress. She may also want to cut down on the Cheetos.”

Sanders doubled down on the post on Tuesday, posting, “Some critics online don’t like my welfare work requirement ad. Next thing you know they’ll say I should have used cookies instead of cheese balls. If you are able-bodied you should not collect welfare simply because you choose not to work. Period.” 

Despite MAGA’s outrage, statistically in Arkansas, between 52 and 54 percent of food stamps, or SNAP, recipients in the state are white, as are 57.8 percent of those on Medicaid. But Sanders’s program won’t solve any problems, as adding work requirements doesn’t reduce poverty, and in some cases, makes people poorer. Regarding programs like health care assistance, most recipients are already working. 

And, as one commentator pointed out, Sanders has only ever held political jobs thanks to her father, former Arkansas Governor and current U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, and has never had to apply for a real job herself. 

In his opening remarks to the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday, Smith reiterated the findings of his two indictments against the president of the United States.

“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation,” Smith said. “If asked whether to prosecute a former president today based on the same facts, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat.”

“The charges against President Trump were the result of the evidence. Grand juries in two separate districts reached this conclusion based on his actions, as alleged in the indictments they returned. Rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power.”

“After leaving office in January of 2021, President Trump illegally kept classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago social club and repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents. Highly sensitive national security information was held in a bathroom and ballroom where events and gatherings took place,” he said.

Smith’s team determined that Trump kept a hold on those documents in order to help advance his business interests.

The former special counsel’s statements were practically identical to his January testimony before the House Judiciary Committee that his investigations uncovered proof “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Trump had engaged in criminal activity.

In December, Smith testified for eight hours in a closed-door hearing before the House committee. He has long sought to testify in a public hearing, but was rebuffed by Republicans until Tuesday in favor of one behind closed doors.

The bill in question—the Protecting Presidential Memorials Act—was the brainchild of Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley and Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski. The Democratic-Republican duo tried to pass the bill via unanimous consent, a procedure that fast-tracks votes and skips debates on noncontroversial matters by only passing a measure if the entire chamber votes the same way.

Lee, however, apparently did not feel that protecting presidential memorials was a pertinent issue, despite the president’s recent machinations surrounding the Kennedy Center and the ensuing looming threat of the historic theater’s destruction.

“Unfortunately, a colleague objected to this common-sense bill,” Merkley wrote in a statement after the vote. “Trump’s threats are straight out of the authoritarian playbook and should infuriate every American who values our nation’s history and the rule of law. Instead of wasting taxpayer dollars putting Trump’s name on memorials and monuments as if he is a king, we should be focused on putting money back into the pockets of working families and honoring America’s greatest cultural institutions, not destroying them.”

Since the start of his second term, Trump has worked tirelessly to plaster his name on the Kennedy Center. Part of that effort included replacing the center’s board with a spate of Trumpian loyalists (and appointing himself as its chairman), and leveraging that power to find avenues to affix his name and brand on the revered performing arts space or its grounds. He has been profoundly unsuccessful in doing so, however: Trump has faced numerous legal obstacles in his quest to rename the Kennedy Center, in no small part because the site itself is under the jurisdiction of Congress.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the Kennedy Center needs him—and his brand—to survive. Yet tax documents obtained by Zeteo earlier this month disproved that conspiracy, revealing that it was actually Trump’s intimate involvement in the building’s affairs that triggered the beginning of its rapid decline.

After the Monday night vote, Trump’s team filed an appeal in the legal saga reiterating his claims. Justice Department attorneys argued that “without appropriate recognition” of Trump, “the Kennedy Center will be back where it was at the beginning—a financially insolvent facility and a decrepit, dilapidated, crumbling building, that is bleeding hundreds of millions of dollars in losses and that continues to race toward physical and financial ruin.”

“The stakes are existential,” the attorneys posited.

Kurt Olsen resigned from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida Monday after spending months working on the probe into Trump’s classified documents case, as well as the claims of Russian interference in the 2016 election. As many as eight people have now left the office. The departures spell doom for the investigation, which was looking into officials from the Obama and Biden eras but thus far had not resulted in any charges.

Olsen has a history of election denial–related work. His previous position was a “Presidentially appointed Director of Election Security and Integrity,” according to the FBI, and in 2020, he worked with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to try to convince the Supreme Court to overturn that year’s presidential election results.

Olsen was subpoenaed by the House January 6 committee in 2022 over allegations that he “contacted various high-level officials at the Department of Justice” to file challenges to the election results on the president’s orders, speaking with Trump multiple times on January 6, 2021. He also was behind the search warrant to search Fulton County, Georgia’s election offices earlier this year. The FBI seized boxes of ballots and other 2020 election materials.

Now that Olsen and many others have left a Department of Justice office tasked with going after Trump’s enemies, it is unclear what happens to those efforts. Is the probe fizzling out, or is Olsen leaving because it was going too far? Trump’s revenge and election activities only raise more questions, as the Trump administration has no results for its efforts just over a month before the midterms.

With just weeks until November, Trump advisers have privately acknowledged that there is little chance for the president’s party to prevail, CNN reported Monday night.

“It’s obviously going to be fucking rough,” one adviser told CNN. The best case scenario is for Republicans to lose the House, but narrowly retain control of the Senate, the adviser added.

As Trump’s polling has hit humiliating new lows, he has opted to use the midterms as a referendum on his presidency—leading some GOP candidates to quietly scrub any mention of “Trump” from their campaign platforms, and others to openly criticize his policies.

Trump intends to spend much of October on the road “spending money, and helping every one of them get elected,” the president wrote on Truth Social Monday.

One official told CNN that Trump intends to be “playing hard in Florida, Texas, Michigan, and Ohio,” and to focus on battleground districts. Another official, however, told the outlet that even in purple states, Trump will only be visiting more conservative areas. Next week, the president will head to Alabama and Oklahoma.

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

We’re a little more than a month out from the midterms, and the GOP leaks of panic and fear are unlike anything we’ve seen in some time. Words like “wipeout” are filling press reports. When a GOP pollster privately told Republicans things might be OK, he was mocked by Republicans themselves as delusional. Trump himself has erupted repeatedly in the last few days in an angry panic about what’s coming. But all this bad news for Trump and the GOP is getting us nervous about Democratic and liberal overconfidence.

So to see where voters really are right now, we’re checking in with Melissa Toufanian, the executive director of the progressive group Navigator Research, which has done interesting polling lately on public sentiment about Trump. Melissa, thanks for coming on.

Melissa Toufanian: Thanks so much for having me.

Sargent: So let’s start with some of these leaks. One Iowa Republican strategist told The Washington Post that this midterm could rival the Dem rout in 2006, saying, “it feels like it could be a wipeout.” Lots of stuff like that coming out of Iowa.

Melissa, that’s striking. Trump carried Iowa by double digits. It’s heavily rural. What do you make of those Republicans’ fears?

Toufanian: It’s funny to hear that, because I was just in Iowa a few weeks ago, and I sat down with two different focus groups with farmers. So these farmers were mostly lean Republicans, strong Republicans. Almost all of them voted for Trump. And what we heard from them is that Trump’s tariffs, and the market volatility caused by those tariffs, is a huge pain point for them.

I mean, they were really upset about diesel prices. If we’re looking at diesel prices now, we’re looking at a cost per gallon of over six dollars and fifty cents. What we heard from them is that’s up more than three dollars from last year. And what that translates to for Iowa farmers, and farmers across the country, is they’re going to be spending thousands of dollars more this harvest season, which is right around the corner, running combines and working in their fields. So that’s a huge pain point that even Trump supporters, Trump voters, are feeling.

Sargent: And are these Trump voters who are speaking to you guys in focus groups, are they blaming Trump for the situation? What’s the nuance there?

Toufanian: It’s a great question. It was mixed. So again, the groups being more lean to strong Republicans, I mean, some were defending Trump. Some said when it comes to tariffs—some said, you know, he’s playing 40 chess. He’s got this long-term plan, this idea of short-term pain. We’re paying higher costs now, but it’s going to be long-term gain. That these tariffs are going to even the playing field when it comes to trade.

So there was that group. But then there was a far more pessimistic group that said, like, I don’t think he has a plan. I don’t think there’s a grand strategy whatsoever. I’m just feeling it in my business, in my family’s expenses. All I’m getting are higher costs.

Sargent: And you probably don’t need much erosion among those people in order to make a real difference, but I want to come back to that. In a series of posts on Truth Social over the last couple days, Trump has really been losing it. I’m just going to read from one here.

First, he talks about how stupendous the economy is, then says:

“Because no one ever wants to give me credit, no one is talking about these Historic Numbers. The FAKE NEWS and DUMOCRATS hate these reports and these record-setting numbers. They hate the TRUTH. Just look at these numbers, THE BEST IN HISTORY. VOTE FOR REPUBLICAN AND ‘TRUMP’ CANDIDATES IN THE MIDTERMS.”

The stuff at the end there about voting for Republicans is in caps. He’s really, really, really starting to unravel, I think. Melissa, your outfit polled recently in a bunch of states that Trump carried by large margins. What did you find?

Toufanian: So we recently polled in Alaska, Ohio, Iowa, and Texas—four states with key battleground Senate races. And across all four states, which Trump won by double digits in 2024, he actually has a net approval of negative 14.

He’s underwater in each of those states. And looking at Iowa in particular, he is most underwater. He’s underwater by 17 points. So in states that helped him get back to the White House, people are now deeply pessimistic about how he’s handling the economy, his job overall as president, and especially the war with Iran.

He’s got 57 percent disapproval in Alaska, 58 percent disapproval in Iowa, 56 percent disapproval in Ohio, 56 percent disapproving in Texas.

Sargent: I think it’s worth underscoring how red that territory is. You know, this cycle is a weird one, where all of a sudden we’re talking about places like Iowa and Texas flipping. But that’s, like, really crazy.

OK, I mean, these are places that Trump won by huge margins. They are Republican states, they are red states. Melissa, can you talk about how long progressives have looked at states like these as being completely out of reach?

Toufanian: Yeah. And these states—Alaska, Ohio, Iowa, Texas—I mean, they’re Republican-controlled states. And Republicans have held power for a very long time. People in these states, looking at our data, looking at other polling, have been really down on Democrats.

They voted for Republicans, and even in our own data, we see they’re still pessimistic on the Democratic Party. They’re not sure if Democrats can deliver for them. At the same time, they’re down on the Republican Party.

An interesting trend that we saw in the data is there’s a growing number of people who, when we ask about party trust—which party do you trust more to deliver on the issues you care about most?—we’re seeing a lot of people in that “neither party, don’t know” category, meaning that they’re feeling frustrated about politics in America right now, and in our political parties and our political system.

Sargent: In a midterm election, voters like that who are profoundly disgusted with the system are going to turn on the party in power, and hopefully, for the first time, open their ears in a new way to Democratic and progressive policy ideas. Is that something you think might be going on?

Toufanian: No, I think you raise a really good point. There are really two things that we’ve been keeping an eye on from Navigator. So the first is kind of that intensity of disapproval. So take a state—we’ve been talking about Iowa, right?

Let’s take a state like Iowa. Sixty percent of Iowans disapprove of how Trump’s handling the economy, but that includes 50 percent who strongly disapprove. So it’s not just people feeling a little frustrated or a little pessimistic. There’s this intense disapproval of how Trump is handling the presidency, and how he’s handling the economy.

I think the other piece that we’ve been tracking closely at Navigator is this what we call gap in focus. So this idea, in every single survey wave—so every single month, we ask Americans, what do you want your elected officials, the president and Congress, to focus on? And then, what do you think Trump and Republicans in Congress are most focused on?

So wave after wave, it’s the pocketbook issues. People want a focus on inflation and the cost of living, jobs and the economy, health care, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. Those are always at the top.

When we ask people, what do you think Trump and Republicans in Congress are focused on? Overwhelmingly, it’s immigration, foreign conflicts. And if you notice, what I said people want their elected officials to focus on is not at all what they perceive Trump and Republicans in Congress focusing on.

In fact, in the battleground—so in that battleground polling I mentioned—we actually see that only 2 percent of people in the battleground perceive Trump and Republicans focused on health care, when we know that’s a top issue for Americans.

Sargent: OK, so in all four battlegrounds, only 2 percent think that Trump and Republicans are focused on health care?

Toufanian: Yeah, it’s almost nothing. What we hear in our focus groups, I mean, across different partisan ideologies—Democrats, Republicans, independents—they just want their elected officials to deliver for them. They just want to feel like they are actually working every single day to make their lives better, and that they have their best interests at heart. They don’t want to feel like their elected officials have been bought out.

In talking about those Iowa focus groups that I mentioned that were with farmers, one farmer said, you know, our elected officials, they go off to Washington, I think they should wear a NASCAR jacket that shows you who they’re sponsored by. And they just—this feeling that they don’t have their interests at heart, and that they’re not delivering for them.

Sargent: And it seems to me that you’ve got these Democratic candidates who are laser-focused on the affordability stuff. And in fact, Trump rages about this constantly, saying it’s a hoax when Democrats talk about it. But for some of these voters, they’re hearing Republicans defend Trump’s record, and they’re hearing Democrats talk about affordability. Is that more or less what’s happening?

Toufanian: I mean, what they’re telling us is the most important issue is affordability, right? So I think it’s extremely important, no matter what the party, to talk about these cost-of-living issues, because that’s where people are struggling. I mean, across our data, whether it’s in our data or in our focus groups, I mean, we’re hearing about people who are skipping meals.

We have a report coming out this week talking about people who are eating less, skipping meals so their kids can eat. I mean, really struggling. We did polling a few months ago where one in 10 people told us that they are selling their blood plasma just to make more money.

So the most important thing for any elected official that I can glean from our data is to connect with people on the issues they care about most, and that is absolutely cost of living.

Sargent: And it seems to me that in this environment, what you’re hearing from Trump is just almost tailor-made to drive people away from Republicans. Because you’ve got Trump raging constantly that it’s just a hoax when people say the economy is not working well. One thing he said on Truth Social is, he quoted Fox saying, “the United States has the best employment numbers in history.”

And then he said: “The Fake News Media REFUSES to report this rather significant development, however!!!”

He repeats this over and over and over. Affordability’s a hoax. Best economy ever. How does that stuff land?

Toufanian: And the irony is, if you look back to the Biden administration, that something that everyone should take note of is, when people are feeling a certain way, when people are upset, when they’re struggling, if you tell them, actually, just look at the numbers, we’re doing great—I mean, it doesn’t work.

And so the irony is, we’re seeing that now, that people are telling us in our data, in our focus groups—you know, just go talk to people at the grocery store, I’m sure they’re going to tell you the same thing, that they’re just really struggling.

And so to be told that their concerns and their worries, especially when it comes to their personal financial situation, to how they’re going to take care of their families—to say that that’s a hoax, I mean, it doesn’t land with people. It doesn’t resonate at all. And if anything, it just adds to their anger and frustration about elected officials in the political system.

Sargent: Well, these Republican leaks are getting worse and worse and worse. I’m just going to read some more. There was an Axios report in which a pollster for Senate Republicans told GOP donors and operatives that they might be able to grow the majority. And one attendee called this, quote-unquote, “delusional.”

Toufanian: I think that the other piece that we’re seeing that should be a warning sign, to show just how disconnected this is, is now we’re seeing Republican defections on support for the war with Iran. Because in our polling, that shows that is one of the issues that people are opposed to. They don’t think it was worth it.

They know it’s raising their fuel costs, which people are filling up the tank to go to work, drive their kids to school every single week. And so that’s a cost that they are continuing to see is so much higher than even just a year ago.

Sargent: Well, let’s talk a little bit about what your firm has found in terms of why people are really rejecting Trump. It’s a complicated thing, right? It isn’t just the economy. You guys polled on what you called Trump regretters, who are voters who regret their support for Trump in the past. What’d you find there?

Toufanian: So we found that about one in five people who voted for Trump in 2024 now regret their vote. And also, when we look a little bit under the hood at the numbers behind that, it’s younger voters, it’s voters of color, it’s even white suburban moms who regret their vote at a higher level than men. So there are definite cracks in that coalition that Trump brought together to win in 2024.

And then when we ask them, you know, why do you regret your vote, what started to make you feel that way—the major answers are broken promises, the war with Iran, and high prices. A lot of times people are just telling us that the economy isn’t working. Trump said that he would keep us out of wars. We’re in another one.

And when you cite the fact that their estimates—the war’s cost, you know, over forty billion dollars—people are thinking, you know, why are we spending forty billion dollars on the war, yet I can’t have Medicaid or SNAP here at home? So it just doesn’t add up for people.

Sargent: Right. I don’t think anybody understands why the hell he’s doing this in Iran. And I think that really cuts very, very deep for him.

Toufanian: Absolutely. I mean, the war with Iran, we’ve been tracking since, you know, even before the U.S. and Israel launched attacks in Iran. And it’s only grown more and more unpopular. We’ve continued to track, do you think this war was worth it?

And even more and more people, especially independents—which, you talk about, that is a key category to keep an eye on right now—even independents are becoming more pessimistic about the war. And we found, when you remind people of the costs, they turn even more negative on it.

Sargent: It’s really interesting that you found very pronounced regret for support for Trump among these demographics, like young voters, nonwhite, working-class, I guess you said, right? And white suburban moms.

Toufanian: Yeah, we said the highest level are people of color, our young voters. Even white suburban moms was one group. It’s really moms—moms regret their vote at a higher level than dads. So there’s some very interesting pieces kind of within that overall number.

Sargent: And in that finding, I think you can really see the MAGA coalition dissolving, can’t you? Because it’s the young voters, it’s the nonwhites, it’s the white women, who just sort of took a flyer on Trump in 2024 because of the economy. They took a risk. They weren’t really ideologically MAGA people in any real way. They just, I guess, forgot what Trump did to the economy in 2020—but whatever, that’s another story.

And they decided that the business guy could really snap his fingers and get stuff moving again. And those are the people that are moving away from him now. That’s the MAGA coalition kind of coming apart, isn’t it?

Toufanian: Yes. I mean, I think people took a chance in 2024. I mean, we still had high levels of inflation, costs were still up. I say this as someone who served in the Biden administration. Like, we had the—the economy still wasn’t doing well, it was doing better than during COVID, but it wasn’t yet at a place where people could feel like they were getting ahead. Now it’s even worse. Now people—not only do they feel like the economy isn’t working, they have even higher levels of disapproval about it.

We also, on top of that, have ICE and immigration enforcement that they’re seeing that is driving disapprovals, especially among Latino voters. We spoke with several different groups of Latino voters who now regret their vote for Trump. And I mean, the regret was so deeply palpable, in these kind of heartbreaking stories of them talking about coworkers or, you know, family members who have been deported. And they said, you know, this is not what I voted for.

Sargent: It is what they voted for, in the sense that Trump said he was going to do that. They just didn’t really hear it, is what I think happened.

Toufanian: I mean, the other interesting piece too is that, you know, from Navigator, we break out MAGA Republicans, which is, you know, in some ways kind of this immovable coalition that they stick with Trump through everything. And then we say the non-MAGA Republicans. So it’s self-identified people who don’t identify within the MAGA wing of the party.

So within that non-MAGA Republican group, it’s one in four who say they regret voting for Trump. So even to have that crack within the Republican Party, I mean, that’s really significant.

Sargent: Yes. And that’s how you can see your way to a wave election, right? Like, I just want to stress for people, you know, we’re still a month out. Things can go wrong. The polling could be wrong. You never know. But the data points we’re seeing right now are that Donald Trump is sliding in approval fairly steadily. He’s at 35 percent or under in some of the approval averages.

Dems are leading in the generic ballot matchup by eight, nine points, depending on the averages. All indications are that that’s growing. People like James Talarico have led in just about every poll in a state like Texas. We’re seeing people like Josh Turek in Iowa leading in some polls. Sherrod Brown leading in most polls in Ohio, which Trump turned red. This is extraordinary stuff.

So just very bluntly, as a public opinion researcher yourself, do you think that what you’re seeing in all this data out there in the public realm—do you think it’s close to right or not?

Toufanian: I think so. I think the only word of caution that I would add, though, is, in our polling, when we look at whether it’s party trust or which party is better positioned to handle different issues—while we’re seeing a pretty even split between people who say they trust the Democratic Party more on, let’s say, lowering costs, versus those who say they trust the Republican Party more, those are pretty even.

But there is that about one in four people, sometimes as high as one in three, who just don’t trust either party. So I think the polling and the data may absolutely be correct as far as the results for the midterms and the direction in which we’re heading. But I would just say, the day after any elected official wins, you’ve got to start working on how to deliver.

And actually, in my mind, in some ways, just as important as winning is being able to deliver—to actually show that you understand these concerns that we’re hearing, that they’re not a hoax, as Trump said, and to actually show people that you can make their lives meaningfully better.

Sargent: Right. All these dynamics can turn against Democrats real quick. We just saw them against Democrats two years ago. So I think maybe the way to understand the fact that both parties are roundly disapproved of by voters is to look at some of these individual Democratic candidates.

James Talarico in Texas, Mary Peltola in Alaska, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Roy Cooper in North Carolina, Josh Turek in Iowa. These candidates seem like they are able to outrun their party in some way, because they’re strong personalities. They’re doing what it takes—even if I don’t like to see it sometimes—they’re doing what it takes to distance themselves from progressivism and the Democratic Party, the national party.

Does that look like what’s happening? I know you don’t poll on this stuff yourself, but as someone who follows this stuff as an educated consumer, do you think that these Democratic candidates probably are outrunning their party? Is that the dynamic?

Toufanian: I think that can be true, right? Let me just full-stop there. I think, at the same time, what we are just seeing is that Trump might not be on the ballot—that’s what a lot of, you know, people point to—but Trump and the Republican Party are so deeply unpopular that I think it’s important to see almost a multifaceted equation to get there, right?

That, like, what you said can absolutely be true. At the same time, there’s just, like, the fact that Republicans in Congress are not seen as focusing on the issues that Americans care about the most. And at the same time, again, in our battleground polling, Americans in those battleground states blame Republicans for this economy. They’re not pointing—you know, the majority of them are not pointing to the Biden administration. They’re pointing to their elected officials.

So I think it’s the disappointment, resentment, you know, outright outrage at the current electeds, and the hope that someone else can deliver. The desire for change is unbelievably high.

Sargent: Right. It seems like there’s a bunch of things that are lining up in a row that have to line up in a row. And right now they are. Melissa Toufanian, really great to talk to you. Thanks so much for talking to us.

Toufanian: Thanks for having me.

Perry Bacon: I’m joined by Paul Frymer. He’s a great political scientist. He’s written several really interesting articles and books, including Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America; Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party; and the most recent one is Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion.

We’re going to talk about the Democratic Party, because Paul’s written a lot about unions and minority groups and how they influence and are influenced by the party. So Paul, thanks for joining me.

Paul Frymer: Great, thank you. Thanks for inviting me.

Bacon: So where I want to start, what made me think about you, was you had a book published in the late ‘90s, and it was updated after that, about the idea that African Americans and the Democratic Party are a—I think the phrase is—captured minority, where because they give all their votes to the Democratic Party, they have very little ability to influence either party, because the Democrats have their votes and the Republicans ignore their votes.

And what I’ve been watching the last few weeks is various Democratic candidates distance themselves from transgender Americans, the transgender rights movement, on sports and on other issues too. You’ve seen this with Talarico. You’ve seen this with the candidates in Iowa and others too.

And I’m curious if that analogy plays out here, where transgender Americans are—the Republican Party is very opposed to transgender rights, so you’re in a party that doesn’t really fight for you and wants to move away from you when it’s time to reach swing voters. But do you see that parallel existing between transgender Americans today and maybe African Americans in the past, and maybe still today?

Frymer: Sure. Yeah, I think the parallel is there. And I should say first that with African Americans it is a historical, longstanding process, that the party system itself was in many ways constructed out of conflicts over slavery and over race and over racism. So when we look at current events and parallels, we find certain parallels, but obviously the same kind of systematic historicization of it is much different.

But yeah, the concept in real time is that neither party wants to advance a group’s votes. And there are moments when transgender rights, in our current moment, is seen as toxic for the party that is claiming typically to represent them. And of course, the other party is trying to take advantage of that. And so yeah, you see the Democratic Party pulling away from that and trying to distance themselves, leaving transgender populations without many options.

Bacon: Are African Americans still a captured minority in your view?

Frymer: I think in important ways, yes. Obviously it’s complicated, and it’s had different historical moments. In our current moment, where it becomes most transparent is when conflicts over race, and particularly with regards to African Americans, come up, and both parties try to remove themselves from this conflict.

And that was historically, in the 19th century over slavery, the design of the two-party system was to focus on the median voter, right? And that median voter is historically a fairly moderate voter, if not conservative voter, on issues like civil rights. And so it leads the two parties to try to avoid the topic. When civil rights issues come up, the party system tends to struggle over that.

So we’re in a current moment. President Trump’s agenda certainly includes things like attacking numerous minority groups. There’s probably more intensity towards immigrants of a wide variety. Transgender issues, of course. Communists, as the Democratic Party are described. And certainly Trump is still in the aftershocks of President Obama and the racial politics there. So I do think there are certainly a lot of parallels there, but it’s certainly changed a bit over time, in form.

Bacon: Uneasy Alliances is written in the sort of Clinton era, right? Can you talk about—we’re talking about the book and when it was written, and so it’s describing the period of the Democratic Party post-civil rights era, of the 1970s and ‘80s mainly, right? That’s the time period for that book. And it’s describing, to be very reductive, the party breaking with Jesse Jackson in a certain way as the kind of framing, right?

Frymer: Yeah, so the Clinton era was very transparently strategic. Jesse Jackson had run for president in the ‘80s two different times. He was blamed by Democratic Party elites for the failure of the Democrats to win, especially in 1988.

It was thought that he was linked by Republicans with Michael Dukakis, who ran that year, was the candidate that year. And was seen by many Democratic elites as too powerful, as too much of a—again, to use the word toxic—symbol of the Democratic Party.

And Bill Clinton invented that term, the Sister Souljah effect, where he turned on Jackson as a way to strengthen his own place as a Democratic Party candidate, and as for the Democratic Party, that he was going to distance himself from Jackson and from African American interests in the party. And so that was a really strong component of Clinton. And it was part of the Democratic Party playbook for quite a while.

There’s a lot with President Obama as well. Certainly when he was running, he too distanced himself quite a bit from Jesse Jackson and the symbolic nature of Jackson. He made very clear over and over that he was running not as a raceless candidate, but certainly a de-emphasis on that, right?

It was others who continually brought race back into the fold with Obama, and he of course is skilled. But a lot of Obama’s strategic sense was not that different from Clinton. Since that time we’ve had a different set of politics, that we have Trump—

Bacon: Let me stop you there, because I want to come back to that. Your book, you did a new edition in 2010, and it ends with Obama, and I want to come to the last 10 years. But let me just talk about, why for Black people is this approach to politics problematic? The sort of Clinton, Obama de-race, distance themselves from the Black electorate. Why is it a problem?

Frymer: There’s pros and cons, right? You want to be a part of a majority. And so one of the things that happened in the Clinton era, this was over the crime bill, going back to a pretty notorious crime bill in our current context, as it’s been discussed.

The Congressional Black Caucus in Congress rejected a more conservative version that Clinton was pushing. And it led to a controversial bill. It still was quite conservative in many ways, but it had important things that the Congressional Black Caucus fought for.

That led to the 1994 midterm elections. Democrats lost those midterm elections. The Congressional Black Caucus lost an enormous amount of power in Congress.

Bacon: Ranking memberships, chairmanships, ability to influence the president, media.

Frymer: And in fact, if I remember, I think one of the things Newt Gingrich did as speaker was to get rid of a lot of the institutional aspects of the Congressional Black Caucus. And they, in certain ways, ceased to exist formally.

So being a majority is important. Everybody knows that. African American voters, among many others, they’re very pragmatic voters, and they recognize the importance of majorities. And African American voters are extremely loyal voters to the Democratic Party in a way that no other group is consistently the same since the 1960s.

The issue there is that because both parties are focusing on winning majorities, when the Democratic Party is trying to distance itself from African American voters, obviously the forms of representation are not ideal. Sometimes that form of representation is via attack, as Clinton used as a foil. Sometimes with Obama, it is extreme caution.

But what it is not—and this is the kind of theoretical argument of a captured group—farmers can get subsidies that hypothetically could be controversial, but the public doesn’t pay attention to them, right? Farmers are represented, whether they’re a majority group or not. They’re just added into coalitions. There are lots of groups. They’re added into coalitions. They’re given different factors.

And for African Americans as a captured group, there are elements of that, but there are important elements where the opposite is happening. There’s a real attempt by their own party, the Democratic Party, in the modern era to use them as a foil to distance themselves. And again, as a form of representation, that’s neither ideal, and it’s also quite unique in our political system.

Bacon: And how did that change the agenda that Black groups pushed? Did it minimize their agenda? Did they pull back their agenda? Did they stop demanding things? How did that play out? So you have the Voting Rights Act and the civil rights era, so what happens in those 30 years after that?

Frymer: So a lot of it goes through litigation. Litigation is a somewhat quieter method, or it can be. President Obama used the administrative state, and litigation over the Voting Rights Act, litigation within the EEOC. So a lot of his measures were quieter.

Where you see the real dramatic impacts, and this is actually where I kind of first got the sense of this, is during the Clinton era, I was a voter registrar within the Democratic Party. And we were sent—I was still a college student—and we were sent consistently to focus on these moderate voters.

And moderate voters are white voters, over and over. You think of the terms, the soccer moms, the NASCAR dads. They are symbolized as white voters. And so they sent us to the suburbs over and over.

Bacon: Although we should emphasize, Black people play soccer. These are code words in a certain way. We’re avoiding saying white by saying these other words instead, right?

Frymer: Yes, that’s exactly right. And so we were constantly sent to the suburbs, and these suburban white voters, we were trying to mobilize them to vote, and they’re constantly like, Yes, I know the issues. Yes, I’m registered. Yes, I know what’s going on.

And then a group of us on our own went into the neighborhoods which were on our maps listed as unnecessary to go into, because these neighborhoods were thought to be already strongly Democrats. Where I was living, this is New Haven, Connecticut, these were neighborhoods that are overwhelmingly African American and partly Latino. And you walk into these neighborhoods on your own, very few people are registered to vote. Many people didn’t know the major issues of the moment.

There’s both a huge mobilization that takes place around these moderate voters, and there’s a lack of mobilization, especially around the Black community. The way campaigns work, and they still operate this way, is the focus is on these moderate voters, and then on election day, get out the vote, right? You go and you rally people. But the long-standing mobilization, the real kind of engagement, the attempt to bring in especially communities that have long-standing been left out of politics, that’s critical, and that hasn’t changed in important ways.

It is reliant there on civil rights groups themselves, whether for Black interests or Latino interests, other immigrant interests and the like. They need to do this themselves. That puts obviously a huge weight on them, whereas the party is mobilizing other groups. You see this now, so much focus on the white working class voter, or the moderates of Michigan and Ohio and the like, right?

So this kind of thing takes place. One more line, I know I’m going on here, but another notable aspect with captured groups is that, again, there are many moments where African American voters are pivotal for elections. They turned the ‘20 election in Georgia, in Pennsylvania, right?

All those voters that Trump said were getting counted at 3:00 in the morning, those were largely Philadelphia, Atlanta, right, in those areas. But the Democratic Party doesn’t reward them, and reward that pivot, in the same way that it rewards the pivot around, again, the Wisconsin suburbs, right? Or Milwaukee.

Bacon: So I guess if we got one of the consultants on the phone, they’d say two things. One, they’d say there are more white people than Black people, obviously.

Frymer: Yes, obviously.

Bacon: And the second they’d say is that a swing voter is worth more than an unmobilized voter, because a swing voter takes one out of the Republican camp and into the Democratic camp, versus a person who doesn’t vote at all only moves one vote to the Democratic camp from the non-camp. So those things are both true, but that doesn’t—I’ll let you respond to that.

Frymer: Sure. So, one reality there. Consultants to parties, first of all, they’re not there to be historically-minded. They’re not there to think about a 10-year goal of the Democratic Party, or social justice, or any of that, right? Or the health of democracy. They’re there to win an election.

So they’re on the ground in a moment, and they’re dealing with realities that have been framed in that specific moment, as they’ve interpreted them. But—sorry, I’m losing my train of thought. The question was—

Bacon: I asked about swing voters counting twice, because they pull one. And then the second is that there are more white people than Black people.

Frymer: Yes. So there’s also a reality here. There are groups out there that are not terribly popular with the Democratic Party, right? The Democratic Party as it’s currently construed, its relationship with white rural voters, for instance, is tense. But it doesn’t lead to a sense within party elites of, we have to stop reaching out to these voters, because reaching out to these voters is—again, I don’t think it’s the best word, but toxic, or disruptive to the party coalition.

There is a sense that reaching out to Black voters, and especially in specific moments, is disruptive to a party that has often held together different coalitions that don’t always fit that well, especially when race is at the forefront, and that is seen as disruptive to this moderate median voter, again, in a different way.

The Democratic Party has the liberty to reach out to different racialized groups in a way that it feels, and its consultants feel, is more disruptive, contested, when it does so with African Americans. And again, you’re seeing it with transgender issues. With transgender issues we’re dealing with very small populations. We’re dealing with very symbolic matters, and yet there is this sense that a word here or there is enough just to set everything on fire for the Democratic Party.

Bacon: It’s an interesting question. In 1992, do we think that being for civil rights was toxic? And in 2024, or 2026, do we think being for transgender rights is toxic? Part of this is, I’m not sure about that.

Some of my friends on the more left say you can be for civil rights and win elections, and that part I am not sure about. I think the party strategy is often overdoing it, and it has real downsides to these interests. I’m actually not sure that you can win an election in the moral way that I would like.

Frymer: Yes, I absolutely agree with that. So there is a conventional wisdom that gets set out, and as we know, we don’t know why elections turn, ultimately at the end of the day.

Bacon: It’s very complicated.

Frymer: It’s very complicated. Everyone is trying to interpret. Everyone is saying, “Oh, the Democrats on transgender issues.” Democrats on Black Lives Matter. Democrats on COVID. Any of these things, right? So there’s this constant theme.

One of the things with largely white consultants, part of their own, I guess we could say, ambivalence about race, is they overreact a lot to what they think might be happening, right? A lot of white consultants, and just generally mainstream consultants in the Democratic Party, including many Black consultants, thought it was a bad idea for Barack Obama to run in 2008. That he wasn’t going to win because of his race. He brilliantly showed that doesn’t have to be the case. He ran a great campaign, and he really transformed things.

A quality of a lot of these candidates, you can include Donald Trump here, is you ignore the conventional wisdom. Because everyone told Trump he couldn’t win in 2016 either. Or ‘20, or ‘24. And so we get these conventional wisdoms, these truths, and we’re seeing that in the popularist movement now, among consultants.

They use their own ambivalence about race and they overreact. And no doubt Clinton was an element of that, in overreacting to Jesse Jackson. So their own deeply embedded politics are loaded within that.

Civil rights groups, progressives, other groups are not wrong to say there is a different form of politics that can address this. There is one that is also mobilized, right? Mobilized long-term. Change the politics. Focus with transgender rights as well. You don’t need to be scared of it. Focus on it. Or address it, right? I agree with all of that.

And so part of what, in making arguments about African Americans as a captured group—I’m not a consultant, right? I’m trying to be a kind of political historian in understanding the dimensions here and why it is recurring. Again, a lot of that is historicized and institutionalized and the like. But I completely agree with you that the political transcript that can be written can be very different.

I will just add one point there, which is that the conventional wisdom does work to demobilize progressive arguments. Because if progressives lose once, they’re thrown out the window. The conventionalists can lose 15 times in a row.

Bacon: Run the same campaign over and over again.

Frymer: That’s right, and they’re still the convention.

Bacon: You’ve written a lot about—in the same period you were writing about African Americans, you also wrote about unions and the study of unions in this period. Are unions also captured by the Democratic Party, or is that a little bit different? Because the period from the 1970s to the 2010s is also a decline in the influence of unions in the Democratic Party as well.

Frymer: Yeah, so it’s pretty incredible that what was a third of the private workforce was unionized, right? Hugely Democratic Party. Major role in legislation, major role in voter mobilization, major role in society and organization. That under the Democratic Party watch, it declines dramatically. What is it, 6 percent now, the private workforce today.

Most of that is under the Democratic Party watch. NAFTA is a Bill Clinton policy, right? The NLRA is not reformed by the Democratic Party despite having majorities across all the federal branches many years. That is stark, right? That the Democratic Party would allow that to happen under its watch.

And that is suggestive, again—the labor movement has been historically, certainly over this time period that we’re talking about, the ‘70s to the ‘20s, maybe changing a bit now, but has been in the shadows. You don’t see the Democratic Party, when they’re looking for a vice presidential candidate or anyone besides the Department of Labor, being a person from a union, right?

They are there to do the grunt work, but they’re not at the center of things, and they haven’t been. Again, because of history, these are short-term analogies as opposed to the same category.

But I want to say one other thing there. Part of my interest in labor is that the labor movement, going back to the early 20th century, was an opportunity, right? If you really want to create the alternative—the people who argue that the Democratic Party should be colorblind, focused on class, right? The union movement was the way forward to that. To try to create a really diverse labor movement. And there were a lot of huge voices that wanted that, from a Walter Reuther, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Cesar Chavez. You can go on and on, right?

There was a real opportunity there, and so part of my interest that shifted to the labor movement was the failure of that. That fell apart, and it leaves you today also with this white working class movement, much of which was formerly labor union, that is left out of the Democratic Party and left out of a broader coalition where they might have felt a greater attachment to it.

Bacon: So let’s go to the 2010s now. You were hinting at it, and let’s come to that now. It felt like Black activists may have read your book or something like that, because there is this period where it seems like Black Lives Matter rises and makes an argument like, “We are currently captured and ignored by the current Democratic Party. Let’s do something different.”

The fact that a movement called Black Lives Matter erupts while a Black man is sitting in the White House is very ironic on some level, but I think captured is exactly what you’re getting at. And so how do you see both the rise and maybe the decline of the BLM movement in these last 15 years, let’s say?

Frymer: Yeah. Obama is important to it, certainly symbolically, right? He raises the stakes. He raises the hopes.

Bacon: That’s a good term, yeah.

Frymer: He mobilized voters. So even though in some ways when he’s running, he’s playing a bit on the Clinton playbook, he’s not Bill Clinton. He is a different candidate. And again, he’s raising hopes and dreams of people that we can live in a different America. And a lot of that is not just him as a figure, it’s also a lot of what he’s saying. He makes the comment about Trayvon Martin. That’s not nothing, right? These are big comments.

Prior to that, and as we know, he’s also somewhat of a Clinton Democrat on crime. He wasn’t a huge progressive on crime. He made some symbolic claims. But even actually during Black Lives Matter, the height of it in the 2020s, I’m trying to think of his role there. He’s quiet.

Bacon: He made some generic comments encouraging the protests in 2020, but he’s not at the front lines of them. He’s following the public as opposed to leading it.

Frymer: Yeah. That’s always been his place there. So on the one hand, he’s not unimportant. On the other hand, the idea of Black Lives Matter, as you say, during the Obama era and moving forward, is suggestive of the fact that this is not a coalition that is attached to the Democratic Party.

Even at its height, it had expressions of the Democratic Party, but not huge efforts by legislators to make any kind of meaningful changes. I think there was a constant sort of, “Where are we going here?” And here again, everybody is kind of trying to spin their wheels as to what is now publicly possible and what is not.

Bacon: What does a median white person think about Black Lives Matter becomes the question, right?

Frymer: And there are overreactions on multiple sides. When Obama was elected in 2008, it was the end of race in America. We had solved all problems. And so there’s some of that. But certainly the Black Lives Matter movement, those who are—I hesitate to use the word leaders, because part of the movement is that it’s supposed to be—

Bacon: Kind of leaderless.

Frymer: Leaderless. But yeah, it sees itself certainly not as an arm of the Democratic Party in any way, shape, or form.

Bacon: And this argument that African Americans need to have a different voice and need to not be so tied to the party, I think that has taken hold. You see more efforts. My sense is Black Lives Matter doesn’t have any formal leaders, but I think there now is a clear fissure among Black activists between sort of Clyburn and the people on Twitter who are more aligned with Black Lives Matter. And their argument is that Clyburn is captured and we need to have another force. I think this is what’s happening now.

Frymer: Yeah. The other thing that’s going on right now that the Democratic Party’s been struggling with is Donald Trump. He raises the stakes.

Bacon: He raises the stakes on all these things.

Frymer: A loss is catastrophic. A loss in this midterm election is catastrophic. Now historically, Democrats have been saying that for a long time. Now it seems real, right?

Bacon: Electability was an argument Clinton was making on some level, being made today. But the difference between George Bush’s second term and Donald Trump and JD Vance’s first term is much different, obviously.

Frymer: Although in 2005 or so, George Bush was pretty catastrophic.

Bacon: I meant Bill Clinton compared to the first George Bush. George H.W. Bush seeking a second term was actually not as catastrophic as George W. Bush became.

Frymer: I don’t know if your memory is this, which I’ll say to my students, in 2000 when Al Gore and George Bush tied, this is the younger George Bush, it was almost like a shrug from the American public, right? Kind of like, “Oh, we got these two candidates.”

Bacon: Who cares who wins? Legacy men whose dads have been in politics. They seem normal, and then it turned out to be very consequential, yes.

Frymer: Whereas if the ‘26 midterms, the Republicans win them, there’s a lot on the line here. And one of the interesting things actually that Trump has been doing—Trump throws so much out at you, right?—but one of the things that he has really done a lot, with less attention, is the civil rights agenda. He has dismantled so many pieces of that long-standing civil rights agenda, and it’s not the headlines, right?

Bacon: I think this goes to what you’re hinting at, that the Democratic Party is nervous about talking about, like as it was running the Department of Education or DOJ, these issues. The party, I would argue, both the sort of mainstream but even the popularist, the Bernie, AOC progressive wing, both have agreed the problem is winning the white working class. So talking about civil rights, talking about government agencies, talking about democracy itself—I would argue the party is unified, the centrists and the progressives, around, we need to do economic policy that attracts the white working class.

They might have different views of the economic policies. One might be Medicare for All, say progressives, Medicare for those who want it, say the centrists. But both of them, defending the DOJ Civil Rights Division is a priority of neither one right now, right?

Frymer: Yeah, no, it’d be an interesting hypothetical: what if the economy was going well? What would be the Democratic Party message? And obviously even if the economy was going well, there’s going to be great inequality.

Bacon: Inequality, no matter what.

Frymer: But if the economy was going well, and the public felt the economy was going well, which is part of Trump’s success in ‘24, was a memory of the economy being pretty good—

Bacon: When he was president the first time.

Frymer: Yeah, the first time. So what would be the Democratic Party message? And it would be interesting to think, because you’re right, we mobilized around certain key principles, and Trump has helped us with those, because he’s tanked the economy. And healthcare, all of that.

But would the Democratic Party focus on things like civil rights? Would it focus—there’s been more local focus on ICE, obviously, out of Minneapolis, Los Angeles. But yeah, where would the focus be? Affirmative action, I assume, is just dead in the water for the Democratic Party.

Bacon: But this view that the party has to move to the right on, quote unquote, social issues, I think is not just shared by centrists right now. I worry that Bernie Sanders has internalized that in a certain way too, and I worry AOC and those people have internalized it a little bit too.

Frymer: Yeah. I think AOC I would see different than Bernie Sanders here. Even historically, Bernie has not been a huge person on that. Mamdani is another. It’s unclear whether that’s a huge concern for him. So yeah, you have also the issues over Gaza that are also a part of the party. There’s so much going on, right? And things to be sorted out. And it’s happening so fast and furious.

But I do think when there is a step back and a discussion of this, where does the party stand on these broad standing issues of civil rights? Title IX is another, right, involving gender and college education, and it also expands into the workplace. These have been left out. And I think, as you say, there is a goal among a lot of progressives to focus on the economy.

It’s obviously an earnest, meaningful goal. But there are things that are not being discussed, and it’s not clear as well, right? I know my colleague Jake Grumbach points a lot to youth voters among African American voters, Latino voters, being very supportive of a DSA agenda on all these types of fronts. But I think a lot of this still needs to be sorted out, as to the consequences of it.

Bacon: So let’s finish by talking about the latest book you’ve written, Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion. Talk about that book and what that’s trying to do. And I’ll emphasize I’ve not read that book.

Frymer: Yeah, so my work in general across these themes has been about the importance of whiteness, to use the woke term. But an identity of the United States as a white nation throughout, and the consequences that has had, whether it’s for partisan politics like captured groups, whether it is for unions, where race has also been central historically. And so that led me to be interested in empire, the ideas of the US empire and the ideas of expansion. And President Trump has brought a lot of this alive, obviously, in a lot of different dimensions.

And so it led me to go out of my comfort zone of the 20th century and 21st century and all the way into the 19th and even 18th century, and understanding the idea of America as an expansionist nation and as an empire. And what was really striking from the start and throughout was the heavy consciousness of being a white nation. And it is not something I have to parse out. It is everywhere in the language.

And it exists really—I think the breaking point maybe is the New Deal. It might even be a bit after the New Deal. The civil rights movement isn’t just a moment of trying to eradicate discrimination and its policies. It changes the whole tenor of what America is, right? 1965 is also an immigration law that opens up the United States to much of the world. All this, of course, is part of the backlash that we’re seeing right now.

But so the argument of the book is that the United States is attempting to expand, and it is doing that throughout the 19th century. It is using—because I’m also interested a lot in boring words like institutions and structures. The party system serves as that, with different groups in terms of representation and captured interests. Institutionally, the United States used a number of different ways to generate a politics of both expansion, but also a way of handling matters when the United States confronted populations that were not white and were not European.

And part of expansion is you confront populations that are not your own. And so as the United States expanded and thought of itself as a white nation, thought of itself very broadly as a white nation, in the sense that pretty much all Europeans were included in that—but as it came into conflicts, whether it was with African slaves, whether it was with Native Americans, either within US borders or in Mexico and elsewhere, whether as we moved to the Pacific with Asian immigrants, there was this constant talk and fear among party leaders and among the populace of, “How do we keep America white?”

And throughout the book there’s a lot of explicit—

Bacon: Keep America white. This is not a Donald Trump invention. This has been the historic trend.

Frymer: No. He is pulling out a lot of themes. And in this book, part of what I try to do, I quote a lot, and I quote at length a lot, because the language is stark.

One of the things that has been lost in history is Abraham Lincoln’s efforts at colonization in the early Civil War years.

Bacon: Meaning that African Americans should be emancipated and move.

Frymer: Emancipated and sent off.

Bacon: Sent. That’s correct. Sent, not moved.

Frymer: And there are long conversations with lots of statistics of how, the number of people necessary to move via boats, and all this kind of stuff. So the kind of stuff that Trump is talking about, mass deportation, it goes back to Lincoln. It failed, fortunately, under Lincoln. It of course reappears in the Eisenhower years and the like. So we had Chinese exclusion in the late 1800s. It’s been a constant thematic.

And one of the interesting things about the US, for the purposes of this book about empire, is it actually ends up in many ways constraining our empire ambitions. So for instance, the US had opportunities, this is now in the 1840s, 1850s, of taking all of Mexico. In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which gave us the land that became much of our Southwest, again, very transparently, the conversation was, how do we get as much land as possible with as few people as possible? And I think we took 60 percent of Mexico’s land, and we got a little less than 1 percent of its population. We looked for empty land because we wanted—

Bacon: To keep America white.

Frymer: To keep it. We wanted to settle it with white Europeans. So it’s a really powerful story that admittedly I learned a lot about as I was reading. And this is what Trump has really brought back out, right? This sense of white European imperialism. Although he at times, as he is apt to do, says things that don’t necessarily fit his agenda, right? Venezuela as a 51st state probably doesn’t fit.

Bacon: It would not fit. I’ll finish with this. I guess there are two theories competing in liberal Democratic politics, both kind of here and abroad, I think. One—I had Thomas Zimmer, he’s a historian, on. He was talking about how you need to have people who lean in and really defend the multiracial, pluralistic project.

The idea that that’s the way to fight for liberalism, is to admit that we want a thing that has all races and ethnicities and religions as part of it, and defend that pluralism. And you have to defend it formally, because the right is fighting it formally, so you can’t just do it sideways. The project has to be to formally defend that.

Others say, and I think Mamdani might be in this group himself, that the way you defend that project is to talk about economics and class issues, and therefore you win more of the white majority, whether you’re in Britain or Germany and so on.

I tend to think the first thing is correct, that you do have to fight the pluralistic fight and win that, while talking about economics too, but it can’t just be done through economics only. But where do you stand on that? And I’m reducing a lot of arguments very simply, but I think those are the two strands, and there are good faith arguments on both sides of that.

Frymer: Yeah, I agree with you. There are good faith arguments on both sides. They have meaningful supporters. There is the New Deal argument, right? The New Deal was the biggest success of the Democratic Party. It brought in the working class. It raised the working class, and in important ways it raised the living conditions of African Americans and everybody in the United States.

The question is, the New Deal was exclusive in many ways over civil rights. And the arguments were made, it’s going to help everybody, and let’s just keep riding it, and then we’ll find opportunities to make more specific progress. Those opportunities never really arise fundamentally.

And so I agree with those who say we need to confront the divisions in our society. We need to confront the history of our society. And we need to have honest conversations about that. It’s hard to say that, for me, honestly, in this moment where we are having even the most basic mentions of that we were a slave nation taken out of our politics. So is this our moment?

There has to be a momentary pragmatism of a certain level, again, to win an election. Elections are seen as the foundation of our democracy, but they’re also not so great for our democracy.

Bacon: No, they’re not. Yes, that’s a good point.

Frymer: They force this goal of winning, and they put aside all the things that we need to have these conversations of. And people say, Oh yes, we do need to have those conversations tomorrow.

Bacon: Tomorrow never comes.

Frymer: Tomorrow never comes, right? And I think that’s why a really important part of the progressive movement is pushing for things like proportional representation that might change some of these dynamics, take away the pressure of having to win these winner-take-all elections. I think that’s something that is meaningful going forward.

But yeah, absolutely, for greater representation and equality and the health of our democracy, we need to have these conversations be transparent. But they’re not going to happen in national politics. I think that’s reality. And people like Trump recognize that some of the places that are having that are universities, so we’ve got to gut them as well.

Bacon: Yeah, as well.

Frymer: Or high schools, or go all the way on down. Or museums, parks.

Bacon: You used the word pragmatism. Just to drill down, to me, pragmatic means James Talarico should not call for reparations, probably, in this term. I don’t think that necessarily means that Marcy Kaptur needs to say, “I voted to ban the education of gender ideology,” which is code words for being—I agree that the Democrats probably can’t press forward on civil rights that much right now.

I guess my concern is that they’re embracing things that are going backwards at times. That’s where I would say the pragmatism maybe is, try to stay even. Don’t embrace moving backwards, though. That would be my concern.

Frymer: Yeah, actually I think that’s a great point. And I think the best politicians do that, right? They don’t go back. They don’t emphasize, but they say it matter-of-factly, and they keep moving forward. At times Obama did that. At times Obama did make the comments about pull your pants up and the like. But I think Obama often was good at just saying, “Let’s stay focused here.” But not, as you say, not trying to step backwards.

And I think from what I’ve seen, Jon Ossoff has been pretty good on that. Again, not emphasizing, but not stepping back, and often using half a sentence or a sentence. Not to be provocative, but to make clear it’s still part of our liberal agenda.

I think AOC, personally, I think she’s shockingly good in a lot of ways of bringing in a politics, and I’d be very excited to see. She’s going to be a great example if she were to run for president, right? Is America ready for her? Maybe, right? It’s not clear. I don’t think the conventional wisdom’s clear. I don’t think America is where Trump is at.

Bacon: No.

Frymer: I think we’re going to uncover that there’s been so much work done from Black Lives Matter, from so many different movements, and diversity, and immigration. We are a nation that is not what Trump is envisioning. And so I think we’ve overreacted in a sense there. A lot of that’s going to come back.

But is AOC ready to do that now? I think she’s incredibly skilled. That would be the interesting example. Could she pull that out? She would be able perhaps to do that, certainly in a way that Bernie would not emphasize or provide, both symbolically and articulating it.

So as the Democratic Party thinks about those kinds of issues, right? She would be that candidate in 2028 that I think could definitely provide it. But you probably read the article too, right, the interview with her just the other day, which mentioned her support among Republicans is 1 percent.

Bacon: Also we’re in this partisan era where that number’s going to go down. But in talking to you, I’m thinking, if you’re Jon Ossoff, you’re a middle-aged white man, you might be able to—this is a tricky thing. His campaign can be, I’m appealing to civil rights issues in a subtle way, and people don’t see me that way because I’m a white man. AOC will have to spend the whole campaign saying, I’m not as civil rightsy as you think I am, even though I’m a young person of color.

I don’t know which approach is better, because there are some days where I actually thought Joe Biden, in a lot of ways, pushed forward on racial issues more than Barack Obama did in many actual policy cases. But having a Black man in the White House is obviously very important.

Frymer: Yeah. I think Joe Biden will get his moment at some point in time. He has been attacked so thoroughly by the Democratic Party, among everything else.

Bacon: For losing, basically.

Frymer: Yeah. But I think he actually—we forgot. He was trying, in some different ways. Not always successfully, but not always unsuccessfully either.

Yeah, I think it’s going to be a really interesting moment. You’re right, the white male candidate has a liberty to go in directions. The opportunity that somebody like an Obama or an AOC has is they can speak another language, and their personhood provides an opportunity there, right?

For people to envision what they mean. It’s funny, even my mom would always say in the Obama years, what’s happening, he’s becoming that moderate conservative, but he was so progressive when he ran. And I said, “All he kept saying was, ‘We’ve got to bring everyone together.’”

Bacon: Yes. He was not progressive when he ran. He would admit that himself if you asked him.

Frymer: No, yes. But everybody saw something in him. And so that’s the tough thing there. Ideally we have these huge conversations, but how do we do it, and where do we do it, and what forum do we have them take place? Certainly our national politics are nasty and all about the 15-second sound bite and the like.

So we really need to restore our communities. It’s cliche to say this, right? But to figure out ways to have these conversations, ongoing conversations, and then jump at the moment when the opportunity is there and try to win that moment. That’s what Trump did, right?

Bacon: That’s what Trump did, yes. He really created and seized on a moment.

Frymer: We have a lot to learn from Trump strategically, right? Because I don’t think American politics was ever where he was.

Bacon: No. But he managed to win anyway, and to change a lot of issues. Actually, if you look at the polls, there wasn’t huge anti-immigrant sentiment in March 2015. He created something. It was latent, but he mobilized it into a political force in a way that is a lesson.

And I do think that—I used to work at The Washington Post, the billionaires did a lot of bad stuff, but I also think that Bernie and Warren did a good job of building out the problem in America, that what connects everything is the inequality and the billionaires, not what Nancy Pelosi or John Boehner is doing. And I think they did a good job. They didn’t win the presidency, but they actually did change the conversation a lot.

Frymer: No, absolutely. I think a lot of the terrain that we’re fighting on is from their efforts. And from the reality of that. The billionaires are unheeded by any warnings. And they just keep going and going. Yeah, I think that agenda has been changed.

But it is interesting. I’ve said this to different friends. The moment at the Super Bowl when Kendrick Lamar is singing about Drake and the whole crowd is singing, and all of America, not all, but is singing along with Kendrick Lamar against Drake. And I sat there thinking, Drake was massively popular like a minute ago.

And I keep hoping and thinking, actually deep down, that moment is going to happen again post-Trump. Where he’s going to be Drake. I was never a Drake fan. Just because I do think there is a mass public that has not bought into Trump at any point in time. And they’re not mobilizing around it, and that’s depressing. The public has not done more about a lot of the egregious hatred that has been out there, and evil towards our fellow people. But I do think there’s a bigger public out there that doesn’t want this.

Bacon: I always thought he would never really get below 38 percent, I would say, because I thought there’s a permanent 40 percent who’s with the person in their party no matter what. And Biden never—I think the G. Elliott Morris polling, I don’t know if you’ve seen this, I think he’s now at 35 percent and maybe 34.

I think his approval ratings are the lowest for any modern president at the midterm. I think Bush fell to the high 20s at the very end, but Bush wasn’t this low this early. So obviously Hurricane Katrina, this huge event, and the Iraq War, huge events, and nothing like that has happened, fortunately, in a certain way.

But I wonder if we get to the point—because at some point in 2009, no one would say they voted for George Bush, who won two terms. And I wonder if we’re getting to that point, where beyond the sort of hardcore 25 percent, no one else—I do have people I know in my life who voted for Trump who are increasingly like, “I voted for him, but I don’t agree with this. Obviously, I don’t want people killed who protest ICE.” ICE is becoming more unpopular. I wonder if we’re not realizing that we are at that point right now where voting for Trump became embarrassing. I wonder if we’re almost getting there right now.

Frymer: Yeah. I’ve been hearing that anecdotally from people who go to the Jersey Shore, which is Trump country. That the flags are gone.

Bacon: The flags are gone. That’s a good symbol.

Frymer: I have a neighbor, actually, even here in Princeton, New Jersey, who’s had big Trump signs up, and they’re all gone. And there was a moment where you didn’t have to just be a Trump voter, you could be a proud Trump voter.

Bacon: Yes, correct.

Frymer: And I think some of that is dissipating. I think one difference between Trump and Bush: Bush deflated as a person, right? He was depressed even at the end of his term. He was saying he didn’t do a good job, and he hasn’t been seen much since. Trump isn’t going to do that, right? He’s going to triple down to the very end. But I do think that a lot of the public isn’t listening to him anymore.

Bacon: Yeah, that’s what I’m getting at.

Frymer: Yeah. When he’s coming up with these threats, when he’s saying, I just did the greatest deal ever, I’ve got this greatest economy ever, I do think a lot of the public is just tuning out.

Bacon: And maybe we might look back, and it’s not Hurricane Katrina, but the Iran war creating these massive high gas prices. That might end up being what took him from 42 to 33, and he never comes back. Even though it’s not Katrina or Iraq in terms of influence on everyday Americans, or deaths. It’s not as catastrophic for deaths in the US. Iran is different. But I think it might end up being politically as toxic.

Frymer: Yeah, and hopefully it stays so. It is, again, a long-term discussion the left needs to have, is, what if he did well on the economy, and didn’t go into Iran? Would we have just allowed all of this other stuff to happen?

Bacon: The authoritarianism to happen.

Frymer: The authoritarianism, the racism, the xenophobia, just the cruelty, right? And we’ve seen incredibly brave people have lost their lives fighting against that on the streets. But as an American public—you probably as well, since the day Trump was elected in ‘25, I furiously click the polls looking for, when is it going to drop? When’s it going to drop, right? And throughout a lot of that early ICE period, it wasn’t dropping, or it was dropping very slowly.

Bacon: And the period when he was destroying higher education—he was destroying universities with no backlash, and in fact being encouraged by news outlets and things like that.

Frymer: Yeah, it’s a pretty depressing statement about America.

Bacon: No defense from the Democratic Party for higher education, or anything.

Frymer: Yeah, it’s something we need to not forget. And obviously we want this economy to be our vehicle to get past it, but it does worry us long term. Would a smarter, less unhinged racist authoritarian—

Bacon: If he did not tank the economy by doing an unnecessary war, would he be able to sustain popularity? That’s unfortunately probably maybe. Because the first year, if they had not—the ICE overreach, I think Minnesota was another inflection point, but if they avoid Minnesota and the Iran war, is he at 43, probably? Something like that?

Frymer: Yeah, I think that’s right. Again, overreaching was part of his whole thing. And a belief that they could proudly try to make America white again is a big part of who they are. And that coalition is still there, and it’s going to stay there.

These coalitions don’t disappear entirely, especially when they get built up over time. And the MAGA right is there, and especially the younger MAGA right is going to stay there, and they’re institutionalized in certain ways. They have some power.

But yeah, I think it’s concerning how much the left kind of sat back. Again, we were stunned. We had a lot of things to focus on. And a lot of the left’s still angry at Biden, and angry about all sorts of different matters. I’m not sympathetic to all this.

But I think these are important conversations we need to have, of what does it mean to be an American today? I hope, and I do think it’s still a post-civil rights message in a good way, that we are a diverse nation. That we have huge things we still need to face and won’t face, but that we’re not a MAGA nation either. That we don’t want to go back. But yeah, I’m humbled and worried about where we’re at.

This is where I think on the left, there are some on the left who argue America is very left and just needs to be harnessed, and there are others on the left who are like, I’m not sure where America’s at and how we go here with.

Bacon: I’m closer to the second group. I take it you are too?

Frymer: Yeah, I’m closer to the second. I just think historically, for so much of our nation, we have had features that are not great. We’ve also had features that are amazing, right? And that’s why we’re a complicated, fascinating nation, and a nation that I am proud still to call my own. I am an American, and I say this with my students. But I am an American who—the nation is a complicated nation, and it was from day one. And you can’t ignore—complicated is a nice word, right?

There’s some really awful stuff. And Trump is not new to that, right? A lot of these people are like, Trump is against American values.

Bacon: Which ones? As you said, there’s a long history of Americans sounding like Trump. The idea that Lincoln wants Black people to be—what’s the phrase—ejected from the country is something I think people don’t know. I knew that, but it’s worth focusing on.

Frymer: Yeah. And so it’s just, I think, these realities. And deportation has been a piece of America throughout our history.

Bacon: The entire time.

Frymer: Including President Obama, right? Again, not with the same desire to be so forefrontly hateful in the things that Trump has done. But Jamelle Bouie says this time and time again in a really good way, is, Trump is not new, but he is. Or he’s doing it in a way that we didn’t perhaps—

Bacon: You can always find the antecedents of things Reagan did or so on, but Trump is doing it in a more forward, direct, aggressive, authoritarian way.

Frymer: That’s right. Reagan did a lot of this. Bush had elements of this. A different form, especially on things like immigration. He saw it as a positive. But these features are here in the United States.

And I think the left, we also probably do need to have conversations. How do we address this? I can say as well, as a university professor, that the over-the-top, as AOC called it, Woke 1.0, it’s not always terribly successful either. It’s not completely as unsuccessful as some make it to believe either.

But we need to rethink how we promote messages that are inclusive and yet don’t lose the important thread that we have inequalities that need to be addressed, right? We’re a nation at a huge crossroads. We have huge issues, but we have the skills and the weapons to do good things. They’re still here. Trump hasn’t gotten rid of all these things, including a populace that I think wants a different America.

Bacon: Great, optimistic, so rare these times. Paul Frymer, thanks for joining me. Great to see you. Take care.

Frymer: Great. Thank you. Thanks.

Democratic candidates in swing states are distancing themselves from transgender rights. That approach in some ways resembles how the party in the past broke with civil rights causes and Black leaders to court white voters. Paul Frymer, a political science professor at Princeton University, wrote a book called Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America that argues that African Americans are a “captured minority.” They are so supportive of the Democratic Party that both parties ignore their interests, he says. In the latest edition of Right Now, Frymer discusses the plight of African Americans, transgender Americans, and other voting blocs whose policy goals are strongly opposed by the Republican Party. He also discusses how the Democrats have positioned themselves on racial issues over the last few decades. The “post-racial” approach of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama isn’t in vogue among Democrats, but nor is the more focused attention that the party gave racial issues in the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests.

Public nuisance was a primary basis for the litigation against Big Tobacco in the 1990s, and was the foundation of the opioid cases over the past decade. It’s played a prominent role in lawsuits on lead paint, predatory lending, water pollution, and “forever chemicals” like PFAS. It was the most important hook in recent successful cases against social media companies like Meta for designing their platforms to addict and endanger children. And most recently, it has been a key cause of action in litigation in several states against data centers for the air, water, and noise pollution they cause.

But not in Utah, Kansas, or Montana. Though it largely passed under the national radar, these states enacted laws this year or last that dismantle public nuisance as a cause of action—laws that, according to the Utah State Legislature’s own Office of Legislative Research and General Counsel, will make claims against data centers and other corporate wrongdoers “more difficult to pursue.” These states are not outliers, either—they’re forerunners. Their laws closely mirror a model bill published this summer by the American Legislative Exchange Council, the corporate oligarchy’s primary conduit for enacting right-wing laws at the state level. As I write this, ALEC’s Public Nuisance Reform Act is likely being distributed to Republican legislators in dozens of state houses around the country—and you can bet that Big Tech, eager to suppress a valuable tool of data center opponents, is lining up lobbyists to coax its passage.

Indeed, if this year was about trialing this extremist proposal, leaders on the ground believe that next year the real onslaught will begin. “Big corporations and the politicians they purchase use states like Utah as a testing ground for their regressive agenda,” Utah state Senator Nate Blouin, a Democrat, told me. “But make no mistake, these corporate immunity laws are coming for you wherever you are. I wouldn’t be surprised if they get introduced in nearly every state next year.”

These attacks on public nuisance law constitute just one offensive in a multi-front war the right has been waging against our ability to use the courts to hold the wealthy and powerful to account. On October 5, the Supreme Court will hear Suncor v. Boulder, in which Big Oil companies will make their case for immunity from legal repercussions for the fires, droughts, air pollution, extreme heat, and other harms they’ve caused to communities.

Boulder, the Colorado county and city, sued Suncor and Exxon Mobil in 2018 over the damage that climate change—and the companies’ lies about their role in fueling it—had done to its residents. After the state Supreme Court ruled that the case should go to trial, Suncor and Exxon Mobil—clearly terrified of what would happen if communities like Boulder were allowed to have their day in court—asked the high court to intervene, arguing in legal briefs that “state tort law is not the solution to global climate change.” As TNR’s Matt Ford wrote recently, the companies “effectively argue that because they and their products have caused damage everywhere, they cannot be held liable for it anywhere.”

In case the Supreme Court doesn’t give Big Oil a get-out-of-jail-free card, it’s pursuing other means. In addition to its public nuisance model bill, ALEC recently published the Energy Producers and Consumers Protection Act, which immunizes all corporations—the fossil fuel industry, certainly, but also all other industries—from liability for any misconduct that is even marginally related to climate change, including “negligence, gross negligence, recklessness, strict liability, products liability, failure to warn, fraud, fraudulent concealment, misrepresentation, unjust enrichment,” as well as all related “criminal charges, indictments, or prosecutions.” In other words, under this legislation, fraud is legal—if you’re a powerful corporation. Meanwhile, Texas Senator Ted Cruz has introduced similar legislation at the federal level.

This right-wing blitzkrieg to shield big business from liability for its misconduct extends far beyond the issue of climate change. On a recent Federalist Society panel about climate immunity for corporations, O.H. Skinner, the executive director of Alliance for Consumers—one of numerous front groups spun up by conservative legal activist Leonard Leo—explained that these efforts need to cover not just fossil fuel companies but every major industry, from Big Ag to Big Tech: “A lot of people in this space only talk about climate. And it frustrates me … I’m the kind of person that, because I care about all these products, I start thinking, well [Big Oil immunity] doesn’t do anything about pork, and it doesn’t do anything about AI regulation.” Earlier this year, the Supreme Court also issued a ruling protecting Monsanto and other pesticide producers from thousands of lawsuits by families and farmworkers devastated by the cancer-causing effects of glyphosate products like Roundup.

This effort really does represent an attempt to fundamentally restructure our corporate governance model in the U.S., which has always relied on robust private litigation. All the way back in 1803, Chief Justice John Marshall, in his famous Marbury v. Madison decision, wrote that the “very essence of civil liberty certainly consists in the right of every individual to claim the protection of the laws, whenever he receives an injury.” While most developed countries overwhelmingly rely on public enforcement of laws, private enforcement—not just to compensate injured parties, but to affirmatively deter corporate malfeasance—has long played a key role in America, where regulatory state capacity has traditionally been much weaker than in places like Europe. This dynamic has become even more pronounced in recent years, as far-right billionaires have succeeded in dismantling significant portions of the administrative state and stacking federal regulatory offices with shills for the industries they’re supposed to be regulating. In this context, public nuisance litigation and other lawsuits that rely on state law are communities’ last—and sometimes only—line of defense against the unchecked avarice of powerful corporations that have been fully unleashed by the Trump administration.

So it’s no wonder that the oligarchy has set its sights on dismantling the basic architecture of our civil legal system. This isn’t an entirely new effort: The corporate right has been waging a version of this war, whitewashed as “tort reform,” for decades. But to outright immunize corporate wrongdoing across the board—from Big Oil’s climate crimes to Big Tech’s data center disasters—would be a whole new level of elite impunity. The oligarchs are coming for every last tool the American people have ever used to restrain corporate abuse, deception, and overreach. And the fight to save these rights will be happening right in your community, no matter where in America you live.

Politico treated that comment as a bold, surprising declaration. It isn’t. While progressive and centrist Democrats disagree on a lot, politicians in both camps often make comments similar to Hinojosa’s. And this perspective is widely shared among many pundits. Writers at both the socialist publication Jacobin and the center-left Bulwark have recently echoed this view.

But just because there’s a consensus doesn’t mean it’s correct. The “economic issues not culture wars” frame shared by much of the Democratic Party is entirely wrongheaded. It’s an example of intellectual dishonesty, moral cowardice, historical inaccuracy, and flawed electoral politics all wrapped together. The sooner Democrats drop this perspective, the better off the party and country will be.

Let me start with the intellectual dishonesty. When most people think of “cultural” issues, I suspect their mind goes to movies, music, sports, or other elements of popular culture. “Democratic politicians should not focus on which musicians perform at the Super Bowl or which shows win Emmys” is perfectly fine advice. But Democratic politicians are rarely fixated on football or Taylor Swift. What gets lumped into “cultural issues” these days includes all manner of meaty matters: higher education, K-12 education, immigration, racism, transgender rights, policing, abortion, sexism, religion, voting rights, and numerous other matters. And it’s true that some Democratic politicians and activist groups emphasize those issues.

As they should. Labeling those issues as “cultural” or “social” trivializes them. But Republicans trying to restrict the teaching of sociology, African American studies, and other academic fields they disagree with, bar transgender Americans from getting the medical care they need, deport people to countries that they have never lived in, and the hundreds of other radical actions that the Trump administration and state-level Republicans have taken on the vast range of issues I listed above is very important. Overly aggressive police departments kill innocent people. Restrictive voting laws limit Americans’ participation in our democracy. These efforts to rig the political system are no mere “culture war.”

The idea that you can easily separate “economic” issues from these “cultural” issues is nonsense. It’s very expensive for transgender Americans to move to blue states so they can live freely. It’s harder to buy a house in a neighborhood with rising home values if you are Black and harder to get a job if your name is Shanice, Terell, or something else synonymous with African Americans.

I suspect that Hinojosa, who has worked as a civil rights attorney, knows all that. So why is the longtime state representative acting as if she doesn’t? Because “cultural issues” is a coded way to hint at the realities of American politics. Despite all the fixation these days on the Democrats’ declines with voters who don’t have college degrees and voters of color, the real fissure in American politics remains the same as it was four decades ago: race. In most states, white voters favor Republicans, while Asian, Black, and Latino voters combined favor Democrats. In 2024, Trump won about 66 percent of white voters in Texas, compared to about 43 percent of voters of color.

“Democrats must get more support from white voters to win elections, and white voters in particular either don’t care that much about policing, racism, and immigration or have conservative views on those issues” would be an accurate statement. But such frankness wouldn’t help Hinojosa or other Democratic politicians win over those white voters. Hence, they engage in misleading rhetoric about the electorate and the issues.

But this rhetoric isn’t just words. Labeling a whole suite of matters as “cultural” provides the pretext to ignore or even adopt Republican positions on them. And that’s exactly what Democratic politicians are doing. The party was extremely slow last year to react to Trump’s hyperaggressive deportations and deployment of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to terrorize liberal cities because of the post-2024 consensus that Democrats were too liberal and focused on so-called cultural issues. It’s why national Democrats have been silent as the Trump administration forced colleges across the country to eliminate diversity and inclusion programs. It’s why Democratic politicians are adopting conservative language (“transgender ideology,” “boys playing in girl sports”) and conservative ideas (restrictions on gender-affirming care) instead of forthrightly defending transgender Americans from the full-scale assault they are facing from the Trump administration.

This is moral cowardice. The overwhelming majority of Democratic politicians are in heavily blue states and districts. They can defend immigrants, transgender Americans, professors, and anyone else with absolutely no fear of losing reelection. But the “cultural issues” frame has not only given Democratic politicians an excuse to not stand up for the marginalized but allowed them to cast that silence as smart and savvy. It’s not. It is the height of irresponsibility and fecklessness to refuse to defend the victims of an authoritarian, bigoted regime.

The usual explanation given for the Democrats’ “economic issues not culture wars” mantra is electoral history. According to centrist Democrats and even some on the left, the story of the last several years is one of cultural excess by the party. Democrats won the 2020 elections but would have gotten more seats in the House and Senate but for the backlash to the “Defund the Police” slogan that emerged from the George Floyd protests, according to this narrative. The party lost the 2024 elections because Kamala Harris was perceived as too liberal on these so-called cultural issues. Some in the party take the story even further back: The Democratic Party has ignored economic issues and obsessed on so-called cultural ones dating back to the 1980s.

That’s historical inaccuracy bordering on fiction. There was a time when the Democratic Party leaned heavily into racial issues: the 1960s. The passage of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts was followed by a white backlash that eventually turned the entire South Republican. It’s sad and unfortunate that some of the greatest actions taken by a political party in the history of the United States became an electoral albatross. But if anything, the Democrats have over-learned the lessons from that backlash. From Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton to Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi to Joe Biden, Democratic Party leaders for the last six decades have relentlessly focused on “economic issues” and not racism or anything that could be labeled cultural, desperate to win back those white voters.

Biden somewhat reluctantly embraced the 2020 protests. But once in office, he governed on economic policies, like expanding infrastructure, that were intended to win over moderate and conservative white voters. By early 2022, he declared, “Fund the police, fund them, fund them” in his State of the Union address to distance himself from the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2024, Harris not only didn’t emphasize liberal stands on these so-called cultural issues but called for more restrictive policies on the U.S.-Mexico border.

The idea that somehow Democrats have too often “taken the bait” on cultural issues, as Hinojosa suggested, is wildly inaccurate. What’s actually happened is that Republicans have harped on race, immigration, and other “dog whistles” for decades to appeal to white voters, in particular, and also some conservative-leaning people of color. Democrats occasionally respond, in part because African Americans, transgender people, and other members of the party’s coalition plead for support from the politicians that they voted for. Usually, that Democratic support is half-hearted and temporary, like what Biden and Harris offered to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Then the party makes a big show of regretting even its half-hearted defenses. The rhetoric from Hinojosa and other Democrats that the party lost in 2024 because it was overly focused on so-called cultural issues is nothing new. Such critiques also emerged after Democratic defeats in 1984, 1988, 2004, and 2016. If moving to the right or ignoring these issues were the key to winning elections, Democrats would never lose. They have been adopting this strategy for decades—lather, rinse, repeat.

That brings to my final point: “Economic issues not cultural wars” is a terrible electoral strategy. What issues resonate with voters is entirely dependent upon the conditions of the country at that time. Casting Trump as a racist authoritarian helped Democrats in 2018 and 2020. Leaning into abortion rights aided the party in 2022, in the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling. Democratic candidates are smartly tapping into the backlash against ICE this year. The reality is that the number of issues that Democrats and the media have labeled as “cultural” is so vast that the party is bound to be on the politically useful side of some of them at any given time. And while Americans may not agree with Democrats on every “cultural” issue, polls suggest that most Americans favor the multiracial, pluralistic society pushed by Democrats over the white, heterosexual, Christian, male-dominated society advanced by the GOP.

Campaigning on economic issues isn’t some panacea. Democratic candidates who relentlessly harp on such issues lose all the time. Which economic issues Democratic politicians push and when really matters. Talking about raising the minimum wage rarely helps Democratic politicians win elections. Most Americans agree with paying low-income workers more, but that’s not an issue that energizes or engages them. In contrast, calling for limits on data center expansion, as Hinojosa and other Democratic candidates are doing, is really useful right now, as hostility to billionaires and Big Tech companies is rising. But that tactic would not have been as effective in, say, 2016.

Hinojosa claims that she’s doing well in the polls because she’s emphasizing economic issues and downplaying so-called cultural ones. Bullshit. The reality is that Hinojosa is doing well because Trump is deeply unpopular overall and has lost huge ground with Latinos, a big bloc in Texas. Those are national trends, so I seriously doubt they have much to do with Hinojosa offering the usual Democratic boilerplate of expanding Medicaid and supporting public schools. What’s driving Trump’s unpopularity is a specific economic issue: high gas prices. And what’s making Trump toxic among Latinos is those high prices and also the excesses of his immigration policies.

“Emphasize economic issues not cultural wars” isn’t even good advice for Hinojosa, never mind something that the rest of the party should adopt.

I hope that Hinojosa and other Democrats who have adopted this “economics not cultural wars” frame win their races, because they will support better policies than Republicans once in office. But I am deeply concerned that if a few Democrats in red states win on this rhetoric, this perspective will become even more entrenched in the party. And that would be terrible. “Economic issues not cultural wars” produces a party that both loses elections and abandons moral causes and vulnerable people. That’s not a theoretical argument—it’s the story of the Democratic Party of my entire adulthood.

The reality is that there are no silly culture wars happening in America. There are equality wars and justice wars and fairness wars. Democrats should try to win those wars—and the elections that involve them.

The question came from White House correspondent Hariana Verás, the first African journalist accredited to the White House.

“She loves Africa, she always asks about Africa. She never talks about any other place,” Trump said before hearing Verás’s question. “Good job. Go ahead.”

“You, among many other administrations … you are the only one who started to do something to end the 30-year war in the [Democratic Republic of Congo],” said Verás, referring to the peace agreement Trump brokered between the presidents of Congo and Rwanda at the White House last December and again in March.

The fighting has continued since then as most of the peace deal remains unimplemented. Meanwhile, more than seven million people have been displaced as a result of the worsening conflict, according to the Center on Foreign Relations.

“Rwanda is still violating,” Verás continued, probing if Trump intended to do anything about the shattered arrangement.

“Yeah, we’re going to stop it, if there is a violation we know about it,” Trump shrugged. “We ended the war with Congo and Rwanda, and they both signed it and both agreed, so, well look, I just heard about it a little while ago, if there’s a problem we’ll stop it.”

But Verás wasn’t satisfied by the president’s response.

“Mr. President, I just came from the DRC. I was there a month ago. I witnessed, again, Rwanda still killing a lot of Congolese,” Verás pressed.

“And you witnessed that?” Trump asked.

“Yes, Mr. President,” Verás continued. “And I have evidence.”

That apparently inspired Trump to switch gears.

“How is Ebola going?” Trump retorted, bringing up the regional viral crisis aggravated by federal cuts to USAID earlier this year.

“Oh, Ebola is under control,” Verás said. “I spoke with the director of the World Health Organization at the [United Nations], and he said it is under control. But still the country needs some help to fight Ebola. But still, the biggest problem is the war.”

“I’ll make sure it works out,” Trump mumbled. “That’s what I do. I make sure things work out.”

Then he pivoted to the next reporter.

Now, how do you feel, @HarianaVeras? 🤣🤣

Don’t you see how ridiculous you look? Tshisekedi’s money won’t make you relevant or get you heard.
——-

Hariana Verás: Rwanda is still killing people in Congo.

Trump: How is Ebola going?

Hariana Verás: Ebola’s under control…..I… pic.twitter.com/8wp1Elb56h

— Fabrice Rugumire (@FabRugumire) September 28, 2026

Paxton’s remarks came at a United States Hispanic Business Council forum in Fort Worth on Monday.

“The criticism has been that I let a child predator out [after serving] one day,” Paxton said. “Well, guess what? They served 60 days. It wasn’t what we wanted, but we did not control the situation. We did our best.”

That is not what you want to hear from a state attorney general running for Senate.

Ken Paxton: The criticism has been that I let a child predator out after one day. Well guess what? They served 60 days. pic.twitter.com/KVZZpCrI4c

— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) September 28, 2026

The embattled attorney general is referring to the sweetheart deal his prosecutors offered to Adam Hoffman, a Texas man charged with repeatedly molesting a young boy, earlier this year. The deal would have allowed Hoffman to serve just one day in prison for the crime he pleaded guilty to, and allowed him to avoid signing up for the sex offender registry—a move that was widely criticized. The judge in the case was appalled by the deal. “One day. Seriously? Somebody has to sell me on the wisdom of it,” said Judge Roy Sparkman, who insisted on the 60-day sentence.

Paxton’s most recent comment comes just a little over one month before what many expect to be an extremely close midterm election against Democratic candidate James Talarico.

“Omg he is STILL lying. Paxton’s office originally tried to get ONE day, the judge rejected it and bumped it to 60, but even then, Adam Hoffman was released early only served 30 days. For child rape. And Paxton’s office didn’t even put the bare minimum requirement for him to register as a sex offender in the deal,” wrote Sara McGee, a Democratic nominee for the Texas House of Representatives. “A completely corrupt failure at every level.”

On Monday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune declined to push back on the “pocket rescission” of $810 million passed by Congress for education and health programs, telling Punchbowl News’s Andrew Desiderio that “it’s something I’m sure will be litigated.”

Thune’s comments came after fellow Republican Senator Susan Collins, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement Friday that the move came without warning and that she would address “these illegal actions” with her colleagues.

“Not only is the delay itself an impoundment that was not reported to Congress, but also it is a usurpation of Congress’s appropriations powers,” Collins said. “[The Office of Management and Budget] is an agency of the executive branch. It does not get to decide which programs are worth funding.”

Asked about Collins’s statement, Thune replied, “As an appropriator she feels strongly that these are decisions made by appropriators and that the administration doesn’t have this authority.”

“Whether you agree in substance or not with what they did, you can argue that they be good stewards, and some of these things may be things many of us agree with, but the process by which they did it is gonna be, I assume, subject to a lot of discussion and probably some litigation,” Thune added.

The OMB said the funds being slashed were “the most harmful government spending.” Most of the canceled funds came from the Department of Health and Human Services’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, which helps refugees and unaccompanied immigrant minors. The Trump administration claims the funds are no longer necessary.

But other spending was also clawed back, including for health research, an education program for immigrant students, a minority entrepreneurship initiative, housing counseling services, and more.

Trump decided to cancel the funds without giving Congress enough time to respond with legislation or reallocation. The end of the fiscal year is in less than one week, and the House is out of session until after November’s midterm elections.

Constitutionally, the power of levying taxes and appropriating federal funds is supposed to lie with Congress. In theory, the president can send a request to the legislature to cancel funds that they disagree with, but with 45 days’ notice to allow Congress to respond. Trump’s rescission did not follow those rules, and is likely violating the Constitution. But even when Trump usurps their constitutionally enshrined powers, Republicans in Congress lack the spine to challenge him.

“This is theft from the American people, plain and simple,” Senator Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the appropriations committee, said in a statement. “These are funds Congress has delivered on a bipartisan basis and should be helping people—not cut off by a president more focused on building a ballroom than investing in families. Every Republican who voted for these bills should be furious because [OMB Director Russell Vought] is saying their votes don’t count.”

Alito’s decision was revealed via a letter issued to the lawyers involved in Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, which pits ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy against the commissioners of Boulder County, Colorado as the two oil companies attempt to throw out a county lawsuit seeking climate-change related damages.

“Justice Alito has determined that he will not continue to participate in this case,” read a letter written by court clerk Scott Harris.

The letter did not elaborate as to why Alito decided to remove himself from the October 5 hearing, though he had faced mounting pressure from progressive groups such as Consumer Watchdog to step down from the case due to his personal investments in oil companies. Alito does not hold stocks in either ExxonMobil or Suncor Energy, but instead has investments in ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66, which are involved in similar lawsuits around the country and are likely to be affected by the Supreme Court’s eventual decision in Suncor.

The decision is a remarkable aboutface for the conservative justice, who previously told NBC News (via a court spokesperson) that he saw no need to withdraw himself from the legal proceedings.

“Justice Alito’s recusal from Suncor v. Boulder is the right decision, and one he should have made from the start,” said Alexandra Nagy, organizing director with Consumer Watchdog, in a statement. “The public should not have to wonder whether a justice’s personal investments could benefit from a ruling that shields the fossil-fuel industry from liability.”

Alito’s recusal, however, will force the nation’s highest judiciary into an eight-person bench, raising the possibility of a 4-4 split on the matter.

Alito is the only justice in the court with a wide stock portfolio, according to a Bloomberg report published earlier this month. Either Alito or his wife owns tens of thousands of stock positions in dozens of individual companies, making him a standout on the bench. The only other member managing individual stocks is Chief Justice John Roberts, who has maintained investments in just two companies (Lam Research Corporation and Thermo Fisher Scientific).

In a legal petition to the Supreme Court, attorneys for Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil argued that state law does not preempt federal law on issues related to greenhouse gas emissions, and that states do not have the constitutional right to seek relief for “injuries allegedly caused by pollution emanating from outside the State.”

But this preemption case is not like others that the court has recently heard, in no small part due to the Trump administration’s decision to pare back the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency.

“One argument on the other side is that allowing states to regulate greenhouse gas emissions is inconsistent with the objectives of federal law,” penned Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of University of California, Berkeley’s School of Law, in a piece last week for SCOTUSBlog. “But as the county commissioners of Boulder County and the city of Boulder argue in their brief, the EPA recently has denied that it has the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.”

“As they say: There is no explanation ‘how the Court can hold that the Clean Air Act preempts claims indirectly relating to greenhouse-gas emissions when EPA maintains that the Act does not allow it to directly regulate some (perhaps any) greenhouse-gas emissions.’”

This story has been updated.

One defendant, Lisa Eisenhart, claims that she was “targeted, arrested, prosecuted, and punished because of her constitutionally protected expressive and associational activity as a member of the protesters who gathered at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.”  

That claim belies the fact that the January 6 rioters did more than just exercise their First Amendment rights. Police officers were assaulted, windows were broken, congressional property was stolen, and offices in the Capitol were extensively vandalized. 

Eisenhart, a former nurse from Georgia who wore a tactical vest that day, got further inside the Capitol than most of her fellow rioters, and allegedly encouraged rioters to fight with police. She was joined by her son, Eric Munchel, a Nashville, Tennessee, bartender who became known as “zip-tie guy” because he was carrying plastic wrist restraints that he likely took from a police checkpoint inside the building. He also was wearing black tactical gear. 

Munchel was sentenced to 57 months in prison, while Eisenhart got 30 months. In her lawsuit, she says that the federal government, “through retaliatory prosecution, discriminatory detention practices, deliberate indifference to plaintiff’s health and safety, and other unlawful conduct…violated [her] constitutional rights and caused severe physical, emotional, reputational, and economic injury.”

President Trump ended up pardoning every single January 6 participant shortly after he was sworn into office in 2025, including Eisenhart and her son. But now, she and other January 6 rioters are demanding money and restitution. Evidently facing consequences for their actions was a step too far.

As Energy Secretary Chris Wright launched into an explanation of the administration’s industrialization agenda and new partnership with Mesabi Metallics, Trump’s eyes shut and his head drooped forward.

Trump is struggling to stay awake on camera pic.twitter.com/sR8EaKNvj9

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 28, 2026

Rewant Ruia, the chairman of Mesabi, expressed his excitement about the project, while Trump kept his eyes closed and neck slack. As Ruia spoke, Trump angled his face toward the executive, but his eyelids continued to flutter open and closed.

Trump's eyes are getting very heavy pic.twitter.com/aKT2goaYkV

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 28, 2026

When answering questions from reporters, Trump sounded truly exhausted. The president’s responses were quiet and short, and his speech was slurred.

In addition to falling asleep during some major announcements, Trump has also appeared to nod off during signing ceremonies, Cabinet meetings, Senator Lindsey Graham’s funeral, and the 9/11 memorial at the Pentagon, to name a few.

For years, Trump’s entourage has boasted about the president’s supposedly endless supply of energy, but over the course of his first two years back in office, the president has repeatedly exhibited bizarre conduct in the public eye. Not only does that include taking naps during public events, but also erratic behavior, slurred speech, appearing lost or disoriented, and sporting mysterious bruises. Trump’s behavior has spurred calls for health examinations from medical experts, politicians, and voters fearful of the president’s apparent cognitive decline.

Several sources familiar with the plan told ProPublica that Trump planned to require all ballots to be delivered through certified mail. That means anyone who wanted to vote by mail would be required to personally sign to receive their ballots—potentially penalizing the voting rights of millions of Americans simply for not being home.

This was a core tenet of one of the earlier versions of the president’s restrictive executive order, which was blocked by the Supreme Court in August. The final version omitted the certified mail requirement, instead simply requiring the U.S. Postal Service to vet mail-in voters through a massive national database.

The certified mail rule was given up on after internal opposition from postal service officials. The rule would have deputized postal workers, ultimately giving them the final decision as to who should and shouldn’t get a ballot based on whether or not they answered the door to sign for their ballot. For some reason, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick would have had control over the effort.

This comes in the wake of reports that Postmaster General David Steiner wants to resign, as he seems unwilling to be at the center of Trump’s baseless election fraud crusade ahead of November midterms.

Speaking on Fox Business Monday, Johnson agreed with host Cheryl Casone’s assertion that the public pushback to artificial intelligence data centers was “coming from China” and being seized on by Democrats ahead of the midterm elections.

“This is what Democrats do. Every election cycle they find something to glom onto and say that this is doom and gloom and everyone will die if we don’t win,” Johnson said. “Don’t buy it. This is a Chinese psyop. I really believe that. That’s not a conspiracy theory.”

Mike Johnson says opposition to data centers "is a Chinese psyop. I really believe that. That's not a conspiracy theory." pic.twitter.com/mQahEOX2gx

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 28, 2026

Both Chinese and Russian actors have reportedly tried to inflame public discourse around AI data centers. Jessica Brandt, a former official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence who tracked foreign influence efforts during the Biden administration, previously told The New York Times that this doesn’t make Americans’ concerns any less real.

“Foreign actors aren’t manufacturing American debates over the future of AI, they are exploiting them,” Brandt told the Times, adding that the objective was to “deepen our divisions in order to dent our appeal and weaken us from within.”

Nearly two-thirds of Americans oppose data center construction in their communities, while half believe that the construction of new data centers is a bad thing for the country, according to a recent YouGov poll.

The results of that public opinion have been tangible. Over the past six months, the United States has seen a massive mobilization against data centers. Nearly 120 projects valued at an estimated $198 billion were blocked or delayed as states and communities nationwide imposed moratoriums on data center development, according to Data Center Watch.

Johnson has made it pretty clear that he’s not willing to have any daylight with President Donald Trump, an outspoken supporter of the AI industry. Meanwhile, in the Louisiana Republican’s home state, Amazon and Meta plan to spend a combined $72 billion on the construction of new AI data centers. A local health official warned that the projects threaten to increase the harmful toxic exposure from gas-fired plants required to power them.

Gaea Powell, a Moms for Liberty activist and loyal Trump supporter who ran for the clerk-recorder position in San Luis Obispo County, California, earlier this year, is facing up to eight years in prison after she was found guilty on nine counts of election fraud last week. That included lying about her place of residence, unlawfully registering to vote, and fraudulently voting, according to SFGate.

The charges stemmed from Powell’s previous bids for high office, when she ran for mayor of Arroyo Grande in 2022 and 2024. At the time, Powell campaigned on some of Trump’s own election conspiracy talking points, honing in on the “integrity of local elections.”

Yet at the same time, Powell had lied to local officials about her true place of residence. In campaign filings—and under penalty of perjury—she swore that she lived inside the Arroyo Grande city limits, as required of local mayoral candidates. She did not.

Powell also failed to follow local laws regarding campaign earnings above $2,000. On June 30, 2022, Powell pledged that she did not intend to raise or spend more than that sum. Then she took an “active role” in raising and spending more than that on campaign mailers, without notifying local officials, according to a press release by the district attorney’s office.

Despite the jury verdict (and just like the president), Powell has refused to acknowledge the evidence or admit wrongdoing.

“I respect the jury’s role. But I am deeply disappointed by today’s verdict,” Powell said in a statement obtained by the San Luis Obispo Tribune. “I have maintained from the beginning, and I maintain today, that I did not knowingly deceive anyone and did not act with fraudulent intent.”

She still intends to appeal the verdict.

“I may have lost this battle. But this is not the end of the legal fight,” Powell continued. “I intend to pursue every appropriate post-trial remedy and to appeal this case. And just as importantly, another chapter is only beginning.”

Bo French, who is running to head the Texas Railroad Commission, posted about publicly executing political opponents including President Obama, CNN reports. The posts span six years, with the most recent post in February 2025, in which French mentioned hangings, gallows, and other forms of public executions.

Those posts were either deleted by French or removed for violating X’s rules, though it remains unclear. French also made similar posts on an account he used in unsuccessful campaigns for the Texas statehouse in 2016 and 2018, before the account was suspended.

In 2020, while President Trump was under investigation for his campaign’s ties to the Russian government, French called for the death penalty for “Obama conspirators,” including then House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff.

“It’s time we drop the hammer on these treasonous bastards and punish them with the full measure of justice. #HangEmHigh,” French posted.

He also called for Obama’s death using the same hashtag.

“The penalty for treason used to be death. Even for a former president. #HangEmHigh,” French wrote.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Attorney General Ken Paxton, and the state’s Republican Party have thus far refused to disavow French.

The Texas Railroad Commission has the important role of regulating the state’s oil and gas industry, and French ended up winning the Republican nomination in May over incumbent Republican Commissioner Jim Wright, who had the endorsements of Republican Governor Greg Abbott, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, and House Speaker Dustin Burrows.

French’s penchant for capital punishment is only one of his many abhorrent stances. He has openly espoused anti-Muslim views, asking his social media followers who the “bigger threat” to America is, Muslims or Jews, before clarifying that he believed Islam “is the bigger threat.” He wants to “end DEI” and “kick radical Islam out of Texas Energy.” He’s called for deporting 100 million people from the United States.

“I’m going to say something that’s going to make some people uncomfortable: The problem is, we call it sharia [law], but the problem is actually Islam,” French said at a panel discussion titled “Don’t Sharia My Texas” at the the Conservative Political Action Conference in Grapevine, Texas, in March. “If they can infiltrate Texas and conquer Texas, then what’s going to happen? They’re going to be able to control the United States.”

Earlier this month, French drew a backlash for a racist post about the student section at a University of Texas football game, saying the racially diverse student fanbase was a “problem” that “is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”

That post led to Karl Rove, the Republican strategist and former adviser to President George W. Bush, saying he would vote for French’s Democratic opponent, Jon Rosenthal, and to Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn calling him “an embarrassment to the Republican Party,” who is “going to drag the whole ticket down because of his racist comments.”

These latest revelations won’t help French, and certainly won’t help Texas Republicans in a year when the party is polling historically low.

“I want to thank President Trump, @AGToddBlanche, and @FBIDirectorKash for the opportunity to serve in the FBI. Under President Trump’s leadership, we have delivered historic results in our mission to Make America Safe Again. With great pride in what we have accomplished, I am announcing that I am stepping down to return to my family in Missouri,” Bailey wrote Monday on X. “I am confident Director Patel will continue to reform the FBI, combat violent crime, defend the homeland, ensure strong organizational accountability, and restore public trust in this institution of excellence.”

Bailey served alongside Dan Bongino, the former talk radio host and conspiracy theorist who himself dramatically resigned from the FBI late last year. Bailey joined the FBI last September, not making it more than one full year of working with Director Kash Patel.

While Bailey cited family duties as the impetus for his departure, The New York Times reported that he and Patel reportedly had an acrimonious relationship, going months without communicating—a report that would not appear out of place given the various internal conflicts and departures within both the FBI and DOJ, as well as Patel’s own controversies.

“The senior @FBI position of ‘co-Deputy Director’—which had never existed before and was created out of thin air because of @dbongino’s inability to handle the role—has now been vacated,” investigative journalist Steve Baker wrote. “Many of us thought that Bailey had been brought in to eventually take Patel’s place as Director of the Bureau.”

“Rats fleeing a sinking ship,” the Missouri Senate Democrats wrote.

This story has been updated.

“We have the best, I guess you could say poverty, they talk poverty. We have the best poverty numbers ever in the history of our country,” Donald Trump told reporters outside the White House Sunday.

Trump was attempting to refer to U.S. economic growth statistics, correcting himself that the U.S. has “less poverty” now than it did before.

Trump: "We have the best, uhh, I guess you could say poverty. They talk poverty. We have the best poverty numbers ever in the history of our country." pic.twitter.com/W3cKHR8ReZ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 27, 2026

A report published earlier this month by the U.S. Census Bureau supports that claim, revealing that poverty had dropped to a historic low in 2025 when just 10.2 percent of the population reported income below the federal poverty line. (That statistic is measured by comparing pretax income to household size. Last year, that threshold was $32,649 for a family of four.)

But that doesn’t mean that Americans aren’t struggling to afford food, housing, gas, health care, childcare, or other basic needs. Affordability is an entirely different metric.

For example, the median household income across New York City in 2025 was $86,900. However, a SmartAsset study found that single New Yorkers needed to make at least $158,954 that year to afford the basics (such as housing, groceries, utilities, and transportation) and cover the costs of a couple of hobbies.

Even in a region such as Texas, where the cost of living is 6 percent less than the national average, the cost of living outpaced incomes. In 2024, the median household income in the Lone Star State was $78,476. But single Texans needed to make at least $90,771 in order to live comfortably, per the SmartAsset study.

That enormous discrepancy is a part of the reason why the economy and the cost of living are ranked as the top two issues for Americans ahead of the midterm election, according to a Pew Research poll published in July.

Meanwhile, billionaires are making money hand over fist, concentrating and hoarding their assets while shrinking the economic pie for the workers who build their products. A Guardian assessment of global wealth in 2025 found that the richest 10 percent of the world’s population own 75 percent of all personal wealth, while just 0.001 percent of the world’s population—less than 60,000 people—control three times as much as the bottom half of humanity.

Trump himself would fit squarely within that demographic, as the 586th wealthiest person in the world (as of the time of publishing). The policies he’s crafted throughout his presidency have only stressed the wealth gap and abetted the ultra-elite, lining their pockets with millions of dollars while the rest of America’s pocketbooks grew by an average of just $1,200, according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress published earlier this month.

“The gains of the past year and a half have been overwhelmingly concentrated among the wealthiest Americans, while millions of families are still struggling with high levels of debt,” said CAP’s chief economist, Cristina Tello-Trillo, in a statement at the time. “Stock market benefits are not being shared equally, and the tax code has been flipped upside down to provide giveaways to wealthy business owners. The wealth gap is growing, making it harder for families in the middle and at the bottom to build lasting financial security.”

On Monday, the Education Department rescinded a 2024 Title IX rule enacted by former President Joe Biden that required schools to move proactively on sexual assault harassment cases, calling on them to strengthen and specify their protections for campus survivors. It also extended protections for LGBTQ students as well as those who were pregnant or a parent. Now that has all been scrapped because the department doesn’t think the requirements are “enforceable nationwide.” 

The timing couldn’t be worse. On Monday, New York state prosecutors reopened an investigation into the alleged 2024 gang rape. The victim filed a lawsuit last week against members of the Chi Phi fraternity for allegedly raping her—and against Cornell University for failing to adequately protect her and discipline the fraternity members. The victim, Jane Doe, said that after leaving a bar she “stumbled alone” to Chi Phi’s  fraternity house around 11 p.m., became intoxicated, and was pressured by the members to snort what fraternity brothers told her was ketamine. She also smoked marijuana and drank more liquor. She was propositioned for a threesome by two of the brothers, even as the lawsuit alleges she was “incapable of consenting.” 

After that encounter, at about 1:42 a.m., one of the defendants texted a Chi Phi Snapchat groupchat telling his brothers that there was “free pussy” at the fraternity house. Jane Doe says she was then raped for hours by seven fraternity brothers. Aside from alleged forced oral and vaginal intercourse, they also allegedly snorted ketamine off of Jane Doe’s body. She said she was completely incapacitated at this point, with the alleged assault lasting until nearly 6 a.m. the next morning. 

Doe filed a report in November 2024. Cornell University conducted an internal investigation, barred the fraternity but only suspended the defendants, giving them the option to write essays to lessen their punishment rather than expelling them. None were arrested, and Doe dropped out of Cornell shortly afterward. Matthew Ingalls, Jonathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris, and Scott Kretzschmar are the Chi Phi members named in the lawsuit. 

“The Cornell University case is a devastating example of why robust federal Title IX enforcement matters,” said Shiwali Patel of the National Women’s Law Center. “Sexual harassment and assault continue to be pervasive in schools and, to the fullest extent possible, we should be working to enforce the laws that protect student survivors of sexual violence. Yet Education Secretary Linda McMahon and the Trump administration have decided to ignore what survivors need, instead weaponizing Title IX to attack trans students.” 

“While the administration is unlawfully eroding protections for trans students under the guise of ‘protecting women and girls,’ they are systematically weakening the very laws that keep students safe and schools accountable,” she added.

New York prosecutors are now reconsidering criminal charges against the defendants. 

Sources at ICE told CBS News’s Camilo Montoya-Galvez that officers had received guidance to limit arrests to individuals with criminal histories—but that policy was quickly rolled back.

“The backdrop here is important,” Montoya-Galvez wrote on X. “Ahead of the midterms, some GOP lawmakers and business leaders have been expressing concerns about the political and economic consequences of ICE’s crackdown.”

It appears that some Republicans are finally seeing how ICE’s operations in their home states might hurt them on Election Day. Last week, Kansas Senator Roger Marshall issued a rare rebuke of ICE after a series of surprise raids in his state sparked protests and business closures.

Marshall was among the majority of Republicans who spent months blocking even the most modest reforms for ICE but saw a dip in the polls ahead of his statement.

This isn’t the first time that cracks have appeared in enforcement at the Department of Homeland Security.

After two deadly incidents in July, the Trump administration issued a temporary pause on traffic stops, and then rescinded that policy just one day later.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin reportedly never received the White House’s blessing before announcing the sudden policy change—leaving President Donald Trump and border czar Tom Homan in the dark. Trump was reportedly furious, believing that it signaled the administration was softening on immigration enforcement.

But increasingly, voters are finding that Trump’s immigration policies have gone too far.

Eighteen months later, the only question before the court is narrow, and worth stating precisely, because the government has spent great energy twisting it into something else: May Chief Judge of the D.C. District Court James Boasberg continue to inquire into whether the administration knowingly defied his order?

The case has taken a long, tortuous path to tomorrow’s hearing. It is important in itself, but the stakes reach past it, to whether this administration set out to buck the law from the first days of Trump 2.0. That’s why I left my usual seat in the journalist’s box and signed onto an amicus brief in the case, one of 12 former Justice Department officials, Republicans and Democrats alike, who think Boasberg should be allowed to do his job.

Cast your mind back to March 2025. It was the first real collision between the second Trump administration and the federal courts: before the birthright citizenship fights, before the funding freezes, before the parade of emergency stays that is now the background hum of this presidency.

At an emergency hearing on March 15, Boasberg ordered the government not to remove anyone under the Alien Enemies Act and, if planes were aloft, to turn them around. His statement from the bench: Any plane carrying these people “needs to be returned to the United States.”

Notwithstanding Boasberg’s instructions, the planes landed in El Salvador and the men went straight into a maximum-security prison, and that country’s president posted a laughing emoji and the word, “Oopsie.”

Later, a whistleblower—Erez Reuveni, a career Justice Department lawyer, since fired—told Congress that at a March 14 leadership meeting, then–senior DOJ official Emil Bove said the planes were leaving “no matter what” and that the Department might have to say “Fuck You” to the courts. Bove, since rewarded with a lifetime seat on the Third Circuit, told the Senate he couldn’t recall the profane remark.

Boasberg has doggedly insisted on getting to the bottom of what happened for well over a year. That has entailed plowing past a series of avoidance maneuvers from the administration. The extended bob-and-weave has included its refusing to address his questions on national security grounds, dismissing the matter as a “picayune dispute,” floating and then not invoking the state secrets privilege, serving up a declaration so empty that Boasberg called it “woefully insufficient,” and filing a misconduct complaint against the judge himself.

When Boasberg continued to hang fire, the administration tried its well-worn play of crying “emergency” to the D.C. Circuit. A panel of three judges gave Trump a ringing victory that lasted only a little while before the court as a whole took the unusual step of vacating the opinion and agreeing to hear the case again. That hearing before the full en banc court takes place Tuesday.

The now-vacated panel opinion was remarkably obtuse and spiteful. It’s the most naked piece of judicial pandering I have seen by a judge this side of Aileen Cannon. It was written by a judge, Neomi Rao, widely considered to be in the running for the next Supreme Court vacancy.

The proof of Rao’s overreach was the series of nasty swipes at Boasberg, a judge widely respected on both sides of the aisle (he was nominated to the bench by Barack Obama and confirmed unanimously). Courts of appeals taking a case away from a district court customarily cushion the blow with polite asides about the learned district judge.

But not in this case. Rao fairly savaged Boasberg, with words that likely shocked her colleagues but delighted her Oval Office patron. Among many pot shots and low blows, she accused Boasberg of a “widening gyre” of investigation and wrote that “criminal liability cannot turn on the unstated intentions (or post hoc assertions) of a district court judge.” It was her vitriol as much as her reasoning that I think explains the full court’s rare decision to vacate her opinion and rehear it en banc.

It’s certain that the eventual opinion will excise those Rao nasty-grams. But the focus Tuesday will be on Rao’s legal analysis. The brief I joined made the fundamental point that, contrary to Rao’s suggestion, there has been no finding of contempt, and all Boasberg’s order does is consider the possibility based on compelling evidence pointing in that direction.

Second and relatedly, Rao’s opinion recasts that factual question as a legal one that isn’t in front of Boasberg at all. Criminal contempt, the majority reasoned, requires a “clear and specific” order, and Boasberg’s temporary restraining order “did not clearly and specifically bar the government from transferring plaintiffs into Salvadoran custody.”

That move takes Bove’s and other administration officials’ mental state out of the equation. But contempt is judged at the moment of the conduct, not against a reading two appellate judges reached a year and a half later. If the people in that room understood the order and defied it because the planes were landing “no matter what,” the fact that some judges now find the wording debatable does not launder the defiance. At a bare minimum, it is no basis for pulling the plug on the inquiry.

As Judge Michelle Childs warned in dissent, the majority’s logic would “echo in future proceedings against all litigants,” letting anyone “argue, based on their preferred interpretation of a court’s order, that they did not commit contempt before contempt findings are even made.”

The D.C. Circuit should stand behind Boasberg’s doggedness. It would have been easy for him to drop it, but I think as the chief judge, he sees himself as acting on behalf of his colleagues, whose three-year project of trying the January 6 offenders—the largest prosecution effort in the department’s history—was wiped away with a stroke in Trump’s wholesale pardons the day that he took office.

Moreover, Boasberg is now in a sense carrying the load for American society and history. The administration has been intent from its first minutes in office on the Orwellian project of whitewashing history and erasing Trump’s perfidy, the worst by any president in our history. Its war on the truth is comprehensive, ranging from the burial of the Jack Smith report to the campaign to launder the Smithsonian’s account of the American past, to the ouster of the national archivist charged with keeping the government’s own record. As Orwell wrote of the machinery of the Party, “Every record has been destroyed or falsified.… And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.”

The D.C. Circuit argument thus has a dual role: It will settle Boasberg’s ability to continue to hold the administration accountable. But it also will serve as a sort of truth and reconciliation commission, on the model of the January 6 committee during Trump 1.0. It is vital for us to know as a country whether the administration came into office determined to elevate presidential will over the rule of law, to land the planes “no matter what.” Unless Boasberg is permitted to finish the job he started well over a year ago, we may never learn the answer—which is precisely the result the administration has been seeking for over a year.

At the Texas Tribune Festival Saturday, the Pennsylvania Democrat was asked why he wouldn’t become an independent considering the stances and votes he has taken in defiance of the Democratic Party. 

“Because I’m a lifelong Republican,” Fetterman responded. 

“Democrat,” CBS News correspondent Major Garrett corrected him as the audience gasped and laughed. “That’s a moment right there, that’s clippable, ladies and gentlemen!”

“Yeah, I’m a lifelong Democrat, though,” Fetterman said sheepishly as some in the audience jeered. 

Q: Why not become an independent?

Fetterman: Because I’m a lifelong Republican.

Garrett: You mean a Democrat.

Fetterman: A Democrat. pic.twitter.com/HD92TVceVr

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 27, 2026

It was quite the revelatory gaffe for Fetterman, who has confirmed President Trump’s nominees, voted to reopen the government, and helped thwart multiple resolutions seeking to end the Iran war. The Pennsylvania senator is facing renewed calls to step down from Democrats in his home state after a Wall Street Journal article earlier this month reported that he has blown off meetings with disabled veterans, families of slain police officers, children’s hospital officials, and numerous constituents in the past two years.  

In 2028, Fetterman is up for reelection, and several Democrats will likely launch primary challenges against the incumbent senator. Several of them have not hesitated to attack Fetterman, with Representative Brendan Boyle calling him a “disgrace” and former Representative Conor Lamb, who lost to Fetterman in the 2022 Senate primary, saying that he should “just quit.”  

“John, if there is a decent bone left in your body, just quit. It’s an insult to decent people in our state for you to treat them and the office this way,” Lamb posted on X. 

Fetterman’s turn toward the right is getting him attention from all the wrong places. He made a surprise cameo at the Republicans’ midterm convention, and he’s become a right-wing media darling at places such as Fox News, which caters to his vehement pro-Israel views. Meanwhile, his Pennsylvania constituents are being ignored. 

U.S. Ambassador David Perdue told Fox News Sunday that “President Trump continues to say: Hey, we sell arms to other people around the world,” and that “he actually asked [Chinese] President Xi [Jinping] would he like to buy some at one point.”

But hours later, the Trump administration aggressively attempted to cover its own tracks. Two U.S. officials denied any such plan while speaking with The Wall Street Journal. One source told the daily that the White House had no intentions of selling weapons to Beijing, while the other acknowledged that it’s already illegal to do so. That ban circles back to Taiwan, which relies on U.S. weapons to deter Chinese encroachment.

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

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

The White House rattled Beijing when it made an $11 billion arms sale to the island in December, with a separate $14 billion package expected down the line. Donald Trump has since held off on advancing that larger sale, despite urging from Senate Republicans ahead of Xi’s visit last week.

“It is difficult to imagine ​how the United States might credibly project influence deterrence in the Indo-Pacific if the price of keeping up diplomatic appearances ​is denying our partners key deterrent capabilities,” Senators Mitch McConnell, Lisa Murkowski, John Cornyn, and Thom Tillis wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ahead of the state visit.

Trump has not commented on the abeyance since. However, Xi made his position regarding U.S. involvement in the region abundantly clear. On Thursday, Xi told Trump that he hoped America would take the “correct position” of opposing Taiwan’s independence.

Taiwanese Deputy Foreign Minister Francois Wu commented on the summit on Saturday, telling reporters in Taipei that maintaining military sales and providing Taiwan the support to defend itself was an “important U.S. interest” due to the island’s dominating semiconductor industry, reported Reuters.

Speaking on ABC’s This Week Sunday, Blanche struggled to keep his composure while facing questions about a federal judge’s temporary injunction on Trump’s decision to ban CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House. 

Last week, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s decision had little to do with national security, as the Justice Department had argued in court, and that the president’s initial statements indicated that the ban stemmed from the media’s coverage of the Republican Party. 

“Well, I’m not going to get into what the judge says, the litigation is ongoing. But our position has been clear from the beginning. What they say is exactly the issue when it comes to national security,” Blanche said. 

When ABC host Martha Raddatz pressed him for a single example, Blanche appeared to claim that any negative reporting about the president was inaccurate. 

“Give you an example of when CNN doesn’t report accurately? You cannot be asking me that!” Blanche said. “They don’t even disagree. There’s not even a real dispute that the information coming out of CNN and some of these other networks is wholly and completely, almost 100 percent, negative towards the president.”

Raddatz reminded Blanche that the judge ruled that the ban had nothing to do with national security, and the attorney general doubled down.  

“At some point, the complete misinformation and the inaccuracy and the one-sided news out of certain organizations does become a national security issue and it’s not right for the people of the United States to have to put up with it,” Blanche said. 

Blanche blew up when Raddatz asked whether the Trump administration planned to screen reporters. 

“I did not say that! I did not say that! You don’t get to put words in my mouth! You don’t get to put words in my mouth! That’s not the way it works,” he cried. 

Then Blanche balked at a question about what the First Amendment meant to him, and insisted that news coverage did not have to be positive for the Trump administration. 

“But you heard what the president said: ‘They want to try to diminish the Republicans and a Republican administration,’” Raddatz said. 

“For you to pick out seven words and say, ‘Oh, that’s what the president means,’ that’s extraordinarily disingenuous,” Blanche said. 

Clearly, the Trump administration simply can’t stand when the press reports on what the president actually says. 

Despite the judge’s order, the Trump administration has continued to lash out at the press. Over the weekend, the president blocked CNN from traveling with him on Air Force One.

Patel attended the wedding of former acting U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Alina Habba, who resigned in disgrace in December.

On Sunday, Israeli-born federal prosecutor Sigal Chattah shared a photo from the festivities, featuring herself, Habba, her new billionaire husband Turhan Mildon, and Ali Abdelaziz, a former UFC manager and NYPD and FBI informant suspected of being a double agent.

According to the 2013 book Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America, Abdelaziz was initially hired by the NYPD to serve as a mole against Muslims of America, a Virginia-based group, but was dropped after they after administered a polygraph test and suspected he was a double agent. The FBI tried to deport him but was unable to, according to the book’s authors.

This is at least the second time Patel and Abdelaziz have been pictured together.

“Why, that’s Ali Abdelaziz is on the far left. Manages a lot of Russian, Belarusian and Chechen MMA fighters including Khamzat Chimaev, who is close to Kadyrov. Abdelaziz was an FBI informant until the Bureau dropped him because they suspected he was a double agent,” The Insider’s Michael Weiss wrote on X. “Looks like Ka$h (far right) has forgiven and forgotten. These MAGA weddings are Mos Eisley cantinas for counterintelligence.”

Patel also drew backlash for appearing with Chattah, who made headlines last year for allowing senior Israeli government official Tom Alexandrovich to return to Israel on bail after being arrested in a sting operation for soliciting sexual acts from a minor.

“We stand firm in the face of any new aggression, even if it comes to a doomsday war. It is up to President Trump to choose. He wanted unconditional surrender in the previous war in two days, and now, it is eight months they are fighting with no result. A new aggression would be certainly the same,” Araghchi said Sunday to Kristen Welker on NBC’s Meet the Press.

Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister: "We stand firm in the face of any new aggression, even if it comes to a doomsday war" pic.twitter.com/WmuLdFHIXW

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 27, 2026

Donald Trump made an apocalyptic threat to Iran during his speech at the United Nations General Assembly Tuesday, where he mused about driving “them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations.” The crazed speech was met with walkouts from delegates, including the Iranian contingent.

Despite Trump’s ominous words, he seemed optimistic about a peace deal with Iran following his speech, with America’s Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner reportedly holding a three-hour meeting with Iranian representatives on the sidelines of the assembly. Iran offered a truce that involves reopening the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for the U.S. ending its blockade of Iranian ports, lifting sanctions on Iranian oil exports, unfreezing an estimated $12 billion in Iranian assets, and a region-wide ceasefire that includes Yemen and Lebanon.

On Saturday, though, Trump rejected the proposal, claiming that Iran’s motivation for seeking a deal was because they are “losing so badly.”

“They want to make a deal, and I think that’s fine,” Trump said. “I’d like to make a deal too. But that deal would not be acceptable.”

Trump’s comments seem ignorant of the fact that Iran believes it is operating from a place of strength and remains defiant in the face of the U.S. president’s threats. The terms that Iran is offering are more favorable to itself and would require the U.S. to make concessions, albeit similar ones to June’s memorandum of understanding between the two countries that later fell apart.

But Trump continues to be stubborn, and the U.S. and global economies continue to suffer, along with civilians across the Middle East, as this war drags on with dwindling hopes for peace. Not even the impending midterm elections seem to be enough to spur Trump to push harder for a resolution.

Fractures have begun to form among the Front Row Joes, a group of steadfast Trump supporters that devote their lives to attending every single one of the president’s rallies, Politico Playbook reported Monday. 

Rick Frazier, who’s been to more than 100 Trump rallies, told Playbook he wasn’t planning to vote in November’s midterm elections. He claimed that Trump “can’t be trusted.”

“Epstein crimes and feeding the industrial military complex … those are big nos for me,” Frazier told Playbook. “He promoted himself as a no-war president. That didn’t work out.”

Frazier told Playbook that 95 percent of the Joes, however, were still “unwavering.” But some are breaking away.

The first major defector was Trisha Hope, who joined the Joes in 2018 and funded her travels by selling a book of Trump’s social media posts and swapping her apartment in Austin for an R.V.

Hope defected in July 2025 after she watched Trump push back on a question about Jeffrey Epstein during a Cabinet meeting.  “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years,” the president said. 

“It was like a dagger in my heart,” Hope told Playbook. “It was like a light switch went on and a veil lifted, and I saw him for who he was, and I have not been able to unsee it since.”

After watching Trump’s handling of his military campaign in the Middle East, Hope’s concerns were validated. She believes he is a “fraud and a liar.”

“If we do lose the midterms and he is impeached again, I will be walking the halls of Congress in support of that impeachment,” Hope told Playbook.

Sean Spicer, the former White House press secretary who produced a documentary about the Joes, told Playbook that the defections raise concerns ahead of the midterm elections about the attitudes of Trump’s soft supporters who were never die-hard MAGA fans.

With just weeks until the midterms, Trump appears to be in hot water with Republicans over his mishandling of the war against Iran and skyrocketing diesel prices. While Trump isn’t actually on the ballot this time around, the president has made every effort to make voters feel like he is. 

After we recorded, Trump again did a ban, yet this time it was only CNN and it was more narrow, excluding it from Air Force One. But’s unclear whether that will last.

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 is in a fury because news organizations have joined together to resist his effort to ban some of them from the White House. He exploded over this, but in the process revealed something important. Collective institutional resistance to Trump actually works.

Unfortunately, this lesson has been learned kind of late, after a whole lot of elite capitulation has already happened. But still, it’s good to see, and we’re wondering now if this will steel the media to go after Trump harder on things that it’s mostly avoided, like his deteriorating mental state.

Paul Waldman’s been writing well on Trump’s waning power on his Substack, The Cross Section. So we’re talking to him about all of it. Paul, thanks for coming on.

Paul Waldman: My pleasure.

Sargent: So a quick recap. Donald Trump banned CNN, Politico, and MS Now from the White House grounds in a fit of tyrannical rage. And then the White House pretended it had something to do with national security. A judge has blocked this, and it appears the news organizations are now allowed back in.

Paul, what are your general thoughts on this whole thing?

Waldman: Yeah, it’s really hard to see what Trump thought this would accomplish. I mean, what did he really have to gain by doing this? Maybe he didn’t realize that the other news organizations were going to rally behind their colleagues. But is one more fight with the media really something that is good for him at this point? Does it do anything for him? Does it make Republicans any less likely to lose the midterms? It’s really hard to see.

And I think there’s a clue in the news organizations that he chose. Sure, MS Now is liberal. CNN, he’s long hated. But Politico—like, that’s not some kind of liberal organization. It seems like it was very impulsive.

And as time goes on, I think more and more of his impulses are going to get translated into action and policy. And that’s never good for anybody.

Sargent: Yeah, that’s where it’s going to be heading, I think. So here’s where it gets funny and revealing. As you mentioned, news organizations banded together. They did this by agreeing to suspend the pool coverage. And as a result, participating networks didn’t end up covering Xi Jinping’s arrival at the White House.

Before we get into the guts of this, Paul, what do you think of that decision by all these news organizations? It seems like Trump wasn’t anticipating that. He just assumed he’d divide and conquer them, right?

Waldman: Yeah, you’d have to think so, because this was really the worst outcome possible for him. I mean, he lives to be on television. Right. And you can just imagine how infuriated he must have been when this state visit from Xi Jinping—that he had been so looking forward to, and he was going to show off his helipad that he must have made sure was going to be finished in time for Xi to get here, and they rolled out a literal red carpet, and all this was going to make for great TV.

Trump loves to put on a show. And then it wasn’t broadcast, and all these news organizations did reports on it with, you know—TV news did reports on it with still photos, because they didn’t have audio and video, because the pools weren’t there. And that must have just killed him.

So it’s hard to imagine that there was really well-thought-out strategy at work here. And maybe he just didn’t even contemplate the idea that the other news organizations would say, you know, we’re not going to tolerate this. But that’s what they did.

Sargent: And in fact, Trump did explode in rage over the failure of networks to carry the arrival at the White House. He posted this:

“CNN and MS NOW refused to cover one of the biggest and most beautiful events to take place in many years, the arrival at the White House of the highly respected president of China...the event was magnificent, but because they’re Fake News, and because they didn’t want credit to be given to Trump, they refused to be there.”

Trump also claimed that the media refuses to give Trump credit for his world historical successes and for his popularity. Paul, what do you make of that explosion from Trump?

Waldman: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s a reflection of his genuine sentiment. You know, he’s always had this kind of back-and-forth with the media that was in part strategic. He starts fights with them, but then he is quick to make up.

He wants their attention. But he also wants to be in this kind of conflict with them. That’s been the story since he was a young real estate developer in New York, trying to get onto the gossip pages of the New York tabloids.

And this sort of push and pull, back and forth, is something that, when you’re the president, it has to be done with some subtlety. And Trump doesn’t have a lot of subtlety. And so he just went too far this time. And the news organizations said, you know, we’re not going to do it.

And I think that this also reflects a realization that he’s in a weak position. And, you know, this may not be in the conscious mind of any reporter, but I think that they’re more willing to be tough with him when he is perceived as politically weak. And he is extremely weak right now.

He’s headed for a big defeat. His poll numbers are in the toilet. And that can kind of stiffen the spines of reporters who are willing to stand up to him in a way they might not have been in a different place and time.

Sargent: I think there’s no doubt that that was going through at least some of these media executives’ heads. But for now, let’s credit this. Let’s point out here that by banding together, the media actually revealed something important, which is that Trump needs their attention really badly. He needs them. What enraged him so much is that the news organizations refused to be divided against each other and agreed to stick together in defense of press freedom.

I think Trump was hoping that some of them would act in their own very narrow conception of self-interest and sell out freedom of the press, and sort of, you know, shrug at what was happening to CNN, Politico, and MS Now.

And this is where the logic of collective resistance comes into all this. And this is how institutions should resist an authoritarian, right?

Waldman: Yeah, absolutely. They do have power, and they have to use it in ways that are responsible. But as long as they stick with kind of the fundamental principles on which the free press is based, then it’s fine for them to exercise that power collectively.

And we had discussions about this when the whole thing with the White House Correspondents’ Dinner happened. And I think a lot of people felt like it was wrong of them to invite him at all.

And now I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of reporters took that criticism to heart and said, you know, we are not going to become an outpost of the resistance. But what we do have to stand up for is the kind of foundational principles that undergird our own profession and the function that we serve in a democracy.

There’s a reason that the free press is in the First Amendment to the Constitution. It’s because the founders understood how important it was. And so they—I think they understand that the more authoritarian Trump gets, it’s not just a threat to them personally or professionally.

It’s a threat to the whole system. And if they’re going to have that privileged position, then there are going to be times when they have to just stand up and say, this is a line you can’t cross.

Sargent: Right. And I think by doing this, they found a kind of Achilles’ heel on Trump’s part. It’s when institutions decide that Trump’s power is not going to roll over them, that things actually turn against Trump. That is the way to disarm Trump. And if you return to early 2025, when it became obvious that Trump was going to use retribution and threats to get institutions to bend the knee—at the time it seemed like some of these institutional elites really misread the moment, kind of along the lines of what you’re saying, right?

They, I think, concluded that he was like this colossus who was kind of, you know, bestriding the United States, culturally and politically dominant and so forth. It seems like at that point the law firms, the universities, the news organizations—including one you and I used to work for—decided the price in getting on Trump’s bad side was too great. But now, in light of this sort of stuff that we’re seeing, it really looks like that was a very serious miscalculation, doesn’t it?

Waldman: Yeah. And you can understand the logic at the time, in early 2025, that maybe if you were a university president, you could say they have this power over us, that they could stop all these millions of dollars in grants we get that are so important for our research, and they could retaliate against us in other ways. And I, as a university president, am just going to, you know, take one for the team and try to protect the institution, as painful as it might be.

And now, when we look back, we realize that that was really a mistake, that the institutions that did bend the knee to him—they didn’t get the protection they were after. He kept coming after them, because that’s what bullies often do. When you show them that you’re weak and you’re willing to bow down before them, they just keep hitting you. They weren’t able to negotiate some kind of a semi-permanent détente with him and his administration. So what was the point?

And I think that that understanding is now pretty widespread. You may not be able to stand up to the administration if you’re one of these institutions in all cases, but there are certain moments when you really don’t have much of a choice. And if Trump had gotten away with banishing these three news organizations from the White House, everybody knows that he would not have stopped there.

The whole point, or one of the points, I think, was to create fear in the rest of them. And so, especially since the bill of particulars against these institutions was so weak—they didn’t reveal any terrible state secrets or anything like that, there were, like, some articles that he didn’t like—that, if it worked, would have meant that every other White House reporter was going to be thinking twice when they filed a story or had a meeting with a confidential source.

If I write this story, is he going to kick me out of the White House? Am I no longer going to be able to do my job and report there? And had that been effective, then he would have kept on kicking more and more news organizations out.

And so I think it was important for those reporters—and I wouldn’t be surprised if they had these conversations among themselves—that it had to be stopped right at the outset. You couldn’t let him kick out three and then five and then 10 news organizations. The first time he tried this, the other organizations had to band together and say, no, we’re not going to stand for this.

Sargent: Let’s talk about how weak Trump is right now, since you referred—you wrote a good piece about this the other day, how his power is just really dribbling away. He had this crazy line in that screed that he wrote, in which he described news organizations this way: “They only write badly about a man who won the election in a giant landslide, winning all seven swing states, the popular vote, and 86 percent of the counties, and whose popularity has grown because of the unprecedented success our country is having.”

So, Paul, let’s just go through some data points right now. In the polling averages, he’s now sunk below 35 percent approval. NBC’s new average of midterm polls finds that Democrats are nine points ahead in the generic ballot matchup. Other averages are finding Democrats at around eight or nine.

It’s clearly a growing lead. Red state Senate races are all really slipping into the toss-up category. In addition, Cook Political Report has shifted 15 House races in the Democrats’ direction. Astoundingly, they are now rating some races in districts that Trump won by as many as fifteen or seventeen points as toss-ups. This is not someone whose popularity has grown, Paul, is it?

Waldman: No, absolutely not. And if you look at the historical polls, what you find is that, to find a president who is at this level, you’ve got to go back to either Richard Nixon in the depths of Watergate, not long before he resigned, or George W. Bush at the end of his term, when we were in the midst of a historic financial crisis and the Iraq War was a disaster.

And then you get this self-reinforcing cycle, where Trump is low in the polls, and Republican candidates start looking at that and saying, well, you know what, maybe it’s in my interest to kind of back away from him. Even if I’ve been right at his side for 10 years, I’m going to be in trouble.

I may already be in trouble. And if I don’t show the voters in my district that I’m not going to be a rubber stamp for him, then I’m going to lose. And so what we’ve seen just really in the last week is a bunch of Republicans taking different kinds of steps to sort of edge away from him. Maybe it’s just on the Iran war, or maybe it’s just on prices, but different ways in which they’re saying, well I don’t agree with this or that, or I’m going to be my own person.

And when that happens, that sends a signal to other candidates that they can do the same thing, and it’s what’s necessary to survive. And this kind of edifice that he’s built, of fear and intimidation in his party, begins to crumble. And that’s, I think, what we’re seeing right now. And as we get closer and closer to election day, I think that’s only going to accelerate.

Sargent: And we’re finding that if institutions band together the way the news organizations did, it actually diminishes him further. I just have to say, it’s a little unnerving to think back to early 2025 and ask yourself, well, if institutions had shown a little more fortitude, a little more courage, a little more willingness to put aside very narrow short-term interest and band together sort of the way the news organizations are doing now—I think things would look a little different now.

I think the history of the last two years would have been maybe not quite as bad. But again, this sense of Trump as having won this gargantuan cultural referendum in 2024 kind of encouraged this institutional cowardice and capitulation and kind of elite softness that I just wish hadn’t happened, Paul.

Waldman: Yeah. And obviously we can’t rerun the experiment to see if things would have been different had they stood up for themselves. And you could make a case, I guess, that it wasn’t until Trump’s popularity got lower and lower that that became more possible. And after all, most of that stuff has to do with, you know, mistakes that emerged over time—the trade wars and the Iran war and all the things that have driven the voters away from him.

But, you know, even today, he’s still talking about what a landslide victory he has. And the reason is that he knows that part of his ability to intimidate people is based on the conception that he does have this power, and he does have the public behind him, and that his election victory was kind of a resounding ratification of everything that he is and wants to do. And that therefore to stand against him is to stand against the great mass of Americans.

And that’s obviously not true, but you can see how desperately he clings to that idea, because he knows that the impression that people had of his power in 2025—when that’s gone, you’re going to see a flood of people in all kinds of different contexts saying, you know, no, I don’t have to do what you want. And that is only going to get worse from here.

Sargent: Right. What triggered him, at least in part, is the clear perception that the news organizations were treating him as a weak and diminished figure and weren’t being cowed by him. And so that gets him to default to this reminder about the 2024 win, which he still sees as this kind of weapon that he can wield over his own party and everybody else.

So let’s look forward, since you just brought that up. Let’s say we see a fairly sizable Democratic win here, at least the House going to Democrats, maybe House and Senate—although Senate, I think, is still pretty damn hard, but I think doable. But let’s just say House and/or Senate, right? What do you see happening after this? Like, he’s going to become a more diminished figure. How do you see institutions and society starting to react at that point?

Waldman: Yeah, it’s going to be a pretty chaotic two years. You’re going to have the Democratic Party, which will be undergoing its own identity crisis, I guess you could say—where all these different people are going to start running for president, and they’re going to start debating, what does it mean to be a Democrat? What do we believe in? How should we act? How should we govern when we get the chance?

And you’re going to have the Republican Party, where there are going to be a whole bunch of people running for president there and trying to figure out, is this still Trump’s party, and is it going to be Trump’s party in two years, and who should lead it? And that’s going to cause a lot of internal conflict.

And I think it’s hard to see some kind of major turnaround from Trump on policy. That maybe the economy will get better in one way or another—there are a lot of variables and things that are not really in his control. But at this point, it’s hard to imagine him coming up with, like, some incredibly deft policy move that really changes how people think about him and lets him leave office with a 65 percent approval rating.

Like, that’s pretty unlikely. And as he’s in that lame-duck period, you should probably see more and more institutions, whether it is the universities or the news media or any kind of civil society, where they’re not willing to take instructions from him. And they’re finding ways to work around him and begin to prepare the ground for what happens when he’s gone, and maybe even when Democrats have power, come 2029.

And so that will then probably kick off a cycle where he’ll be even angrier and be lashing out even more and be even less likely to do kind of responsible things and be more obsessed with this ballroom and everything. It’s like everything that’s happening now is only going to be intensified once we get past this midterm.

Sargent: I think that’s exactly right. And I really hope that Democrats don’t make the mistake of thinking that, if they quote-unquote overreach, then you could see something like Bill Clinton’s comeback when Republicans overreached—because Trump is not Bill Clinton.

He’s, I think, going to be in a worse position than Bill Clinton. And Democrats can’t go into this with that kind of mindset. But of course, that is possible, isn’t it, Paul?

Waldman: Absolutely. There will be a lot of voices in the Democratic Party saying, you know, we just have to be cautious and careful and keep talking about grocery prices, and not go too far, and make sure people know that we are the responsible party. And one of the things that I’ve argued is that the voters don’t give you any credit for being responsible.

It may be a good thing in and of itself, but you cannot expect any political benefit from being responsible. That’s just not how things work. So it’s going to be its own debate among Democrats, of how aggressive they want to be.

Sargent: It’s going to get ugly on our side as well, Paul.

Waldman: I believe so, yes.

Sargent: Folks, if you enjoyed this, check out Paul’s Substack, The Cross Section. Paul, always awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Waldman: Thanks a lot, Greg.

Rarely has such an inauspicious personality been raised in such auspicious circumstances. Born in 1948 in New York City, Trudeau grew up in a large home atop Mount Pisgah in Saranac Lake, where the streets and local landmarks (such as a sanitarium for tuberculosis patients, founded by his grandfather) often carried the Trudeau name. “You could imagine what that does to a kid’s sense of himself,” Trudeau recalled. “I was a big fish in a little pond.” For many years, the telephone number for his father’s medical practice “was simply 1.” As Joshua Kendall describes in his new history Trudeau & Doonesbury, the biggest and possibly sole challenge of Trudeau’s childhood was his parents’ separation in 1959; otherwise, his upward trajectory was firmly assured.

And yet he found inventive ways to stray from his assigned path—such as departing the normal studies of a Yale art major to draw spiky caricatures for the school humor magazine, and to turn his personal anxieties about being drafted into a self-illustrated song, sung to the tune of “When I’m Sixty-Four”:

If I got shot up during the war,
Many months from now,
Would you still tie my shoe for me and help me eat
Pre-strained prune juice, finely chopped meat.
If I pass out at quarter to three,
Pick me off the floor.
Will you still knead me, will you still feed me,
When I’m twenty-four.

In many ways, Trudeau spent his years at Yale like the famous British double agent Kim Philby did at Cambridge: He never fit in among the nation’s future leaders as much as he appeared to, and nobody got to know him as well as he got to know them. Among classmates like biographer Ron Chernow and the even-then unlikable George W. Bush—who, as frat president at Delta Kappa Epsilon, endorsed branding new enrollees with coat hangers—Trudeau was shy, maybe less by disposition than in an act of judgment.* In a 2008 interview with The Washington Post he called Bush “all noblesse and no oblige,” and decades after graduation, he wrote some of his funniest strips about the frat-boy Bushes being admitted to top-secret society (and CIA-feeder) Skull and Bones. Growing up with these entitled, keg-loving, spoiled elites, Trudeau managed to never feel intimidated by them; instead, he treated them like tawdry relations he could cheerfully expose to the rest of us.

Kendall’s new pictorially rich book is appreciative bio more than a grand argument about Trudeau’s life and work, which is somewhat fitting. For even though politics was often close to the surface in Doonesbury, presenting a political argument has never been exactly the point. Most of Trudeau’s characters live together fairly politely on the same pages, whatever their differences; and they still enjoy one another’s company whenever they meet up. Even when confronted by the latest, often insane and demoralizing dose of television news, they remain patient observers of the America they live in; and the strongest response they seem to feel is a sense of mildly exhausted (but never dismissive) chagrin.

Perhaps it doesn’t take that many hardships to forge a sympathetic soul, and Trudeau certainly made good use of all the hardships available to him. A relatively short man, as an undergraduate at Yale he wrote some of his earliest cartoons about characters who felt awkward around women, and his apparent sense of social disconnect led to spending lots of time alone, doodling unproductively. The doodling developed into caricatures of friends, which were incorporated into illustrations for the college paper, The Yale Daily News, and eventually led to his first serial comic strip, bull tales, based around the exploits of popular Yale quarterback Brian Dowling, later immortalized as the football-helmeted B.D. According to Trudeau’s editor at the time: “When he asked me if we would publish them ... I confessed that we print just about anything. I thought the strips were interesting, but the sketches were very primitive.”

At first, Trudeau borrowed heavily from his most obvious influence, Jules Feiffer, depicting jagged-faced, shaggily outlined characters who often sat immobile in frazzled chairs or face-to-face conversations, buzzing with reflections, monologues, and dialogues that filled the top half of each panel without the traditional comic “bubble.” Often a strip simply presented three or four repetitive images one after the other, such as an individual thinking out loud, or gathered with fellow athletes in football huddles, with the occasional eruption of a character’s head to speak or interject something humorous. (This repetition of a single focused image was a technique he would later use to depict the cover-up conferences being overheard outside a distantly framed White House or, later, the steadily mounting stone wall behind which Nixon gradually enclosed himself.)

Between 1968 and 1970, Trudeau developed an unremitting work schedule, published two reasonably successful collections of bull tales, and earned a contract with Universal Press Syndicate, granting him an escalating pay scale over six years and “copyright ownership of the strip from the get-go—a concession rarely granted.” It was a job that kept him working, creatively engaged, and successful for the rest of his life. As he recalled for NPR in 2010: “It’s a ridiculous story, and it nauseates my children that I would find my life’s work six weeks into it.”

The central characters from bull tales would develop into the strip’s central figures—B.D., the always-pro-American and eventual volunteer soldier in Vietnam and Iraq (two tours); the enthusiastic nerd-loser Michael Doonesbury; the bullhorn-wielding, left-wing campus agitator Mark Slackmeyer; and probably most important of all, the stoned-out but always morally-responsible-in-irresponsibility Zonker Harris, smoking weed in the football huddles, calmly conversing with his devoted houseplants, or snorkeling in a tiny pond outside the Walden commune. Zonker was always missing the beat of whatever was going on in the world, which was good for Zonker—since he managed to fail just enough at everything (except perhaps as surfer dude and tanning circuit pro) to save himself from the perils of success in a world that worshipped nothing else. Most of all, he got along amiably and playfully with everybody, functioning sort of like the strip’s eternal inner child.

For its new syndicator, the Universal Press Syndicate, Doonesbury presented an opportunity to carry the traditional comics pages beyond the postwar backwash of mundane household comedies, such as Family Circus and Bringing Up Father, as well as the fist-swinging action men like Dick Tracy and Steve Canyon. For those of us growing up in the 1970s, Doonesbury provided a space where we could read about characters who lived in a world we recognized: where the president was going crazy behind mounting walls of his own making, our college sports stars were getting lost in the Vietnamese bush, and housewives were frantic to run away to somewhere new, such as, well… “Cleveland, say?” As the soon-to-be liberated Joanie Caucus suggests to Mike and Mark when they abet her domestic escape during a cross-country motorcycle tour, Cleveland might seem the perfect destination for a woman who hasn’t been anywhere outside of a bad marriage.

But while Doonesbury started strong, quickly attracted lots of young and not-so-young readers, and earned swift praise from the comic profession’s old pros such as Charles Schulz and Milt Caniff, the best was yet to come. For it was somewhere into the second and third years of the strip’s publication that Trudeau, following the breadcrumbs laid down by already established characters, began to explore distinctly new comic territories. It would be a journey without maps into a widely unfolding landscape of characters, interrelationships and, of course, America’s televised reality. Along the way, Trudeau would report home to the rest of us so much that was beautiful, moving, and multifarious about a ridiculous country—just as Dickens had once done for Britain, or Zola had done for France.

One of the greatest pleasures of following Doonesbury over the decades hasn’t simply been the individual story lines, or how they jived with the historical reality in which we read them, but also the depth and breadth of human experience they charted. Trudeau left no character behind for very long, however incidental or insignificant they seemed. So, for example, B.D.’s one-time nemesis and eventual friend Viet Cong guerrilla Phred, would, over the decades, go on to run budget tours for returning American vets, represent his country as U.N. ambassador, and help bring capitalism (and terrible working conditions) to Vietnam through the Nike Corporation.

The low-key (and always committed to fairness) Joanie Caucus goes to work in day care, attends Berkeley Law School where she learns to abide the daily sexist jokes of her profs, rooms with the politically energized Ginny Slade, works in Washington as an aide to old-school Republican congresswoman Lacey Davenport, and ultimately finds love in the arms of investigative journalist, Rick Redfern, with whom she has a second child. Meanwhile, Mike Doonesbury marries Joanie’s no-longer-estranged daughter, J.J., a self-promoting performance artist, only to be abandoned when she runs off with Zeke, a former property manager to the always errant Uncle Duke.

Zonker’s Uncle Duke—a continually self-serving, self-medicating, gun-happy former journalist for Rolling Stone—was prepared to go anywhere on any mission that promised unearned treasures. He moonlighted as governor of American Samoa, ambassador to China, manager of the Washington Redskins, and as college dean for an unaccredited medical school in Haiti … okay, I’ll stop. His career eventually led him to captain a luxury cruise ship for Donald Trump, and later took him to Washington, D.C. with the future president. Twice. Clearly these two were meant to be together. (And like another comic vision of sometimes very unfunny American history, The Simpsons, Doonesbury was quick to identify the real Trump as a con man who loved nothing so much as hearing himself speak—especially when he was selling crap to suckers.)

A half-century in, the beautifully interwoven stories and people of Doonesbury can seem more real than the country that inspired it. While Trudeau has often been extolled (both by this admiring new book and elsewhere) as a “journalist,” he has always been more artist than anything else and the fact that he was the first cartoonist to win a 1975 Pulitzer Prize for journalism probably gives a misleading impression of his greatest strengths. Trudeau possessed one gift in the area of commentary, and that is to identify stupidity in all its crass, glaring obviousness, and to provide unforgettable snapshots of that stupidity, from Mr. Butts, the wannabe spokescartoon for Big Tobacco, all the way up to Trump.

The greatest and most memorable “revelations” in Doonesbury were always hiding in plain sight—such as when the strip presented two color memorials to the dead soldiers in the second Iraq War, or took us on a tour through the neon-lit, glitch-ridden corridors of Reagan’s dizzyingly self-reflective brain, or introduced us to the crudely mugging Arnold Schwarzenegger as a large groping hand named the Gropenführer. While most news reports at the time analyzed who said and did what, Doonesbury rendered these stories in larger-than-life detail.

Trudeau held the powerful to account, and at the same time, he kept his attention on the everyday people whom our politicians and television personalities often neglected. Sometimes those people were returning war vets like B.D. who suffered from missing limbs, PTSD, alcoholism, and an inarticulable rage against the country they had been told they were protecting; other times they were young men dying of AIDS back when our president wouldn’t even mention the name of the disease. Decade after decade Trudeau called out the cartoonish villainy of public figures—such as the idiot-imperialist George W. Bush wearing a silly Roman helmet while uttering his illiterate one-liners; or the chicken hawks like Dan Quayle, identified by fluffy white feather.

Kendall’s new book is easygoing, much like its subject, and doesn’t really challenge readers to do much beyond enjoy what Trudeau has been doing for us over all these years, and to browse among some of his most memorable strips. At its most critical, it argues that Trudeau takes a fairly middle-of-the-road approach to our political half-century, which is perfectly fair, and part of Trudeau’s charm. And yet Trudeau’s core principles as an artist have never been, in essence, political. His primary subject has always been the range and variety of American life: going to school and falling in love and marrying and child-raising and sometimes divorcing to marry and raise children all over again. And, of course, eventually dying, which Doonesbury characters (like all of us) are prone to do. These are all things that Trudeau knows about because he did them himself, all while observing the daily horrors and absurdity of the news every morning. As the rest of us do—preferably after a quick brain-steadying dose of Doonesbury.

* This article originally incorrectly included Al Gore and Tommy Lee Jones in a list of Trudeau’s classmates.

One such shift deserves more attention: the expansion of the so-called public charge rule, a concept dating back to the colonial era intended to restrict the arrival of immigrants deemed likely to become dependent on the state. Though public charge exists in federal law, it is not specifically defined, meaning that the executive branch has the leeway to define it. Many presidents, including Bill Clinton, have tried to redefine the rule, though none nearly as aggressively as Trump. The new regulation, which technically went into effect this month, allows adjudicators with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, to deny applications for green cards based on “receipt of any means-tested public benefit,” while striking specific definitions for terms like “receipt (of public benefits),” instead giving USCIS bureaucrats more latitude to interpret the terms as they see fit.

An assortment of states and cities have already sued to block the regulations. Litigation managed to stop a similar effort during Trump’s first term, in 2019, before the Supreme Court allowed it to go into effect in late January 2020, not ruling on its merits but instead against the use of a nationwide injunction by a district court to block it. This proved brief, as a lower judge blocked the rule again as the country went into Covid lockdowns in March, making it only effective for some two months. The Biden administration fully rescinded the rule in 2022. Yet the fact of its limited application did not make it a loss for Trump or for Stephen Miller, who is credited with designing the rule along with the majority of the administration’s anti-immigrant framework. It was a significant victory in the narrative war and had long-lasting effects on immigrants’ trust in public benefits and services. The administration’s current effort to shape the public charge rule seeks to build on these previous machinations.

While this policy has been described as a revamp or a reinstatement of that 2019–20 public charge expansion, its main distinction is that it is far vaguer and more discretionary than the first iteration, which at least mostly made clear what its expanded parameters were (though it did purport to evaluate applicants’ potential future use of benefits, an absurd standard). The new rule gives USCIS personnel—whom the administration has worked to make more like their enforcement counterparts in Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, and who are generally not lawyers—enormous flexibility to interpret the law, potentially considering everything from local non-cash benefits to children’s usage as negative factors in their parents’ adjudications.

“In this moment, I think even the service providers are evaluating whether their own existing long-term services would fall under this new rule, and having to field questions about it that are a bit unknowable at the moment,” said Karina Albistegui Adler, director of health justice at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest.

The Trump administration’s own analysis in the updated rule shows that zero applicants were ultimately denied as a direct result of the earlier expansion during the rule’s “effective period” of October 15, 2019 to March 21, 2021, and only 90 were denied on public charge grounds at all. This is unsurprising based on the simple fact that public charge denials have long been extremely rare and that the population of people who both qualified for most public benefits—that is, those who had some form of non-humanitarian status eligible for benefits but also did not yet have permanent residence, as public charge does not apply for naturalization—was fairly small. An analysis by the Migration Policy Institute estimated that a population of roughly 167,000 people might be affected, a relatively tiny fraction of the millions of noncitizens in the country.

Making a similar assessment this time around is far more difficult given the vagueness of the rule, but there’s no world in which this rule by itself forecloses access to residency for large numbers of people. That said, it does not need to do so to be effective by Miller’s standards. What it will certainly do—and is doing—is pushing people to overcorrect, to not take even the minimal chance that they might be targeted as a result of receiving some kind of public benefit to which they are otherwise entitled.

One oft-cited UCLA Center for Health Policy Research brief found that, in 2019, “1 out of 4 low-income immigrant adults in California reported avoiding public programs like Medicaid or nutrition assistance programs out of fear that participating would negatively impact their own immigration status or that of a family member.” While many immigrants have long been skeptical of benefits usage, the public charge rule and the acute concern around it seems to have supercharged the effect, which is likely to happen again.

“They said in the preamble to the new rule, basically, ‘We think a lot of people are going to drop off of public benefits, even some people who might not be affected by this rule,’ and yet they made the choice not to provide any clarity,” said Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute. As an example, she pointed out that the rule does not make clear, if an applicant has a U.S. citizen child and that child qualifies for SNAP benefits, “‘do I get double-dinged if they receive that SNAP and less punished if they don’t, or is it just the low income is enough and the actual receipt doesn’t make any difference?’ I don’t think we actually know that right now, and all of that vagueness is going to amplify the chilling effect.”

Just because someone gets a denial based on public charge does not mean that that decision is final. While no applicants were in the end prevented from reaching status during the last go-around, the same analysis notes that three denials were issued before the cases were reopened and approved. People who are denied residency are able to petition for reconsideration or just reapply. In rare cases, they might even be able to file suit over a denial. Often, USCIS does not deny cases outright, but issues a so-called notice of intent to deny, which then allows an applicant to find and submit additional evidence supporting their case, which in this case would likely entail additional financial sponsors.

This is, however, all a hassle that not everyone is going to be willing or able to navigate. The already-substantial paperwork burdens that all people seeking to obtain legal status through the immigration system endure are only getting more overwhelming; low-income immigrants using public benefits are already less likely to have access to sponsors; and every additional legal step means more money for attorneys, more application fees, and more uncertainty. It is a weaponized time tax to fulfill the administration’s objectives of reducing immigration and making the remaining immigrant population into a permanent underclass via their own fear and administrative hurdles that are technically but not necessarily functionally surmountable.

The states’ and cities’ legal argument is that it will fall on them to contend with their residents stepping back from receiving federal housing aid or health insurance, for example, and as a result losing their homes or moving away from preventative health practices in a way that the community as a whole will end up having to pay for, both monetarily and socially. Analysts and community organizations are already seeing impacts, though it’s hard to tell what is as a result of this rule versus the administration’s general animosity toward social services. Meanwhile, state providers are reticent to attribute fluctuations in service usage to any particular cause.

In what seems like a representative response, the Illinois Department of Human Services—which manages federally funded programs like SNAP and Medicaid—said that it “cannot speculate on the impact of the public charge rule change on program participation, given the overlapping changes affecting non-citizen eligibility for public benefits and broader changes in immigration policy during this same period.” Nonetheless, it is preparing for a concrete impact and working with community organizations given that “many immigrants are not subject to the public charge test, but the rule change will likely create confusion and fear, particularly for mixed-status households. Lack of clarity in the rule change makes it difficult to guide customers and clients.”

“It’s all been impacted by H.R. 1 [Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act] as well, and so I think it’s just really difficult to disentangle in this moment,” said NYLPI’s Albistegui Adler. “What I fear is, call me back in six months, and we’ll have some pretty terrible numbers.”

Sunday, the headlines read a little differently. “Is the World Staring at a Big Stock Market Crash—and Recession? 5 Uneasy Signs.” “The Fed Just Raised Interest Rates. Recession Is Next.” “Billionaire investor Leon Cooperman sees a recession in 2027 and a stock drop ahead.” “Legendary economist Gary Shilling says consumer signals point to a recession in the next 12 months.” And so on.

This is still the minority view among such people. But I follow all this enough to be able to tell you that this is a shift. Cooperman, a former Goldman Sachs CEO, cites oil prices that look like they’ll stay elevated for a while. Shilling notes that consumers are nervous—retail spending and consumer confidence are way down.

Different people will cite different reasons, I suppose, but there’s really only one reason for all this, and his name is Donald J. Trump.

Every decision he makes is the wrong one and makes the situation worse. Take the tariffs. The Tax Foundation keeps track of the economic impact of the tariffs Trump promised would “liberate” us. Short answer? They’ve been a disaster. They increased taxes on the average American household by $1,000 in 2025, will reduce long-run gross domestic product by 0.4 percent, and more.

Let’s check in on the war with Iran. Everybody knows what that conflict has done to gas prices, fertilizer prices, and trade. What’s new is that over the weekend, Trump rejected Iran’s latest offer to return to the table and end the war in seven days. He appears to think he has the Islamic Republic over a barrel—it is a fact that the Iranian economy is in horrible shape—and can get a better deal by waiting them out.

This is one thing that Trump might actually be correct about—emphasis on might. He assumes that the more dire Iran’s economic situation becomes, the more it will soften its terms and be desperate for peace. But one expert told Al Jazeera over the weekend: “The danger is that he is confusing Iranian pain with Iranian willingness to capitulate. Those are not the same thing.”

Also, by rejecting the proposal, Trump is walking away from the chance to tell Americans that the war is over before the midterms—and ensuring that gas prices stay high through Election Day. Trump also has been telling aides, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal over the weekend, that he expects to resume bombing after the voting. That will be popular.

There’s so much more. Trump promotes AI relentlessly, essentially calling people who oppose data centers idiots and rubes. The U.S. economy is dependent on data-center construction now to an alarming degree. This could all work out. But (a) Americans hate them and are trying to block their construction everywhere you look, and (b) if productivity and other gains are underwhelming, the AI bubble could burst—and burst hard. A lead economist at Oxford Economics wrote recently: “For there to be a sharp correction in the AI sector, it doesn’t require the technology to prove worthless, only for there to be disappointment relative to the currently elevated expectations.” Trump has placed himself clearly on one side of this debate. If AI doesn’t deliver, that’s one more terrible economic decision by the so-called businessman.

Finally, let’s devote a moment to Trump’s announcement over the weekend that he’s rolling back Biden-era auto emissions standards. From a simple-minded, let-the-free-market-roar perspective, this sounds like a good thing, I guess. But it’s horrible. It’s horrible for the planet—because of Trump, Detroit has already mostly stopped moving toward electric vehicles and is betting its future on the internal combustion engine. But it’s awful for the economy too. Investing in old technologies while new ones are taking over doesn’t usually pan out so well. Auto manufacturers in Europe, Japan, and South Korea are moving toward E.V.s, and as soon as there’s a new Democratic president, the United States will again too. So this is a temporary, but costly, disruption: Refitting and re-refitting assembly plants costs Detroit probably billions of dollars. But hey—real men pollute the atmosphere, dammit.

I have no idea whether all this adds up to a recession next year. But I do know enough to know this. Trump is wrecking the economy. And he’s wrecking the economy for the same reason that most Republican presidents wreck the economy.

The post-Keynes era—the era when the United States broadly speaking switched from following the regulated-market principles of John Maynard Keynes to the unregulated, free-market principles of Milton Friedman—dates to the mid-1970s. That time period has seen six Republican presidents, going back to Gerald Ford (Richard Nixon was a self-professed Keynesian, at least some of the time) and counting Trump twice. Five of them have overseen economic calamities. Only Ronald Reagan did not. There are a lot of reasons why, starting with then–Fed Chair Paul Volcker, who ended the inflation of the era by hiking interest rates dramatically. Reagan’s tax cuts did—briefly—spur economic growth (while also starting the country down the path toward massive debt and deficits and the rampant inequality that just keeps getting worse). Also, Reagan wasn’t nearly as doctrinaire on taxes as Republicans are today. He raised different taxes several times, most notably on Social Security.

But other than that—terrible. Every single one of them. The reason is that they believe in economic nostrums that are either lies or fairy tales. Lie: that lower taxes can produce revenues equal to or even greater than higher taxes. Fairy tale: that the unregulated free market will unfailingly find solutions to society’s problems. As we’re seeing right now with cryptocurrencies and AI, the unregulated free market of the sort we have in this country now creates more problems than it solves.

And so it’s not a coincidence that the last five recessions, and seven of the last eight, have happened under Republican presidents. Look ’em up: December 1969, November 1973, January 1980, July 1981, July 1990, March 2001, December 2007, February 2020. Only the 1980 one happened under a Democrat (Jimmy Carter). In fact, you can go back to 1953 and add four more recessions, all of which happened during GOP presidencies. That’s 10 out of 11 in the postwar era.

Trump is responsible for one of them, and admittedly it was not entirely his fault. It was pandemic-driven. But if Leon Cooperman and Gary Shilling are right and he presides over another one, it will be entirely on him. He may have driven the country into the ditch, but at least he will have exploded the “we need a businessman” myth with a force no liberal Democrat could ever hope to.

Elementary school students fresh off an Earth Day lesson would probably suggest saving the tree. Reasonably well-informed adults would explain that living trees absorb carbon dioxide, growing atmospheric concentrations of which are raising global temperatures. A climate scientist might say that forests around the world emit half as much carbon as they absorb—roughly 1.5 times the emissions of the entire United States. That scientist might add that additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is helping many of the world’s forests grow faster and absorb even more carbon.

A timber company executive, meanwhile, despite being in the business of harvesting trees, might take credit for that warming-fueled growth because some portion of it is happening on land he owns. With creative enough accounting, industry representatives could make the case that, like the forests, their companies absorb more carbon than they emit. A proposed change to the go-to global standard that corporations use to measure and manage their emissions might just ratify this fairly preposterous reasoning and allow major forestry, furniture, and even beef producers to count their tree-cutting and burning operations as “carbon negative,” i.e., better for the planet than the activities of companies that don’t cut down trees. The more wood companies harvest and sell, the more carbon would—by some applications of this accounting method—be removed from the atmosphere.

That proposal has kicked off an ongoing scandal within the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, a nonprofit-managed initiative that invites representatives from civil society, academia, and industry to jointly develop the accounting standards that 97 percent of Fortune 500 companies now use for reporting their greenhouse gas emissions. One of just two independent forest carbon experts on the protocol’s Independent Standards Board resigned in June, and a string of coverage has tracked the saga and the scientific debate at the heart of it. Danny Cullenward—a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy—publicly accused the protocol of “violating its own rules” and “effectively delegat[ing] forest carbon accounting standards to a secret, industry-led working group.” In July, Tim Searchinger—a senior research scholar at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs—resigned in protest from his role as director of forests at the World Resources Institute, one of the organizations that oversees the GHG Protocol.

Searchinger takes issue with the proposal itself, and with a process he sees as awarding industry interests an outsize say in answering scientific questions. “Giving companies such a large role in defining how to count emissions confuses voluntary efforts with science,” he told me. “Companies can legitimately decide how much they want to reduce emissions when voluntary, but that does not mean they get to decide how to count emissions.”

While corporations rely on these standards to voluntarily assess their greenhouse gas emissions and create emissions reduction pledges, the standards are also being integrated into formal rule-making processes in California and the European Union, which legally mandate that companies report their emissions. Depending on how the GHG Protocol opts to move forward with its proposed forest carbon accounting methods over the next few months, those new rules could soon be baked into law. In other words, timber and paper companies (among others) may have already helped write the rules that will govern them. Internal documents reviewed by The New Republic shed light on how that happened, and on the relatively subtle ways that corporate interests can come to dominate consensus-based multi-stakeholder processes.

The initiative at the heart of the scandal dates to the late 1990s. That was when the earliest iteration of the GHG Protocol set out to tackle a somewhat novel problem: how to measure individual corporations’ greenhouse gas emissions. As policymakers seemed to be closing on regulations and some sort of large-scale carbon pricing scheme, companies, governments, and international institutions needed to do exactly that. A by-then well-established environmental nonprofit—the World Resources Institute, or WRI—took on that task.

It took off, and GHG Protocol methodologies now form much of the basis for corporate net-zero pledges. University of Toronto political scientist Jessica Green—who has researched the GHG Protocol initiative extensively—describes a supply-and-demand dynamic at work in the protocol’s success. On the supply side, she explains, WRI was eager to play a role in an exciting new policymaking landscape where its expertise could be of real use. On the demand side, companies, international institutions, and governments all lacked the capacity to develop these sorts of standards in-house. Companies especially had good reason to want to get out ahead of any prospective climate rules or trading systems; whenever rules did come down, they wanted to be prepared. Having the standard-setting process be administered by a respected nongovernmental organization—with plenty of input from corporations—would lend it credibility and give companies a say. Participating firms could improve their image with a climate-concerned public by taking part in the process, and show would-be regulators that they could be trusted.

The GHG Protocol receives considerable corporate funding; its forest carbon accounting work specifically is funded by the Ikea Group, Cargill, and the forestry giant Weyerheuser, among others. Its governance structure has been overhauled in recent years so as to better balance the interests of stakeholders across business, academia, and civil society. Its day-to-day operations are handled by a secretariat staffed by WRI and the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, a nonprofit network of more than 250 corporations, including Ikea’s parent company, the Ingka Group, Amazon, EY (formerly known as Ernst and Yong), Shell, and Weyerhaeuser. Its top governing body is an 11-person steering committee that provides high-level advice and oversees the GHG Protocol’s main decision-making body, the 11-person Independent Standards Board, or ISB. As of now, the steering committee contains no independent scientists, and the ISB contains no civil-society representatives.

The forest carbon accounting scandal started brewing last spring. At a May 2025 meeting of the Independent Standards Board, EY consultants contracted by the secretariat presented findings from a larger Technical Working Group tasked with proposing forest carbon accounting methods. Technical Working Group membership is made up of scientific experts, forestry products industry representatives, and NGOs; this group’s members had been approved by the Independent Standards Board, according to the organization’s bylaws. Since the Technical Working Group was unable to agree on a single recommendation, EY presented the ISB with two separate accounting systems developed by two different cohorts within the TWG.

One approach was less generous to industry, and one far more generous. “Activity-based accounting” would distinguish between changes in forest emissions caused by firms’ treatment of the land; if a company cuts down or plants trees, for instance, its carbon ledger would reflect those activities. The other approach, called managed land proxy “plus,” or MLP+, would instead track forest carbon absorption, storage, and emissions across the land a company manages. Companies would be allowed to count carbon absorption that happens on land they own or lease toward their total emissions, regardless of whether their activities on that land have caused that absorption. Separately, firms would also report on the specific impact of their forest management. In Northern climates, forests are currently growing faster as a result of climate change—additional atmospheric carbon dioxide speeds plant growth, and warmer temperatures can mean longer growing seasons. By some estimates, such effects amount to more than 10 gigatons of additional carbon removals worldwide per year—roughly a third of all carbon dioxide emissions. Under the proposed accounting method, companies could take credit for at least some portion of those climate-induced removals while also cutting down and burning massive numbers of trees, thereby contributing to climate change. So long as the company owns enough wooded land—and the forests on those lands are growing—those carbon removals can effectively cancel out the carbon emitted by tree harvesting and burning.

The proposal presentation, reviewed by TNR, does note that companies would have to disclaim that carbon removal reported using these methods could not be represented as their having achieved “net-zero.” The MLP+ is intended to correct for shortcomings in a similar draft proposal that was shelved in 2022, after more than 200 scientists wrote to WRI and WBCSD leadership claiming that it “would have the effect of inaccurately claiming that harvesting trees for bioenergy or any other purpose is carbon neutral or maybe even carbon negative.”

Under MLP+, companies wouldn’t account for actual wood harvesting in their physical emissions inventories, either. The emissions of the wood that companies purchase would instead be counted as a proportion of forest growth across somewhat vaguely described regions. On a recent webinar, Searchinger highlighted a study showing how this accounting works in practice. Poland’s forests, for example, absorb roughly 60 megatons of carbon dioxide annually, during which time the country typically harvests roughly 20 million square meters of roundwood. Under the managed land proxy method, each square meter of Polish roundwood would be credit as removing three tons of carbon dioxide: The more trees are cut down and sold, the better off the planet. As Searchinger noted, “This is physically backwards and incoherent.”

That approach holds some obvious benefits for firms that, on paper, could remove carbon by owning land, cutting down trees, and/or buying wood. A 2022 pilot study circulated within the GHG Protocol shows that—using an earlier version of the managed land proxy accounting method—all but one of the participating forestry products and pulp and paper companies recorded negative emissions.

Among the other core problems with this approach, experts argue, is that these already-occurring forest carbon removals are already accounted for in our understanding of climate change. Over a 100-year time frame, that is, a single ton of carbon dioxide is understood to cause warming equivalent to half a ton of carbon. That’s because oceans and forests—both better able to absorb carbon as a result of climate change itself—absorb a quarter ton each. Notably, wooden chairs and tables do not absorb carbon from the atmosphere; the on-paper emissions removals amassed through buying the wood used to make those things are already being factored into our planetary accounts. If that carbon is not actually absorbed—if those otherwise carbon-absorbing trees are cut down—then companies could be branding themselves green for depleting one of the world’s most important carbon sinks.

A month before the EY presentation—on April 9, 2025—American Forestry Foundation vice president Nathan Truitt,* who belonged to the Technical Working Group, complained privately to the secretariat and EY staff about the group’s composition. Together with the Nature Conservancy, the American Forestry Foundation runs a revenue-generating program that pays private landowners to responsibly manage forests. This generates “carbon credits” that correspond to the amount of carbon purportedly removed by way of that responsible management. Corporations can then buy those credits through the voluntary carbon market to offset their own emissions.

Truitt complained, in an email reviewed by TNR, that the Technical Working Group lacked the expertise needed to present all the relevant scientific literature on the subject. He alleged that the TWG’s academic researchers were “engaged in advocacy for one particular solution.” While that is “not necessarily a problem,” Truitt wrote, he claimed that this advocacy meant the working group was ill equipped to present “independent research,” and suggested that more impartial experts could have been invited to take part in the deliberations. Truitt also alleged that the developing optics within the TWG—where most scientists supported activity-based accounting and most industry representatives supported the managed land proxy approach—had created “a biased and unfair dynamic where the ‘scientists’ all support the ABA approach, while ‘industry’ support the MLP approach.” According to Truitt, the dynamic “suggests to casual observers that this is an example of ‘industry’ resisting what ‘the science’ demands.” He suggested inviting into the Technical Working Group four additional academics, whom he cited as supporting the managed land proxy approach.

When EY presented the Technical Working Group’s proposals in May, it didn’t include the same kind of explanatory memoranda for the activity-based proposal that was included with the MLP+ proposal. Having heard that this explanatory memoranda was submitted in late April, Cullenward—on the ISB—questioned the secretariat’s staff, Bassen, and an EY presenter about whether the ISB had been given all available documents. The board maintained that it had, that the accounting-based activity authors were still working on their memorandum, and that the ISB would be able to read the memo in June.

And while Truitt’s complaint wasn’t shared with the ISB, that body’s chairman—German economist Alexander Bassen—obliquely referenced a “critique that the selection of the academics in the board is going in one direction, too strong in one direction.” He also announced that the four researchers Truitt had suggested inviting in his complaint—a complaint still unknown to other ISB members—were invited to give their opinions on the Technical Working Group’s proposals.

Cullwenward asked about the source of the accusations that the TWG’s independent scientists were biased. “I’ve heard a number of people use the passive voice in expressing the observation that somebody, without identifying who that somebody is, has expressed concern with respect to the balance of the group that has brought us one of these two proposals,” Cullenward said at the recorded meeting. “I’m concerned that we’ve begun this with what I think is a fairly unbalanced set of documents, and right now an unvoiced allegation about one of the groups not being representative, that I think is pretty profoundly concerning as a way to open what will be a technically complex discussion.”

He did not receive an answer. The ISB continued debating the two proposals for the rest of the year. Unable to reach an agreement, they opted last July to form a subgroup made up of Bassen and four others, including Cullenward. The subgroup was tasked with determining broad points of agreement about the two forest carbon accounting proposals, which it would then propose to the broader ISB in the hopes of coming closer to a decision. After some spirited back and forth, the subgroup agreed that the first point of agreement presented to the ISB would be that managed land proxy accounting methods are “are not suitable for a physical inventory for corporate reporting.”

Bassen said he would to run a subsequent draft by GHG Protocol governance lead David Burns, a WRI staffer, to see if it raised any governance concerns—a fairly standard step in these sorts of bureaucratic processes. In the next draft Bassen sent back to the remaining subgroup members in early January, language about managed land proxy methods being “not suitable” was deleted. A new bullet point noted that the subgroup hadn’t reached consensus on “whether MLP methods or the ABA method are suitable for the purposes of estimating an organization’s greenhouse gas inventory.” A spokesperson for the GHG Protocol did not respond to a request to explain how or why this change was made.

Cullenward and forest ecologist Heather Keith protested the change. Bassen countered that he “did not censor anything” (his emphasis) and eventually agreed to revert the language back to a previous version, then transmitted that to the rest of the group in early January.

In February, Cullenward and Keith filed a formal complaint listing several concerns, including the handling of Truitt’s email, the subgroup process, and alleged witholding of documents. In the months that followed, ISB members’ complaints made their way through the GHG Protocol’s internal processes; the protocol hired an external mediator to resolve disputes. Cullenward and Keith received a response to their complaint that they were barred from sharing; a spokesperson for the protocol declined to provide more information about it. In response to a request for comment on several of the specific allegations raised by Cullenward and Keith, and in subsequent reporting, a spokesperson for the protocol wrote that forest carbon accounting “remains an open topic under consideration,” emphasizing that the GHG Protocol was still considering the merits of both proposals. At the end of June, RFI announced a seven-month public comment period on the proposed accounting methods. “Given the importance and complexity of the topic, the ISB concluded that further methodological development, testing, and stakeholder input were needed before a decision could be made,” the spokesperson wrote. “The ISB therefore did not reach a final consensus, and no approach has been selected.”

Shortly after Cullenward and Searchinger resigned this summer, the GHG Protocol announced that it would be aligning its carbon emissions accounting with the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO, a venerable and corporate-dominated body responsible for industrial standards that range from screws to chargers. The two organizations formed a strategic partnership last September. And while the ISO has long utilized GHG Protocol standards, the two have not formally collaborated on accounting methods. The ISO has its own proprietary forest carbon accounting standard that SourceMaterial and Bloomberg report closely mirrors the managed land proxy approach. In combining their methods, the jointly formed committees that help make those decisions could be anonymous, per ISO policy and against GHGP Protocol, which stipulates that membership lists be made publicly available. Cullenward has reasoned that this could offer cover for corporate representatives to dominate talks more openly than they have been, given the GHG Protocol’s governance rules. Searchinger told me he eventually left because of the protocol’s agreement to create standards “by anonymous committees using anonymous votes,” and felt he could be “more effective in influencing what the world ultimately does on the outside.” The protocol spokesperson declined to comment as to whether these bodies’ membership and votes would be disclosed to the public.

Lurking in the background of all this arcane drama is an overriding sense of scarcity in the world of climate policy, and—relatedly—the cottage industry built up around helping companies meet climate goals. Corporate uptake of the GHG Protocol standards has been propelled, in large part, by the belief that those companies would eventually be regulated. Whatever modest progress had been made in getting climate policy on the books these last few years is, for now, stalled. Engaging in multi-stakeholder processes can still have material and reputational benefits for major polluters. But accounting for emissions does not necessarily mean reducing them. Generally only states can force that kind of change, and the credible threat of regulation is essential for voluntary initiatives like the GHG Protocol. At a time when it’s easier than ever for companies to abandon their climate commitments—and to stop funding green nonprofits—GHG Protocol secretariat staff may be understandably anxious to keep industry on side. Faced with the prospect of these hotly contested accounting methods being drafted into law, well-meaning environmentalists may have to decide between keeping corporate stakeholders engaged and happy, and maintaining scientific integrity.

* A previous version of this article misstated Nathan Truitt’s affiliation.

The survey was published this week by Liberal Currents and it sought to catch the mood of the Democratic electorate as Election Day looms. Much of what the poll found was downright anodyne: A plurality of respondents favor Kamala Harris as the presidential nominee in 2028; “economy, inflation & cost of living” wins as the respondents’ biggest issue they want a future Democratic president to tackle. But one result made me do a double take. Under the section, “Feelings about Trump leaving office,” respondents were asked, “If you woke up tomorrow morning and saw the following news headlines, how would you feel?”

One of the choices, “To ‘safeguard the Constitution,’ a group of U.S. military leaders have removed President Donald Trump from power and assumed control of the United States” earned a net approval of 31 percent, with 59 percent approving and 28 percent saying no. That’s not good! Now the reason I’m not completely disassociating is because the ways respondents answered the other choices were more rational: Impeachment was by far the favored choice of removing the president, at 80 percent net sentiment, followed by removal via the Twenty-Fifth Amendment at 77 percent, and “dying peacefully in his sleep” at 40 percent. Assassination—by far the most immoral and dangerous way Trump could leave office, for all the reasons I lay out here—was the only choice with a negative sentiment, as it should have.

Still, I’m sorry, but the approval number for a military junta taking over the United States is way, way too high. Folks, you do not want a military coup in the United States under any circumstances.

Perhaps one reason this idea polls so well is that we’ve recently had a sample taste of what it’s like to be under unconstitutional leadership and it led to a desirable outcome. During the January 6, 2021, insurrection and for about a fortnight after, the United States was for all intents and purposes governed by a weird triumvirate: Nancy Pelosi, Mike Pence, and General Mark A. Milley. Trump was, during this time, meaningfully constrained from exercising some of his constitutional authority, while this troika took it up. It can be argued, of course, that this may have been for the best. This interregnum eventually yielded to the Biden administration and its comparative normalcy. But for many people, myself included, it was still fairly unsettling. In many places around the world, such takeovers end badly.

This is perhaps why the basket case anecdote came flooding back in my memory banks, as Brazil’s history is demonstrative of why military coups d’état are a bad idea. If the Latin American nation is any guide, once you start having military takeovers, you tend to keep having them. As the Berlin Journal’s James N. Green recalls, “Since 1889, when the Brazilian army ousted Emperor Pedro II and established a republic, the armed forces initiated nine attempted takeovers, five of which were successful.” Brazilian history also teaches us that military takeovers can be very difficult to dislodge. “The last military intervention into Brazilian politics took place in 1964, with the explicit support of the U.S. government,” writes Green. “It led to a 21-year-long military dictatorship.”

I feel it should be obvious to most that a Trump-ousting coup would be an incredibly combustible event that would shatter the political landscape and lead to widespread uproar that would be difficult to contain. As I’ve noted previously, the MAGA movement is steeped in conspiratorial thinking and bound in cultlike devotion to Trump. Martyring him is thus a very bad idea. A military-style coup d’état would likely reinflame the passions that led to the January 6 insurrection, and serve as rocket fuel for the growing number of people who TNR’s Matt Ford says claim “a purported Second Amendment right to murder civil servants and assassinate elected officials.”

As TNR’s Tim Noah wrote earlier this week, one Trump-removal scenario that’s on the table comes down to the GOP’s long-term political thinking: Should Republicans get battered in the midterm elections, there could be a strong incentive to convince Trump to retire or quit and pass the torch early to Vice President JD Vance, so as to allow him two years to essentially run as an incumbent. If that’s the way it goes, so be it. Trump would, of course, have strong incentives to stay, as his becoming a private citizen again would immediately embroil him anew in any number of legal battles.

Barring that, the constitutional methods of removal that most Democrats thankfully seem to favor are the better options—though it seems that impeachment is, for Democratic leadership anyway, off the table. Perhaps it would be impractical for a newly empowered Democratic Congress to try impeachment for a third time (though they say that’s “the charm”). Still, it’s worth remembering that Republican senators had two shots to end a derelict presidency—once immediately after he sicced a mob on them—and they failed in their duty to oust Trump and bar him from holding public office. In this way, impeachment should remain a salient issue in this autumn’s Senate races: All of the miseries we are experiencing right now would never have happened if enough Republican senators truly loved their country.

It needs to be said that if Trump’s reign is to end prematurely—that is, before his stepping down on the next Inauguration Day—things won’t be peaches and cream. Even if it comes about through constitutional means, the U.S. will have to navigate a period of tumult. If we’re contemplating the end of the Trump presidency, rather than indulge in fantasies about a military coup, we should all contemplate how each of us, in our own way, might help reinforce the civic foundation and serve as good stewards of a nation of laws. Perhaps, as Noah writes, we’re within sight of Trump’s fall. We should not take such matters lightly, because if the fall is all that’s left, it matters a great deal.

Helpfully, this has now been confirmed—belated but significantly—by none other than Donald Trump himself. Late Thursday, while erupting in a wild fury over media companies that have joined forces against his effort to ban select ones from the White House grounds, he accidentally revealed an Achilles’ heel of sorts.

Trump raged as follows:

They only write badly about a man who won the Election IN A GIANT LANDSLIDE, winning all 7 Swing States, the Popular Vote, and 86% of the Counties, etc., and whose Popularity has grown because of the unprecedented SUCCESS our Country is having on both the World Stage, and at home. CNN and MSDNC, to show you how fake they are, today refused to cover one of the Biggest and Most Beautiful Events to take place in many years, the arrival at the White House of the Highly Respected President of China, Xi Jinping, and his beautiful wife, Madam Peng. The event was magnificent — Actually made for Television but, because they’re Fake News, and because they knew how good it would be, they didn’t want credit to be given to “TRUMP,” they refused to be there.

Buried in all that derangement is an important revelation. After Trump banned CNN, Politico, and MS NOW—ostensibly on national security grounds, but in reality out of pique—the networks that run the press pool joined them in solidarity, which suspended the pool’s rolling coverage of the president. 

As my colleague Tim Noah observed, this has only worked to Trump’s detriment. Though a judge has now temporarily blocked Trump’s ban, the immediate result of the pool suspension was that the participating networks didn’t film Xi’s arrival. So there was no widely aired coverage of Trump’s grand ceremonial reception of him—hence his fury.

In angrily pretending the news organizations boycotted the event to deny him attention during a successful moment, all Trump really demonstrated is that he badly needs their attention. Thus, their decision to join together in defense of excluded colleagues has located a real weak spot—and nailed it with a direct hit. That’s the true source of his furious outburst.

Relatedly, the part of Trump’s tirade in which he claims his “Popularity has grown” comes at a funny moment. The Cook Political Report just shifted its ratings of 15 House races in Democrats’ favor, and two really jump out: North Carolina’s 11th district and Texas’s 15th district, which have both moved from Lean Republican to Toss Up.

Trump carried North Carolina’s 11th by nearly 10 points, and he carried Texas’s 15th by nearly 18 points. The North Carolina district is in the western part of the state, deep in Appalachian Trump country. The Texas district is in one of the border areas that Trump dominated, prompting talk of a major realignment among Latino voters.

He’s now deeply underwater in places just like these. Indeed, in a statement, the Democratic-aligned House Majority PAC says its polling is showing Trump’s approval sinking “especially in districts Trump won by over 10 percent.” But you don’t have to take Democrats’ word for it: Note that Trump’s own Super PAC and its affiliates are sinking money into shoring up both the North Carolina and Texas districts.

For these to be serious toss-ups suggests extraordinary deterioration in Trump’s standing among many different demographics, from noncollege and rural whites to the Hispanic voters that defected to Trump in 2024. And there’s other evidence that Trump’s collapse is a big factor in these districts, too.

The Cook Political Report, for instance, also shifted Florida’s 27th district from Likely Republican to Lean Republican—hard for Democrats to win, but not impossible.  Recall that the GOP congresswoman who represents it, Maria Elvira Salazar, just ran a direct-to-camera ad denouncing Trump for his “betrayal” of Latinos who supported him. This wouldn’t be happening unless he’s cratering in this district as well—after Trump carried it by nearly 15 points. It’s now at least within reach for Democrats on a very, very good election night.

Which leads us back to Trump’s eruption at the media. It’s hard to know whether the press would have banded together to confront him in quite this way if his approval rating were what it was, say, throughout 2025 and even into early 2026. Certainly other institutions were not doing so. In one way or another, law firms, universities, and media companies all surrendered. 

As Michelle Goldberg writes in The New York Times, a big factor driving all that early capitulation was serious elite miscalculation: Figures at these institutions got spooked into overestimating the price of getting on Trump’s bad side. Indeed, if the last two years have confirmed anything, it’s that the logic of collective resistance is sound. Not only is the immediate price for bucking Trump small; it actually works. It’s one of the only things that can really disarm him.

Trump’s own furious reaction to the media’s stand against him neatly underscores the point. And it’s useful to have it confirmed, even if it came awfully late, at a moment when his tailspinning public standing made it a whole lot easier.

Earlier this week, ProPublica exposed Collins’s involvement in an alleged illegal pay-to-play scheme with a defense contractor. Collins has denied the allegations.

“The Biden-led Justice Department and FBI totally cleared my office, my campaign and me five years ago of these seven-year-old allegations,” Collins told The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. 

But as it turns out, Collins’s denials don’t add up. Collins’s claim that the Biden administration didn’t find any wrongdoing only applies to allegations as of 2021. The ProPublica article concerns allegations made by former Navatek CEO and Collins campaign donor Martin Kao from 2022 to 2024, which the FBI was still investigating until the probe was shut down during the current Trump administration. 

ProPublica also pointed out in its report that the defense contractor Navatek, which allegedly had Collins steer government contracts its way in exchange for campaign cash, didn’t provide anything of value to the people of Maine.

Steve Abbott, who is managing Collins’s reelection campaign, claimed at a press conference Wednesday that Navatek’s research in 2019 benefited the University of Maine, which used it to launch a new boat last month. He even held up pictures of the boat at the press conference. Unfortunately for him and Collins, the University of Maine debunked his claim.

“This most recent boat has no Navatek connection, and UMaine has not worked with Navatek since 2021,” the University of Maine’s Samantha Warren said.

Annie Clark, Collins’s deputy chief of staff, also attacked the ProPublica article, claiming that it relied on the “word of someone who pled guilty to five counts of money laundering, three counts of wire fraud, one count of bank fraud, and making false submissions to the FEC,” referring to Kao. 

ProPublica pointed out that it didn’t simply print Kao’s words at face value, but reviewed evidence gathered by the FBI, thousands of pages of legal records, and sources familiar with Navatek as well as the FBI’s investigation. 

All of this does not reflect well on Collins in the midst of a tough reelection campaign against former Maine state Senator Troy Jackson, who is polling neck and neck with her in a year when Republicans are historically unpopular. In November, Maine voters may choose to reject a  senator surrounded by corruption who supports a corrupt president. 

In a resignation letter obtained by The New York Times, prosecutor Sheri H. Mecklenburg claimed that she was used as a fall woman for the DOJ’s failed prosecution of the six people who protested outside an ICE detention center in Broadview last year—and was threatened with firing if she spoke up. She named U.S. Attorney Andrew S. Boutros as the specific person who pushed for her to pursue felony charges and who hung her out to dry when they failed to stick.

“Preventing me from defending myself is particularly reprehensible given the Office’s failure to adequately defend me.... You sent an office-wide email laying responsibility at my feet for a felony prosecution that you personally directed over my objection that the case was better suited to misdemeanor charges,” she wrote. “You then publicly announced an investigation of my conduct spanning twenty years. These inexplicable actions severely damaged a reputation I worked hard to build over decades and have damaged my prospects for future employment and income.”

The DOJ denies Mecklenburg’s claims.

This case was a disaster for the DOJ. They initially tried to hit the Broadview Six—which included then congressional candidate Kat Abugazaleh—with felony conspiracy charges carrying a maximum sentence of six years in prison for blocking an ICE vehicle. The case was thrown out with prejudice by a federal judge in April after it was found that Boutros had been in contact with members of the grand jury in the case.

This massive failure, like many of the Justice Department’s overzealous charges, shows that most of these charges are rushed, and pushed by attorneys who are extensions of the Trump administration rather than independent adjudicators of the law.

He cited a 2024 presidential election analysis as evidence, claiming that 300,000 “warriors” were not registered to vote that year.

“That’s more than the ballots cast in cities like Detroit, Boston, Milwaukee, or Seattle,” Hegseth said in a video statement, specifically naming liberal cities.

“As you know, the war department exists to protect our nation and her freedoms. That includes the freedom to decide who leads us, and the right to vote,” Hegseth continued. “Regardless of your home state or current duty status, you can use a standardized federal postcard to register and request a ballot, and if you’re forward deployed and your standard ballot is delayed, you can use the federal write-in absentee ballot. All of these processes are straightforward and protected by law.”

Hegseth also had an explicit message for U.S. commanders, telling them to “get out the vote.”

“You’re not telling them who to vote for, you’re just telling them to vote,” Hegseth said.

“Every warrior deserves an opportunity to cast his or her ballot, and be confident that it will be counted. Keep our nation the land of the free and the home of the brave,” he said. “Get registered and vote.”

TO OUR WARRIORS—MAKE SURE TO VOTE!

Visit https://t.co/3eIJe4DKJh to register and request your ballot. pic.twitter.com/H6RisErQWU

— Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) September 25, 2026

The order to America’s 2.1 million service members comes as Republicans stare down some sorry odds ahead of the midterm elections. But the party’s affiliation with the Trump administration has yet to help the cause.

Donald Trump has done almost nothing to assist his Republican subordinates. In just his second term alone, Trump has repeatedly incensed the American electorate by thrusting the country into a forever war with Iran, indiscriminately annihilating small watercraft in the Caribbean and the Pacific, abducting Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in a midnight raid, aggravating America’s longest alliances—most notably with Canada—with a seemingly endless fountain of shitposts, tearing down the White House in order to build a $600 million, gold-laden ballroom, and repeatedly kowtowing to Moscow.

He also decided to make an already contentious midterm cycle a referendum on his popularity, despite the fact that his popularity is currently tanking in the polls.

The Washington Post reports that in classified documents provided to Congress, American intelligence agencies assess that the Saudi government wants to keep the option of building nuclear weapons open, a disturbing prospect considering that President Trump signed an agreement with Saudi Arabia in July to build four nuclear plants in the country.

At the time, Trump stressed that there would be “no enrichment of material” as part of the deal, but that’s not what it says in writing. In fact, the deal is much less restrictive than other agreements under Article 123 of the U.S. Atomic Energy Act of 1954. Some Democrats are concerned over the deal giving Saudi Arabia a path to enriching uranium to nearly 20 percent, which could be diverted into weapons.

In contrast, President Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal only allowed Iran to enrich uranium up to 3.67 percent, and only for 15 years. Trump heavily criticized that deal during his 2016 campaign for president, and later scrapped it after he was elected.

The Post’s report seems to confirm Democrats’ fears. Right now, the Saudi nuclear deal is under a 90-day review in Congress, and legislators have the ability to block the deal with enough votes. Some Democratic senators are signaling that they might take action.

“With this deal, the Trump administration is departing from precedent, adopting looser restrictions, and caving to Saudi demands by agreeing to a process that is all but certain to allow Riyadh to acquire the means to enrich uranium and possibly develop nuclear weapons,” Senators Ed Markey and Jeff Merkley wrote in a letter Friday to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

In 2018, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said that his country would develop nuclear weapons if Iran did. It’s one of the reasons Merkley signed the letter, as he doesn’t trust Riyadh on this issue.

“It’s bogus as hell,” Merkley told the Post. “If they’ve given up the intent to develop a nuclear weapon, then they’d give up domestic enrichment and reprocessing power, right? They’d accept massive inspections from the [International Atomic Energy Agency.]”

“I’m just wondering if you had a word for some of our colleagues at CNN who are having difficulties with the White House,” a reporter asked the pope on Friday while en route to France.

“I am very happy that here, you are all welcome,” Pope Leo replied. “Good coverage … I think it’s important that we have it all the way around, for everyone.”

Pope Leo reaffirmed his support for freedom of the press after being asked about President Trump’s decision to bar several news outlets from the White House.

Speaking to reporters aboard a flight from Rome to Paris, Leo said press coverage was “very important.”

The White House… pic.twitter.com/JP6JRC3NMA

— CBS News (@CBSNews) September 25, 2026

U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly temporarily reinstated the outlets’ access for a two-week period starting Thursday morning—an order that the Trump administration defied twice the same day.

The first American pope has been quite talkative this week. He also criticized AI and the damage it has inflicted on the human essence on Friday, stating that “it cannot answer questions that concern the meaning of life, which is rooted in lived experience.” He has also long criticized the Trump administration’s current war on Iran, which notably sparked a threat from the Pentagon in April.

Pope Leo XIV on ethics of AI: "It cannot answer questions that concerns the meaning of life, which is rooted in lived experience." pic.twitter.com/SoJ6w6CRX5

— CSPAN (@cspan) September 25, 2026

The Lever reports that in September 2024, the Biden administration began the process of implementing a rule that required AI companies to report their experiments to regulators at the federal government. At the time, officials said that the rule was aimed at preventing “dangerous accidents” that “could result in injury or even loss of life.”

AI investors and companies such as OpenAI balked at the requirement, even as many safety officials resigned or were pushed out over its warning about lax safety regulations. Leading AI investors started donating millions to Trump’s reelection campaign, and after he won in November, they opened their wallets even further.

Just before Trump’s inauguration, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s Tools for Humanity company donated $5 million to Trump’s super PAC, MAGA Inc. Only nine days later, Trump signed an executive order ending Biden’s AI policies, including the reporting rule, although it was still on the federal regulatory agenda.

Then more tech donations arrived in Trump’s coffers. In February, Open AI investor Marc Adreesson donated $500,000 to MAGA Inc., and his partner Ben Horowitz matched the donation. The next month, they donated another $5 million, and in June, Elon Musk, who has his own xAi venture, donated $5 million himself. In September, OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman and his wife donated a combined $25 million to MAGA Inc.

In December, more than a year after the Biden administration proposed the AI disclosure rule, it was formally withdrawn from the federal regulatory agenda. Today, these same AI leaders are claiming they always supported regulating the technology and are demanding lawmakers step in after some high-profile hacking incidents. It’s a far cry from the millions they spent to ensure the government would leave them alone.

Oxygen Forensics CEO Lee Reiber and Russian national Oleg Sergeyevich Davydov were arrested and charged by the Department of Justice with conspiracy to commit wire fraud earlier this week.

Reiber allegedly advertised that his company, which provides forensic and archival services for electronic data, exclusively sold American-made software and had no foreign ownership.

Yet five Russian nationals, including Davydov, reportedly owned and controlled Oxygen Forensics through a holding company based in Cyprus, according to a criminal complaint released by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California. The company’s software, too, was Russian, the complaint alleged.

Several executive agencies were affected by the scheme: the Defense Department and components of the Department of Homeland Security, including the Secret Service, the National Computer Forensics Institute, Homeland Security Investigations, and the DHS Office of Inspector General.

The Secret Service specifically had signed a five-year contract with Oxygen Forensics in 2024.

The Virginia-based group allegedly concealed its true ownership after the U.S. imposed additional sanctions on Russia in early 2022 following its invasion of Ukraine. Months later, Reiber—of Boise, Idaho—was appointed the company’s CEO, president, and chairman of the board, while mentions of Russian ownership were stripped from the company’s public filings, according to the complaint.

Details released in the affidavit suggest that Reiber was well aware of the conspiracy. In November 2023, Reiber wrote to Davydov and the alleged Russian accomplices after a reporter asked about Oxygen Forensics’ connection to a Russian company. Reiber noted at the time that the reporting “could destroy” a pending contract with the National Computer Forensics Institute, and that the “current existence of this company hangs in the balance,” according to the criminal complaint.

Both Reiber and Davydov face a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison if convicted.

The nation’s highest judiciary sided with the Justice Department Friday, undermining a lower court’s ruling that stopped state officials from using sensitive personal data such as Social Security numbers to perform citizenship background checks.

The ruling effectively revives the Homeland Security Department’s redesign of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, also known as SAVE, an enormous database that has previously flagged eligible voters as noncitizens. The Supreme Court’s decision also allows the administration to utilize that tool in its quest to create indexes of adult citizens in each state.

SAVE was created out of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 to assist federal agencies in determining the status of immigrants and naturalized citizens applying for public benefits. Its form and purpose were distinctly different then: It was not a database, but rather a jumping-off point tool to query other federal databases, according to the American Immigration Council.

That changed in 2025, when the Trump administration reimagined SAVE as a device to restrict the electorate. The goal, according to an April 2025 release by DHS and the Department of Government Efficiency, was to “ensure a single, reliable source for verifying noncitizen status nationwide.”

The administration integrated criminal records, immigration timelines, addresses, Social Security numbers, driver’s license data, and federal passport databases into SAVE. The government pushed the system onto state agencies, citing Trump’s debunked 2020 election fraud conspiracy while urging them to upload their state voter rolls to investigate and verify American voters.

It is not clear how accurate the new system is, but a Texas Tribune-ProPublica investigation published in February found that at least 87 people in Texas (one of the first states to comply) were falsely flagged by SAVE as noncitizens.

Brian Broderick, the chief of the verification division at Citizenship and Immigration Services that oversees SAVE, told those outlets at the time that the system can’t always source the most current citizenship information.

Opponents to the sweeping initiative have argued that SAVE violates federal privacy mandates.

In June, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan blocked the new version of SAVE, ruling that the “federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.” Weeks later, the U.S. Court for the District of Columbia Circuit refused to intervene.

The sustained block inspired Solicitor General D. John Sauer to appeal to the Supreme Court earlier this month. He argued in writing that the ruling “threatens the integrity of upcoming elections by vacating the federal government’s authority to internally use Social Security data when fulfilling its duty to respond to requests by States to verify the citizenship of individuals for voting and other purposes.”

Sauer argued that the government would suffer “irreparable” harm due to Sooknanan’s order, as it would force the government to “return to an older, more cumbersome, and less reliable version” of the SAVE system. He added that any reversal of the ruling “would come too late for the 2026 midterms.”

This story has been updated.

The cancellation was announced Friday morning as a massive nor’easter is anticipated to hit the East Coast over the weekend.

“Due to the severe weather forecast throughout the weekend, the tour has made the difficult decision to cancel the Ed Sheeran concerts at Gillette Stadium,” a spokesperson for Kraft told TMZ Friday. “The decision was made with the safety of fans, staff and everyone involved in the shows as the top priority. Refunds are available now at the point of purchase.”

Sheeran drew waves of backlash after a coalition of NFL owners demanded that he either boot rapper Macklemore from his U.S. Loop Tour or have the concerts canceled entirely. Macklemore has been an outspoken voice against Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, which clearly set off Kraft, an avowed Zionist who runs the “Touchdown in Israel” program that takes former football players on a propaganda tour of Israel. Sheeran took the easy way out, and Macklemore was removed from the tour earlier this month. The move led Sheeran to lose thousands of followers on social media, as he was lambasted for being spineless—all of which was made worse after he gave a morally impotent statement after Macklemore’s dismissal.

“Macklemore coming off tour was the promoter’s decision, it was not mine. Macklemore’s contract for the tour was with the promoter, not me,” Sheeran wrote on Instagram last week. “I am not complicit. I have my personal views on this devastating conflict. Just because I choose not to speak publicly, it doesn’t mean I don’t have them, and it doesn’t mean I don’t care.”

“Ed told me that Kraft said I would not be allowed to perform in his stadium,” Macklemore said in his own statement. “Ed also told me that Kraft had rallied some of the other stadium owners and collectively they gave him an ultimatum: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you will not be allowed to play in our venues.”

Now Sheeran won’t be playing either, at least this weekend, as this incoming nor’easter serves him his poetic justice.

On Thursday, Macklemore announced his own tour, titled the “Free Palestine” tour with Macklemore and Friends. It will make stops in Dublin, Paris, and London in late October.

This story has been updated.

MS NOW’s Jonathan Lemire told Morning Joe Friday that Donald Trump was confused by the lack of cameras at the executive mansion the night before, despite the fact that he had banned MS NOW, CNN, and Politico, sparking a press pool–wide protest as a result.

Trump did not consult with his aides before he banned the trio, according to Lemire.

“They understand that, first of all, he needs the media like he needs oxygen,” Lemire said. “So he would be the one to miss it.”

“In fact, even yesterday I am told he was asking aides ‘Where are the cameras?’ because there was no pool camera, and here’s why,” Lemire added.

Trump announced last week that he was banning MS NOW, CNN, and Politico from the White House, writing on Truth Social that the prohibition was the result of “FAKE NEWS.” Within days, the trio had filed a lawsuit against the president and his administration, describing the selective ban as a “a blatant violation” of the First Amendment.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly reinstated the outlets’ access for a two-week period starting Thursday morning, though the Trump administration immediately defied the order. The denied entry sparked a request for an emergency hearing, in which an attorney for the media entities claimed that the White House “already repeatedly” violated the court order.

Reporters were not allowed to return to the premises until Thursday afternoon. Some journalists with the affected broadcasters, including CNN and MS NOW, were still denied entry well into the evening as Trump’s state dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping commenced.

“Whoever gave them that order should go to jail,” said Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough. “I mean, that’s contempt of court.”

“There will be a time when justice will be done for people in this administration ignoring court orders. There will be a time when the masks will be taken off of ICE agents and justice will be done for every person that they beat, for every person that they jailed, for every person that they starve, for every person that they tortured, that time is coming.”

“So I want to know,” Scarborough continued. “I want somebody to take note in the White House, who gave those Secret Service agents, who defied a court order, who gave them that order to defy a federal judge? Because when you defy a federal judge, you’re in contempt.”

Inside Washington

The FDA’s Overton window problem

On Thursday, Republican Senator Susan Collins, a self-described abortion rights supporter, asked not a single question about abortion during the hearing for Food and Drug Administration commissioner nominee Heidi Overton. That, along with testy exchanges with Democrats over Overton’s vaccine views, is likely to be the primary takeaway from the confirmation hearing.

But while Overton’s past comments on mifepristone and vaccines receive top billing, less attention is being given to the larger dysfunction that has plagued the FDA since Trump’s second inauguration. 

Democratic senators, unlike Collins, took a strong line on abortion on Thursday. “I am not going to support someone who doesn’t support a woman’s right to make her own choices,” Senator Patty Murray of Washington, who sits on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, told The New Republic. If confirmed to lead the FDA, Overton will inherit an ongoing study of mifepristone’s safety, which could be an opening step for the Trump administration to restrict its use. In her past role at the MAGA-aligned America First Policy Institute, Overton wrote an article claiming that medication-assisted abortion is “dangerous to women.” On Thursday, she dodged questions about whether she believes mifepristone is safe, instead saying that she agrees with “the statutory standards of safety and efficacy” set by the FDA.

Vaccines were another major issue during the hearing, particularly because of Overton’s association with Trump’s and Health Secretary RFK Jr.’s rhetoric on vaccine safety. Last month, Overton stood beside the two men when they suggested that combination vaccines could cause autism. Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire pressed Overton on vaccines, asking her if she believed Trump could “ever be wrong about something.” Overton didn’t answer the question directly, instead saying that she “had the privilege of working for the president.”

Overton also attended Trump’s Oval Office signing of an executive order to reduce the childhood vaccination schedule and split the MMR vaccine into multiple shots. During the event, Trump also called the MMR vaccine “potentially quite lethal.” Overton denied that the vaccine is lethal at Thursday’s hearing, but that disavowal came too late for some senators. “She should have corrected the president in public when he was putting out bad information about the efficacy of vaccines,” said Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, who sits on the HELP Committee. “When he said it was ‘lethal,’ she should have corrected him right there.”

“She seems like a very nice person, but I don’t think she’s the person who should hold that job,” Senator Bernie Sanders, the ranking member of HELP, told The New Republic. “We need people who have the courage to stand up to President Trump. I’m not sure that’s her.” 

Overton stands to take over a deeply troubled federal agency. The FDA’s current crisis began early on in President Trump’s second term, when nearly one-fifth of the agency’s workforce (around 4,000 employees) left due to firings or buyouts. Since then, a number of high-profile foodborne illnesses and recalls have popped up across the country, which some experts and politicians have suggested could have been exacerbated by cuts at the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Staff turnover has been rampant at the FDA. In 2025, around 90 percent of senior FDA personnel reportedly left the agency, leaving just three experienced senior leaders in place. Since Trump’s inauguration, the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which focuses on the development of vaccines and drugs for rare diseases, has had six different directors. In May, the then head of the FDA, Marty Makary, resigned after just a year at the helm. His tenure was marked by political interference into the FDA’s decision-making. Anti-abortion groups criticized Makary for not advancing the review of mifepristone, while e-cigarette company executives complained to Trump that Makary wasn’t approving their products fast enough. The vaccine chief under Makary, Vinay Prasad, left the agency twice after right-wing activists like Laura Loomer and biotech executives alike criticized him.

In addition to their concerns about abortion and vaccines, some Democratic senators worry that Overton would continue this pattern of politicization within the agency. “I just don’t think [Overton is] committed to ending political interference in the FDA decision-making process,” Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who sits on the HELP Committee, told The New Republic. “She’s been given that job specifically to protect political interference.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

The charter companies running ICE deportation flights out of Akron-Canton Regional Airport, the Ohio Capital Journal reports, owe the airport a combined $46,513 for landings between the end of April and early September—of which $33,927 is past due. In recent weeks, “Akron-Canton has become a Great Lakes hub,” reports Doug Oplinger, who has been staking out the airport while scrutinizing flight records. He finds “planes landing here in the evening, often from a major ICE prison and deportation center in Alexandria, Louisiana, and on occasion directly from Tapachula, Mexico, the end point for many of the deportees.” Oplinger writes that attempts to get comment from the companies involved, ICE media relations, and multiple other parties have been “largely unanswered.”

In case you missed it: The Arizona Republic’s Stacey Barchenger went hunting for the alleged Democrats supporting Republican Andy Biggs against Katie Hobbs in the Arizona governor’s race—the ones mentioned in a slew of “Democrats for Biggs” signs that have proliferated recently. The signs, she notes, are paid for by conservative group Turning Point USA—the late Charlie Kirk’s group. “Biggs couldn’t name a Democrat who supports his campaign—but he said they are out there” and referred Barchenger to “whoever’s putting up those signs.” Barchenger duly contacted Turning Point spokespeople, who “did not respond to multiple questions about … whether any coalition of Democrats backing Republican Andy Biggs for governor exists.” Read the full story for all this and significant further shenanigans.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

Public Citizen publishes a statement on the report recently released by Senators Chuck Schumer and Sheldon Whitehouse on the fossil fuel industry’s influence in the Trump administration. The report highlighted, among other things, the policy “wish lists” the industry compiled for the administration, many items of which were quickly enacted. “Every American family struggling with high costs is suffering because of the corrupt relationship between Donald Trump and the fossil fuel industry,” says Public Citizen’s climate program director, David Arkush, in the group’s statement.

Friday, September 25, at noon, the Roosevelt Institute holds its Fall Policy Summit with Roosevelt Network members “fighting for academic freedom, democracy, and LGBTQ+ rights; working with local organizations to explore how city governments can better support workers; and traveling across their states to hear directly from farmers about the economy they want to see.” Interested viewers can join on Zoom to “hear from Network members about what they’re working on and how they’re turning ideas into action.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Good Week: Abdul El-Sayed

The Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan got two new polls this week offering him good news, and boy is this welcome for Democrats. A Suffolk poll found El-Sayed leading GOPer Mike Rogers by 47–40. And the gold-standard New York Times survey found him up by 49–44. Notably, the latter found him clearing 40 percent with working-class whites, a key threshold. With many analysts wondering if he’ll win enough of this demographic to prevail in the Midwestern state, all this will help quiet Democratic panic about El-Sayed’s chances.

Bad Week: Troy Jackson

The aforementioned gold-standard Times poll also finds this week that Maine Senator Susan Collins is leading her Democratic challenger by three points, 49–46. What really jumps out is that Jackson’s support among non-college voters is an abysmal 34 percent. True, a recent CNN poll showed Jackson up three points, but taken altogether, this is way too close for comfort in such a pro-Democratic national environment and in a state that Trump lost by seven points in 2024. What’s more, the CNN poll also finds Jackson at 38 percent with non-college voters, suggesting this group is a real problem for him. That’s especially noteworthy, since one of this fifth-generation logger’s biggest political selling points is his roots in the rural working class.

—Greg Sargent

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

Tomorrow, Donald Trump will be in Knoxville for the Tennessee-Texas game. Some years ago, a president infamously waded into a heated debate over who was the number one team in college football. This was back when presidents didn’t offer their opinions on every topic under the sun, and it was a big controversy. Whose fans did he please, and whose did he infuriate? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in Tuesday’s newsletter.)

—Michael Tomasky

The DOJ on Thursday announced it has dropped more than 50 school desegregation cases. As The New York Times reports, that brings the total to 57 dropped cases since Trump was reelected. Nearly 80 percent of the cases took place in the Southern states of Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana.

The move drew backlash with Democrats on the House Education and Workforce Committee saying the move was “turning us back toward the Jim Crow era.”

“Schools are just as segregated today as they were in the late 1960s,” the committee wrote in a post on X Thursday. “Segregated schools mean segregated opportunity.”

Meanwhile, Republicans in the South celebrated.

“This is just the beginning,” Alabama Attorney Steve Marshall posted on X, thanking Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, for ending “three outdated orders” in his state. “We will keep working until every school district in Alabama is free from unnecessary consent decrees.”

Dhillon posted a video bragging about the move Thursday, claiming that “Ending outdated consent decrees means these school districts can finally redirect taxpayer dollars back to students.”

“In this administration, we are ending prolonged federal oversight of these school districts because the effort does not reflect the reality of those classrooms today,” Dhillon added in a statement.

The orders didn’t only seek to ensure racial diversity in schools. They also mandated equal funding, access to better facilities, encouraged fair representation in advanced classes, and are the product of the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education making segregation unconstitutional. For years, the DOJ took school districts to court to enforce desegregation, with many of them being federally monitored and required to report enrollment data.

Now, with the Trump administration’s war on diversity, equity, and inclusion, those efforts will end. Dhillon’s statement didn’t make any mention of discrimination. With no government enforcement, many southern school districts, along with others across the country, will soon be able to discriminate openly.

The president unveiled yet another hype video on Wednesday set to JMSN’s hit song “Love Me.” The ad goes full Red Scare, playing audio from Trump in which he proclaims that “together we will defeat communism, Marxism, and socialism in America. America will never be a communist country.” The ad then flashes pro-Trump claims like “Largest Tax Cuts in History,” “Reigniting American Manufacturing,” and “Defend Law and Order and Police,” all while “America Will Never Be a Communist Country” flashes on the screen. The ad notably states it was “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”

So I was just watching Fox News and this commercial played during Jesse Watters show. It says “Paid for by the US Government.”
This is clearly a campaign ad. And the singers are just singing over and over again, “Love me” - over images of Trump. @CBSMiami @CBSNews pic.twitter.com/eCkEZpipWx

— Jim DeFede (@DeFede) September 24, 2026

The ad debuted Wednesday on Fox News during Primetime with Jesse Watters and began airing on CBS and other national networks the next day.

The White House is framing this blatantly biased advertisement for one of the most unpopular presidents in history as a “public service announcement.”

“These public service announcements are about reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad,” said a White House spokesperson. “The ad is educational and unapologetically patriotic. We should be proud of our country.”

The ad is not educational—it’s just a hype edit for a president who deserves none, especially seven months into a widely panned war on Iran that has resulted in death, destruction, and skyrocketing fuel prices. It’s one of many the Trump administration has been posting as midterms draw near, but this time, it’s paid for by taxpayers. Other presidents have made public service announcements, but never like this. For comparison, a public service announcement in the Biden administration urged Americans to obtain a Covid-19 vaccination.

JMSN decried the use of his song for the ad.

“To anybody who has followed my career and knows what I stand for and built my career on, it should go without saying that I would never authorize my music to be used for ANY political agenda or campaign. For those who are new here, this could have gone 2 ways. 1. The President or his team reach out and ask to license the song, I respond ‘no’ and you never know about it. 2. The President illegally uses the song without asking but still the public goes full retard and immediately assumes that a license was granted,” he wrote Thursday afternoon. “Obviously it went the second way.”

The commercial was also criticized by congressional Democrats in a letter to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.

“This is the sort of government propaganda one might expect in North Korea, not the United States of America, and it is an egregious and illegal misuse of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars.”

The president claimed on Truth Social Thursday afternoon that MS NOW and CNN “refused to cover” the arrival of Chinese President Xi Jinping at the White House.

“The event was magnificent—Actually made for Television but, because they’re Fake News, and because they knew how good it would be, they didn’t want credit to be given to ‘TRUMP,’ they refused to be there,” Trump wrote. “That’s why they have such poor Ratings.”

But that was far from the truth. Reporters from those two networks, as well as many others, refused to cover Xi’s arrival in protest of Trump’s attempt to ban CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House grounds. What’s more, just hours after Trump’s post, CNN and MS NOW were blocked from covering the state dinner at the White House Thursday night.

MS NOW’s White House reporter Laura Barrón-López explained she had attempted to cover the greeting ceremony as Xi arrived at the state dinner.

“We had submitted our credentials for this event last night, at the deadline that was issued by the White House to submit them,” she said. “A pretty typical event here at the White House that we would regularly cover.”

“When I went up to the wrangler, who is one of the press assistants who handles press and logistics like this, after most of the press had gone through I said, ‘Will I be admitted? I’m with MS NOW and I submitted my credential.’ I was told, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t let you in. I’m sorry, I can’t.’”

Barrón-López said she was then directed by a White House staffer to speak to White House Communications Director Steven Cheung for an explanation as to why she was restricted. She said she texted Cheung, though it was not clear if he responded.

Barrón-López added that she did receive a credential to cover Trump and Xi’s visit to the National Archives on Friday, though that trip is notably not on the contested White House grounds.

Trump announced last week that he was banning MS NOW, CNN, and Politico from the White House, writing on Truth Social that the prohibition was the result of “FAKE NEWS.” Within days, the trio had filed a lawsuit against the president and his administration, describing the selective ban as a “a blatant violation” of the First Amendment.

Other broadcasters considered the ban an affront to news institutions across the country. By Monday, every reputable broadcaster in the White House press pool—including NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox News—had joined together to suspend coverage of the president and his actions until he reversed course.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly reinstated the outlets’ access for a two-week period on Thursday, though the Trump administration immediately defied the order.

“The big question is: Is this going to continue?” Barrón-López added. “Are we not going to be credentialed into these daily events?”

Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison was among the guests at the event, reports Deadline, as he awaits a judge’s approval of a settlement in Paramount’s merger with CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Meanwhile, neither CNN nor MS NOW were allowed to cover Xi’s evening arrival at the dinner, despite a Wednesday court order giving them and Politico access to the White House.

On Thursday morning, the three outlets were also barred from covering Xi’s arrival to the White House in defiance of the order, and they immediately notified the court. In response to U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, the White House claimed in a court document that access was restored to Politico, CNN, and MS NOW as of 9:55 a.m. In reality, the outlets reported not being allowed on the premises until around noon, long after the press conference with Xi.

Trump again revived his ban later that evening, showing his contempt for Kelly’s ruling and daring him to take further action. Trump’s disdain for the free press seems to match his disdain for federal judges who rule against him, and Ellison is demonstrating that he will suck up to Trump instead of standing up for any of his journalists. 

Paramount also owns CBS, which was boycotting broadcasts of the president along with the rest of the White House press pool. Ellison, though, is more concerned with making money off of a $110 billion merger instead of any kind of critical journalism.  

Documents reviewed by CBS News reveal that U.S. Southern Command is exploring the availability of combat sustainment, engineering, and medical units—as well as a military police brigade—within the next “90-120 days.”

The administration and USSOUTHCOM have remained vague about their intentions for these units.

“Due to operational security concerns, we do not disclose details or comment on U.S. operational movements or potential deployment timelines associated with current or future operations, contingencies, or planning,” a spokesperson for USSOUTHCOM told CBS. “However, U.S. Southern Command continuously coordinates with the Joint Force to assess a range of potential requirements across its [area of responsibility] in support of assigned missions.”

This comes just days after Trump’s incendiary United Nations General Assembly speech in which he called for the downfall of the Cuban government, claiming that “freedom will be coming to Cuba” while the Cuban delegation walked out.

This recent development also aligns with Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s aggressive, paternalistic approach to the island, slowly choking it to death—blocking key resources and enacting harsh sanctions—while claiming that the government is a “state sponsor of terrorism that spies on America.”

“What we’re trying to teach them is there are no escape valves.... Every time they create a new mechanism in which they try to get out of the noose, we just close it off,” Rubio said last month. “They certainly can’t wait us out. Certainly this isn’t going to go away for the next [two and a half] years.”

Cubans have suffered immensely since President Trump’s return to power. The administration has carried out a blackout-inducing oil blockade since January that has directly contributed to widespread food insecurity, economic collapse, and death, as infant mortality doubled on the island. The U.S. has attacked Cuba on multiple fronts, from accusing its doctor export program of human trafficking to claiming that it’s aiding international terrorism. Now, with this recent USSOUTHCOM report, military intervention seems imminent.

Nationwide blackouts have left millions across Cuba without power. Some outages can last up to 20 hours, disrupting everything from food storage, to cooking, to sleep.

Blackouts have become an ongoing crisis since the U.S. blocked all oil shipments to the island in January. pic.twitter.com/6TP1Wv6SG2

— AJ+ (@ajplus) August 7, 2026

Funnier still is the way the thing was hammered out. The New York Times reported that the deal “explicitly stops short of conveying any territory to the United States. And no one—especially Denmark, which governs the vast but mostly empty space—wanted to emphasize that point, for fear that Mr. Trump might renounce the agreement he had just hailed as ‘tremendous for Europe and for the United States.’” Why yes, dear Emperor, you have the most magnificent clothes!

It would be a huge embarrassment for any other president, except that Trump did so many more other embarrassing and vile things this week that Greenland doesn’t even rank. The White House press ban. The appalling welcome to Xi Jinping, where Chinese state media got more access than some U.S. media (speaking of press freedom, China ranks 178th out of 180 countries, while Trump’s United States is now sixty-fourth). The invitation to Vladimir Putin to the G20 summit, to be held in December outside Miami (well, specifically, and inevitably, at Trump’s golf resort).

But for all that, it was a positive week in that we finally began to see cracks in the MAGA foundation. A couple Senate candidates said the war in Iran has to be brought to an “immediate” end. Mississippi GOP Senator Roger Wicker denounced the pomp surrounding the Xi visit.

And most encouragingly, the word bloodbath began to appear in articles about the midterms, but there’s nothing Trump or Congress can do to turn the economy around dramatically in seven weeks, as mortgage rates top 7 percent and are expected to rise even more. But remember—it’s a small price to pay for preventing Iran from having the nuclear capability it never had until Trump tore up the Obama deal.

Let’s focus on that word, bloodbath. Yes, a lot of these Senate races are stubbornly close. But each passing week brings news of the experts shifting Senate and especially House races from “likely R” to “lean R” and from “lean R” to “toss-up.” A bloodbath may or may not happen, but one is surely gathering strength out there. And most Republicans are preparing for it in the way that politicians normally do—throwing whatever Hail Marys they can to try to save their hides but preparing themselves psychologically for a thrashing.

Trump doesn’t do that. Roy Cohn didn’t teach his protégé about the most dignified way to throw in the towel. He taught him that when you can see you’re going to lose, you search for new and more creative and abominable ways to cheat.

And so we have this rather alarming report from The Atlantic this week that an old friend of Trump’s is urging him to declare martial law “on or around” Election Day. Peter Ticktin went to military school with Trump and apparently has his ear. He persuaded Trump to pardon Tina Peters, the MAGA county clerk in Colorado who tried to prove nonexistent voter fraud in 2020. Radio host Wayne Allyn Root is another named in the article who has pushed Trump to declare a “national-security emergency” around Election Day.

These people are mad as hatters, but the problem is that the president of the United States is too, and he listens to them. Another problem is whether there’s anyone else telling Trump the opposite. The Atlantic article suggests that there are; that the more wizened political professionals around Trump are prepared to advise against things like sending troops to polling places and issuing declarations of martial law.

Comforting if true. But I wonder if, when the moment of truth comes, chief of staff Susie Wiles or any of the other supposed normies around Trump will make a forceful, concerted effort to prevent him from taking whatever extreme measure he wants to take. If Trump wants to find a way to invalidate the election, well, that isn’t Wiles’s bailiwick. It’s a Justice Department thing. So Todd Blanche is going to stop Trump from invoking the Insurrection Act?

Democrats and liberal groups are preparing for all this, to the extent they can. Marc Elias’s law firm filed an important suit this week with major Democratic campaign committees to block the Trump administration from sending armed guards from the FBI and ICE to the polls on Election Day. Why do they need to do this? Because Trump and his top officials have hinted or said repeatedly that they’d do it.

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin confirmed that he had the authority to place officers at polling places. Border czar Tom Homan has said: “I mean, bottom line is, what are they afraid of? They say illegal aliens don’t vote.… But if only U.S. citizens can vote, I don’t see the issue.” FBI chief Kash Patel said, “If there’s a reason to go [to a polling place] because there’s been a violation of the law, we will.” And Blanche said at the Conservative Political Action Conference: “Why is there objection to sending ICE officers to polling places? Illegals can’t vote.”

In addition, as the Elias lawsuit explains, in June, the Justice Department quietly removed from its website a long-standing manual about prosecuting election crimes. The manual noted that federal law prohibits dispatching “any” officer to “any polling place in any election.” Now that language has been scrubbed.

Donald Trump is an ignoramus, but he does know two things. One, he knows that if the Democrats take Congress, he’s in for an extremely difficult two years—or worse. With subpoena power, Democrats could launch investigations that could eventually make their way into federal courtrooms and dog him for the rest of his iron-slicing, well-done-steak-eating life.

Two, he knows how to cheat and steal—and that cheating and stealing, done brazenly enough, usually work. That’s where he’s going to be concentrating his efforts between now and November 3. And if all that fails, we can be sure that Peter Ticktin will be standing at the ready with advice.

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

A right-wing radio host in Iowa unleashed an extraordinary screed this week. He leaked internal polling data about the House races there and said districts Donald Trump carried by double digits are in serious peril. And he blamed Trump’s war for just about all of it. This comes as Republicans are leaking fresh levels of midterm panic, and new polling shows further deterioration for Trump and Republicans. But Iowa has special significance. If Dems can win here, it suggests there may be an opening to regain ground in rural America.

We’re lucky to be talking about all of this with Rita Hart, the Democratic Party chairwoman in Iowa. Chair, thanks for coming on.

Rita Hart: My great pleasure, Greg. Thank you.

Sargent: So Iowa radio host Steve Deace, who’s pretty thoroughly MAGA now, dropped this bombshell on X. He said this:

“Iowa House Republicans were informed by their own pollsters that if you are in a plus-15 district, you’re within the margin of error. And if you’re in a plus-10 district, you’re underwater.”

Chair, if Trump or GOP plus-15 districts are within the margin, and plus-10 districts are underwater, that means a double-digit swing toward Democrats, maybe a 15-point swing toward Democrats in Iowa. And this is a place Trump carried by 14 points. Do you think that’s where things are right now?

Hart: I think it’s quite remarkable that Steve thinks it’s that dramatic. I would tell you that we have known for a long time, since last year, when we were successful in running some special elections where we overperformed by over twenty points, that things were moving in our direction.

And things have only become even more in our direction, especially when we look at the fact that we’ve been under rule by the Republicans for ten years, and under the direction of Kim Reynolds, who is, you know, the most unpopular governor in the country, and has been for a while.

You can look and see that people are paying more at the pump, they are paying more at the grocery store, they’re paying more for their health care. In some cases, their local hospitals have shut down, or their hospitals are no longer providing certain services that they’ve got to drive farther for, and therefore, again, pay more money in increased costs.

These are all things that have caused people to say, you know what, if I want things to change, which I desperately need them to change, then I’m going to have to vote for some Democrats and wake these Republicans up.

Sargent: Well, that is a remarkable turn of events. Let’s talk about the Iowa districts that are in play here. There’s Iowa’s First District, which is represented by Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks. Trump won that district by 8.5 points. There’s Iowa’s Second, which is an open seat—Trump won that by 10 points.

And then there’s Iowa’s Third, represented by Republican Zach Nunn, which Trump won by four points. Can you describe the demographic makeup of these districts? How rural are they? How working-class are they? What’s their makeup?

Hart: Well, we’ll start with the First District. You know, that’s a district that I ran for Congress in, back in 2020. And it is a rural district. I mean, Iowa City is the largest city in that district, but it is quite a few counties along the Mississippi River, and it goes all the way to the Missouri border. It’s a fairly rural district.

The Second District, we’re talking, again, a lot of rural counties, along with the city of Dubuque and Cedar Rapids, so there’s an urban-rural mix there. The largest city in the Third District, of course, is Des Moines, which is very urban, and so that is probably the most urban of the four districts, but it also includes some rural counties as well in that Third District.

Sargent: Well, let’s go back to Steve Deace’s eruption for a sec. What’s critical is that he blamed Trump, particularly his war, for the brutal political situation Republicans are in. He talked about the war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

He actually compared this to the COVID lockdown and the bank bailout in terms of unpopularity, and those things were not popular in Iowa, or anywhere else. And he said this: “Here in the cheap seats, it feels like another Middle East war quagmire, regular folks are paying for on both ends all over again.” Chair, what’s your reaction to that? Is that how you think voters are seeing it?

Hart: I hear this all the time from our voters, that they don’t understand the logic of this war. Now, of course, you’re going to have a certain number of folks who are still hopeful, right? They voted for Donald Trump three times. They have a notion that he is smarter than everyone else, that he’s got a plan, and if he just gets a little more time, that he’s going to show that he’s got it under control.

But the vast majority of people have never understood the rationale behind this war. They don’t understand exactly why we went into it. And it’s understandable why they don’t, because the story has changed too much.

You know, here we are with high gas prices, with high diesel prices, and the tariffs continue. All of that is wreaking havoc on our Iowa economy, which is very ag-dependent. And I would tell you right now, we’re facing a very tough harvest. We’ve been very wet, and the future doesn’t look good. It doesn’t look like it’s going to dry off.

They’re telling us that we can count on one or two dry days, and then it’s going to rain again. A wet harvest is really difficult, takes longer, it’s more discouraging, and it costs more. And so farmers are really under the gun, and that puts our entire economy in jeopardy. So there’s a lot of reasons why, again, people are not happy about the Iran war, they’re not happy about the tariffs and the costs that they’re going to bear.

Sargent: So let’s talk about the Democratic candidates for a second. They are Christina Bohannan in the First District, Lindsay James in the Second, and Sarah Trone Garriott in the Third. Can you just give us a one-sentence description of each of them?

Hart: Sure. So Christina Bohannan is a candidate who is smart, who has run great campaigns. This is her third time to run in this district. She knows this district well, and she is determined, as is evidenced by that, to represent the members of the First District in Congress.

Our Second Congressional District candidate is Lindsay James, who is a former pastor—a present pastor, I guess—who has been a state representative, who is smart and capable, and really is a caring individual who is very charismatic and works really hard.

Our Third District is Sarah Trone Garriott, also a very scrappy woman, who has won in Republican districts and has taken on some incumbents with a lot of clout and managed to win those districts.

And our Fourth Congressional District—I’m going to add that, because I think he’s a great candidate as well—Dave Dawson, who is a former state representative and is, again, somebody who really cares about this state and wants to see better representation in the Fourth District.

Sargent: Well, we’re getting a lot of leaks from Republicans right now. Politico reports that Republicans may be giving up on the Georgia and North Carolina Senate races. I bring those up because they’re places with a lot of red rural areas in them, just like Iowa.

So you can see similar things happening in places like western North Carolina, parts of Georgia, and rural Iowa. One Republican explained to the Times, meanwhile, that Republicans are running from Trump now because, quote, “this is survival mode time for Republicans.”

Can I ask, though—Iowa is sort of a different kind of place. It’s much redder than either Georgia or North Carolina. It’s one of Trump’s real success stories. He turned it into a much more red state.

I think people would be shocked to know that Barack Obama carried Iowa twice, and Trump has really transformed it. Is there a shot at winning? If you had to make the call now, if the election were today, how many of those House races are you going to win in Iowa?

Hart: I guess I would tell you, Greg, you never know. I’m—you have to understand that I am somebody who the polling was really high on before election day, and then we ended up losing that race by six votes. So I never take anything for granted. We don’t know what people are going to do until they enter that voting booth. But what I can tell—I’m going to push it back on you a little bit, Greg, on saying that Iowa is not as red as you might think, right?

I mean, because we’ve had these close races in the past. We haven’t gotten them across the finish line, so then it looks a lot redder than it is. But I have a lot of faith in the Iowa voters. They are practical, they are smart, they do their homework, and they are looking for a candidate that’s going to represent them. They want people who are going to not only tell them what they want to hear, but actually act on it. And our Democratic candidates are ready to go to work for them.

And that’s what I’m counting on, is that the average voter in Iowa is going to recognize that the Democratic candidates are going to make a difference if they just give them a shot. Because that’s what they look for.

They look for who’s going to represent me best. And they’re smart enough, and understand the political situation enough, to know that if you want different results—and right now we need different results—you’ve got to vote for something different. So those people who have been voting Republican are going to give our Democratic candidates a shot.

Sargent: Well, so it seems like, on paper, the ingredients are in place for Democrats to win some of these areas that Trump won, again, by ten points, one of the districts, 8.5, another one of the districts. The two main ingredients seem to me to be, number one, deep, deep dissatisfaction with Trump and a big collapse in support for Trump, including among rural voters, including among non-college whites—the MAGA coalition essentially breaking up. That’s ingredient number one.

And ingredient number two is Democrats having candidates that are matched well to the districts. Those two things together create a situation where, all of a sudden, voters are willing to listen to Democrats where they were not willing to before.

Is that something you’re seeing kind of on a day-to-day basis? Are voters who normally just tune out Democrats—they think of Democrats as culturally alien—are those voters opening their ears to what Democrats are saying now?

Hart: Well, I certainly hope so. And I would tell you that that’s been our strategy throughout this cycle. We understand that people have been looking to Democrats for a different kind of representation. And I would tell you that we struggle here in Iowa to present ourselves as Iowa Democrats, in light of the negative connotations that have gone along with national Democrats, right?

Iowa Democrats are not the extreme folks that we sometimes see in the national news. So our strategy has been that we’ve got to get our ordinary Democrats, who have so much in common with any other Iowa voter, to get to the doors, to talk to folks, to let them know that there’s much more that we agree on than we disagree on, and that there’s been an overemphasis on the social issues.

And that, as a result, that’s caused some people to dismiss Democrats out of hand, when those Democrats should be considered, because they’re the folks that are going to work the hardest and show up, and their priority is working Iowans, people who need that kind of representation and haven’t been getting it.

So we’ve got an organizational plan that gets folks to the doors, that has these one-on-one conversations, so that we recognize, again, that it’s time for change. Things have not gone well here in Iowa because of the result of one-party rule for 10 years. Democrats understand they’re prioritizing the issues that are most important to the average Iowa voter. And that if we work together, we can start to turn this state around. So it’s time to vote for change.

Sargent: Well, the third ingredient that I think you probably need for voters to be opening their ears to Democrats is this kind of full-scale betrayal of rural America that we’ve seen from Donald Trump, which is, I think, not like something we’ve seen before. Tariffs, trade war with Canada, the war driving up diesel prices, the cuts that are closing rural hospitals—the list is really endless.

I’ve not seen an opportunity like this open up in my lifetime for Democrats to regain ground in rural America. So are Democrats leaning into this enough right now? Beyond just winning these immediate races, is there the potential for something really significant to happen in terms of repairing some of those relationships?

Hart: Well, absolutely. And that’s crucial to all of us—you know, whether you are on the Republican side, whether you’re an independent, or you’re a Democrat. We have got to elect people that are going to start bringing us together as a society. You know, we’ve got so many things that we can point to that have driven us apart.

And I would like people to take Donald Trump up on his challenge to say, vote like Donald Trump is on the top of the ticket right now. Because he has not made good decisions for Iowa. He has not made good decisions for the people. He has benefited from this personally, financially. His family has done that as well. This is a corrupt administration, and people are tired of being taken advantage of.

So yeah, we’ve got to not only reach out and have those kinds of conversations where we find things in common for this cycle, but we’ve got to build for the future, so that we have a stronger Iowa and a stronger United States of America as we come out of this spin that we’ve been in.

Sargent: Do you think that your candidates right now are ahead in all those three races?

Hart: I think that this is going to be a very tight race. We’ve got 40 days left. We’re going to do everything we can to make sure that it isn’t as tight as it seems right now. And we’ve got to make sure that our voters have every opportunity to get to know our candidates better, from now until November 3, so that we can get more of their votes.

Sargent: And is the money there? Donald Trump’s own super PAC, or at least its affiliates, are spending money—investing in, or reserving time in—at least two of these Iowa districts. Two of them, the ones that are Trump plus 8.5 and Trump plus 10, his super PAC is putting money into those districts. Are you getting outspent in these places?

Hart: Yeah, they’re pumping millions and millions of dollars in there. I’ve never been one to believe that we have to match the spending, but we have to have enough resources to fight back effectively. And so that’s what we are doing.

I think it’s a good sign for us that they’ve been pouring these millions of dollars in, and yet the polls still keep us in the game. That’s a good sign for us. I think that people are smart—especially as they see these negative ads, and they see how many lies are in these negative ads, they are smart enough to reject that and say, what is really happening here? And give our candidates a chance.

So yes, money is always a problem, and we are working very hard to make sure that we have enough resources. But the bottom line is, our candidates are the better choice, because they’ve got more solutions that are going to be important to average Iowans.

Sargent: Are you going to have enough, or do you need financial reinforcements right now?

Hart: We cannot raise enough money. That’s the bottom line. And so, yeah, anyone who is looking for good results here in November ought to be helping out financially as much as possible.

Sargent: Chairwoman Rita Hart, thank you so much for joining us. Good luck out there.

Hart: Thank you. Good luck to all of us.

That liberal leaders have woken up to the need to do something is a good thing, however long in coming. But whether proposing legislation under the banner of “reform” is the right thing is another question. Indeed, the abrupt conversion of ordinarily cautious figures like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to unspecified “dramatic” reform could be a diversion, hoisted to persuade frustrated constituents that their leaders are finally up for the transformative change they crave—all while those leaders still shrink from tackling the essential turnabout prerequisite to any viable strategy for regaining traction in the ongoing war over the Constitution and the courts.

That prerequisite—what Dems and liberals need, first, last, and foremost—is a politically marketable vision of how the actions and agenda of this rogue band of justices has sabotaged the material interests and aspirations of middle- and working-class American families and individuals. Moreover, the illumination of how the agenda of the conservative bloc unlawfully flouts prized statutory and constitutional safeguards—and how its warped vision conflicts with the designs of the Framers who crafted those laws and provisions—is paramount.

Without that undergirding, any reform proposals Democrat leaders assemble will be dismissed—including by many Democratic constituents—as a partisan gimmick. If that perception takes hold, the Supreme Court reform boomlet will likely lose political momentum and fizzle out entirely.

Earlier, I wrote that the right-wing justices will be wary of reform proposals and may temper their reactionary ambitions—but only if and as long as those initiatives are politically credible. If Supreme Court reform is unmasked as a political paper tiger, those justices will pounce, emboldened that they can get away with whatever their hard-right political-ideological agenda dictates.

Indeed, the evidence of the last few terms indicates that this perverse boomerang has already occurred. Contrast the court’s 2022–23 term, when the conservative justices’ sharp zigs to the left shocked court-watchers, with their zags to the far right during their most recent term, three short years later.

Over the course of the 2022–23 term (among other surprises), the justices rebuffed right-wing activists’ invitations to emasculate long-standing voting safeguards, refusing to gut fundamental provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and to embrace an antidemocratic doctrinal theory that could have empowered state legislatures, not voters, to dictate election results. The justices similarly rejected a radical concept that would have materially furthered a reactionary project touted by all six of the justices on the right—dismantling the federal “administrative state”—by dismissing a suit aimed at eliminating Congress’s authority to tie regulatory strings to federal funding grants.

But during this most recent term, the right-wing justices turned those barely three-year-old left-leaning rulings on their heads. Shedding Chief Justice John Roberts’s 2022 praise for the VRA’s “stringent,” explicitly “race-conscious” safeguards as “the most successful civil rights statute in the history of the nation,” Roberts and his colleagues returned to the form of a decades-long prior record redolent with hostility to the VRA.

As election law expert Richard Hasen pointed out, in decisions in April and May 2026, the court’s entire six-justice ultraconservative bloc parroted “the rationale of Justice Samuel Alito’s dissent” to the chief’s 2023 invalidation of racially discriminatory Alabama congressional districts. As Hasen noted, the court’s 2026 swerve brought “back the requirement that minority voters prove discriminatory intent—in contravention of Section 2’s text, congressional intent, and common sense.”

In a less-noticed but equally cataclysmic and a-textual 2026 volte-face, the six-justice bloc on the court’s right shredded a three-year-old 7–2 decision, in which four of them (Roberts, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett) had joined, upholding Congress’s long-standing broad authority to tie conditions to federal funding grants. This June, those four conservatives flipped, now echoing Justices Alito’s and Thomas’s dissents from their prior ruling. The new decision embraces a head-scratcher of a “theory” that a federal law implementing Congress’s constitutionally specified authority is somehow not a law at all but a mere contract offer to potential recipients of federal largesse. Thus, the decision illogically held, Congress cannot constitutionally empower individuals to sue state agencies or officials that violate conditions prescribed in such laws. This effectively stripped Congress of its only realistically effective tool to ensure that those conditions are not empty paper promises.

In short, liberal leaders have ample evidence for their diagnosis. As Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer noted, “The Supreme Court has become a morass, both ethically and substantively.” Schumer’s colleague California Senator Adam Schiff referred to the high court as “a partisan and retrograde institution.” Jamie Raskin, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, accused the Roberts court of returning “to the historic baseline of political white supremacy.” Due to its evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, Raskin observed that “by 2028, we will probably see an all-white congressional delegation from the deep South.”

But getting right how far the ultraconservative bloc has gone off the rails does not prove that any specific reform measures or centering the “Supreme Court reform” label is the right strategy to get the court back on track.

To merit liberals’ investing energy and resources in the heavy political lift required for any legislative initiative, such an undertaking needs to meet three criteria. First, the proposal must be feasible: There must be a credible path to enactment, however challenging or long-term. Next, it should be of some benefit to liberals’ own interests, policy goals, values, or political infrastructure. Finally, it must benefit the public interest—in this case, it must improve the Supreme Court’s capacity to perform its constitutional roles of adjudicating alleged governmental incursions on individual and minority rights; responding to claims that Congress, the executive branch, or state governments have strayed beyond their constitutionally prescribed missions; and to uphold the rule of law.

Those criteria narrow the options for would-be Supreme Court reformers. To begin with, any proposal requiring a constitutional amendment plainly flunks the feasibility test. Without a massive, currently unforeseeable mobilization of support reaching well rightward beyond Democratic constituencies, this isn’t going to happen. That means a much-touted reform idea—replacing life tenure with term limits for justices or for federal judges at all levels—is off the table.

The above conclusion seems unavoidable, despite work-arounds offered by term limit advocates. In July of this year, a cadre of Democrat senators led by Rhode Island’s Sheldon Whitehouse introduced a bill that would establish by statute prescribing “18-year term limits and regularized appointments for Supreme Court justices.”

“Under the legislation,” Whitehouse explained, “a new justice would take the bench every two years and spend 18 years participating in all Supreme Court cases,” after which he or she, though retaining life tenure, would be pushed upstairs—elevated to “senior status” and limited to innocuous duties not including hearing cases that reach the court through appellate review.

To be sure, enactment of such a law might be plausible if in 2028 Democrats capture control of both houses of Congress and the White House and a majority of Senate Democrats vote to dispense with the filibuster. But the prospects for any such law surviving a constitutional challenge in this Supreme Court are dim at best. Reformers might expect the justices would be loath to brook the broad public majorities supportive of term limits for Supreme Court justices. But, more likely, current support for term limits among Republican voters will collapse, once they are exposed to criticisms leveled by their leaders. In that event, the conservative justices will feel free to vote their druthers, confident that quashing term limit legislation will stick.

Alongside term limits, another reform proposal popular among Democratic leaders is “court expansion,” skewered by its opponents as “court-packing.” The statutorily prescribed number of slots for justices has remained at nine since 1869, notably including in 1937, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt failed to gain enactment of a bill authorizing addition of one new justice for every incumbent over the age of 70. Today, House Democrats appear to be coalescing behind a proposal to increase the number of seats on the court to 13, to match the number of federal circuit courts of appeal. At the House Judiciary Committee’s May 21 hearing, Jamie Raskin spelled out a commonsense case for that number:

We got 13 circuits, but we only have nine justices. So … for entire federal regions, four federal circuits will be left out completely.… Worse [today] we’ve got five justices from New York City alone, one for each borough. But you’re telling a majority of the people who live in a majority of the states that they can’t find anybody qualified to serve on the Supreme Court.

The Constitution is silent on the size of the Supreme Court, and before 1869, the number of slots fluctuated frequently, for precisely the kind of purely partisan or ideological motivations that opponents would seek to discredit in any such contemporary court expansion proposal. So if Democrats score a trifecta in 2028, and vote out the filibuster, an expansion bill such as Raskin’s would surely pass constitutional muster and, hence, the feasibility hurdle.

But the tougher questions court expansion proposals must face involve the other two essential prerequisites to liberal embrace: Will such a measure, if it becomes law, deliver net benefits to Democrats and liberals? And will it serve the public interest? For both questions, court expansion is problematic. The reason for this is no secret. As soon as Republicans regain the tripartite control of the federal branches they enjoy today, they will add enough seats to give their appointees a majority, canceling any advantage for Democrats and liberal justices.

Hence, creating new court slots by statute makes partisan sense only if Democrats are confident that they can retain control of the government for the foreseeable future, or at least remain in a position to block Republican legislation to regain their court majority. Furthermore, the partisan tit for tat will ultimately trivialize the court’s stature—and not only liberals but the nation will lose a respected bastion for protecting liberal minority rights, limiting executive and congressional lawlessness, and upholding the rule of law.

Indeed, the Democrats’ sole witness at the May 21 hearing, Harvard Law professor Nikolas Bowie, told the committee that it should thus sideline altogether the Supreme Court and the Article 3 judicial branch as power players in national law and policymaking. Bowie recommended stripping federal courts of the core power they have held since 1803 to declare federal laws violative of the Constitution. Per Bowie’s urgings: “When the court defies federal law by declaring it unconstitutional—by announcing that the views of five or six unelected lawyers are superior to and beyond the reach of every official 340 million Americans have the power to elect—the court disrespects your oaths and undermines the possibility of republican governance itself.”

But kneecapping the Supreme Court’s ability to check overreach by the political branches disserves fundamental interests of liberals and of the public. Zealots like Bowie, who fixate on the court’s admittedly pro-business, antisocial reform tilt through much of its history, should have been cautioned just days ago, on Friday, September 14, to acknowledge a broader picture. That evening, a 7–2 Supreme Court majority, including three Trump appointees, upheld decisions by lower court judges, likewise including Trump appointees, that enjoined Trump’s scheme to conscript the United States Postal Service to block millions of mail ballots this November. As underscored by this and other court-aborted Trumpist assaults on constitutional democracy, liberal governance requires an independent judiciary armed with the power to declare “what the law is,” as Chief Justice John Marshall indelibly wrote two centuries ago.

At this juncture, liberal leaders should think twice before squandering time and political capital on magic-bullet institutional makeover solutions—including Supreme Court expansion and term limits—that are either unenactable or, if enacted, would not reliably benefit liberal interests, or both. Since such proposals will be perceived as fronting the cause of a judiciary more congenial to liberals, they will stagnate, unless liberals first market a persuasive account of how this radical right judiciary has and continues to upend long-enshrined, essential legal guarantees of ordinary Americans’ basic needs and aspirations, and lay out a credible roadmap of how liberal redirection of the courts will—lawfully—rectify that catastrophic upheaval.

As it happens, there is one prominent reform idea that is worth centering in this effort. That reform project is enacting a sensible but enforceable code of ethics for Supreme Court justices. Such a proposal is eminently defensible on the merits. Supreme Court justices are the only officials in the federal government, including all lower court federal judges, who are not subject to a meaningful code of conduct. Substantial popular majorities, including multitudes of Republicans, support legislation to plug that gap. Most important, at the present moment, spotlighting the need for meaningful ethics strictures will provide the first step reformers most need: an effective platform for amplifying the real-world devastation from and nonexistent legal basis for what President Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general, the late Charles Fried, labeled the right-wing justices’ “tak[ing] a constitutional wrecking ball to generations of Supreme Court doctrine.”

Encouragingly, Supreme Court ethics legislation appears to be on the table. Such legislation has repeatedly been introduced and refined over the past several years, spurred by a persistent think tank named “Fix the Court,” led by CEO Gabe Roth. Very recently, leaders on both ends of the Capitol have teed up tweaked versions, ripe for hearings and floor debate. On July 23, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy introduced an updated version of his Supreme Court Ethics Act, with 14 co-signatories, including ranking Judiciary member Dick Durbin, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair Chris Van Hollen, Democratic Senate Steering and Policy Committee Chair Amy Klobuchar, and Senator Adam Schiff, the former House lead impeachment manager. Representative Hank Johnson, ranking member of the House Judiciary Courts Subcommittee, has introduced companion House Supreme Court Ethics Act bills in prior Congresses, and is expected to repeat.

Republican legislators inevitably dismiss all such ethics proposals as partisan schemes—though in not so distant years past, Supreme Court ethics reform garnered bipartisan support from leading Republican politicians, academics, and appointees. Potentially more telling, reforms along the lines of the Murphy-Johnson bill—(as well as kindred proposals from other Democrats, such as Senator Sheldon Whitehouse) find favor with rank-and-file Republicans.

On September 17, a Marquette Law School poll reported that the proposition “Enforce a strict ethics code for the justices” was approved by 91 percent of Democrat respondents—and an identical 91 percent of Republicans. By contrast, “Increase the number of justices” produced an expectable partisan split: Democrats voted 68 percent for, 32 percent against, whereas Republicans were 65 percent against, 35 percent for. Given this extraordinary bipartisan support, at least some congressional Republicans might mute opposition to a bill like Murphy-Johnson.

The current Murphy-Johnson iteration effectively closes the most critical—yawning—gaps in existing ethics constraints on the justices. At the same time, the bill eliminates or adjusts earlier provisions criticized by Chief Justice Roberts and respected academic experts, such as law professor Amanda Frost, for testing constitutional separation-of-powers boundaries and unnecessarily burdening both the court and litigants before it.

Grudgingly acknowledging that he couldn’t beat something with nothing, Roberts in 2023 herded his cats to agree on a “voluntary” ethics code, though one quickly labeled more loophole than law. Murphy-Johnson closes the most damaging of those loopholes. More important, it also puts teeth in a federal ethics statute applicable to all federal judges and “justices,” on the books since 1948. This law, Section 455 of the federal criminal code (widely known as “Section 455”) is strongly worded but has been ignored, especially by the Supreme Court’s nine members.

Section 455 expressly mandates that federal judges and justices recuse from “any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned,” and, more specifically, recuse if “the judge or the judge’s spouse … is known by the judge to have an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding.” Those criteria should, for example, require Justice Clarence Thomas’s recusal from cases over which he notoriously presided, which potentially implicated his wife Ginni’s involvement in promoting the overturning of the 2020 election.

But Thomas, Alito, and other justices, including Democratic appointees, treat Section 455 as a ghost law. They feel free to get away with this misbehavior because of two gaping deficiencies in the ethics legal architecture pertinent to the court. The first gap is the absence from its terms of any mechanism for implementing or enforcing its substantive guarantees. The second deficiency is that resolution of specific questions about justices’ compliance with Section 455, or even with their own (inadequate) 2023 code of conduct, is left entirely to the individual justices themselves, with no accountability or transparency to the court as a whole, let alone to any individual or entity outside the justices’ control.

The Murphy-Johnson Supreme Court Ethics Act addresses these two fatal flaws, meaningfully but prudently. Its key provisions require the Supreme Court itself to “issue a code of conduct” applicable to each justice that “at a minimum incorporates the requirements of Section 455.” For implementation and enforcement, the bill requires the court to appoint an “Ethics Investigations Counsel”—roughly similar to inspectors general for executive agencies—“who shall adopt rules providing for the enforcement of the code of conduct.” The counsel is given a renewable term of four years, and is made removable by the court (only) for cause—traditionally a high bar. Further, the bill authorizes individual justices to rule on recusal motions by litigants but requires public disclosure by the justice of the “reasons for the denial of the motion.”

Apart from the merits, and even if Republican legislators double down on their lockstep opposition, vetting such commonsense ethics safeguards in committee, on the House and Senate floor, and elsewhere, will provide ample opportunity to galvanize media and public understanding of, and opposition to, the justices’ reactionary, law-defying actions and agenda that cry out for rectification. This path, at worst, leads to an opportunity to consistently call out the Roberts court’s most egregious misdeeds, paving the way for higher public support for reforms of all stripes—thus ensuring that the momentum behind change won’t burn out at the first obstacle.

Perry Bacon: And I’m Perry Bacon, the host. I’m joined by one of my colleagues, Monica Potts, who writes about class politics, the working class, which we’ll come back to in a little bit, and policy, particularly on economics as well. So Monica, thanks for joining me.

Monica Potts: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

Bacon: So we’re going to talk about two pieces you wrote recently that I thought were really important and interesting. The first is—I tell people all the time, “We don’t write the headlines,” but in this case I think the headline does capture something about the piece: “The term working class is useless.” So talk about—in political coverage, the term working class is used. But that really is a synonym for what? Why is the term working class being used improperly right now? What are we talking about when we’re defining the working class in most articles right now?

Potts: Yeah. I think part of the issue that I wanted to get into is that everybody means something different when they say it. But I would say most of the time in politics, people are using it as a shorthand for people who didn’t graduate from college, so they don’t have a bachelor’s degree.

Bacon: That’s about 60 percent of US adults, something like that, right?

Potts: Yeah. It’s a huge group of people. Only about a third to maybe 35 percent of Americans have bachelor’s degrees at any given time. It doesn’t mean that those other people didn’t go to college. A lot of people go to college and drop out, actually.

And so it’s just the majority of Americans. It encompasses a huge number of people who are making their living in entirely different ways. It includes people who might be married to someone with a bachelor’s degree. And I would say too, if you don’t have a bachelor’s degree, that means something entirely different in New York City or Washington, DC, where a lot of writers live, versus where I’m from in rural Arkansas, or where I live now in rural upstate New York.

Bacon: So why has working class come to be defined as not having a bachelor’s degree?

Potts: I would say partly because it’s easiest. When we do exit polling, when we do surveys, a lot of the time the people who conduct those ask people about their education level, so it’s very easily measured.

And so a lot of people during the Obama era started to make the argument that was a good enough synonym, or a good enough proxy, to use for people who were working class, because generally having a bachelor’s degree correlates with having maybe a managerial position, or having a white-collar job, or making more money.

And not having a bachelor’s degree means that you might make less than the median, or you might be a worker that we think of, a blue-collar worker, or somebody who has a boss that they have to answer to. All of the other sociological definitions of working class are very involved and specific, and sociologists and economists are probably still going to use the term working class no matter what I say, because they have a very specific definition.

But I say it’s not a good proxy, and it’s especially not a good proxy for the people who are in Trump’s camp, which are older Americans—

Bacon: Let me jump back a little bit. You said something about the Obama era. In 1987, would we have defined working—there’s no defined view, but in 1987 were people less likely to say college, non-college means working class? How was working class defined in, like, 1987?

Potts: Yeah. First of all, the landscape was different. Even fewer people had college degrees. And I think that in 1987, working class, what it still connotes today, might have been closer to true. It was usually a man working in a factory, working in construction, working in a manual labor job or a physical labor job. And so I think that’s still what we think of. The economy has changed a lot.

What happened in the Obama era is that how people without college degrees voted switched. So it used to be that people with college degrees voted Republican pretty reliably, and people without college degrees, we tend to think of them as the union base in the past, voted for Democrats. And that completely flipped in the Obama era, and it’s still flipping today. It’s one of the biggest divides in American politics.

Bacon: So what would be a more useful definition of working class?

Potts: I think a more useful definition of working class screens out for income first. So in today’s economy especially, you have people with bachelor’s degrees who would otherwise identify, and be identified, as working class. So they are workers. They show up, they clock in, somebody’s monitoring them. They have bosses, they have managers. They’re not in control of their working hours.

The median income for families in America in 2026 was about 87,000, and for full-time workers it was about 66,000. Social workers, teachers, a lot of them make less than that. They have bachelor’s degrees. So I would lop off income first. Somebody without a bachelor’s degree who makes more than $100,000 a year, that’s a different story, and those people do exist.

Bacon: So let me just stop you for a second. The median income for a full-time worker is $66,000, you’re saying, for one individual. So somebody who makes $60,000, you’d say is in the working class, even if they have four degrees?

Potts: You could make an argument. Because another component I would say that you have to look at, in addition to income, is the kind of job that they have. So a freelance writer with a master’s degree might make $66,000 a year because they’re working on a book, and they’re not earning as much income.

So I think that sociologists and economists look at the kinds of jobs people are doing as well, and that also matters, I think, to working class. Because if you’re in complete control of your workday, your work life, and you’re making less money for reasons that you chose, it’s a different story, I would say. It doesn’t mean you’re not struggling, but I don’t think the term working class is useful in that situation.

Bacon: But part of what you’re saying is that in 1987, the working class might be a man in a factory. Part of that was already always problematic, because plenty of people of color, and women—we’re probably really talking about white men—were working class in 1987. And also, factory never covered the—there were plenty of people working as domestics and so on, and all kinds of other jobs. So we want to define this away from the factory job, right?

Potts: Yeah. It was more true in 1987 than it is today that that described a lot of workers. And it always left people out. And now it leaves a vast majority of the working class out, because you have people, as you said, doing domestic labor, doing home healthcare, doing healthcare, that are working class by any definition, and they might have some certifications.

And you have people doing pink collar jobs who might have bachelor’s degrees or might not, and a lot of those are women, and they’re especially women of color. So I think that is a huge reason to stop using the word working class, because our political image of what that word means hasn’t caught up to the reality.

Bacon: All right, so college education, bad way to measure working class. You’re hinting that income, work conditions are more useful. So there’s the other framing, which comes from the DSA. I think Zohran Mamdani, if you listen to him carefully, is trying to say the working class is anyone who doesn’t own capital, functionally.

Anybody who—I think he would probably say if you have a 401(k) and a house, that’s one thing. But if you own a business, if you are an executive at a big company, then you’re not in the working class, you have a lot of capital. How do you view that? So working class is like the 99 percent, on some level. It’s everyone but the real capital owners.

Potts: Yeah. I understand what he’s trying to do, and I think that politically, especially for somebody who describes themselves as a social democrat or democratic socialist, it makes sense to set workers against owners, which is what he’s trying to do. I would just call them the workers, which you can do. You and I are both workers.

But I don’t think that it’s useful to call them the working class, because I still think that carries with it a lot of assumptions about how people’s economic struggles—and people’s economic struggles are different.

You can make a super solid argument that people in the middle class today, even the upper middle class, aren’t earning enough of what they should be earning. That they’re increasing productivity and the ownership class is getting it all. You can make that argument without using a word that I think is imperfect, and used too often, and has become useless, like the working class. You can just call them workers.

Bacon: We had an academic on, on Monday, and she was talking about the fact that people in academia, journalism particularly, but other fields too, there is a precarity that I think is becoming more important in these sort of white collar jobs that used to be more stable. Journalism, very unstable. Academia, but other fields too.

So I think it is useful to say we’re in an industry with some precarity, and maybe more than it used to be, without saying we’re in the working class, right? And we do have more threat than if we owned capital and owned the business. The precarity does matter here.

Potts: I think so, yeah. And a lot of small business owners are in a very precarious position.

Bacon: That’s fair. Elon Musk is not, but right, yeah.

Potts: Yeah, exactly. So you can make a lot of arguments about the way that the economy is set up against all of those people, for various reasons, and how we should change the structure of the economy in a way that helps the vast majority of us and not the Elon Musks who are getting their unfair share. You can do that without relying on words like the working class, I think.

Bacon: So the piece made a couple of interventions, but would your goal be to say we should define the working class based on income and work conditions, not college education? Or do you think we should just abandon the whole term and be more precise?

Potts: I do think maybe journalists need to think about abandoning it, because nobody defines it, and everyone defines it differently in their pieces or in their publications. And how readers are going to read it, at this point, has become so muddled that I think it’s worth it for us, most of the time—unless we’re quoting someone, or talking about an organization that specifically targets the working class, in which case we should say how they define it—I think we should try to avoid it and be more specific, because it’s just become meaningless in journalism.

And again, I think that’s not true for organizations that do research and define it in a way that they specify every time.

Bacon: So let me push back, only to say—you cited at the beginning of your story an analysis that was published in Jacobin. I think the creators of it were the Center for Working Class Politics, and they defined working class so broadly it would include people whose incomes are $150,000 a year.

So they’re stretching working class to pretty upper middle class income. So my thought is that you and I, and most reasonable people, could agree that working class probably does not include people whose income is $200,000 a year if they don’t have a college degree. I think it’s obvious that working class doesn’t include Bill Gates, who doesn’t have a BA.

So is part of the effort here, by the sort of class left and the sort of centrist Democratic center, to define working class in a way that makes that bloc more Republican, if I want to say that? If you define working class the way you or I are defining it, you would include Black women who have college degrees with low income, and you’d probably include more Democrats, is my guess, right?

Potts: Yeah. All of this started in a way that was trying to figure out what had happened when people elected Trump in 2016. And that was the year that the non-college educated, especially non-college educated whites, but more recently there’s been a shift to non-college educated Latinos and Black voters, towards the Republican Party.

And there’s a certain group of people who want that to be a class story. They want it to be an economic story. They want it to be a money story. And I think using the term working class tries to communicate that in some way, that these people are voting for Trump because of the economy.

Bacon: And the centrists wanted it to be an elitism story. So the working class is a different set. But anyway, go ahead.

Potts: Yeah. And there’s been a similar effort at the same time by Republicans and by the right to define anyone associated with college, anyone who has a college degree, anyone who works at a college especially, as elite. And that is just not true. And so I think that partly I would want to avoid working class because I wouldn’t want to play into that game. Especially, but also because working class has become now a political identifier.

So you see Republicans being more likely, at any income level and no matter their job, to identify themselves as working class. It used to be that everybody in America wanted to identify themselves as middle class.

And I do think that those broad trends do speak to a sense of precarity that people feel, but they also speak to a lot of other things. A business owner, or somebody who owns a really big farm in the South who doesn’t want changes to the guest worker program that would require him to pay his workers more, and who doesn’t want taxes on the land that he owns, may be operating on thin margins, but their interests in the economy are different from someone who’s a social worker earning $45,000 a year who thinks that they should be paid more.

Bacon: Because I was reading your piece, I thought, if we define working class as $60,000 of income or below, and we can define different fields you’re in, and you don’t have paid leave, there probably are policies that would help everyone or most people in that class of people. Versus, what policy would benefit everyone who doesn’t have a BA seems very broad and hard to understand. Versus, what policy would help people who are below a certain income—I think I could get pretty closely to coming up with a policy, right?

Potts: Yeah, exactly. And I think that’s where the specificity comes in. How Mamdani defines the working class is anybody who doesn’t own things. There are policies that would help that vast group of people. They’re different from things like increasing the minimum wage, which does help.

I think increasing the minimum wage usually helps everyone, but that specifically helps people who make minimum wage now. And so I think that if you’re talking about specific policy interventions, it’s just useful to be more specific.

Bacon: So this college, non-college thing is happening, as you said. It is true that college graduates have become more Democratic the last 20 years, and non-college graduates have become more Republican.

And by saying working class, that implies that Republicans have great economic policies for low-income people and Democrats don’t, when it’s, of course, the opposite. Or, Democrats aren’t great on that, but they’re better than Republicans are. So if the education story is not about class and economics, what is it about?

Potts: It’s hard to exactly say, but I think there are a lot of things going on. One is that people who live in rural America are usually much less likely to have a bachelor’s degree than people who live in cities. So that divide is already well-described, and I think it could partly be correlated with that.

I think that you have a lot of people without bachelor’s degrees who are trying to make their living as a business owner, and they have economic reasons that they might be invested in trying to align themselves with the Republican Party.

The economics of the Republican Party as traditionally the party of small businesses might be appealing to them for other reasons. And even if the income that they bring home is not that much, they think of themselves as a business owner.

And I think also that different things happen when you go to college. If you go and you stay in college and you liked it, then you liked the kind of education that college provides, which tends to be something that people with a more liberal upbringing would appreciate in a different way than somebody who has a more conservative upbringing, or somebody who believes that they should stay home and raise a family.

Bacon: Both choosing to go to college, and maybe attending college, puts you in a more multicultural, pluralistic environment. Is that what we’re hinting at?

Potts: Yeah, exactly. And so if you like it, and you stay—and also, if you have a bachelor’s degree, you’re going to usually find better job opportunities in cities, and so you’re going to go to a city, which helps reinforce that urban-rural divide.

And additionally, if you’re in a different economic bracket in your upbringing, you’re more likely to go to college as well. And so a lot of what we’re talking about with non-college-educated voters, and areas with a lot of non-college-educated voters, they are people who are eligible to vote, but least likely to vote.

So in places like where I grew up in rural Arkansas, you have people who didn’t go to college who are still working at the jobs they got in high school at Taco Bell or McDonald’s or other fast food places, or they’re working at Dollar General, or if they got lucky, they got a job as a clerk at the local government building or something like that.

And so I think that group of people, in their earlier years especially, are least likely to vote. And I think that’s who we often are thinking about when we’re thinking about the policies that would help low-income workers the most, and they’re not even voting necessarily. So I think that’s an important thing to keep in mind.

Bacon: So if the Democratic Party is trying to reach people with lower incomes, versus the Democratic Party is trying to reach people without college degrees, how would those look different, we think? I think the problem is the second, not the first. But if you were trying to reach people with lower incomes, you would do X. What would you do if you’re trying to reach people who don’t have college degrees? How would that be different, maybe?

Potts: Reaching people who don’t have college degrees?

Bacon: Yes. Versus reaching people who have lower incomes. We’re talking about two different dimensions of class, I think. How would they result in different politics is what I’m trying to ask.

Potts: I wouldn’t try to moderate on economic policy issues that are aimed at the kinds of people who voted for Trump. If somebody voted for Trump and is a non-college degree holder and is a car salesman and makes actually a pretty good living, then that person is not going to be swayed by—

Bacon: Raising the minimum wage. They have the money.

Potts: Yeah, increasing the minimum wage. I think it’s incumbent upon any progressive who cares about democracy in the US to really worry about how low our turnout rates are for elections, and to try to get more people registered to vote, make voting easier, and get them in to vote, which I think would change the map a little bit. It would change the denominator on who’s voting where.

And so then you might get the 22-year-old clerks at Dollar General who are least likely to vote now thinking about what policies would help them. I think things like increasing the minimum wage and a public option for healthcare would help a lot of people, whether they identify as working class or not.

And so I think the mistake that the parties make is when they try to misread why people are voting the way that they’re voting. And so, people without a college degree who are voting Republican, it’s not necessarily economics that has switched them over, or not economics in the way that we’re thinking about it.

Bacon: And we think using the word working class might put in your brain that we’re talking about economics. That’s part of the issue, right?

Potts: Yeah. We’re talking about people who are struggling economically. We’re talking about workers. And working class comes from a kind of materialistic view of the world. It’s just inherently part of an economic framework that we understand, and that’s why I think that talking about working class is not useful for political journalists, maybe not for politicians either.

Bacon: So the exit polls do include income, though, right? So should we just quote that more? I think Kamala did worse among lower income people than, like, Al Gore did too. But would it be better to start with income?

People are always going to write stories and so on. Your point would be to do income, education, race, religion separately, and not do a mega category of working class?

Potts: Exactly, yeah. Working class, I think, is not a good proxy for the things that people are trying to use it to talk about. And also, in 2024, people felt like the economy was bad, and so voting for Democrats in that context was a different story as well. So I think people overread these signals a lot as well.

Bacon: OK. Now I’m going to move to—”move” is funny. I moved to New York to pay more in taxes, and I’m glad I did. So talk about why you were living in Arkansas.

Potts: I’m from Arkansas. I’m from a small town in the southern part of the Ozarks. I had been living in DC for a lot of years as a journalist, and I’d lived on the East Coast since I left for college. And I was working on a book about my hometown, and that was a big part of the reason I moved back.

And so I lived there for five years with my partner. And there are a bunch of reasons that in the beginning we thought we might stay. It’s affordable, it’s beautiful, it’s where I’m from, my mom’s still there, and we like to live out in the country among trees and cows and horses.

And we changed our opinions over the course of being there. And one big part of it, and it wasn’t the only part, was this sort of disregard for the idea that governments can provide social services to people and can make life easier for people. So that was a huge part of it, in addition to the summers being way too hot, and climate change disrupting the climate I was used to there.

It just was really hard to get normal life done. Everything took more time. Everything from getting our city water fixed to taking our trash to the dump became a huge hassle, and I just realized how much of my life that was taking up, as opposed to the things I wanted to do, which was invest in my community and live my life and work. So that was a huge part of it, and so we moved to New York State.

Bacon: And talk about why New York State is better. What community are you in? You’re not in New York City, you’re in New York State. So what community are you in, and why is that better?

Potts: Yeah. I’m in northern Oneida County, north of Utica. And Utica’s kind of the city that we shop in, although we have stuff here too. We’re not in a super small town. But first of all, trash pickup is so much better. That sounds so—

Bacon: Very practical, trash pickup. Yes.

Potts: Yeah. It matters. That sounds so quotidian. But when you live in a place that doesn’t do stuff like that routinely, or well, it makes a huge difference on your quality of life, and everything else is like that too. Our electricity is better. Our heating system in the winter is better, and we are always in communication with those services if anything goes awry.

There’s no stray dogs and cats running around, which was a huge stressor for us in Arkansas, because dogs would just show up in your yard and there was nobody to come pick them up, because there wasn’t really robust animal control services.

Now we have roads that work. The roads are always plowed. There’s not potholes everywhere. There’s a really well-funded library system. Just everything that you don’t think about until it’s not there is better, and it makes our lives easier in that way.

Bacon: Did you move from very small town Arkansas to medium-sized town New York? And would it be different if you lived in very small town New York and medium-sized Arkansas? Or do you think these differences are state-based?

Potts: They’re state-based, yeah. And also, I live in a medium-sized town compared to—the town I moved from was 2,500 people, and the town I live in now is about 5,000 people, so it’s not that big.

Bacon: Oh, OK. I don’t think I realized that totally.

Potts: Yeah, but it is in a bigger county. But I know from experience that there was a county south of my home county in Arkansas that had the same problems that we did. They didn’t have a county level animal control. Animal control is a huge issue that, if you don’t think about, can really—

Bacon: No, I didn’t think about it.

Potts: —can really change your life. Because dogs and cats need to be taken care of and controlled. And if somebody has a loose cow, you need to know who to call about it. And so those things matter, especially in rural areas.

And then also, even when we travel up into the mountains, it’s more densely populated. Even though there are small towns here, they’re more densely populated. That makes a difference as well. But I think that there’s just a sense of an idea that we have to preserve and take care of the place that we live, that is taken for granted here, and I think it’s something you don’t realize until you move to a place where that doesn’t exist.

Bacon: So part of what has resonated with you—I live in Louisville, Kentucky, which runs better. We don’t have animal control problems. But we do have, and we didn’t get into the politics of it, all these crazy bills to ban speaking, to limit our universities. You can’t say X word in public, and all the sort of normal things: lower taxes, weak social services. The Appalachia part of the state is being disinvested from rapidly, low wages, right to work, so all the things that happen.

So when the abundance book comes out, and then we’re having this discourse about how Texas is great because you can still build up there, and California is terrible because it’s expensive, I was thinking, there’s a lot of other things going on in Texas beyond housing. The housing is—what are we missing here? And then, as far as I know, the author of Abundance, the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, does not live in Texas or Alabama.

And so I was thrown off by—there are problems in red state America, and there are benefits of being in blue state America, and I thought that discourse was frustrating to watch. And now Nick Kristof is very focused on, the test scores have gone up in Mississippi or Alabama, and why doesn’t the rest of the country learn from that?

I still think you want your kids to go to school in Massachusetts over most places. I think that’s obviously true. And so what do you think that’s about? I found this discourse to be very strange.

Potts: Yeah. I think part of it is that the lived experience that you have in those places isn’t something that you can always know from the numbers. Housing is cheap in Texas, cheaper than it is in California. But if you have a disaster in Texas, if your house is destroyed in a hurricane or a flood in Houston, you have less recourse, because the state probably allowed you to live in a place that was a flood zone without proper flood insurance, because there aren’t as many regulations.

And actually there are stories coming out of Texas like that, where low-income people who may have been able to buy houses have a much harder time recovering from those disasters and moving back to their towns, and aren’t getting back their money from the houses they bought.

And so there are a lot of regulations and a lot of protections for people that make sense, that we shouldn’t think about waiving just to build housing. If we built housing without thinking about those things, then it costs the poorest people on the back end. So yeah, you can get a cheaper house up front, but you’re more precarious, like we were talking about before, for a variety of reasons.

And I would say the same is true of Arkansas. We definitely spent more money on our house and pay higher taxes now to live in New York, and we wouldn’t trade it for the world.

There is a huge affordable housing problem, and a lot of it does come down to a lack of supply. But there are also cheap houses in places where life doesn’t provide as many opportunities, and I think that was the component missing from the abundance argument. How do we think about ways to get people opportunities in cities that they are trying to leave now?

Bacon: I guess the thing is, you’re living in New York, but not New York City. California, I think, has high housing costs in a lot of places, but Illinois, Maryland, Rhode Island—I’d be curious. Is housing unaffordable or super unaffordable where you live? Because you don’t live in New York City.

Potts: No, it’s not. Here’s the thing, and I’ve also written about this. There is very cheap housing here. It tends to be old, and it needs serious remediation, especially for things like lead paint. And so the opportunities for people to get naturally affordable housing, which is what we call just cheap housing, are slimmer, because it’s harder to get a loan, because the house might not appraise.

There are loans specifically for first-time home buyers that provide funds for doing the kinds of renovations that those homes need. They’re impossible to get, and they’re impossible to use. They’re really difficult to use. And so there are houses here that are less than $100,000, less than $200,000, that are difficult for people to buy, even though they could easily afford the mortgage payments on those. So I think that’s another component.

Bacon: Need policy in that area, probably. That would be helpful to have policy.

Potts: Yeah. We need policy for more low-income people buying cheaper, older homes, and think about how to revive that housing stock. Because if you went through Utica and tore down all the old houses and built new houses, they would be less affordable, so I think that’s part of it too. You could encourage remote workers to move to places like where I work, but unless they have a lot of cash, they can’t deal with the challenges of owning an old home.

Bacon: Because I was left, at the sort of abundance discourse, knowing what it’s like living in a red state, being like, maybe we should have better housing policies in San Francisco, in Boston, in Los Angeles, but also we should move to a blue state, but not the most expensive area in that state, is what I was thinking.

Don’t move to Alabama, and probably don’t move—maybe Texas is better, but I think if you look at the state government sitting in Texas, I don’t think you want to necessarily invest in Texas all the time, especially if you’re Black, a college professor, transgender, all these identities that the governments in these places are really against and very hostile to. I know there are plenty of Black people who live in Houston and Atlanta, but I think those state governments are not necessarily investing in them. I think it’s fairly obvious to say.

Potts: Yeah. And those cities tend to have their own money, to some degree, not always. But if you’re in a big city in a red state, you’re still going to have interventions from the state government that make the way that you want to live in that city harder. And the things that you’re talking about are really important. I experienced Arkansas as a woman, and it became harder to get OB-GYN care, because people don’t want to practice in a state where they’re—

Bacon: They’re nervous about all these laws.

Potts: They’re nervous about all the laws, and that’s true. And nobody wants to live in a place where they’re worried about what they’re going to say, and what their kids are going to learn in school, and whether their kids can get the books that they want from the library. Those are really important things about how people live their lives that I think are also underappreciated.

Bacon: So you’re in New York. What do you think about the housing issue, though, in the big cities? There is a problem there. If you were advising Zohran Mamdani, what would you say about the housing issue?

Potts: I think he’s already doing a lot of cool stuff with the land that the city already owns. I’ve written about this too, but I think the supply folks miss that developers can develop luxury apartments that go half rented and still pencil out their investment. And so nobody’s ever going to invest in building housing for very low income people. And housing for low income families in New York, as it is now, goes off area median income.

Whenever developers are required to set aside 10 or 20 percent of the units that they’re building in a building to be affordable for the area median income, the incomes can get quite high, because the area median income in New York City is quite high. So you’re still going to leave off people at the bottom.

And I think that the only answer is also more robust public housing, and people call it social housing now. But almost any country that houses its lower income people and low income workers, and even early career workers who aren’t making as much as they will later, is doing it through government intervention in the private market.

Bacon: Last thing. The piece mentions the fact that in blue states you generally have better health outcomes. That’s the main—better, usually, what else? Educational attainment, food security, median income. By most measures of societal health, blue states are ahead of red states. So that could be two things.

One, it could be that richer people choose to move to blue states, and therefore this is an effect of cohorts. Or it could be that blue states create these better conditions. Why do you think it might be the second and not the first? Or do you think it’s a combination of both?

Potts: It probably is a combination of both, especially for cities, because cities with really good numbers, it’s because they’re pulling in people who are already in a better position. And it’s self-selecting. But I have people in my family and in my life who rely on social services.

My husband is a case manager for people with health issues, and I see the kinds of services that they have access to, and the kind of care that they get, as opposed to places like Arkansas, where the social service interventions tend to concentrate on trying to get people off government programs—getting them off food stamps, getting them into work, getting them off Medicaid. Things like the work requirements that we’ve now seen pass at the national level for Medicaid, which—Medicaid’s not designed to get people into work. It’s designed to get people medical care that they need.

And once you start introducing those other ideas into that program, it interferes with the care that they need. Here I’ve witnessed with my own eyes people getting the care and the help that they need in a much more robust way.

Bacon: So you would assume the better outcomes of blue states are in part because they are providing better services?

Potts: Yeah, I believe that is true from my own experience, yeah.

Bacon: OK, final question. Since you worked at FiveThirtyEight, as did I—what are you making of, do you believe the polls? I hate to ask this. I know Elliott Morris and a lot of my friends do polling and believe in polling.

But on the one hand, I keep reading polls about the generic ballot is Democrats plus 10, Talarico’s doing well, and so on. And I know that a general election is different, but the primary polls were so bad. The Wisconsin result was totally different than what we projected. The Michigan result in the primary was much closer. I know we had these huge polling failures two months ago, but now we’re—so how do you view the polls right now?

Potts: Yeah. Elliott Morris was on On the Media talking about this, and it was no surprise to me that the primary polls were very bad. And I think that they were probably bad because of their likely voter screens. The people who turned out to vote in those primaries weren’t the same that they thought would turn out. And so I believe what the polls are telling us right now. I just don’t know what that means for November.

Bacon: Why is the likely voter sampling better for general elections than primaries? Couldn’t the same problem happen in the same way?

Potts: Yeah, the same problem could happen. I think this has been one of the challenges in the Trump era, is figuring out who’s actually going to vote. I think that it was already baked in that Democrats were going to have a much easier time this year. I think that one thing we have to be careful of is looking at races where—like in Texas, where the Republican candidate does seem very bad.

He had the ads against him about stealing pens, stealing people’s pens and stuff, which I think would be very damaging in any normal year. And compared to that, Talarico is a better candidate. I don’t know how many voters who are going to actually vote are evaluating candidates on those scales.

I don’t know if they’re just purely motivated by partisanship anymore, and partisanship is kind of this alchemy that doesn’t have to do with how people think about the issues as much as we think it does. It has to do with who you’re around, and what you’re feeling, what the vibes are. And so I think polls against vibes is always really hard to tell.

Bacon: And I guess what I’m getting at is, if you told me—if I didn’t see a poll the entire cycle, I would tell you the Republicans just won the presidency, so the Democrats are likely to win the House. It’s this very small number of seats that’ll flip. And because the Senate map is where it is and so on, the Democrats will gain one or two seats, but be short in the House.

So in some ways, I can trust the models in the sense that they already told me stuff I already knew, which is that Democrats are favored for the House, the Senate is close. The models right now are saying the Democrats are the favorites in the Senate, but I’m guessing many of these people, if they sat down with me and we discussed it, and I bet money and they bet money—if I had to bet, I would bet on Paxton winning in Texas despite every poll I’ve seen, and I would bet on Jon Ossoff not winning by 10 points or whatever. I would bet on Roy Cooper winning by two and not 12.

And so in some ways I do worry that if we’re looking at the polls seriously—but none of us really believe Roy Cooper’s going to win by 10, do we? You don’t either, it sounds like.

Monica Potts: No, I think Nate Silver’s projection the last time I looked at it was 59 percent odds of capturing the Senate for Democrats, or something like that. That’s almost a coin toss. That’s almost even.

Yeah. So I think that’s fair. I think that everything that we’re looking at, versus partisanship and structure of the Senate—you can say, “I don’t know what’s going to happen. Democrats might have a better than normal year for the Senate races,” and I believe that’s true. I think Talarico’s going to do better than we think. I don’t necessarily know if that’s going to be enough to win.

And I would be suspicious, because Texas is just conservative. It’s a conservative state. And so it really is a matter of who stays home and turns out, I think, for the most part.

And then I think the same is true of Maine. I’ve always thought Susan Collins is vulnerable, especially now, but I don’t think people there associate her with MAGA as much, and she has incumbency, and people just don’t think about politics as much as we do. And yeah, I would say they’re probably going to win the House. I don’t know by how much. And I would say the Senate is almost a coin toss.

Bacon: The Democrats are probably going to win the House.

Potts: Yeah, the Democrats are going to win the House, yeah.

Bacon: Related to the polling, I guess we’re seeing polls where Trump is in the low 30s now, or 35, 33. Again, I think it’s fair to say Trump is less popular than he was at the start of his term. I think that’s true, because the same polls are showing Trump going down. So that’s fine. I’m dubious.

I wonder if the election day exit poll will show Trump’s approval rating among the voters is more like 39 than 33. Again, I’m suggesting that maybe the sample is underselling. Is Trump more unpopular than he was this time last year? Yes. Is Trump at George W. Bush levels of unpopularity? I would say I don’t know, because the surveys are too liberal-leaning. That’s what I would say.

Potts: Also, I would say another thing that I feel like is always underappreciated is that people don’t like Trump and they still vote for him. They will think he’s doing a bad job and still vote for him. That happened in 2024. People who said, I don’t like Trump and I don’t like all these things he said, still voted for him.

Bacon: So do you mean—that doesn’t matter in this case, though. Do you think people who don’t like Trump, who are Republicans, are going to vote for the Republican? I’m saying they’re going to vote for Ken Paxton despite disapproving of Trump. Do you agree with me?

Potts: Yeah, I agree with you. So even if they disapprove of Republicans in general, they’re going to be like, Oh, it’s still better than the Democrats, or, Ken Paxton, there’s other things in place that’ll keep the worst things that they’re saying from happening. So yeah, I just don’t know.

Bacon: All right. Monica Potts, great to see you. Thanks for talking. Good to see you.

Potts: Yeah, thank you so much.

Bacon: Bye-bye.

Emily Ogden, near the start of her probing, and sometimes puzzling, new book, Darkness Becomes Bright: On the Brief Life and Immortal Art of Edgar Allan Poe, admits that she, too, “didn’t like Poe at first”: “I found him lurid and puerile. Obsessed with death and frightened of sex, he was, at the same time, a vulgar showman.” She came around only after teaching a course on his work at the University of Virginia, Poe’s alma mater, where Ogden is a professor of literature. In Darkness Becomes Bright, she takes Poe seriously indeed, staking a claim not only for his literary value but for the therapeutic resources his writings offer. Her Poe is not a concocter of hokey ghost stories: He is an excavator of repressed emotion, an explorer of existential poles, even a sacrificial figure who suffers in the reader’s place.

Poe was born in Boston in 1809 to a pair of professional actors. Orphaned by the age of three, he was taken in—though never formally adopted—by the Allans, a family of tobacco merchants in Richmond, Virginia. He excelled at Latin and at swimming: At the age of 15, he swam six miles in the James River against a strong current. Ogden sees this feat as an early sign of Poe’s lifelong propensity for the extreme. She tells us that he “used to encourage [his schoolmates] to punch him in the chest to show that he could stand the pain.”

He attended the University of Virginia for a single year, which was enough time to pick up the dissolute habits that would persist throughout his life. By the time Poe left UVA, he owed about two thousand dollars in gambling debts and was well on the road to chronic alcoholism. He commenced his literary career by publishing three little-noticed books of verse before taking up short fiction, which paid better. (Though the Allans were wealthy, they were stingy with their foster son, and he was perpetually short of funds.) As Ogden notes, the idea of making a living as a professional fiction writer was still a novel one in the 1830s, when Poe started out. A wave of new literary periodicals were hungry for fiction, as well as articles and reviews (which Poe also supplied en masse). Though he always regarded himself as a poet first and foremost—he even signed himself “Edgar A. Poe-t” on occasion—short stories written for the flourishing magazine market were how he made his livelihood, and it’s on those stories that his reputation rests.

Poe wrote in a variety of popular genres, from satire to science fiction, but he came to specialize in tales of the macabre. These were influenced by the Gothic horror of E.T.A. Hoffmann—Poe was always Eurocentric in his tastes—but infused with their own peculiarly American intensity. His stories usually deal with murder or the supernatural (or both) and are almost invariably written in the first person; his narrators are frantic wretches on the verge of insanity. They tend to be highly educated aristocrats, with fancy Latinate vocabularies and a penchant for speechifying. “Oh, outcast of all outcasts most abandoned! to the earth art thou not for ever dead? to its honors, to its flowers, to its golden aspirations?” the protagonist of “William Wilson” (one of Poe’s best stories, and one of the earliest doppelgänger narratives) cries out. As Ogden points out, Poe’s default rhetorical mode is the confession: “More than murder itself, what obsesses Poe is how to talk about murder … Can we bear to speak, and can anyone bear to listen?” His tormented men, talking to no one and everyone, presage Dostoevsky’s Underground Man and Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert (Lolita is rife with allusions to Poe). The psychological suffering of his narrators is arguably what’s most compelling about Poe’s stories, more so than their somewhat pat plots.

And Poe was certainly familiar with suffering. In 1835 he married his first cousin, Virginia Clemm, when he was 27 years old and she 13. (As Ogden points out, cousin marriage and marriage to minors were both common practices in Poe’s day, though “[it] must be said that he leaned into the incestuousness of their bond. Edgar called her Sissy, almost as if he wished that the blood relationships had been closer.”) Virginia’s health was fragile: She spent half their marriage slowly dying from tuberculosis, the same disease that killed Poe’s mother. At the age of 19, she had her first pulmonary hemorrhage, a scene Ogden permits herself to imagine in visceral detail: “The arterial blood would have been vermilion, likely a few mouthfuls or a teacupful, although some people coughed up a good deal more than that.” Poe started grieving Virginia even while she lived: “Her life was despaired of,” he wrote to a friend (a rather chilling use of the passive voice). “I took leave of her forever & underwent all the agonies of her death.” She recovered from this initial bout, but the disease continued to progress unevenly over the course of five years, condemning Poe to a “horrible never-ending oscillation between hope & despair” before she finally died in 1847, at the age of 24.

It was during the period of Virginia’s protracted illness that Poe wrote and published many of the works we remember him by today, including “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Raven.” All of them fixate on death, guilt, and decay, and it seems impossible that their author’s grim circumstances played no part in their creation. Of the composition of “The Raven,” Ogden notes: “Lenore, the lost beloved in the poem, is already gone, but Virginia is still alive. Some of [Poe’s] readers have registered the ghoulishness of his picturing the death of a dear woman while his own wife lay dying.” Yet Poe insisted, in his 1846 essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” that “The Raven” (like all his writings) had been written according to a predetermined aesthetic formula, in order to produce a calculated effect on his readers. The word “Nevermore” was selected as a refrain because “the long o [is] the most sonorous vowel,” and he chose the subject matter because “the death … of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.”

Ogden, like many a scholar before her, is skeptical of this explanation. “Here is what Poe asks us to believe,” she comments. “He wrote a poem about mourning a dead lover. His own wife was dying at the time. But he didn’t write to release an upwelling of despair.” When he says he regards the death of a beautiful woman as a mere trope, “he sounds heartless and creepy”:

He sounds like he thinks a woman’s death is a plaything, a mere abstraction. But I don’t believe he thought that. He wrote as a man to whom death was too real, not as one to whom it was not real enough. He was doing what some of us do to manage the unthinkable: making it into an intellectual problem to be solved.

Indeed, Poe seems to have dealt with the extremity of his circumstances by escaping into fantasies of still more extreme circumstances. And also, notably, into scenarios where the worst had already occurred: Poe’s narrators, for all their anguish, are recounting past traumas, not experiencing ongoing ones. It must have been a relief, of sorts.

By the mid-1840s, the Poe family’s financial situation was truly desperate. “Many of the best stories of Poe’s career are the pressurized result of his attempt to face life’s demands and death’s ultimatum at once,” Ogden says. “He wrote for crowds—he wrote so that what he wrote would sell—but he wrote in the shadow of the death that hounded him.” This duality seems to be part of why Ogden is so fascinated by Poe: He sublimated his misery into popular entertainment. If a part of Poe was a half-insane romantic, another part was a canny literary operator—one smart enough to understand the market value of a half-insane romantic. “To combine madness and strategy was his way,” Ogden observes. “A part of him plumbed the depths of human experience while another part worked angles.”

While Poe could be pragmatic, he could also be self-destructive. His inveterate drinking and gambling only exacerbated his financial burden, and he enjoyed picking pointless fights with other writers in public. In 1845, he started a feud with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the beloved author of The Song of Hiawatha; Poe accused Longfellow, baselessly, of plagiarism, and also, per Ogden, “implied that the other poet’s nose was too large.” One of his defining traits was what he himself called “the spirit of perverseness.” In Poe’s story “The Black Cat,” the narrator — who gouges out the eye of his pet cat for no apparent reason, and later hangs the animal from a homemade gallows—asks: “Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not?” Perverseness—“the unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself”—drove Poe, as it drives his protagonists, to ruin, or the brink of it, again and again. But it was also the source of his inspiration and, Ogden argues, his enduring relevance for us today.

By any measure, Poe has had an extraordinary influence. He’s a crucial figure in the American horror canon, of course—a forerunner to the likes of H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King—and is often cited as the inventor of detective fiction on the basis of the three “tales of ratiocination” he wrote featuring the amateur investigator C. Auguste Dupin, who became a model for Sherlock Holmes. Poe has also been important to modernist and avant-garde literature, thanks largely to his effect on the poet Charles Baudelaire, who translated much of his work into French and was greatly impressed by what Ogden calls “Poe’s insistence that morality and beauty had to be kept rigorously separate.” Baudelaire’s admiration raised Poe’s profile in France, and for decades his fame on the Continent dwarfed his American reputation. Ogden devotes a detailed chapter to Baudelaire and another to the Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar, another Poe aficionado, who translated Poe’s prose works into Spanish in the 1950s.

She also tracks Poe’s surprising influence on psychoanalysis. There is a strong resemblance, Ogden suggests, between Poe’s “spirit of perverseness” and Sigmund Freud’s notion of the death drive: “The two concepts circle around the same mystery: why do we frustrate ourselves?” But a more direct line of descent runs through Marie Bonaparte, a great-grandniece of Napoleon and close associate of Freud. Poe’s stories had terrified Bonaparte as a child, and when she was analyzed by Freud in the mid-1920s, she decided to deliberately induce anxiety by revisiting them. Thus, “she read Poe’s stories in the evenings, dreamed about them overnight, and recounted both the stories and the dreams to Freud in the morning.” Freud went along with the plan, though he himself was not a fan of Poe’s writing: “I was so close to throwing Poe out the door, he is too ridiculous,” he wrote to Bonaparte. A year into the treatment, he was urging her to switch to Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Don’t you think Hawthorne is refreshing, compared to such a psychopath?”

But Bonaparte, who went on to become a practicing analyst herself, remained transfixed by Poe, so much so that she published a two-volume psychoanalytic biography of him (or, as she preferred to call it, an “analysis of the dead”) in 1934. According to Bonaparte, Poe’s life and work were both determined by the early death of his mother, which “deprived [him] of the possibility of detaching from her slowly.” “In love with her and deprived of her,” Ogden summarizes, “he felt a sexual desire for dead women. He then repressed this forbidden wish and avoided sex altogether.” (Bonaparte conjectured that Poe’s marriage to Virginia was never consummated.) A central text for Bonaparte was Poe’s story “Ligeia,” in which a man’s beloved first wife dies prematurely, only to resurrect herself by possessing the corpse of his second wife. To Bonaparte, this represented the revenge of the dead mother on the son who attempts to replace her.

Ogden’s readings of Poe are psychoanalytically inflected, too, though at times her book feels less like an “analysis of the dead” than a self-analysis, or even a therapy session. Her personal investment in Poe evidently goes far beyond what is typical in literary criticism (or, at least, far beyond what most literary critics will admit to). She quotes Marie Bonaparte: “We like to feel, through space and through time, the beating of hearts that seem to keep time with our own,” and adds that when Bonaparte “wrote about Poe, she knew that she was also writing about herself.”

Ogden seems to be up to something similar. Darkness Becomes Bright isn’t a traditional biography: It’s organized essayistically rather than chronologically, and it’s dotted with anecdotes from Ogden’s own life that are often only tangentially related to the subject of Poe. She tells us about narrowly avoiding a car accident on the highway around the same time she learned she had been passed over for a literary prize. (“I dwelled on that loss almost more than I did on the near accident. I told my husband that it was odd how little it felt like a prize, not dying.”) She describes the houses she designed in her head as a child when she was struggling to fall asleep. A surprising number of these stories concern animals: a dream about a hawk, raccoons slaughtering her backyard chickens, the prolonged terminal illness of her dog Howie.

The animal motif is a bit perplexing, and one begins to suspect that these stories are standing in for others, stories Ogden is unable or unwilling to tell. They circle around themes of death and domesticity, highlighting the uncanniness of living alongside other beings, and how loving others exposes us at every moment to the threat of irreparable loss. And yet we don’t, for the most part, dwell on this: “we distract ourselves; we look on the bright side; we bury ourselves in work; we dance or buy something; we read self-help.” Sometimes we write stories, or read them, that dramatize what we can’t bear to face. At one point, Ogden imagines Poe composing “The Black Cat”: “Poe did not kill his wife or his cat. But he wrote in the first person about someone who did, probably while his own wife and cat were in the next room. Catterina, Poe’s cat, could have walked across the writing table. Virginia could have been coughing.”

One of the most compelling things about Darkness Becomes Bright is that, while Ogden’s reasons for writing about Poe seem deeply felt, she never quite clarifies them: It’s possible that she doesn’t fully understand them herself. “Why write about Poe?” she wonders aloud at one point. “Sometimes I have no reason; other times I do, just as one is not at every moment in love with the people one loves.” (This is one of many plangent aphorisms Ogden scatters throughout her book.) One gets a sense that reading Poe has helped her through some intense emotional pain—she says, in the book’s final sentence, that she has “nominated him to handle death on her behalf”—though she is reticent about confessing the particulars. That, apparently, is Poe’s job.

Though Ogden makes a spirited case, I come away from Darkness Becomes Bright not quite convinced of Poe’s greatness. (Or rather, I was convinced until I reread some Poe stories myself and got bogged down in the purple prose and rampant melodrama.) But her book is moving anyway, as a meditation on how literature can transmute the worst experiences—author’s and reader’s alike—into something bearable, or even beautiful.

Last month, the justices allowed his illegal White House ballroom project to move forward after a lower court had blocked it. Part of the conservative majority’s reasoning was that the executive branch had declared that the project was necessary on national security grounds, citing sworn statements from a variety of top government officials about the importance of a bunker being built under the ballroom.

Trump and his aides appear to have taken that lesson—that invoking “national security” is a good way to get what you want—to heart. Earlier this week, he announced that another planned project in the nation’s capital would get a militarized makeover. Trump has long sought to build a grandiose and gaudy triumphal arch on a roundabout between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery.

To smooth the way, Trump proclaimed last weekend that the 250-foot arch would also be a “top grade military complex” with the ability to house and store “large numbers of drones, plus snipers,” as well as “large quantities of sniper ammunition.” Trump bragged that “there will be no facility like this anywhere in the world,” likely because it doesn’t make any sense. The president also insisted that the change came “at the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes.”

National security was invoked once again when Trump banned reporters from three outlets—CNN, MS NOW, and Politico—from the White House. Past attempts to deny credentialed reporters access to the complex have failed on First Amendment grounds. This time, Trump and his lawyers introduced a new twist by arguing in a court filing that the outlets were “trafficking in verifiable falsehoods about national security and other issues, and publishing sensitive or classified information.”

This did not persuade a federal district court judge, who ordered Trump to temporarily allow the reporters back into the White House. Nor does the government’s description of the stories in question appear to be accurate. In Politico’s instance, for example, one news outlet reported that the background source for a contested story was none other than Vice President JD Vance.

Judicial deference to presidents on national security grounds is not a new phenomenon, nor is it necessarily wrong in all circumstances. Justices from across the ideological spectrum have justified deferring to the executive branch (and to Congress, to a certain extent) on foreign policy matters because the Constitution explicitly assigns them there. “Our precedents, old and new, make clear that concerns of national security and foreign relations do not warrant abdication of the judicial role,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a 2010 opinion involving federal bans on support for designated terrorist organizations.

At the same time, Roberts concluded, factual determinations by the elected branches are “entitled to deference” because federal judges often lack the competence and expertise to second-guess them. Drawing the line can be a difficult question for the court. Justice Sonia Sotomayor derided the majority in a 2018 ruling that allowed Trump’s Muslim travel ban to go into effect. In her dissent, she criticized her colleagues for “blindly accepting” the Trump administration’s “superficial claim of national security.”

Some members of the court are more enthusiastic about this deference than others. Last year, Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs that imposed hundreds of billions of dollars in import costs for U.S. businesses and consumers. The White House justified the tariffs by pointing to broad language in the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, a Cold War–era law that does not explicitly give the president unilateral power to levy tariffs. Some businesses quickly argued in litigation that the lack of explicit authority ran afoul of the Supreme Court’s major questions doctrine.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing in an unrelated case that summer, suggested that the doctrine should not apply “in the national security or foreign policy contexts” while opining generally on its scope. “The canon does not translate to those contexts because of the nature of presidential decisionmaking in response to ever-changing national security threats and diplomatic challenges,” he wrote. Kavanaugh has always been an extreme proponent of executive power, and his suggestion quickly became part of the Trump administration’s defenses for the law.

The Supreme Court ultimately struck down the IEEPA tariffs in February, but not on major questions grounds. The six-justice majority grounded its decision in what it called the “ordinary tools of statutory interpretation,” while three conservative justices concluded that the doctrine did not apply. That prompted a mild rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts and the other two conservative justices in the majority. Roberts opined that abandoning the doctrine “makes little sense when it comes to tariffs” because the power is entirely held by Congress, not by both branches.

But the real turning point came last month when the court vacated a lower court’s order that had blocked Trump from building an illegal ballroom where the East Wing of the White House once stood. The five majority justices’ shadow docket ruling was unsigned and highly deferential. It cited a flood of sworn statements from Cabinet officials and agency leaders attesting to the project’s importance, the supposed risks of pausing it, and even the essential nature of the ballroom itself.

“The Secretary of the Army, for example, represents that ‘the height and mass’ of the planned aboveground ballroom are ‘crucial’ to shield the planned underground military installation ‘from kinetic impacts,’ and that, without such height and mass, ‘engineers would need to dig impractically deep,’” the majority wrote in its order. In other words, the president’s illegal ballroom needs to be as big and beautiful as possible not just for aesthetic reasons, but because it will deflect bombs, missiles, and the like.

One almost wonders why more people don’t build ballrooms over their air-raid shelters and storm cellars if they are such effective protection. Maybe the next Congress can stimulate the economy by funding the construction of ballrooms in Americans’ backyards in Tornado Alley to help them better shelter themselves from deadly twisters. Lawmakers can even pay tribute to the justices who approved this notion by instructing the Army Corps of Engineers to inscribe “GULLIBLE” on each of the ballrooms’ ceilings.

It remains to be seen whether the president’s latest invocations will succeed if and when they reach the Supreme Court. If they do, future Democratic presidents should take a similarly broad interpretation of what counts as “national security” to advance their own policy goals. At the top of the next president’s to-do list, for example, will be buying a giant ACME-style plunger, wiring it to dynamite bundles inside the illegal ballroom and the anti-American arch, and blowing them up on national television on the Fourth of July in 2029. Don’t bother suing to stop the detonations from taking place. Our national security depends on them.

Working class is a term constantly invoked by the media, pundits, and even politicians these days. But TNR’s Monica Potts argues this discussion is misguided, expanding on a recent piece that she wrote. First of all, there is no universal definition of working class. So those using the term are often discussing disparate groups of people, says Potts. Secondly, many in politics use working class to describe anyone who doesn’t have a bachelor’s degree. But Potts says that definition doesn’t make sense. Some people without college degrees own businesses, are very wealthy, and don’t fit any traditional definition of working class. And some with degrees are in blue-collar and/or low-paying jobs. Potts also discusses her recent article arguing that it’s easier to live in a blue state compared to a red one. And she says that while polls may be overstating the Democrats’ chances, they are clear favorites to flip the House and have a strong chance at the Senate too.

For those unfamiliar with how Washington works: The only fake news to be harvested inside the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room and its adjacent cramped offices, and indeed the only news of any kind, is planted there by the president’s designated spokespersons. As I explained earlier this week (“Why Trump’s White House Reporter Ban Matters So Little”), virtually the only consequence to Trump’s exiling CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from this urban smallholding was that these reporters were briefly and partially impeded in bringing to market whatever officially sanctioned utterances, many of them transparent lies, that the president wished to convey. That makes Trump’s expulsion of these news organizations—overturned in court early Thursday by a temporary restraining order from a Trump-appointed judge—not only illegal, but bizarrely self-defeating. In game theory it’s called a subgame imperfection. In life it’s called called a really stupid thing to do.

I’m not aware that game theory has yet come up with terminology to describe Trump’s after-the-fact justification for these expulsions, because the man is breaking fresh ground. In a letter the press office sent Politico after that publication got kicked out, the White House cited six specific “reporting incidents” that failed to “abide by standards of professional conduct” or “demonstrate a level of trustworthiness commensurate with the privilege of unfettered access to the White House Complex.” These included instances “that have threatened national security and/or spread falsehoods.” (As my colleague Matt Ford explains, Trump has lately acquired a fetish for redefining everything as a national security concern.)  

One of the six reporting incidents concerned information that was spoon-fed to Politico by the White House press office itself. As Scott Nover reported in The Washington Post, the White House sent a Politico reporter—presumably Cheyenne Haslett, who covers the White House for the publication, though possibly Felicia Schwartz, a national security reporter who shared the byline on the resulting story—an invitation to interview a certain administration official. I like to think this invitation was hand-delivered on cream-colored cardstock lettered in Cormorant Garamond. More likely, though, it came in a routine email that Haslett opened at home or inside Politico’s newsroom across the river in Rosslyn, Virginia. At the appointed hour Haslett and/or Schwartz, along with representatives from various other news organizations that Trump didn’t kick out of the White House, phoned the press office and heard a White House press aide say, “Good afternoon, and thank you for joining this press call. The contents of this call are on background, attributable to a senior administration official. By remaining on the line, you agree to those terms.” Nover has a copy of the recording.

If you’re shocked that the White House itself would officially designate some government official as an anonymous source, don’t be. “The ship of state,” The New York Times’s James Reston famously observed, “is the only known vessel that leaks from the top.” Even Trump does it. We know that because Trump admitted as much on social media. In August 2018, The Toronto Star ratted Trump out for telling Bloomberg News off the record that he would not make any trade compromises with Canada. “Here’s the problem,” Trump told Bloomberg. “If I say no—the answer’s no. If I say no, then you’re going to put that and it’s going to be so insulting they’re not going to be able to make a deal.” After Trump’s off-the-record remarks leaked out, Trump took to Twitter (it was called Twitter then) to complain, “Wow, I made OFF THE RECORD COMMENTS to Bloomberg concerning Canada, and this powerful understanding was BLATANTLY VIOLATED.” Translation: “Yes, I speak to reporters off the record.”

“It is my opinion,” Trump tweeted in May 2017, “that many of the leaks coming out of the White House are fabricated lies made up by the #FakeNews media.” He’s uttered that sentiment many times since. But a more accurate assessment would be that many of the leaks coming out of the White House are fabricated lies made up by the White House, to which the White House wishes not to be held accountable. 

Trump’s off-the-record comment to Bloomberg was a good example. Trump said, sotto voce, that he would make no trade compromises with Canada. One month later, Trump made trade compromises with Canada, in the U.S. Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA. For example, the United States wanted the USMCA to expire after five years. Canada and Mexico said no. They insisted that the USMCA expire after 16 years. So that’s what the final treaty said. Eight years later, in July 2026, Trump took advantage of a scheduled review period to walk away from USMCA. Therefore, a more truthful off-the-record statement to Bloomberg back in 2018 might have been: “Whatever deal I make with Canada, I’ll welsh on it later.”

Vice presidents leak too. “May I go off the record for just a minute?” a vice president I will not name said to me once. I don’t remember what the off-the-record comment was, but I do remember being surprised that even vice presidents played this game. (I was much younger then.) They still do. The “senior administration official” the White House press office served up to Politico and other news organizations on that fateful phone call, Oliver Darcy reported Wednesday in Status, was Vice President JD Vance. The subject was the likelihood of a deal to end the war with Iran. Vance said it was 80 to 85 percent certain, and that was true; the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding was released less than a week later. But the deal fell through soon after, leaving us still at war with Iran three months later. Anybody who wants to complain the information Politico imparted was somehow wrong will have to blame Vance.

The White House’s denunciation of Politico for publishing material that it spoon-fed the outlet and many others is the most outrageous rationale for Trump’s press expulsions, but they’re all pretty ridiculous. Another pretext cited in the letter sent to Politico was its publication of “a document detailing funding for the White House ballroom containing intricate descriptions of how the Secret Service would invest in security improvements.” Here is the document, which the Secret Service handed out to a bunch of Republican Senators at a meeting with Secret Service Director Sean Curran. Note that it is not marked “Top Secret” (not that reporters shouldn’t report on Top Secret documents). Its contents, to whatever extent they’re truthful, are unexceptional.

In a letter to CNN, the White House press office appeared to dispute, seven months after the event, that the United States military attacked an Iranian school, even though various other news outlets and a United Nations report confirmed the strike. Indeed, all the offending CNN story reported was the publicly released U.N. report’s conclusion that the attack was a war crime. If I ever get kicked out of the White House, I’d like it to be for showing more enterprise than that. 

In a letter to MS NOW, the White House press office claimed that it violated national security to report that the FBI was conducting a criminal leak investigation after The Atlantic’s Sarah Fitzpatrick reported that Kash Patel was drinking heavily and behaving erratically. If there were any national security concern here, wouldn’t it be that our FBI director, who we know for an absolute fact has given away bottles of Patel-branded whiskey, might be kind of unstable? Instead, the White House press office felt the injury was that Fitzpatrick and her sources were tipped off that the FBI was trying to harass them.

What’s most striking is that none of the many stories used to justify CNN’s, MS NOW’s, and Politico’s expulsion were untrue. Individual news outlets do get it wrong now and then, because nobody’s perfect. Couldn’t White House lawyers find any examples? I guess they were in too much of a hurry. Vance’s background comments were unreliable insofar as they conveyed false optimism that the Iran war would end soon. But even Vance doesn’t appear to have been telling deliberate lies. (Maybe the headline should have been: “Vice President Tells Truth!”) What the “reporting incidents” have in common is that most contradicted the Trump White House line. If Trump doesn’t like being exposed as a liar, then instead of kicking out reporters, he might consider lying less.